Page 16 of Unwell
‘Elijah,’ I whimpered. ‘Can’t we just kiss?’
‘Baby, I need you. It’s killing me to be away from my girls.’ Elijah cupped my stomach as he lost himself inside me. Holding her. Not me.
Gripping his hand, I pulled it up to my waist, but he slid it back down to caress my bump.
The bark dug into my back, scratching me. I cried out as he forced himself deeper. Taking. Always taking. I’d loved him for so many years that I tried to push down the way he sometimes overrode my desires when his own grew too large. He’d told me a good girl always gives first.
I’d always tried to be good for him.
‘Turn around,’ Elijah demanded, forcing my face against the tree. I winced as he filled me with roughjerks, my upper body grazing against the roughened trunk.
Still, he protected my stomach with his strong hands.
‘She’s mine,’ he growled. ‘All mine. And this time I’m keeping her. It won’t be like the others.’
‘And me? I’m her mother.’ My breath hitched as he fucked me viciously.
‘She’ll be with her mother. Always. It’s what we’ve been working for, all this time.’ Elijah shuddered behind me, his body stilling shortly after.
Hot liquid spilled over my thighs from the point where we joined.
‘You’ve been such a good girl,’ he crooned into my hair. ‘Not too long to go.’
‘This place is going to kill me, Elijah.’
His heart thumped against my back as he trailed his fingers over my stomach. ‘I can watch you here. I can be there when the baby comes and it’ll be different this time.’
‘Help me get out.’
‘You just keep growing her. I’ll do the rest.’
NINE
NANCY
The car felt smaller than usual; the air stifling with Robert’s cloying cigarette smoke. I tapped my fingers against the worn leather bench seat, the sound irritating even to me. Still, I couldn’t stop. Her face kept flashing into my mind, taunting me. Ginny, so pale and slight, hanging behind my closed eyes like a ghost in the asylum window.
Why couldn’t I get her out of my head? I’d had sorrowful patients before. Poor souls who I wished I could spirit out of the crumbling walls.
Yet, she persisted in my thoughts. As visceral in her absence as the acrid smoke invading my nose.
‘She shouldn’t be here,’ I said. Robert’s eyestwitched, ignoring me. ‘She seems perfectly fine. Wellard isn’t a home for unwed mothers. She should be with her family.’
Robert exhaled. His nose made that whistling noise that forever grated at my nerves. We’d been so in love once. But the last six or seven years had brought a distancing. Likely because I was a failure of a wife. Couldn’t even catch a bun in the oven.
‘Maybe her family didn’t want her,’ he said with a shrug.
The thought was unfathomable. Sweet, lovely Ginny. How could her family not want her, even in her condition? Seeing the heartbreak on her face made me want to gather her up and steal her away.
‘Surely they love her?’
His fingers gripped the wheel too tight, whitening at the knuckles. He once hung on every word I said, swallowing them down between desperate kisses.
‘No one loves a loose woman.’
I snapped my gaze to him, heat flaring in my chest. ‘Maybe not. But Wellard still isn’t the place for her. You know what they do to people in there…’
His lips twitched. He looked far less disgusted than I was. ‘If she isn’t crazy going in, she soon will be. Don’t pity her, she probably brought it on herself.’
