Verity

Chapter 3

I knew I was pregnant because my breasts looked better than they had ever looked.

I’m very aware of my body, what goes into it, how to nourish it, how to keep it toned. Growing up watching my mother’s waistline expand with her laziness, I work out daily, sometimes twice a day.

I learned very early on that a human is not merely comprised of only one thing. We are two parts that make up the whole.

We have our conscious, which includes our mind, our soul, and all the intangible parts.

And we have our physical being, which is the machine that our conscious relies on for survival.

If you fuck with the machine, you will die. If you neglect the machine, you will die. If you assume your conscious can outlive the machine, you will die shortly after learning you were wrong.

It’s very simple, really. Take care of your physical being. Feed it what it needs, not what the conscience tells you it wants. Giving in to cravings of the mind that ultimately hurt the body is like a weak parent giving in to her child. “Oh, you had a bad day? Do you want an entire box of cookies? Okay, sweetie. Eat it. And drink this soda while you’re at it.”

Caring for your body is no different from caring for a child. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes it sucks, sometimes you just want to give in, but if you do, you’ll pay for the consequences eighteen years down the road.

It’s fitting when it comes to my mother. She cared for me like she cared for her body. Very little. Sometimes I wonder if she’s still fat—if she’s still neglecting that machine. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t spoken to her in years.

But I’m not interested in speaking about a woman who chose never to speak of me again. I’m here to discuss the first thing my baby ever stole from me.

Jeremy.

I didn’t notice the theft at first.

At first, after we found out that the night we got engaged became the night we conceived, I was actually happy. I was happy because Jeremy was happy. And at that point, other than my breasts looking better than ever, I didn’t realize how detrimental the pregnancy was going to be to the machine I had worked so hard to maintain.

It was around the third month, a few weeks after I found out I was pregnant, that I started to notice the difference. It was a small little pooch, but it was there. I had just gotten out of the shower, and I was standing in front of the mirror, looking at my profile. My hand was flat on my stomach and I felt something foreign, and my stomach was slightly protruding.

I was disgusted. I vowed to start working out three times a day. I’d seen what pregnancy could do to women, but I also knew most of the damage was done in that last trimester. If I could somehow figure out how to deliver early…maybe around thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, I could avoid the most detrimental part of pregnancy. There have been so many advances in medical care, babies born that early are almost always fine.

“Wow.”

I dropped my hand and looked at the doorway. Jeremy was leaning against the doorframe, his arms folded over his chest. He was smiling at me. “You’re starting to show.”

“I am not.” I sucked in.

He laughed and closed the distance between us, wrapping his arms around me from behind. He placed both hands on my stomach and looked at me in the mirror. He kissed my shoulder. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.”

It was a lie to make me feel better, but I was grateful. Even his lies meant something to me. I squeezed his hands and he spun me around to face him, then he kissed me, walking me backward until I reached the bathroom counter. He lifted me onto it, then stood between my legs.

He was fully clothed, just returning from work. I was completely naked, fresh from the shower. The only thing between us were his pants and the pooch I was still trying to suck in.

He started fucking me on the counter, but we finished in bed.

His head was on my chest, and he was tracing circles over my stomach when it rumbled loudly. I tried to clear my throat to hide the noise, but he laughed. “Someone’s hungry.”

I started to shake my head, but he lifted off my chest to look at me. “What’s she craving?”

“Nothing. I’m not hungry.”

He laughed again. “Not you. Her,” he said, patting my stomach. “Aren’t pregnant women supposed to get weird cravings and eat all the time because of the babies? You barely eat. And your stomach is growling.” He sits up on the bed. “I need to feed my girls.”

His girls.

“You don’t even know if it’s a girl yet.”

He smiled at me. “It’s a girl. I have a feeling.”

I wanted to roll my eyes, because technically, it was nothing. Not a boy, not a girl. It was a blob. I wasn’t that far along yet, so assuming the thing growing inside me was actually hungry or craving any particular type of food was absurd. But it was hard for me to state my case because Jeremy was so ecstatic about the baby, I didn’t really care if he treated it like it was more than it was.

Sometimes his excitement excited me.

For the next few weeks, his excitement helped me cope. The more my stomach grew, the more attentive he became. The more he would kiss it when we were in bed together at night.

In the mornings, he would hold my hair while I puked. When he was at work, he would text me potential baby names. He became as obsessed with my pregnancy as I was with him. He went to my first doctor’s visit with me.

I’m thankful he was at the second doctor’s visit, too, because that was the day my world shifted.

Twins.

Two of them.

I was quiet when we left the doctor’s office that day. I had already feared becoming the mother of one baby. Being forced to love the one thing Jeremy loved more than me. But when I found out there were two, and that they were girls, I was suddenly not okay with being the third most important thing in Jeremy’s life.

I tried to force my smile when he’d talk about them. I would act like it filled me with joy when he rubbed my stomach, but it repulsed me, knowing he was only doing it because they were in there. Even if I delivered early, it didn’t matter. Now that there were two of them, my body would suffer even more damage. I shuddered daily at the thought of them both growing inside me, stretching my skin, ruining my breasts, my stomach, and god forbid the temple between my legs where Jeremy worshipped nightly.

How could Jeremy still want me after this?

During the fourth month of my pregnancy, I started hoping for a miscarriage. I prayed for blood when I went to the bathroom. I imagined how, after losing the twins, Jeremy would make me his priority again. He would dote on me, worship me, care for me, worry for me, and not because of what was growing inside me.

I took sleeping pills when he wasn’t looking. I drank wine when he wasn’t around. I did anything I could to destroy the things that were going to push him away from me, but nothing worked. They kept growing. My stomach continued to stretch.

In my fifth month, we were lying on our sides in the bed. Jeremy was fucking me from behind. His left hand gripped my breast, and his right hand was against my stomach. I didn’t like it when he touched my stomach during sex. It made me think of the babies and ruined my mood.

I thought maybe he had reached orgasm when he stopped moving, but I realized he’d stopped moving because he’d felt them move. He pulled out of me and then rolled me onto my back, pressing his palm against my stomach.

“Did you feel that?” he asked. His eyes were dancing with excitement. He wasn’t hard anymore. He was excited for reasons that had nothing to do with me. He pressed his ear to my stomach and waited for one of them to move again.

“Jeremy?” I whispered.

He kissed my stomach and looked up at me.

I reached down and teased at strands of his hair with my fingers. “Do you love them?”

He smiled because he thought I wanted him to say yes. “I love them more than anything.”

“More than me?”

He stopped smiling. He kept his hand on my stomach, but he scooted up, sliding an arm under my neck. “Different from you,” he said, kissing my cheek.

“Different, yes. But more? Is your love for them more intense than your love for me?”

His eyes scanned mine, and I was hoping he would laugh and say, “Absolutely not.” But he didn’t laugh. He looked at me with nothing but honesty and said, “Yes.”

Really? His reply crushed me. Suffocated me. Killed me.

“But that’s how it should be,” he said. “Why? Do you feel guilty because you love them more than me?”

I didn’t answer. Did he really think I loved them more than I loved him? I don’t even know them.

“Don’t feel guilty,” he said. “I want you to love them more than you love me. Our love for each other is conditional. Our love for them isn’t.”

“My love for you is unconditional,” I said.

He smiled. “No, it isn’t. I could do things you would never forgive me for. But you’ll always forgive your children.”

He was wrong. I didn’t forgive them for existing. I didn’t forgive them for forcing him to put me third. I didn’t forgive them for taking the night we got engaged from us.

They weren’t even born yet, but they were already taking things that had once belonged to me.

“Verity,” Jeremy whispered. He wiped a tear that had fallen from my eye. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head. “I just can’t believe how much you already love them and they aren’t even born yet.”

“I know,” he said, smiling.

I didn’t mean it as a compliment, but he took it that way. He laid his head back on my chest and touched my stomach again. “I’ll be a fucking mess when they’re born.”

He’s going to cry?

He had never cried for me. Over me. About me.

Maybe we haven’t fought enough.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I whispered. I didn’t have to go, I just needed to get away from him and all the love he was aiming in every direction but mine.

He kissed me, and when I climbed off the bed, he rolled over, his back to me, and forgot we’d never even finished fucking.

He fell asleep while I was in the bathroom, attempting to abort his daughters with a wire hanger. I tried for half an hour, until my stomach started to cramp and blood was running down my leg. I was certain more would follow.

I climbed into bed, waiting for the miscarriage. My arms were shaking. My legs were numb from the squatting. My stomach hurt and I wanted to puke, but I didn’t move because I wanted to be in the bed with him when it happened. I wanted to wake him up, frantic, and show him the blood. I wanted him to panic, to worry, to feel bad for me, to cry for me.

To cry for me.