Chapter Fourty One
"I feel like you know almost everything about me and I know so little about you." Kelly said one night to Dimitri as they lay in bed.
"That's not true" Dimitri said, "You know my name. You know what I do for a living," he paused, then added, "... Oh, and you know a lot about my body too"
Kelly hit him playfully on the shoulder and he giggled.
"Seriously, come on, Dimitri. I'm serious" she continued, "What about your family, your parents.... Do you have any siblings? What was your childhood like?"
Dimitri hesitated. They weren't supposed to know so much about each other according to their initial agreement that they stay in a purely sexual relationship, but who the hell was he kidding? He knew that they had gone way beyond that... At least he had.
"Apart from a few cousins that I rarely speak to, it's just me" he said finally. "Like you, I had just my dad, except he wasn't a family kind of guy... Always focused on work. Hardly stayed at home. He took care of my education and that was it. He died a few years ago... There's not much to tell"
"Oh I'm so sorry about that" Kelly said softly.
"It's fine. We weren't close and I really don't like to talk about him" Dimitri replied.
Kelly lifted her head from his chest to stare at him. "Do you always have to be so tough all the time?" she asked.
"What?"
"You don't have to be that way" she replied, "It's okay if you show emotions... You are human and it's normal to feel. You say your relationship with your dad doesn't matter but it does from the sound of your voice. It's okay to feel hurt that you didn't get the kind of relationship you wanted with your dad. It's okay to feel hurt about his death."
Dimitri looked away from her, "Emotions make you weak. They make you vulnerable" he said, just the way she made him feel. And he hated it. "Emotions bring expectations and expectations hurt. I prefer to be on the safe side"
"But they can also make you stronger" Kelly replied. "You can learn from them. And it's okay to want someone you can lean on when there's the need to. We all need someone Dimitri, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that"
Dimitri said nothing and pulled her back towards him so her head was on his chest again.
The woman had no idea how vulnerable she already made him feel. And she wouldn't because he wasn't going to tell her. This feelings would go away with time and he sincerely hoped that time came soon.
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The pain was back again.
Kelly thought one afternoon in her office as she tried to stand. For the past few days she'd felt weird... had a feeling in her stomach like something was different. It wasn’t quite like cramps since it didn’t particularly ache, though she felt that something was definitely up with her body. The first time she felt it, she passed it off as her body reacting to her workouts. But the cramp had stayed even days later. Starting and stopping at intervals, and Kelly was getting worried that this was something more than what she suspected.
Soon she began to suspect that she was pregnant. It wasn't impossible with the way she and Dimitri had been having sex.
She decided that she would give a pregnancy test a go out of curiosity to see if her suspicions were correct. She had read that the best time to take the test was the first time you use the bathroom in the morning. So on her way home that evening, she got a pregnancy test.
Half asleep by 4 am the next morning, she took a test out of the box and read the instructions. Pee on the stick. Easy enough, she thought.
One line appeared pretty much immediately, and she relaxed a bit. With eyes barely open, a few moments later she could make a second line faintly appear to make a plus sign. A positive. At this point she was way too tired to make sense of this or know how to feel so she just crawled back to bed and went to back to sleep.
When she woke at a more godly hour she thought she would try again to confirm if the test was true. She took another and the result was the same. Was she dreaming? The second test turned out to be another positive. Nope, it was definitely real.
And she shouldn't be surprised about this, considering the fact that she and Dimitri were barely able to keep their hands off each other... Sometimes.... Most times actually, they were even careless. She didn't even want to start thinking of the way Dimitri would react to this news.
Hell, she didn't even know how to react herself.
She sat down slowly on her bed, deciding that she wasn't going to the office that morning anymore, knowing that even if she did, she wouldn't be able to concentrate on anything.
She needed to take some time off to think about this new development.
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A week later, Kelly checked her watch as she headed towards her kitchen for morning tea.
She found Evelyn, her help, alone in the kitchen, vigorously grating carrot for her favourite cake.
Kelly had known Evelyn since she was young girl. When her father had been too busy with work to pay her any attention, which was quite often, Evelyn had been the one who stayed with her....even been like a mother to her.
She brushed off Evelyn’s offer to make tea, munching some dry biscuits to settle her stomach while she brewed the tea herself. As soon as she sat down at the table with a steaming mugful, the grating stopped and Evelyn faced her with a determined air of confrontation.
"Are you going to tell him?" Evelyn asked.
Kelly shrugged her bewilderment. "I don't understand. Tell…whom…what?" she asked.
Evelyn wiped her hands on a cloth, the dark brown eyes of her aboriginal heritage measuring some goal she had in mind before speaking again. "Don’t think you can be fooling me, Miss Kelly. I’ve seen the signs too many times. So don't even think about lying to me."
The nausea she’d been fighting every morning for days rolled around her stomach and Kelly swallowed nervously.
