Slow Agony (Assassins, #2)(30)

He hadn’t moved. I could see him by the window, silhouetted against the moonlight. “We aren’t going to be able to fix this, are we?”

I pulled the covers close. “I don’t know, Griffin.”

“All I want to do is forget it happened.”

“Do you think you can?” I rolled over so that my back was to him, but I could feel his presence behind me. “I thought that was what I wanted too. But now, now that I’ve touched you, I’m not sure that I can forget. It’s all there, Griffin. It’s in the way we made love. You were right. We’re broken.”

He sat down on the bed. I felt the weight of him tug at the covers.

I turned to look at him.

“How far along would you have been now?” he asked.

“Six months.”

He stared at his hands.

“I did it because you were gone,” I said.

“Dammit, Leigh.”

“It’s a good thing, Griffin. Can you imagine how much worse all of this would be if I was pregnant?”

He flinched like I’d slapped him. “I would never have let him near you if—”

“Right,” I said. “Because if I wasn’t a selfish slut, then you wouldn’t have left me. Weren’t those the words you used, Griffin?”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was gravelly. “It’s only that it doesn’t make sense. If it really it was my baby, then why’d you get rid of it?”

“Because you disappeared,” I said. “And... I thought we’d talked about it, anyway. I thought you knew that I didn’t want—”

“I thought you were joking,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone could seriously terminate a pregnancy because she was worried about stretching out her stomach.”

“I was joking about that,” I said. “That’s not why I did it.”

He clenched his hands into fists. “You didn’t even ask me.”

“You weren’t around to ask.”

He got off the bed. “So, it’s my fault?”

I pulled the covers tight against my chin, as if they could protect me. Yes, it was his fault. He’d blown up at me in January at the New Year’s party over nothing. He was convinced I’d kissed Clint, and then he ran away. And I didn’t see him for weeks.

That was when I missed my period.

By the time he came back, full of apologies, I’d already gotten rid of it.

I had to. I had to.

He’d left me all alone.

“How can it be my fault when you’re the one who did it?”

I didn’t know what to say. “It was your fault that you abandoned me.”

“I wouldn’t have left if I’d known,” he said.

“I didn’t know either.”

“You were supposed to be on birth control. It wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I was,” I said. “But I must have missed a few pills. I don’t know.”

When he came back, I didn’t have to tell him about it. I could have hidden the abortion from him. But I was angry with him, and I was hurting.

Right afterwards, I was pretty depressed. The doctor said it was hormones, and it was to be expected. My body had to readjust to its not-pregnant state, and it processed the whole thing something like an abrupt miscarriage. I knew there were physical reasons for why I felt the way I did, but that didn’t stop me from feeling that way.

I was sad and lonely and a tiny bit guilty. Because...

Well, I was too young to have a baby.

Except for the fact that I wasn’t so sure that was true anymore. It had easily been true when I was eighteen years old. It had been mostly true when I was twenty. But I was twenty-two now, and in my senior year of college. I was planning on going to grad school after college, and I wouldn’t have been able to take care of a baby and get a master’s.

But...

Well, I wasn’t sure that I really should get a master’s. Wasn’t graduate school a little vain and unnecessary? Couldn’t I have taken my degree and gotten some kind of management job and supported my baby and waited until she was five or six to go back to grad school?

Couldn’t I have made a better decision?

After all, no one ever felt ready for children, did they?

At what point did my decision cross the line? Was it the responsible thing to do given that I wasn’t ready to be a parent? Or was it indicative of my immaturity and selfishness? Was it time for me to grow up now?

But it didn’t matter, anyway, because, when he came back, it was already done. Maybe I hadn’t thought it through enough before, but...

I sat up in bed. “You have to understand, Griffin, what it felt like. I’d been invaded. I had this thing in me—”

“Don’t say that.” He sounded disgusted.

“I didn’t ask for it, it was just there, and I wanted it out. I wanted it gone. I was afraid of it.”

“You...” He sucked in breath through his nose. “It wasn’t a thing. It was a baby.”

“No, it wasn’t. Not yet it wasn’t. It was... part of my body, like a disease or a virus—”

“Don’t say that,” he said. He stalked over to me. He leaned down, his face inches from mine. “It belonged to me too.”