Trapped (Caged #2)(61)

“You okay?” I asked cautiously.

She nodded once, but it wasn’t convincing. I reached out and took her hand in mine and then pulled her up to me. She placed her opposite hand against the mattress for balance as she crawled up the bed and lay down beside me.

“So, uh…” I said, fumbling around trying to figure out what the right words to say at this point might be, “what did you think?”

“I heard it…well…that it tasted pretty gross,” she told me.

“Who told you that?”

“Elissa,” she said. “Nikki, too.”

I figured as much.

“Don’t worry about it, baby,” I said. “I told you before you don’t ever have to do anything you don’t like.”

“What do you mean?” Tria asked.

“Well, if you think it’s gross…” I really had no idea what else to say.

“Oh no!” Tria laughed. “It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be! Not good, but better than I thought.”

My heart started again, and I was fairly sure there was a God.

*****

It was a few weeks before I could get back into a daily routine of working out and preparing to fight again. Dordy had been in a pretty generous mood—either that or he was afraid he might get sued for negligence or something—and let me make a few bucks helping him out at the bar. It wasn’t as much as I had made fighting, but it worked out in the short term.

Tria bugged me to convince Dordy to let it be permanent, but he never would have gone for it. Even if he did, I had no intention of changing careers. She had brought it up a couple of times since the hospital, but I usually shut down the conversation quickly. We were at an impasse, and it wasn’t going to do any good for either of us to harp on it.

I couldn’t wait to get back in the cage. Not having anyone to punch for so long was driving me nuts. It was almost as bad as when Tria and I were sleeping in the same bed together while my cock had been threatening to shrivel up and fall off due to lack of use.

“You’re nearly there,” Yolanda said as I stepped up on the scale.

I had lost several pounds while in the hospital but was back up to one ninety-five again. Yolanda was finally letting me do some abdominal work as well once Dr. Baynor okayed it. After my next appointment, I was pretty sure I would be cleared to fight again. Honestly, I felt great—better than I had in years despite the eight-inch scar down my side. I just needed to get my muscle weight back up.

Deciding to walk home from the gym instead of taking the bus, I grinned to myself as the sunshine peeked out from between buildings. Though my side was a little sore from working out, it didn’t feel any worse than it might have if I had just skipped the gym for a few days. Finishing up my cigarette, I tossed the butt into the street and gave Krazy Katie a wave. She ignored me, so I went inside and headed up the steps with a smile on my face, glad to know I’d be getting back to real work soon and would be able to get caught back up on bills and shit. Maybe I could start saving up a little extra so I could take Tria out again.

I slipped the key into the lock, shoved open the door, and stopped in my tracks.

Tria was on the couch, which was expected. However, she didn’t have her nose in a book or a notepad, and she wasn’t watching television like she did when her studying was done for the day. She didn’t have her typical glass of apple juice on the table, and she wasn’t relaxed against the cushions. She was just sitting there on the edge of the couch with wide, unsure eyes and her bottom lip clamped in her teeth.

“Tria?” I said cautiously. “What’s wrong?”

She glanced up at me quickly. Her eyes held anxiety, fear, and trepidation. She looked away, then back at me, and then seemed to look all around the room for a minute. A shiver ran through her, and she clasped her hands together in her lap. She looked down at them as she finally spoke.

“The health center called me today,” Tria said. “There was a…um…a recall.”

“A recall?”

“For the pills I’ve been taking.”

“Pills?”

“Birth control pills.”

My forehead creased as I tried to figure out what she was saying.

“Recall?” I repeated like a total moron.

“There was a bad batch,” Tria said quietly. “They weren’t effective.”

I shook my head to clear it and tried to put together what she was saying.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “We f*ck all the time. If they were ineffective, then you’d be…you’d be…”

I couldn’t say the word. Instead, I watched in silence as Tria slowly reached for an object on the coffee table, and my gaze followed. The object was shaped like a big, fat, plastic pen with an oval dent in the center of it. In the center of the dent, there was a small, pink plus sign.

I was never one to panic, but some circumstances just called for it.





Chapter 17—Do the Worst


I couldn’t even begin to describe what was going on in my head.

For some odd reason, I remembered the story of The Red Balloon from when I was a kid. Mom had always picked up every book that had won any kind of award for anything and had made sure she read it to me. What I had remembered most about it was asking why everything—the buildings, the clothes, the hairstyles—looked so weird, and Mom having to explain the seventies to me. My reaction to the story itself had been that the kid was a loon and that the red balloon was a symbol of his journey from sanity to insanity. The part when the bullies broke the balloon was just the end of his grasp on reality.