As much as I liked to think of myself as grown up, as a woman who had been living and existing in Europe with her older French boyfriend, traveling across the world, digesting all sorts of life altering information and not breaking down—it was in that moment, realizing I was pregnant, that I was confronted with how much of a child I still was.
I’d wanted my mother.
It was that simple.
Then there was the other thing. The thing that I’d done very well at repressing. Not healthy. Not in the slightest. But in order to live with myself, I had to force myself not to think of it. Otherwise it would all crumble down.
When I got here, to Garnett, New Mexico, even after hearing that my parents were divorced and my mother was engaged to another man without even knowing my parents were having trouble, I’d planned on telling her. Not about the pregnancy. I didn’t know about that yet, or maybe I did and was ignoring all of the signs my body was giving me because I couldn’t handle it. Because I needed those margaritas, those glasses of red wine to get me through.
Still, I planned on telling my mother theother thing. Spewing its nastiness all over the idyllic life she’d created. Selfish, maybe. But maybe it was a little vindictive too. Maybe I’d been more pushed to tell her when I heard she’d gone and created a whole new life in less than a year without telling me.
Maybe I’d wanted to punish her a little for that.
In the past year, I’d learned that there were a lot of things I didn’t like about myself.
And maybe I wanted to see what it sounded like, delivering that news out loud. If it made me different, changed the way Elden looked at me. Everyone thought I was so pure, so innocent, perfect. That I needed to be protected from the harshness of the world, unaware that I already bore scrapes and bruises I hid from everyone.
I didn’t want to hide those from Elden, though. Because I didn’t want him to see me as pure or innocent. As a girl. I wanted him to see me as a woman. One who did things like got abortions and told people about it, out loud without shame or guilt.
He blinked only once, staring at me without shock or judgment. But something else awakened in those icy eyes, something that blazed like flames.
Fury.
I knew enough about the men of this club to understand that they were crazy protective, alpha males, so that fury was likely on my behalf.
I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. “Before you Hulk out, the sex itself was entirely consensual, and I was veryinvolvedin the process… I am not some innocent girl who got taken advantage of,” I took a swig of the Jack. “I’m just a young woman who drank too much and let an asshole with a good jawline and an accent convince me we didn’t need a condom.”
It was likely the booze or the weed that made me be so forthcoming with all of the details. And it was likely the booze or the weed that made me forget that offering this information to a protective alpha male would only make him madder.
Elden’s jaw ticced to communicate this fact, his hands now fisted at his sides.
“Who took you?” he uttered, the words coming out like stone grinding against stone, turning to dust. Flickering through the air, absolutely covering me.
I blinked at the question. It wasn’t a ridiculous question to ask, it was quite practical, really. But it was not, in a million years, the kind of question I expected Elden to ask. Not that I had any reason to expect anything from Elden. I didn’t know him well enough to have created a set of expectations for the man.
Yet I did. Expect things from him.
“Colby,” I replied, on reflex more than anything else.
He stared at me. Unblinking. It was unnerving. Even through the haze of booze and weed it was unnerving. It might’ve been downright terrifying if I’d been sober.
“Colby,” he repeated.
It was not a question. Or a clarification. It was a threat. A single word coated in violence, suggesting some kind of reckoning.
Not directed at me. No, at the man who took me to and from my abortion. Who fulfilled a deed that was not required nor expected of him.
No good deed goes unpunished, it seemed.
I nodded slowly, my body thrumming with something that cut through my inebriation.
Not quite fear. But something close.
“Why in the fuck didColbytake you?” he ground out.
His anger, like my expectations of him, didn’t make sense. We barely knew each other. We hadn’t engaged in any meaningful conversation—or any conversation for that matter until I blurted out about my abortion few minutes ago. There was no ownership or intimacy here.
Or at least there shouldn’t have been.