Chapter 15: The Test
The house felt different when Catriona returned. It smelled the same—linen spray, the faint earthiness of Aidan’s good wool coat hanging by the door, yesterday’s coffee grounds. But the air was charged, a silent hum underneath the ordinary sounds of the furnace kicking on.
Aidan was in the kitchen, chopping vegetables with a focused, rhythmic precision. The knife thwacked against the cutting board. He didn’t look up immediately. “Hey.”
“Hey.” She dropped her bag on a chair, the thud too loud.
“How’d it go?” He asked it to the bell pepper, his shoulders tight.
“It went. They took the blood. Now we wait.” She leaned against the counter, watching his hands. They were the same hands that had held Jenny’s hips, that had pushed into her with a deliberate, devastating purpose. “She’s terrified. She said she can still feel you. Inside her.”
The knife stilled. He finally glanced at her, his gaze searching, wary. “And how do you feel about that?”
“I told you before. I’m not jealous.” She took a step closer, drawn to the tension in him. “It turns me on. Is that what you want to hear? It does. Knowing you left that deep of a mark. It’s fucking primal, Aidan. And it’s ours. This whole… thing. It’s ours.”
He put the knife down, wiping his hands on a towel. The careful domesticity of the gesture clashed with the rawness of the conversation. “It doesn’t feel entirely like ours right now. It feels like it’s hers. Her body, her result, her life.”
“But it’s your child.” The words hung between them, a fact both monumental and mundane. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he echoed. He reached out, his thumb brushing a smudge of paint near her temple she hadn’t even known was there. His touch was electric. “What did you feel? Watching us.”
She hadn’t expected the question. Her breath shallowed. “At first, I felt like a director. Making sure it was working. Then I just… disappeared. It was just the two of you. The sounds. The way her body opened for you. The way you looked at her—not like her, but like a target. A mission. It was the hottest and the coldest thing I’ve ever seen.”
He moved closer, his body heat enveloping her. “I thought about you the whole time.”
“Bullshit.”
“I did.” His voice was low, gravelly. “I was thinking, ‘Catriona is watching this. Catriona chose this. Catriona wants this.’ It kept me from getting lost in it. It kept me from… feeling too much for her.”
She believed him. The logic of it was sound, but it was the raw need in his eyes that convinced her. It wasn’t guilt. It was a shared complicity. He cupped her face, his palm rough against her skin. “When she called you from the bathroom, after. Her voice was different. Shaky. Full of… awe.”
“She was full of you,” Catriona whispered, and the image was instant, unforgiving: Jenny on her knees, lips swollen, taking what was given with a desperate gratitude that was almost religious.
Aidan’s mouth crashed down on hers. It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a claiming, a reconfirmation of territory. It tasted of salt and desperation and the ghost of the other woman’s panic. Catriona met it with equal force, her fingers digging into the hard muscle of his back, pulling him into her.
They didn’t make it to the bedroom. He lifted her onto the cold granite of the kitchen island, sending a bowl of onions clattering to the floor. The shock of the cold surface against her thighs made her gasp into his mouth. His hands were everywhere, pushing her shirt up, palming her breast through her bra, clumsy with need.
This was different. Their sex had always been good, often passionate, sometimes lazy and familiar. This was a exorcism. A reaffirmation. Every thrust was a question: Are we okay? Are we monsters? Is this still us? She answered by wrapping her legs around him, pulling him deeper, her nails scoring his shoulders. She saw Jenny’s blissful, tear-streaked face in her mind and a wave of something dark and victorious crested in her. He’s mine. He did this for me. He comes home to me.
After, they stayed tangled on the hard surface, breathing heavily. The abandoned vegetables stared up at them from the floor. Aidan’s forehead rested against her collarbone.
Her phone buzzed on the counter, rattling against the stone.
They both froze. A single, seamless unit of dread.
Catriona reached for it, her arm trembling. The screen glowed. A text notification. Not a call from a blocked clinic number. A text from Jenny.
> Doctor’s office just called. Results are in. They want me to come in tomorrow at 10 to discuss. They wouldn’t tell me over the phone.
Aidan read it over her shoulder. His breath stuttered.
“They only make you come in for bad news, right?” Catriona heard the childish hope in her own voice. “No, that’s a myth. They make you come in for good news, too. Right?”
“I don’t know.” Aidan’s voice was flat. He straightened up, helping her off the counter. Their intimate heat was rapidly dissipating, replaced by a new, colder anxiety.
Catriona typed back, her thumbs clumsy.
> Do you want us to come with you?
The three dancing dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. A long minute passed.
> Yes.Please. I can’t do that waiting room alone again.
Catriona showed Aidan the phone. He nodded once, a grim acceptance.
“Okay,” she said aloud, to Jenny, to Aidan, to the room that still smelled of their frantic coupling. “Okay.”
She slid down to the floor, her back against the cabinets, and pulled her knees to her chest. Aidan sank down beside her, their shoulders touching. They sat in the wreckage of their kitchen, in the silence after the storm, staring at the fallen peppers and the gleaming knife on the counter.
The waiting had just become a physical space. It was this kitchen floor. It was the cold tile of the clinic hallway. It was the fragile chamber of Jenny’s womb. It was everywhere, and for the next sixteen hours, there was absolutely nothing to do but live inside it.