Make Me Yours

“November. Why?”

“It’s almost February. You’re late by two months.”

Something hit her down, it felt like a surge of electricity.

“No… it can’t be. I… I’m on the pill. It must be the pill messing up my cycle. I thought as much and then, I have been very stressed lately. And I’ve lost weight; I haven’t eaten a decent meal in three weeks. It’s… it’s all of these things. You know how these hormones can be, don’t you?”

There was loud silence.

Finally, Jenny left and came back with a test strip.

“Good thing we always have one around. Here. There’s only one way to find out.” We will be right outside.”

Her friends piled away as she received the test strip, but not without giving her reassuring hugs.

“How is she?” she heard her mother ask as the door closed behind them.

“She’ll be fine. What’s important is that she knows we will be here for her, no matter what happens.” Carrie responded.

Zoey could not believe it. For a long time, she simply held the sink and bowed her head, willing herself to wake up from this nightmare. It had to be a dream, didn’t it? It had to be a dream. All of it. Right from the moment she met Xen, because it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible that she could be pregnant from the man who had taken her heart, played with it for a bit and shattered it by getting married to another woman, without so much as a word of explanation. No. It just couldn’t be real.

She simply wanted to wake up. Wake up on the day she was supposed to leave Singapore with her girls for her birthday. Then, she would cancel the trip and go somewhere else. Somewhere she wouldn’t meet Xen or fall in love with him. Goddamnit! She didn’t ask for this! She didn’t ask for him to come into her life… she didn’t ask for this gaping hole in her chest that hurt like nothing ever had before.

A knock sounded on the door then.

“Zoey? Everything good? Need any help?”

“No. I’m fine. I’ll be out in a bit.”

She looked at the test strip in her hands, with what was left of the pieces of her heart beating in fear. What if she was pregnant? What would she do? Two months gone. Christ. She must have gotten pregnant before she thought to get on the pill. They hadn’t exactly ever played safe.

You can do this, Zoey. Whatever that strip says, you are going to take it like the strong woman you are and handle this. Okay? And if it’s positive, then you better be happy that you’re finally gonna have a baby, no matter how bad the circumstances may be.

Charged by the pep talk, she finally took the test. It was the longest three minutes of her life, waiting for it to show plus or minus. Finally she picked it, and slowly opened her eyes to look.

The moment she saw it, she felt a mixture of emotions. More heartbreak, pain, sadness but in the midst of it all, was one flickering candle of light – hope.

Chapter 14

Xen stood in his office in the high rise building. One of the tallest buildings in Singapore and he had the best view. The glass wall afforded him the city at a glance; the lights, the roads, the people, the buildings. All of it was beautiful. It was something he could never get over and in the past four months, this had been his place of peace.

Not home where his mother lived, and that stranger he called wife. Certainly not in his heart, where he mourned for the woman he had truly loved and lost, where he missed her greatly every day and definitely not his mind, where guilt ate at him for doing what he did to her.

No. Taking an hour or two every day to stare out this wall was the only moment he felt peace in all his twenty-four hours. He feared that if he continued this way, someday he would start hearing the call to jump through and maybe, just maybe one day, he would actually do.

Maybe then, his mother and Rachel would be happy. Happy with what this captivity he had been put in had made him. And maybe then, Mr Young would be proud that his daughter had become a widow so soon.

He was doing it again; thinking dreary thoughts. No. That would not do. This was his movement of peace. But, peace meant different things to different men, did it not? To many men, it meant death. To him, it had once meant being in Zoey’s arms.

Sleeping next to her and seeing her face first when he woke up in the morning. Peace had been hearing her laugh and the way his heart sung whenever she mindlessly reached for him. That had been peace to him.

And what had his mother done? She had gotten her revenge for the Colorado incident, and she had stolen that peace from him.

He still thought about her. He would never stop. He stalked her on social media as discreetly as he could. She was doing very well for herself. The affiliation with Li Group concerning Belmont 2.0 had given her company great exposure that had taken her to the skies. She was as beautiful as always and working as hard as only Zoey could. Even from such a distance, she still amazed him, and inspired him.

There had been the matter of backlash from the media concerning his marriage, of course. But she had handled it well, before he had managed to get it under control. He had felt terrible that he had to put her on the spot to answer to questions concerning how real their relationship had been, and if she had known about Rachel but had simply agreed to be the other woman.

He had watched all the video footage and not once had she cracked in front of those cameras. He wondered if she had cried in private, though. He had too. Silently, at nights when he had his back turned on Rachel. Those early days when the pain of being away from her had been too much to bear, he had cried.

He had only found consolation in the fact that even if she did cry, unlike him, she had friends and family who would be there to dry her tears and hold her.

Ah… what a royal mess. He had wanted a life with Zoey, but she would never know that, never believe that. Many times, he had thought of calling her, going to her, begging her forgiveness, explaining it all. But he had stopped himself. Of what use would it be? When it mattered, he had kept silent.

But had he had any other choice? He had arrived at Singapore after that urgent call back to find out that three of their biggest shareholders had pulled out of the company with their percentages and over two billion dollars stolen funds. His mother had told him that she had known for a while now, but had simply wanted him to enjoy the end of the year holidays with Zoey, believing that she could handle the situation and prevent them from declaring bankruptcy.

However, all her plans had proved futile except one – the only one which she was yet to try: a merger.