Zahara rested her forehead in her palm. “You’re freaking me out here. I really don’t remember.”
“Think, Zahara.” Despina leaned in. “It’s important. A woman your age should be having regular periods.”
Zahara had lots of friends whose cycles were messed up. But those friends also had medical problems. She didn’t have any medical problems, and the re
ason she didn’t have to track her periods was because they came like Swiss-precision clockwork.
Panic niggled deep in the pit of her stomach.
“Are you on the pill?” Despina pushed.
“No.” She dropped her hand to the table. “The last period I can remember came while I was filming Chilled.”
“Zahara, that was two months ago.”
“I’m not pregnant,” she insisted. “We used condoms.” She felt like she was in high school being questioned by a guidance counselor. God knew her mother never cared enough to talk to Zahara about it. “Look, I’m sure it will come any day.”
“Condoms aren’t all that effective. The manufacturers love to tell you they are 98% effective, but in real world studies, the statistics are significantly lower.”
Zahara frowned at her. “And you know this how?”
“I ran across it during my research on fertility. Malcom and I have been trying to get pregnant for over a year.”
“Really?” Zahara smiled. She liked the idea of babies—as long as they were someone else’s. “That’s great.”
Despina laughed a little. “The day I’m late, I’m peeing on a stick. It’s hilarious in a really neurotic way.” She stood, took Zahara’s hand, and pulled. “Come on. Chop, chop. Let’s get this done. I have pregnancy tests at my place.”
“What? No—”
“As soon as it’s negative, we can chalk all this weirdness up to stress. Let’s go now, over the lunch break. We can grab food from my fridge. The chef cooking for me is amazing.”
Zahara tried to maneuver her way out of it, but Despina would have none of her excuses. The woman finally hit a bull’s-eye when she said, “Do you want to worry about this for God knows how long until your period comes, or do you want to put your mind to rest and focus on the movie?”
That got Zahara out the door and into Despina’s ride. But after only a block of sitting still with this new worry on her mind, Zahara wished she could bail out of the SUV the way she’d bailed out of the muscle car earlier. And the closer they got to Despina’s rental, the more terrified Zahara became over what they would find.
She focused intently on her body, searching for any signs she might be pregnant. But besides this lingering nausea, fatigue, and the goddamned emotional minefield she’d been leap-frogging through, she hadn’t noticed anything different.
She looked out the window as they moved into a suburban neighborhood and steered her mind elsewhere. “Is Chase staying in a house near you? Do you two ride in together in the morning?”
“No,” she said. “He’s at your hotel.”
“He is? Why?”
Despina smiled. “Judging by the look on his face whenever he sees you, I’d say he wants to be as close to you as possible.”
Zahara was going to call that a bunch of bullshit, but the driver pulled into the driveway of Despina’s house, and fear tightened her throat. Zahara might have reprogrammed her brain to relish facing fear, but when it came time to open the door and get out of the car, she found herself paralyzed.
Despina came around and opened the door for her, giving her a quizzical look. “What’s going on?”
“I can’t be…” The words rolled off Zahara’s tongue in a whisper, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the last, which was better in the end, considering the driver within earshot.
Just the thought of pregnancy… The blood drained from her face. Her cheeks suddenly felt chilled, as if she’d been out in the cold.
“You’ll feel better once we get this done.” Despina pulled Zahara to her feet.
She climbed the stairs to Despina’s house feeling shaky and vulnerable. A sensation she could only liken to the way she’d felt as a kid, hiding behind the sofa during a fight between her mother and one of her stepfathers.
The house was big and open with light-colored furnishings and lots of windows, but Zahara couldn’t appreciate the home’s beauty with Despina rummaging through a drawer in the bathroom for a pregnancy test.