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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 fuck 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.
With my hand clenched into a fist, my mind tried to hold on to the little string tethering the big red sanity balloon in my head.
Along with the ridiculous mental imagery, I was bombarded with a hundred conflicting emotions. Part of me screamed that there was no way this could be happening—not again and not to her. Pills didn’t just fail to work, did they? And if they did, wouldn’t the company have to fix it? And by fix it, I meant make it not happen in the first place. How could Tria have let this happen? Did she just forget to take them and was now making excuses?
I knew that wasn’t true.
Once my head managed to grasp the idea that it had really happened, I knew how much danger Tria was in and that it was ultimately my fault for fucking her in the first place. I mean, she had been a virgin before I got all over her, and my chest tightened with the guilt of knowing this was all because of me and my dick.
With blame and anger and guilt ricocheting through me, I still couldn’t ignore one more feeling.
More than anything else, there was fear.
Sheer fucking terror.
I couldn’t let this happen. Not again. Not to her. I had been so sure everything would be perfectly fine the last time, and now I knew better. I knew what could happen to her because of that thing I put in her, and I wasn’t going to allow it. Not this time. I was going to do what I should have done years ago.
I finally managed to move my eyes from the pink plus sign to Tria’s face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and tore right through me. I realized how scared she had to be about the whole thing and knew she had to be worrying about how much it would cost to take care of it. I wasn’t really sure what the price would be, but I wasn’t going to let her worry about that.
“We’ll find the money,” I said through a clenched throat. “I’ll pick up a few extra fights or see if Dordy will keep letting me do a few things around the bar. I know they’re pricey and whatever, but clinics have deals or options or something, so we’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of it?” she repeated. Her voice sounded dead, and it sent a chill up my spine. She had to be in total shock and was probably just minutes away from a complete freak-out. I had to make sure she knew I was going to take care of everything.
“We’ll get rid of it,” I said with a definitive nod. “I’ll find the money—you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll get rid of it so it can’t hurt you. Shit, the pharmaceutical company will probably pay us back.”
“Hurt me?” she said in the same lethargic voice.
I walked quickly to the edge of the couch and dropped down in front of her. I picked up her hands out of her lap and looked into her eyes.
“I’d never let anything hurt you,” I said to her. “You know that. We’ll get this taken care of, I swear.”
“What are you saying?”
I watched as Tria pulled her eyebrows together and looked from one of my eyes to the other.
“Take care of…of it?”
“Of course,” I replied. I tried to smile though I really wanted to scream. I kept telling myself it was okay because it was early, and we were going to have someone deal with it right away. “I bet Dr. Baynor could help. I mean, I don’t think it’s really surgery, but—”
“You want to…to get rid of the baby?”
“I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you,” I confirmed, ignoring the word baby. “Just put it all out of your mind, Tria. We’ll go right now—I’ve got the money for the rent, and I’ll just make sure I manage to make some more before the first of the month. We’ll use that for now, though. I’ll call Dr. Baynor in a minute. I’m sure he knows where to go. Shit, there might even be a place that won’t cost much at all. He can tell us, but you don’t worry about it. I’ll get you something to drink and make a few calls. Then we’ll be on our way, and it will be like this never happened.”
“Never happened?” Her voice was still distant and sounded confused.
“You’ll be okay,” I said again. “By this time tomorrow, it will be like a bad dream.”
