Love's Awakening Read Free

“My apartment building. What does it matter?”
    Celia narrowed her eyes. “Plenty of fish in the sea. Something happen with Lori?”
    “I don’t get you,” Oliver snapped. “Your husband is fighting for his life, and you’re asking about my girlfriend—excuse me, my ex-girlfriend—and where I tripped?”
    Celia’s chin trembled. Tears coming now. “I heard. Maybe I don’t want to think about it.”
    Great. He’d made Celia cry. You’re a shit, Oliver. He rose from the bed and waved the policeman and his father’s surgeon in. He let his grandmother hold Celia, and Oliver imagined he had told the truth: Well, Lori and I were at my place. She was drunk out of her mind. She accused me of being in love with you. I denied it and walked out of the apartment to the staircase. Lori tried to block me from leaving, and this guy, this six-foot-tall muscular guy, ended up kerplunking down the stairs.
    Yeah. Embarrassing. Would not go over so hot.

Chapter Two
    Celia had to pee but kept putting it off. One nasty secret she had not learned until after the birth: doctors told you to lay off the toilet paper. She had a little squirt bottle to help clean herself up, but a hose was what she needed. She was a gush of blood when she peed. The blood reached her thighs, calves, ankles. Celia wanted her body from nine months ago back. She hated her gargantuan vaginal lips, the stretch marks, the sore breasts.
    Molly, the nurse who snapped the Friday the 13th picture, patted a wheelchair. “Pee before we go. You have your squirt bottle?” That was all the nurses asked. Squirt bottle, squirt bottle, squirt bottle. Nothing about David; that was too tricky, too emotional. Therefore, the world would end if Celia did not have a damn squirt bottle.
    “I can wait,” Celia said.
    “Go to the bathroom.”
    Celia sucked it up and peed. And bled.
    Afterward, Molly patted the wheelchair again. “Let’s go.”
    “Can’t you forget policy and let me walk?”
    “Afraid not.”
    Celia sighed and got into the wheelchair. Ten a.m. had turned into four p.m. Time to visit David.
    Celia ignored the inhuman mass and humming of machines and tubes as best as she could. She stared at the spider web of thick, dark stitches marring her husband’s scalp. What kind of spider lived there? Tarantula, black widow? Definitely the kind that could kill. What did spiders eat? Flies, moths, ladybugs. Spiders were arachnids, right? Kind of like insects but with eight legs. Celia remembered her and Janet, both five years old, watching as Janet’s tarantula, Freckles, ate Celia’s pet baby mouse, Melody. She had nightmares for a week. The tarantula had towered above the mouse, and Celia felt something in her groin: fear, terror, something almost sexual, something bad , she knew. The tarantula lowered its mouth toward the mouse’s head. Celia watched, terrified and fascinated, as the mouse squee squee oh God help me squee, convulsed and was gone.
    This mess was Celia’s husband. David’s head was bare, shaved to let the stitches breathe. Doctors said he probably would not live through the night. They had no idea how he had made it this far already.
    Celia held up the picture of her and the baby. “Caleb Brandon Hall,” she whispered. “You win.”
    She recalled enough from Oliver’s mumblings and the haze of conversations with the police and David’s surgeon to piece together how the accident happened. Yesterday, Oliver fell down the steps on his way to meet David for a late lunch, so he called David to take him to the doctor. Afterward, they went to Almond’s—a bar. Not the one where Oliver worked, which made sense. Why go to the place you work when you’re off duty? They talked a while, and then David drove away in his Lexus. He was going to the hospital to be with her, Celia. David stopped at the Almond’s parking lot exit, looked left, looked right, forgot to look left again, and pulled out in front of an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on