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“Yeah. I was uh, expecting Evan.”
“I think we need to talk, Bryce.”
He stepped back, giving me room to move into the room. The door clicked closed behind me. I had never heard such a deafening silence before. The sound of my heart racing thumped in my ear.
“We can sit if you’d like. Or stand. I mean your choice Hannah. Whatever would be better for…”
My mouth opened without my consent, not only cutting him off but spewing words with such force and speed I wasn’t sure how I was doing it.
“Bryce, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just abandoned you like I did. Not when you needed me. I never told you everything about why I was on that vacation when I met you. No one knows the whole truth, not even Nicole. I told her the general idea but there was more to it.”
The faster I could get the words out the better it would be for me. I sat on the couch, my hands twisting against one another as I spoke.
“My boyfriend at the time, Felix, he wasn’t the best person. He would tell me how much I needed to lose weight. How no one would ever want to be with me if I looked like a cow. He would tell me what I could and couldn’t eat, when to go to the gym. If I dared wear something revealing, he would laugh in my face and remind me I wasn’t the hot one of my friends.
Two weeks before I walked in on him screwing my ex-best friend I took a pregnancy test. It was positive, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew he didn’t want kids. So, I went to the doctors alone.”
Bryce settled next to me, his hand covering mine. It was such a simple gesture. My voice caught in my throat all the same.
“Hannah, you don’t have to…”
“Yes, I do Bryce. I went, and I found out it was a false positive I had a cyst growing. They thought it might be cancer.”
His eyes grew wide as his thumb rubbed against mine comfortingly. The calluses on his hands reminded me of all the hard work he had done in his life. A life I was going to ruin with my past.
“Hannah…”
“It wasn’t. They did a biopsy. He was supposed to come with me but he said he had work. I had to get a ride home from a stranger. I was a nervous wreck over it. Instead, I found him with Christina when I got there. Christina had planned the vacation with me. It was supposed to be a girls’ week to get away regardless of the test results.”
I stood. Unable to sit and let him watch me reveal the worst parts of me.
“I went to my parents’ house and you know what my mom told me? I should have worked harder to please him. That if I was screwing him and giving him blow jobs every day, he wouldn’t have cheated. My mom told me I should go back and try to fix things with him. That’s why she was so happy when I came back and met someone who was willing to take care of me. She always said I was lucky anyone took me in.”
Pushing down the lump of rejection I felt from my mother I sucked in a ragged breath.
“Maybe she was right. I’m lucky anyone would want to be with…”
Bryce was behind me, I hadn’t even heard him get up. His fingers gripped my forearm spinning me to face him.
“Shut the hell up right now Hannah. Jesus fuck how can someone say that to their own daughter? How can someone just abandon someone they say they care about like that?”
My eyes were burning as I held back my tears. Ones that my mother didn’t deserve to be shed over her harsh treatment of me. Bryce held my face between his hands, his thumb sweeping up to catch a stray tear before it stained my cheek.
“That’s not it Bryce. When you were still out of it you kept calling me Kelly.”
Her name barely crossed my lips and his hands fell away from me. His breathing halted as he look back at me, wide eyed and panicked.
“Evan told me what happened when you were a kid.”
“I uh. Yeah. It was stupid I don’t know what he told you. Is that why you didn’t come back?” Raking his hands through his hair, his eyes refused to meet mine.
“Bryce, what was Kelly’s last name?”
With questions swirling behind his eyes he shrugged.“Nelson, I think why?”
“And the name of the guy who she started dating that didn’t want you around?”
“Jason.” He paused before mumbling, “asshole.”
