Millie
It’s been a few weeks, and perhaps against my better judgment, I’ve continued seeing him under a variety of different circumstances that I can only describe as “unlike me”. We meet randomly in the middle of the night, sometimes just for sex, but sometimes he insists on taking me out on early morning dates when the shop isn’t open.
We’ve done things I would never dream of doing with anyone else, and that makes me crave him even more. I have to admit that despite my misgivings about Viktor, I’m really developing a lot of turbulent feelings for him.
The hesitation isn’t gone; it’s just muted. While I know that something just isn’t quite right about him, the way he treats me when I’m with him completely demolishes the walls I’ve put up.
And I know there are things he’s hiding from me, like why he vanished in the first place during our first date. He’ll never tell me, and I’ve given up asking. Again, living in fantasy is far better than the bitter truth that reality holds.
The crisp October morning settles in as the sun begins to stream through the storefront windows of the bakery. I’ve been here since three AM preparing for an unusually large cupcake order for an engagement part later in the day. By the time customers begin to pour in, I’m already exhausted and looking forward to settling into the two-person bathtub in Viktor’s master bathroom.
It’s around midday when I get a string of vague but urgent texts from Katherine. “Millie WTF?? Is this the guy you’re fucking?” asks the first text, and I feel the marrow of my bones freeze solid.
A rush of panic floods my body as a stream of notifications pop up, two of which are more texts from Katherine followed by a news report of a brutal murder in the inner city.
“This sounds like your guy. Did he fucking kill someone?!” she pleads, asking iterations of the same question over and over.
When I open the link to the news story, I feel my vision tunneling as I read the description of the person who allegedly shot the owner of a dive bar in the back of the head six or seven times. I nearly fall to the floor when I realize that the incident took place the night that Viktor rushed from his apartment after a mysterious phone call right after we had sex.
I thought the truth might be bitter, but this is straight-up poison.
“Yeah, that sounds like him. Jesus, what the fuck was I thinking!” I text back, feeling a bold rush of shame as I consider exactly how intentionally naive I had to be to not see this coming.
In hindsight, I can’t believe I spent that entire night just wandering his apartment, looking at all of his expensive, opulent belongings when he was loose in the streets, killing somebody.
I should have known better. What kind of person needs an entire apartment building to themselves like that? How the fuck would real estate give him that kind of power?
I’m such an idiot.
My hands shake as I put down my phone, but the next wave of anxiety doesn’t come from Katherine’s frantic text messages. It comes from something much worse in the wake of the news.
The true depth of my dread doesn’t settle in until I realize that I’ve missed my period by at least two weeks. I’ve always been a freak about tracking it since I developed a fear of bleeding through my clothes in middle school, and I keep a tracker on my phone that notifies me when I’m coming up on my first day.
When I think hard enough, I can remember swiping away the notifications while I was with Viktor, totally enamored by his stories of growing up in Soviet Russia. I never even thought to return to the app and check the notifications, and when I open it with sweaty palms, my stomach drops to the floor when I realize that I’m fourteen days late.
Fourteen days! How the hell have I not realized that I’m late by fourteen days?!
I’ve never been more than two days late for a period, and even then, I was going absolutely postal trying to figure out if I could be pregnant. Two days late can be normal, depending on stress levels.
Fourteen days is not.
My face turns white, and my hands grow clammy and begin to shake even harder. I snatch up my phone and read the article again and again, feeling myself detaching from reality as the gravity of my situation becomes more and more apparent to me.
There’s a decent chance that I am pregnant with the baby of a killer.
I force myself to turn off my phone and shove it back into my coat pocket in the back hall, where I keep my belongings. I can’t afford to close down the shop early today, even though I feel like I’m moments from having an absolutely catastrophic panic attack.
Would a panic attack be bad for a baby? Is that something that should bother me? Should I be bothered that it doesn’t?