The Surrogate

The Fertility Clinic

Monday August 30th, London.

It's the late summer bank holiday in England and the city is busier than it would usually be on a Monday. As is tradition (or at least that's how it feels) for a bank holiday it's also raining heavily with the occasional flash of lightning and loud rumbles of thunder.

Holly is sitting in Starbucks by the window, listening to the rain pelting on to the glass outside and glancing up from her phone as people dash past without umbrellas, overtaking those who remembered to bring theirs out with them or dress appropriately for the weather. She's waiting for Ester to join her for a coffee and a bacon roll but her friend is running late, stuck in traffic due to an environmental protest rally being held outside Parliament.

While she's been waiting, she's been messaging Seb and looking at the photos that Britta took yesterday afternoon after the race. The weekend already feels like a distant memory. She's been to an F1 Grand Prix and had full VIP access to the paddock, Aston Martin's hospitality, garages and the pit lane - the kind of experience that any ardent race fan would give their right arm for. If it wasn't for the photos then she wouldn't believe that she'd been there herself and she's since discovered, upon closer inspection, that her pass is valid for the remainder of this season. Seb is obviously planning on having her attending more races this year.

Two photos in particular have got her swiping left and then right, she's going from one photo to the other and then back again, looking at the way that Seb appears to be gazing at her lovingly and then realising that she was caught gazing at him in exactly the same way.

She can't stop looking at him and thinking about him, she's missing him and wishing that she'd taken the chance to fly to Zürich with him. Messaging him doesn't feel like it's enough, she wants to hear his voice and see his handsome face.

She's pining for him.

And it's wrong, it's not allowed, it's not meant to happen. She's a surrogate mother not his girlfriend.

Returning to London was the right thing to do; she has to distance herself, think with a clear head and press the reset button.

In her head she knows that going ahead with the surrogacy could be a recipe for heartache, if she spoke to anyone at the office then she'd be told to call it off before they got to the agreement stage and any papers got signed. But in her heart she wants to do this, she wants to make him happy and give him the child that he longs for and she wants to be able to continue seeing him and being a part of his life for the next year. She can't back out now.

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Zürich.

Seb sits in his car outside the clinic. He feels tired and as he cranes his neck to look at his reflection in the rear view mirror, he looks tired too. He'd got home late, around one AM this morning, gone straight to bed and then laid there thinking about Holly and today's appointment. He'd been picturing that small room, that pile of pornographic magazines with the pages stuck together, that box of white tissues and that plastic sample pot. Then he'd imagined himself struggling to get an erection and the utter embarrassment of having to tell the doctor that he couldn't get it up and so can't provide his semen sample. He's been lucky if he's managed to get more than a couple of hours sleep in total.

Even messaging Holly hasn't improved his mindset, not that he's let on to her how he's worried about not being able to perform for the test. The last thing that she'll want to know is that he's worried he won't be able to get hard.

He looks again at the last message that she's sent him, it's just a simple 'good luck x'. Yeah, I'm going to need all the fucking luck in the world. I wish you were here with me.