Page 48 of Knocked Up
"Your doctor," Beckett said. "Do you have one, or do we get one?"
"I have one. Mateo took over the practice on Wadsworth. I've known him nine years. He did Marisol's second."
"Okay." He was looking at me now and not at the floor. "When's the next appointment?"
"Beckett."
"When is it?"
"The nineteenth."
"What time?"
"Two-fifteen."
He took his phone out of his jacket and put it in.
I watched the starting goaltender of the Denver Peaks put my obstetrics appointment into his calendar with his thumb. I could not get a full breath into the top of my lungs.
"Can I come?" he said.
"That's not…"
"I'm asking. That's a question, it isn't a plan." He put the phone away. "If it's a no, it's a no, and I'll ask again in three weeks."
"Why would you ask again in three weeks?"
"Because it might be a different answer," he said, "and I'd rather ask than assume."
"Okay, stop. Stop being like this."
"Like what?"
"Like this," I said. My voice did something I did not authorize. I turned around and straightened a jar of cotton balls that did not need it.
Behind me there was the sound of a very large man not getting up.
"Tessa."
"Give me a second."
"Take it."
I took about four. Then I turned around and did the thing I came in there to do.
"Here's the part you need to hear, and I need you to let me get all the way to the end of it. This changes the logistics. It does not change the terms. What I said in that doorway in October is still the whole of it. I'm not asking you for anything. Not money, not time, not a place in the rotation, not a conversation about what we are, because we are not anything. I'm not going to be a situation that a man handles."
"Understood."
"I'm telling you because it's yours to know. If you want in, there's a way to do that and we will work it out like adults with a calendar. If you don't, you say so tonight and I will never once bring it up again. I mean that, and I'm good at it."
He let about three seconds go by.
"Are you finished?"
"Yes."
"I want in," he said.
