“Poor you.” She paused. “I thought she was a lesbian?”
“She is,” I grumbled.
“Then how?” she wondered. “The way she talked in class, she sounded like men were like flesh-eating bacteria stuffed into a male body. The way she made it sound, she’d rather die than touch a man with a ten-foot pole.”
“Apparently, that only comes into effect when you’re not trying to have a baby with a dumbass.”
The woman snorted. “Good luck with that.”
I’d need it.
She gathered her books and took off, leaving me to deal with the snake slithering toward me on my own.
“Who was that?” she asked when she got to me.
“I don’t know,” I admitted truthfully. “She told me to stop drinking so much coffee.”
“You should, it’s not good for you. Almost all coffee grounds that come to the US have mold spores in them.”
I didn’t dignify that with a response.
Mold or not, I wasn’t giving up my coffee.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “I’m not giving you him every other week.”
I shook my head. “Court orders say differently.”
She scoffed. “They can say it all that they want, but he’s my child. Mine and Brooke’s. He doesn’t know you and won’t ever know you.”
“Brooke isn’t his father, though. I am,” I pointed out. “And literally, we have court orders. They said that you’d be in contempt of court if you didn’t give me my time with him.”
Nadine stayed stubbornly silent.
I sighed. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
Nadine crossed her arms over her chest. “It’s already hard. What’s a little harder?”
With that she walked out and left me standing there.
I placed my coffee by the trash cans and walked out, anger lacing my every step.
Maybe that was why I did what I did next.
My brain was on autopilot as I walked across the campus to my truck.
I’d just stepped off the curb headed toward the nearly deserted parking lot when I heard the screams.
I turned, wondering if I’d heard what I thought I heard, and saw it.
A car door opened.
The screams were coming from inside.
I hurried toward the door, my fingers reaching out to yank the man backward off of the woman in the car that was flat on her back.
When I yanked, he hit his head on the car door and practically folded in half.
I let him fall to the ground, and his head hit the curb of the concrete with a sickening crack.
