Starla claimed she was unable to get a doctor’s appointment. While she claimed she could schedule one for mid-January, well after the deadline I had given her, she said not a single doctor qualified to determine whether or not she was pregnant was available before the day I told her she had to be out by.
“So, you see, Harlow,” she said to me as we sat in the living room in Grandma’s house, “you’re just going to have to give me an extension.”
I stared at her for a long moment before I reached into my pocket, pulled out my cell phone, searched for OBGYNs in the area, skipped right over the one I’d gone to see myself, and selected the second one, a Dr. Kemp in the next town over. “Try this one,” I told her.
She looked at my phone and said, “I already did
I followed the “happy” couple into the waiting room of the doctor’s office. It wasn’t very crowded. Only a few overly-pregnant women and their husbands, as well as a couple of ladies who looked like they might be there for something else, or just to confirm their pregnancy, like Starla, sat in the chairs. Sam, wearing Ben’s face, looked around the room, uncomfortable, and took a seat as Starla approached the counter. I didn’t dare sit down since I had no idea whether or not someone would come and literally sit on me, so I stood next to him.Sam/Ben covered his mouth with his hand and whispered, “You here?”I put my hand on his shoulder, and he nodded slowly, knowing that meant I was. A few moments later, Starla came back and sat in the chair next to him, filling out all of the paperwork she could&rsq
Getting back into the truck to go home was a reversal of all of the steps I’d had to take to get there, except for Sam, wearing Ben’s face, was so angry right now, I was afraid he might forget that pesky fly was me and accidentally squash me, so I hung back in the corner of the backseat of the truck far away from his hands.Starla was crying as they made their way back to Grandma’s house. Sam/Ben said nothing, only drove, which I thought was remarkable because I fully expected him to start yelling at her immediately. He was doing a better job of remembering he was Ben to her than I’d thought he was capable of.It wasn’t until we had almost reached Whispering Hollow that Starla stopped crying enough to say, “Ben, I’m going to have to ask you a favor, and you’re going to have to promise me something, okay?”
“The enemy?” Sam asked, staring at his girlfriend through eyes that looked just like my boyfriend Ben’s. “What are you talking about, Starla?”“Listen, Ben,” she began, still wiping at her eyes with the leftover fast food restaurant napkin that he had handed to her a few moments ago. “The reason that I asked you to take me today was because I was afraid all of this would come out, and I thought you would be more understanding than anyone else would be. You always seem like such an even-keeled person. If I had known you were going to get this angry, I wouldn’t have asked you to be the one to take me to the doctor today.”“You’re acting like it’s some sort of a privilege that I got to take you to the doctor today,” he said, sounding absolutely more like Sam than Ben. Starla’
“Is that Starla?” Melanie whispered as the three of us girls heard a knock on the door.I nodded. “Yep. I’m sure she’s here to spew more lies.”“You never know,” Raven said, hopping up to go answer the door. “Maybe she’s here to tell the truth for once.”I hid a chuckle because, if there was one thing I was certain of, it was that Starla was not going to tell me the truth.“Hey, Starla,” Raven said, opening the door and sounding more welcoming than I would’ve been able to pull off. “How are you?”“Awful,” she said. “Is Harlow here?”I could see Raven through the
I lay on our bed with Ben for about an hour, neither of us even speaking for the better part of that time. He was content to rest there next to me, holding my hand, while we stared at the ceiling. When he did talk, it wasn’t to ask questions or to tell me what he’d learned from the run with Sam, only to make sure that I was okay.I wasn’t sure I was okay, so that was a difficult question to answer. I just wanted to take Starla and throw her as far away from me as I could so that I’d never have to see her again. I had known from the beginning, somehow, the second that I’d met her, that she was going to end up being trouble for me. Even though I’d avoided her at all costs, it was inevitable that she would come back around and end up being a major pain in my ass.Despite my agitation, I was beginning to get tired, and my eyes we
I knew what I was asking of Ben was a lot, and I shouldn’t even be pondering the possibility of requesting that he go through with what Sam had suggested. Sending Ben over to Starla, to try and convince her to tell Sam the truth, was too much. So, as my boyfriend came and sat down near me on the couch--not right next to me, as I would expect--I wasn’t sure if I should even tell him, not that he didn’t already know.“I don’t think this can end well, no matter what we decide,” he said, sitting down and folding his hands between his knees.“I know,” I agreed. “But… Sam wants to know who the father is. He deserves to know. We all do.”“I’m not sure the rest of us do,” Ben said, being pragmatic. “But I do agree that Sam deserves to
There is something about running in the form of a wolf that is freeing in a way I cannot quite describe. Since I’ve learned about my magical abilities, I have tried traveling a few different ways, and all of them are fun. Riding a unicorn. Flying as a bird. Running in other animal forms. But when I am a wolf, I feel so connected to my pack. I feel like I am more one of them than any other time when I am just their mage. So even though it was just Brice and I running through the woods that evening, as the sun was beginning to set, our paws crunching over the fallen snow and decaying leaves, I still felt like I was one of them in a way I hardly ever felt.We ran for about a half an hour, making our way through our forest toward the river, crossing a few yards, and heading past the quarry, through the forest that Ben had taken me to that first time he kissed me. We ran through the trees over there, me f
“Is this something that Francis is doing from Paris, or did she not go?” Melanie asked me from the room downstairs where I’d asked everyone to gather so that we could talk about what Brice had discovered in the woods. We might be able to wait until after New Year’s to do anything about Starla, and we might be able to wait to actually do anything about this, but I at least wanted to talk to my pack about it so we could think about what we needed to do to stop the spread and get Francis Flamingo under control.“I don’t know if she went or not,” I admitted. “I haven’t talked to anyone over there in a while, nothing more than Merry Christmas, anyway.” I had been trying to put some distance between myself and the School for Mages since Mage Jaye had promised she’d be dealing with me as soon as the holidays were over. I hadn’t felt that it w