Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68515 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
I chose to sit down and ignore it.
Mostly.
Taking my own bite of the gumbo, I decided that I’d gone a little light on the salt and pepper, because it was missing something.
Not that I knew what.
“You may be right,” she admitted. “When I left, I was very close with my mom’s father. That’s the wild game dude,” she explained. “But he didn’t stop me from…” Her mouth snapped shut and then she sighed. “I was a literal modern retelling of the Virgin Mary. I got pregnant without penetration. The boy I was with came on my…” She gestured down to her lap with her spoon. “And somehow, someway, I got pregnant. My parents didn’t believe that we weren’t intimate in that way, and I was kicked out. I lived on the streets for a while and ended up getting hypothermia as I tried in vain to find shelter and couldn’t. I lost the baby. It took me a while to get on my feet, but eventually I moved down to Texas where it was warm and would always be warmer than Utah. I get PTSD from being in the cold sometimes, so warm is welcome.” She shook her head. “But my grandfather, through all of that, never contacted me. Never offered to help. So… he may be reaching out, but I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to forgive him for not helping.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Like, seriously.
There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind when I pressed into her the other day that I had just de-fucking-flowered her.
I knew the instant that she closed around me that I’d taken something from her that no other man would get to take.
So it was quite horrifying to think she’d had to go through that crazy time as a child.
“How old were you?” I asked, wondering if I should take a bite of my gumbo, or stab the table with my spoon.
Goddamn, it made me mad on her behalf that she would have to go through that at any age.
“Seventeen,” she answered.
Rage boiled in my guts at her answer.
“That’s insane.” I shook my head. “I’m not condoning doing shit like that and getting pregnant. I mean, it’s sort of a consequence that you live with when you make that adult decision. But nobody should ever have to go through that alone.” I winced. “Erich had a pregnancy scare with a girl when he was in high school. I remember it vividly because both Erich and Rachel wanted me to pay this little girl to go away. I did, but not for why you might think.” I leaned back in my chair. “She deserved more than what Erich could give her. So, I offered her twenty-five K to do with what she would. And I told her if she ever needed help, to contact me. She turned eighteen a few weeks later, and then I never saw her again. I do get messages from time to time with pictures of the baby, though. Or, more accurately, the child. He’s ten now.”
Her mouth fell open. “You hid a kid from Erich?”
“Erich was fucking half the cheerleading team, and then had a wild night with this sweet little girl that was captain of the debate team. Brought her home to meet us because he wanted his mom to think that she wasn’t like all the other girls she hated. Once he had that little family meeting out of the way, he fucked her, then dropped her. He treated her like shit publicly, and she was running scared. I knew she was about to drop out of school, and Rachel and Erich pleaded with me to pay her off so it wouldn’t ruin his chances of getting into school. They think I did it for their reasons. But I did it for my own. Erich doesn’t deserve that kid,” I told her bluntly.
She waved it away. “Does Erich know he has it? As in, does he know that she didn’t have an abortion like he wanted her to?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just did what I did on my end. Whatever crap that girl’s hidden is on her. But, like I said, I don’t feel bad.”
She sighed. “I think you already know my opinions on Erich. But let me be perfectly clear, we were nothing more than four dates, I don’t have any friends in town kind of thing. Anisa works a lot of shifts at her parents’ hotels. If I’m lucky to hang out with her, she’s usually doing shady things to rebel, since she now has an arranged marriage on the horizon.”
And we talked.
We talked, and talked, and talked, until the dreaded ‘call’ happened.
I knew it was coming.
Mostly because during those hours that we talked, the power had gone out.