Verity(28)

“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.”