Her brows lift. “You’re not? I can’t imagine that your girlfriend is going to be happy that you knocked up some chick you don’t care about.”
“She’s not—” I shake my head, focus on the more important question. “Why do you think I don’t care about you?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Acid churns through my insides. “Harp?—”
She sighs and pushes to her feet.
But she does it so fast, she wobbles…and she really doesn’t like it when I steady her with my hands on her shoulders.
“Don’t,” she snaps, brushing me away.
“Don’t be stubborn,” I snap back. “You’re pale and shaking and clearly feel like shit. Let me help you.”
She snorts. “Right. You want to”—she does finger quotes—“help me.”
“Look,” I say, shoving a hand through my hair, “I’m an asshole, but I’m not a monster. I’m not going to tell you to have an abortion. I’m not going to tell you to keep it. That’s your choice, and I’ll respect whatever decision you make.”
“So, you’re a good guy now, huh?”
The question. The tone. The shame piling on my shoulders…they all catapult me back in time.
“Don’t ever have kids, yeah?” my father says as he scowls over at my mother. “They’ll ruin your fucking life.”
My mother sniffs and dumps the hamper full of dirty clothes onto the couch. “Leo, why don’t you tell your father that it’s not his son’s laundry I have a problem doing. If he’d stop being a jerk and start treating me like the queen I am then I’d gladly do his laundry too!”
“And why don’t you tell your mother that I’ll treat her right when she starts acting like a real wife,” my dad snaps. “Of course, I don’t think she has those skills in her.”
A gasp of outrage. “Leo, you tell your father?—”
I growl and shove the memories away, the edges of my temper beginning to fray. “What the fuck do you want me to say?” I grit out.
“What do I want you to say?” Harper steps closer, cheeks flushing, eyes flashing with anger. “How about what I want you not to say?”
Fuck.
“How about I really wish you hadn’t fucked me and told me you couldn’t wait to see me again?” She jabs at my chest with her pointer finger. “Or maybe that you hadn’t showed up the next day and decided to be brutally honest about how much of a mistake it was to slum it with a girl like me?—”
“I didn’t?—”
“Or maybe it’s just that I wish you’d been straight with me from the beginning instead of pretending to care.”
“I do ca?—”
“Don’t you dare lie to me,” she spits out.
I want to tell her why I had to end us before we started, why she should be relieved instead of upset.
But that doesn’t matter.
All that does is?—
“Look,” I say, “I know that neither of us planned for this, that neither of us want this. But I’m not going to force you to do something you’re not comfortable with, whether that’s keeping the baby or not.”
She opens her mouth.
“If you do keep the baby, I’ll be here,” I say, stomach twisting at the thought of becoming a dad, even as the thought of Harper raising our child without me fucking kills. Yeah, a baby is pretty much the last fucking thing I need in my life, but I can’t deny that I feel something for it already…
