Page 22 of Craving Dahlia

The flight is far from smooth. I throw up again in the airport bathroom before I even make it to the plane, and then twicemore on the plane itself, rushing back to the tiny bathroom and apologizing the whole way as I bump into passengers trying to get back to their own seats. By the time I’m back at JFK and I find Evelyn waiting by the baggage carousel, I feel exhausted and haggard. I don’t dare turn my phone back on yet. By now my mother will have seen my texts, and I don’t feel in any way equipped to handle that yet.

“Dahlia, what’s going on?” Evelyn grabs my suitcase off of the carousel for me, her face scrunched up with worry. “You look?—”

“Like hell?” I supply, and her nose wrinkles.

“I wasn’t going to say it out loud. Come on. We’ll go back to the mansion and you can tell me what happened. Was the party that bad?”

I’m on the verge of telling her that I want to go back to my apartment, but she’s already hustling me towards the front doors, my baggage in her hands and that no-nonsense look on her face that I’ve seen when she’s handling customers, and I decide to just go along with it. I don’t have the energy to argue, and honestly, I’m not sure that I want to. Not when I have my best friend here, and she’s trying to take care of me.

There’s a black town car waiting outside. The driver standing next to it opens the door, taking the bags from Evelyn without a word. “After you take us home, take her things back to her apartment,” Evelyn directs. “You have a doorman he can leave them with, right, Dahlia?”

I nod, momentarily startled. Sometimes I still forget the kind of life Evelyn leads now, one that has more privilege than even my upbringing. “That works,” I manage, and Evelyn gently nudges me into the car, sliding in after me.

She rubs her hands together as the door shuts, leaving us in the warm interior as the driver pulls away from the curb. “Are you okay?” she asks, turning to look at me, and before I can manage a single word, I abruptly burst into tears.

I don’t know where it comes from. The whole morning, I suppose, I’ve been in triage mode, focused on getting away from my parents’ house and back to New York. I haven’t been able to stop long enough to cry, and now that I’m sitting here with Evelyn, everything that I’ve felt since the possibility of my being pregnant occurred to me last night comes out in a rush of shoulder-shaking sobs.

“Dahlia!” Evelyn sounds alarmed as she reaches for me, pulling me into her arms and smoothing her hand over my hair. “It’s alright. Whatever’s happened, it’s going to be okay. I promise. We’ll figure it out together.”

I want to tell her, but I can't stop crying long enough to speak. I’m crying so hard I can barely breathe, my stomach twisting into knots that make me afraid I’m going to vomit again, and I just barely manage to avoidthatas Evelyn tries to soothe me.

“We’ll talk when we get to the mansion,” she says. “Just try to breathe. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out.”

I nod, the tears still coming. As soon as the car pulls up to the Yashkov mansion, Evelyn hustles me into the house, past the housekeeper and staff and up the stairs to one of the guest bedrooms, and straight to the attached bathroom. She starts the shower, turning me firmly so that I’m pointed at it, and looks at me.

“There’s everything you might need in there. You’ll feel better after a good shower. I’ll bring you something to change into. I’ll ask one of the staff to make us some tea, and we’ll talk.”

I’m too grateful to have someone taking care of me to do anything other than exactly what she says. Once Evelyn leaves, I strip out of the leggings and sweater I wore on the plane, stepping under the hot spray of the shower. She’s right about that—the hot water and the sweet-smelling soap makes me feel a little more human, and I scrub myself down before getting out,drying off, and finding mouthwash and a spare toothbrush in the medicine cabinet.

Evelyn left a pair of soft cashmere sweatpants, a long-sleeved shirt and slippers out for me, and I slip into them gratefully, throwing my hair up in a messy bun before venturing downstairs to find her. She’s in the kitchen, talking to a middle-aged woman who I assume must be the household cook, and the moment Evelyn sees me she picks up a steaming mug from the counter and thrusts it into my hands.

“Come with me,” she says. “We’ll go sit in the living room and talk.”

The smaller, informal living room is plush and cozy, with a fire going and a large, soft couch just in front of it. Evelyn sinks down on one side and pats the cushion next to her, and I sit down, too.

“What happened?” she asks, and the look on her face is so sweet and encouraging that I somehow manage to just come right out with it.

“I’m pregnant,” I blurt out, feeling the word drop into the air between us with the heaviness of an anvil, and Evelyn’s eyes go wide.

“Oh, Dahlia,” she whispers.

Relief washes over me at the tone in her voice. Evelyn is pregnant too, almost four months now, just enough to see the soft swell of her stomach underneath the soft fabric of her sweater. Her pregnancy was unexpected, too, but she’s happy about it. I hadn’t really thought that she’d suddenly think thateverypregnancy is a good thing just because she’s happy about hers, but there had been that tiny bit of worry in the back of my head.

It’s clear that she doesn’t feel that way, though. “Is it—” she says slowly, and I nod.

“That guy I took home from Hush. It must be—it had been a while since I’d been with anyone before him, and I haven’t been with anyone since. And—” I feel my cheeks heat up. “We didn’t use a condom. He pulled out,” I add quickly, before Evelyn has a chance to think that Icompletelylost my mind that night. “But I guess that wasn’t good enough.”

“It’s not the most reliable method of birth control,” she says wryly. “But at least an effort was made.” Her expression sobers and she reaches for one of my hands, squeezing it. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” I say miserably. “I only found out this morning. That’s why I came rushing back. I didn’t even see my parents this morning. I left before they could wake up and got the flight home.”

“So it wasn’t something that happened at the party last night?”

“Sort of—” It all comes out in a rush then, and I explain all of it to Evelyn—how I’d gotten sick while talking to Jude, the moment that I realized that I was late, getting the pregnancy test, all of it. She holds my hand the entire time, squeezing it gently as she listens, and when I’m done I sag back against the couch, exhausted.

“And you don’t want to try to find him?”

I shake my head. “I only know his first name. And anyway, he was so quick to leave that night.” I bite my lip. “He obviously only wanted the one night, and he didn’t have any interest in finding me or seeing me again after that. I don’t want to chase down someone who doesn’t want me. He’s not going to want the baby, either.”

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