Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90564 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 453(@200wpm)___ 362(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
“Like I give a shit.” Hendrix reached for the front door. “I hate his ass.”
Kyle was about as harmless as plankton. Hendrix never necessarily liked him before, but he never hated him the way he did now. Surely, he didn’t really think I’d slept with my best friend?
“I’m well aware of how much you hate him for no damn reason.”
Hendrix whirled around on the welcome mat, his jaw ticcing, nostrils flared. “No damn reason?” He bit his lip as though he was trying to cage the words that wanted to break free. It didn’t last long. “He helped fuck up my entire life. He can eat shit and choke on it.”
“What could he possibly have done to you?”
“I saw you leave the clinic with him!”
There was a beat of silence, a moment of horror that rang through my brain. I’d been too numb to notice much that awful day, but surely, I would have noticed him?
“You told him. You told Jessica. You didn’t tell me. And if you want to know why I really fucking hate him, it’s because he took you to abort a child that could have been mine.”
Not his. I’d told him as much.
His disgusted gaze flicked over me, and I shrunk beneath the weight of his anger. “You were right, Lola. We shouldn’t have unbottled shit. Because there’s a helluva lot to unbottle now that I think about it.”
I tried to remain calm, to hide the bubbling panic rising within me. I hated lying to him. Before that day two years ago, I’d never lied to Hendrix. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell him. I had been both terrified of his finding out the truth and desperate for him to see through the lie.
“I told you; it wasn’t yours,” I managed through my tightening throat.
“And how the hell did you know that, Lola?” He crowded my space, the smell of grease and his faded cologne washing over me. “We didn’t always have condoms. Too poor. Too stupid. Too in-fucking-love.”
Hendrix and I had been stupid and poor, and God were we in love, but when we couldn’t manage to afford or steal protection, he’d always pulled out.
Johan didn’t pull out.
Johan didn’t care.
Not when I fought and cried and begged him to stop. He certainly didn’t care about coming in me and leaving a traumatized sixteen-year-old knocked up with her rapist’s baby. I guess he thought the money he had tossed beside my crying body absolved him of all morality.
Was there a chance that it was Hendrix’s? According to the dates the clinic gave me, no.
When I went to the clinic to confirm that I was pregnant and the nurse gave me the conception date, I felt everything inside of me die. The seventeenth of June. The date Johan had turned up to screw my high, passed-out mother and raped me instead. The date right in the middle of the only two weeks Hendrix and I had been apart since we were six. He’d been sick the week before, and it had taken me a week to put myself back together afterward.
Tears threatened, and I closed my eyes, unable to look at him. “The dates lined up, Hendrix.”
“That memorable, then? So fucking memorable, you know the damn date?”
“It’s just a date,” I whispered. One engraved on my heart in an ugly scar.
Every line on his face hardened, the betrayal in his eyes saying no one could possibly ever hurt him more than I had.
His damaged fist met the rotting siding of his house, leaving behind a bloodied knuckle print. “Fuck, I hate myself for being so stupid in love with you.” He turned back to me. “And I fucking hate you.”
The blow struck home, seizing my heart in a death grip.
“I know.” I ducked my chin to hide my welling tears.
Footfalls thudded over the porch before the front door opened, then slammed shut, and the second it did, the tears fell.
This was our tragic fate. Pining and loving and hating and punishing.
Round and round it went.
Chapter 24
HENDRIX
The dates didn’t match up. God, I was an idiot for thinking we could be together again.
I slammed the bathroom door behind me, fighting back the emotions I had buried. When Jessica told me Lola was pregnant, I was scared shitless. We had already struggled to make sure Gracie was taken care of, but I wanted it. With Lola. More than anything.
I took my guitar, the only present my mother had ever given me, the only thing I’d ever been good at, and traded it at the pawn shop for a small ring. Asking her to marry me was the one thing I was going to do right. I stole fairy lights and candles from Wal-E-Mart and had this grand, stupid idea that I would ask her to marry me in our treehouse…Then Jessica texted and said Lola had asked her to take her to the clinic. That she wouldn’t, but someone else had.