Vicious Cycle (Vicious Cycle #1)(39)
“Did you have an abortion?”
A mirthless laugh escaped her lips. “Go to a clinic and have someone kill my baby? No. I could have never done something like that.” She shook her head. “I did something far, far worse.” She glanced back at me, her dark eyes almost soulless. “I killed my baby.”
I sucked in a breath of shock at her admission. “You did what?”
“It was during rehearsals at my ballet studio. We were practicing lifts with our male partners. There was this really high one where I was practically over his head. And when the idea came crashing down on me, I didn’t even take a moment to try to talk myself out of it. I just acted.” She drew in a ragged breath, her eyes staring past me like she was seeing into the past.
“You would think it would have to be something pretty momentous to rip a life from your body. But it was so simple. … Just one slip of my leg, one missed position I’d executed flawlessly time and time again. And even as I started to fall, it still wasn’t too late. I could’ve changed my mind, twisted my body to where I could’ve fallen on my back. But no. I made sure I came down as hard as I could on my abdomen.”
Her eyes closed like she was once again experiencing the physical pain along with her emotional torment. “With the wind knocked out of me, I lay there, gasping and wheezing for breath. Everyone came rushing over, asking me if I was all right. When I could finally breathe again, I felt sick at what I had done, so I excused myself and went home. The rest of the evening I waited for something to happen, but it never did. As I lay in bed that night, I put my hand over my sore abdomen, and then in that instant, the strangest thing happened. The most absolute acceptance and love for my future child pulsed through me. I went to sleep that night ready to tell my parents about the baby first thing in the morning.”
Tears shimmered in her eyes, and I could tell she was close to losing it. “I woke up in a pool of blood. When I screamed, my parents came running. I pretended that I had screamed in pain because of really bad period cramps. After shooing my embarrassed father out the door, my mother started caring for me like I was a little girl again. She stripped me down like a child and put me into the shower. While I washed the innocent blood of my baby off of me, she changed the sheets. If she suspected anything, she never said. She just called in to work and stayed in bed with me all day, giving me the comfort I so desperately needed.”
“Jesus,” I muttered, unsure of what the hell to say to such a story. Part of me wanted to get the hell out of there—put as much distance as possible between me and Alex’s pain. Somehow being in that room with her was harder than facing down a thug with a gun.
“A year later, on the very same day I killed my baby, my parents were killed. Sometimes I think it was a punishment for what I did—a karmic retribution that I threw away what I was given, so I had something else I loved taken from me.” My mouth gaped open that she could honestly believe that. For a minute I wondered if it was the alcohol talking, but then I remembered how sharp it made her.
“Hey, now, don’t be thinking shit like that.” When Alex didn’t look at me, I took her face in my hands, enjoying the softness of her skin. “Did you hear me? Your parents’ dying had nothing to do with the baby. Bad shit happens all the time.”
She didn’t acknowledge anything I said. “After they died, I changed my major to education. Not only was it to honor their memory, but I thought if I could love children, I could somehow repent for what I did.”
“Alex, listen to me, dammit. You were just a scared teenage girl who chose a path that maybe wasn’t the best route. In the long run, what you did wasn’t any different from going to a clinic. The end result would have been the same.”
“I did it to myself. That makes it worse.”
“But it’s not.” Gripping her chin, I tipped her head up to look me in the eye. “You didn’t kill your parents. Shit doesn’t work that way. Yeah, you killed your baby, but what you did didn’t start some cosmic chain of events to punish you.”
When she only sighed in response to my words, I said, “Fine. You want something about me? I’ll give you something. When I was fifteen, I killed my father.”
While I thought my statement might cause her to run, to cower in fear, or at least gasp in shock, she did none of that. She simply stared at me, waiting for me to continue. “That doesn’t freak you out?”
“I always knew you were an outlaw, Jesse James,” she said with a small smile.
“Is that right?”
She gave a slight nod of her head. “But without you telling me the history between the two of you, I can only imagine it was justified.”
The f*cking eerie calm with which she said the words had the same effect as someone dousing me with a bucket of ice-cold water. “How can you of all people sit there and say that I was justified? I murdered my own flesh and blood,” I countered.
Easing up in the bed, she pinned me with a stare. “You want me to be judge, jury, and executioner? Then don’t just tell me that you murdered him. I may not know you that well, but what I do know tells me you would never kill someone unless you had to.” Jerking her chin at me, she said, “Tell me what he did to you.”
“I think you’re smart enough to already know.”
“But I need to hear it from you.” Inching closer to me in the bed, she murmured, “I think you need to say it aloud, too.”