Released (Caged #3)(10)
“It wasn’t, though. We…um…we got serious. She was the first…you know?”
Like an idiot, I looked up at Tria again as she raised an eyebrow.
“Um…yeah,” I stammered. “Sorry.”
I ran my hand through my hair and tried to go on.
“We were kids…stupid,” I told her. “I used a condom most of the time, but…well…not always. She got pregnant during the summer before our senior year.”
Tria’s eyes widened and her hand went up to cover her mouth.
“You already have a child,” she whispered.
Pins and needles crept up my legs as my body tensed. At first, I couldn’t answer, and I watched a tear come to the corner of Tria’s eye and spill over her cheek.
“No,” I told her. “Um…give me a sec.”
I rubbed at my own eyes and then followed my fingers with my gaze as I dropped my hands to rest on my legs. I gripped my knees a little.
“I freaked out when she told me,” I admitted, “but my reaction was probably a fairly normal one given the circumstances. We were young and scared. I knew my parents were going to be pissed and that the conversation was going to suck, but I also knew I had enough money to take care of her and still get us both through college. I figured we’d move into my parents’ house and hire a nanny so we could finish high school and then go to Hoffman so we’d be close to home and the baby and whatever. It wasn’t where I planned to go—Dad had already made sure I was set up to study at Harvard Business School—but it would still work out. I mean, I already had a job and a career lined up for me.”
“Once we talked about all of that, we both felt a lot better. Aimee had grown up with nothing, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that with the money I had, we would be able to completely support ourselves and the baby while we got our lives together. She only knew what it was like for her cousin who got pregnant and married young. The father of her baby turned out to be a real * and eventually left her with nothing—no money, no education. I think knowing she’d still be able to finish high school and go to college is what really helped her.”
I took a long slow breath in, then let it out just a slowly.
“We decided to tell my parents first,” I said. “I knew they weren’t going to be happy, but the reaction they had—especially my father—was far more callous than what I thought it would be. He flipped—I mean really, really flipped. He called Aimee every name in the book and claimed she was nothing more than a money-grubbing whore who had let this happen on purpose.”
I had to stop a second, pressing my fists tightly against my thighs as I tried to hold my shit together.
“What about your mom?” Tria asked quietly.
“She just cried,” I said. “She didn’t do anything but take his side. When I tried to get her to defend me, she just turned away.”
I rubbed at my temple for a second, trying to drive away the throbbing in my head. Even though I had no intentions of seeking it out, my body was definitely letting me know it wanted more junk.
“Dad said we’d get nothing,” I went on. “No money, no support. He said he would only pay for an abortion, but we had already talked about it for so long, she was already thinking of it as her child—our baby. She didn’t want to do that.”
Tria’s eyes softened a little for the girl in my past she would never meet. Maybe I had never paid attention before or just never noticed how much like Tria it was to do that—have sympathy for a girl in my past—but now it made me feel warm to know how inherently good she was. I wondered if there was anything she could possibly say about Keith that would make me sympathize with him and decided there wasn’t.
It was one of the hundred ways she was an amazing, incredible woman.
“Aimee went from accepting what was happening to panicking about the whole thing. After my parents reacted the way they did, she wouldn’t tell her mom at all. For the next couple of months, she hid the pregnancy while I tried to convince my parents to reconsider. We both thought that if my parents would help us, her mom wouldn’t freak out about it so much.”
Another deep breath.
“My father wouldn’t budge,” I said. “Mom wouldn’t go against him and just kept saying how disappointed she was that we hadn’t been careful. Eventually I had it out with Dad and told him we were going to have the baby, and he was going to have to live with that. We had a big fight, and as I was leaving, he told me not to come back, so I didn’t.”
My hands were starting to shake a little, and I knew if I had been anywhere else, I’d be heading straight for the nearest needle right now.
“Aimee was almost six months along,” I told Tria. “I was sleeping in my car near the school’s parking lot and spent my time going back and forth from Aimee’s trailer to school. I kept trying to get her to open up and tell her mom about the baby, but she wouldn’t. She was afraid she’d get kicked out, too, and wouldn’t have anywhere to live before the baby was born. I bought her a bunch of baggy clothes, and she even made me wear baggy shit, too, so she could claim it was just the latest style. Her mom wasn’t really all that observant anyway. I think she just liked that I was buying shit for her daughter.”
“Where is she now?”