Burn It Up(115)

“No,” she said, smiling. “It’s not.”

He looked up.

“Your pleasure? All those nights when she kept you awake, shrieking? All the nights you stayed up to stand guard, worried about my ex?”

“Well, it was my honor, anyhow.”

His honor . . . He did have that, in a way. And not long ago at all, he’d had her respect, her admiration.

And I still have his, if only because he never got to find out about my own mistakes.

She knew he was hurting, from how she’d rejected his past. Maybe he’d feel just a little better if she shared her own mistakes with him now. A little relieved, like maybe he’d dodged a bullet himself. It wasn’t as though he was the only monster. She was far from perfect.

“Listen. Sit a minute.” She patted the bed. “If you can spare it.”

He sat and she did the same, facing him.

“You told me about your past,” she said. “I still owe you mine. Maybe it’ll help you understand why it is I need everything in my life going forward to be on the up-and-up.”

“You don’t owe me anything, but I’ll listen all the same.”

“It’s . . .” A ragged breath hijacked her chest, but she forced out a long exhalation, calming some. Damn, one word in and already she was a mess.

“You don’t need to say it if it’s only going to upset you.”

“No, I do need to. Because I . . . I’ve made such a train wreck of my life.” She raked her hair behind her ears with her fingers, struggling for composure.

Casey moved closer and put a hand on her knee, rubbing. Such a familiar gesture. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re not the first girl who got knocked up by the wrong guy, you know. And you won’t be the last.”

“It’s not that.” She sniffed loudly and sat up straight, wiping her nose on her sleeve’s cuff.

“Hang on.” Casey got up and grabbed a box of tissues from the dresser. “Here.”

“Thanks.” She honked her nose and he waited patiently.

When her breathing had slowed some, he coaxed, “So if you’re not talking about the pregnancy, what?”

She laughed miserably. “Where to begin? The baby’s just about the only thing I’ve managed to do even half-right, these past few years.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“The beginning . . . God. Okay. Well, I guess everything first started going wrong when I was fifteen. I got into a relationship with . . . with my preacher.”

His eyes grew round, belying his calm voice. “All right.” Between those two words were sandwiched a few others, to the tune of, Okay, so that is a little f*cked.

“And I should tell you, my name wasn’t Abilene back then—it’s not even my legal name. My real name’s Allison Beeman. And I’m twenty-two, not twenty-four.”

He nodded, not looking completely surprised. “Raina said once she wondered if your ID was fake.”

She met his eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Well, I got the fake one when I left home, and started lying about my name and birthdate. But if you ever saw my medical records, they have my real information on them.”

“That why you wouldn’t let me pick up your mail for you?”

She smiled her apology, feeling shady in an instant.

“And why you wouldn’t let me come inside the hospital with you, after the baby was born?”

“That’s why.”

“You’re not evading the law, are you?”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t even know how to, like, get a fake social security number or anything like that. I really only changed my name because I didn’t want people plugging me into Google and finding out why I left my hometown—it made the papers, after all.”

“What did, honey?”

Honey. She’d missed that name more than she’d realized.

“My preacher, he was about forty-five,” she said. “And married. And I’m from, like, the quaintest little God-fearing town in Texas you ever saw. Church was everything, and everybody adored him. So did I.”

“And he took advantage of that.”

She offered another sad, sheepish smile, and Casey’s expression changed—from concerned to surprised in a beat.

“You approached him?”

“Not exactly. But I wanted him, in a way, and he could probably tell. You have to know my family for it to make sense, maybe . . . My dad was a retired colonel—I mean, he still is. My parents are still back there, alive and married and probably trying real hard to pretend I never existed. Anyhow, they’re both hyperconservative Evangelicals, and it was just implied that I’d wait until I was married to have sex.”

“Right.”

“But I was always curious about that stuff. I was precocious, was how my grandma put it. Anyhow, my preacher seemed so . . . I dunno. He was handsome, and he was holy, so it felt like the attraction wasn’t as sinful as it could have been, somehow. I got completely infatuated with him. And he must have known it.”

“And eventually, he exploited that?”

She shrugged, not knowing the answer. “I couldn’t say. It wasn’t as though I didn’t want it, and it wasn’t like I ever told him no. Quite the opposite. I was fifteen, and so suppressed by my parents and the church . . . I know it seems like, oh, of course, it was the adult who’s to blame.”