On Rotation(80)

“Ricky,” I said flatly, “you just told me that you were getting ready to move across the country for her.”

“Not for her!” Ricky said, exasperated. “For our kid.” He scooted closer to me, grasping my hand and squeezing it beseechingly. “Angie, there’s nothing between me and Camila anymore. I’ll be honest. I was expecting to feel something when I saw her again. I thought it would at least hurt, given how long we were together. But it didn’t. I felt like I was talking to a stranger. Even at the obstetrician’s office—”

I snatched my hand back. At the obstetrician’s office?

“You went to her appointment?” I said, alarmed. During my ob-gyn rotation, so many of the women had come to their appointments unaccompanied that when I walked into their exam room to find an extra occupant there, I would be thrown off guard. Now the image of Ricky and Camila together came into sharp focus; Ricky standing next to the sonographer as she passed the ultrasound probe over Camila’s exposed belly, declaring that the baby was the size of a peanut—

Ricky looked up at me with wide eyes.

“Yeah, I did,” he said, just a bit defiantly. “I won’t apologize for that. That guy she was with ditched her the moment he found out she was keeping it. She was going to go alone.”

Even as my fury mounted, I understood. Of course Ricky went to her appointment. That was just who Ricky was. Always trying to do the right thing for everyone, all the time. Camila must have known this. As she lay down on the clinic table, spread-eagled and exposed, she must have prayed for her pregnancy to be older, for the chance that her child was also his. Maybe, had he told me what he was doing instead of letting me rot, he could have garnered my sympathy. But at this moment, all I could think of was how, even after all this time, Camila’s feelings still trumped mine.

I stood abruptly and pivoted toward my front door. The audacity of this man, really. The peace I had managed to build around myself had just been knocked down with a battering ram, but I would put it together again. There was always more wine, always more museums, always more Great British Bake Off. Just as soon as I got this berserker out of my home—

“Angie,” Ricky said, storming after me. “Angie, please.”

He grabbed my sleeve, and I swiveled to face him, my anger flaring as he closed the space between us. I’d never thought of him as especially tall, but in that moment, the four inches or so between us felt vast.

“You still care about her,” I declared.

“Not in the way you think,” he tried.

“Liar,” I spat, trying to hold back the tears that pricked the corners of my eyes, because enough—I had already cried enough over him. “Can you even hear yourself? You drove across the city to go to her appointment to play house and who knows what else, but you couldn’t pick up your phone and call me? Couldn’t even spare five minutes? Are you kidding me right now?”

“Angie, I—”

“I can’t believe that I thought . . .” My voice trailed off as I filled in the rest. That I thought he was different. That I thought what we had was special. That I’d spent the last month feeling so sure that we would work, thinking of him not just as my potential partner, but as my friend—

“I’m sorry,” he was saying. “I was stupid. I felt stuck. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I know that doesn’t change the fact that I did, but . . .”

“You realize I don’t need you, right?” I interrupted, searching his face. “I’m going to be a doctor, and I’m turning out to be a pretty damn good one. I have the most amazing friends in the world. A nice place. Everything I could possibly need—”

“I know that!” Ricky said in a harsh whisper. “You think I don’t? You think I don’t think about that all the time?”

“Do you?” I said. “Because it feels like you think I’ll always be here. That you can just keep playing games with me, and that I’ll sit around, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for you to decide that you’re ready to commit—”

“I’m not playing games,” Ricky said. “I was embarrassed, okay? It’s a baby. I wasn’t sure if it was my baby! Angie, you know this about me. I’m not abandoning any child of mine, ever. I’m going to be there for all those moments—their first steps, first words; I’m going to be there changing diapers, taking them to daycare, doing all of that. How was I supposed to ask you to be a part of that, huh? How was I supposed to tell you that I wanted to be with you, but, oh, also, can you please include my kid in your plans for the future that you’ve been working so hard for? How was I supposed to, in good conscience, ask you to do that for me?”

I sucked in a sharp breath, my fists unfurling at my sides. In the flurry of my anger, I hadn’t fully considered what the consequences of Ricky’s being a father would be on our relationship. But spoken out loud like that? I imagined arranging my rank list for Match with programs in Arizona, a state I had never even visited, at the top. A small, strange child screaming down the halls when I was trying to sleep after twenty-eight-hour calls—

Ricky squeezed his eyes shut, smoothing his hands down my arms.

“Look,” he said, his voice reed thin, his words flowing fast. “I know last week I hesitated. And I know that you think it’s because I’m not . . . invested in you, or something. But that’s not it. My last relationship was a mess. And the one before that. And before that. I kept going all in with people who weren’t ready to go all in with me. I did some shitty things to people I cared about just to try to salvage relationships that weren’t worth salvaging. And I told myself, ‘Well, this is just what you do for love.’” He chewed at his inner cheek, and I wondered if he was thinking of Shae. “But it wasn’t love, was it? It was just me trying to do what I thought was right. And with you . . . it was like I was falling back into old patterns. Jumping in, when I really needed to be holding back. Except it was worse, because the way I felt . . . The way I feel about you is just so much more, you know?”