by L. J. Evans
“Remember when you got stitches?” she asked.
I smiled. Yes, I remembered.
Khiley had spent the night at our house because Cam and Blake were up in Nashville for some entertainment event. She was sleeping in my room on the trundle bed that was always hers on nights like these, but instead of sleeping, she woke me with a flashlight in my eyes.
We were learning about astronomy at school, and Khiley decided we needed to go out and explore the heavens to see the constellations for ourselves. I didn’t even bat an eye. I just got out of bed and went with her.
That air was dog heavy, announcing summer was only a few days away, as we made our way down the beaten path to the lake. Khiley beelined for the picnic tables, climbing up on top of one and lying down before turning the flashlight off. I joined her, my hand finding hers. We stared out at the dark sky while the crickets talked and the fireflies flitted around us.
She sighed, contentment rolling through her, and it drew my eyes from the dark sky to her face and her body barely visible in the moonlight. She was wearing nothing more than a tank and cotton pajama shorts, and they showed all the curves that had suddenly sprouted from her lean frame. Those curves tugged at parts of my body that were changing as much as hers, and for the first time in our life together, I’d wondered what it would be like to have her lips pressed against mine. Would it feel as complete as when we had our fingers linked?
I didn’t give it much thought past that. I just leaned over and put my lips on hers. Softly and then pressing harder. At first, her whole body stilled in a way it rarely did, and then she pushed me so hard I rolled off the table, catching the bench with my chin on my way down. Blood instantly spurted from the cut.
Khiley laughed, her soft laugh I only heard when she was with me, until she realized I was bleeding. Then, she was at my side in a flash, pressing the bottom of her tank top to my chin.
“Oh my God. I’m sorry,” she said. The blood instantly soaked through the edge, spreading out over the thin material.
“Take your shirt off,” she commanded.
“You take yours off. Mom will make me do laundry for weeks if I come home with blood on mine after sneaking out.”
Khiley averted her gaze. “I… I can’t take mine off.”
“Why not?”
We’d seen each other naked a gazillion times before. Not as much in the last few years. But as little kids, we’d gone into the lake in nothing more than underwear more than we’d worn swimsuits. After biking or fishing or hiking, Khiley was never patient enough to wait until we changed before diving into the cool water.
Her gaze met mine, unsure—so not her—and it caused my eyes to journey down to the little buds pushing against the thin material of her tank. That was all it took for me to reach for the back of my T-shirt and pull it over my head, shoving it against the open wound.
She pulled on my arm, guiding me back toward the house. As we walked, the air was awkward between us in a way it never was. “I’m sorry I kissed you,” I told her.
Her eyes flitted to me. “I was supposed to do it first.”
I stopped in my tracks. “You wanted to kiss me? Then why’d you push me away?”
She shrugged and pulled on my arm again to get us moving, but I didn’t budge.
“Come on, ‘Ley. Tell me.”
“You’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Tell me.”
It took her a few seconds before she said softly, “I don’t want it to change things between us.”
I pulled her to me with my arm that wasn’t holding my shirt to my chin, and she let me hug her. “Something as stupid as kissing can’t ever change what we are.”
She’d looked up at me then, her eyes huge and shadowed in the shimmering light, judging if I meant what I said.
And I had. Except, that was exactly the same thing she was afraid of now. She was afraid the baby would change us. Change who we were together.
I pulled the swing to a halt by the chain and moved around so I was in front of her. I pulled her legs and locked them behind me. Our bodies were tucked as close as they could have been in layers of jeans and coats and scarves. She put a hand at my waist to balance herself.
“’Ley. We’ll do this like we’ve done everything. Together. It isn’t going to pull us apart. It’s going to bring us closer,” I said, meaning it. Making another promise to her I meant to keep.
She started crying again. I felt like a jackass for the millionth time this month. This was my fault. We could say it took two to tango as much as we wanted, but I was the guy. I should have covered it up like I had every other fucking time since we’d first made love at sixteen.
“What if I tell you I don’t want it…that I’ve made an appointment to…” She sobbed and looked away. I stilled, shock spilling into my pores. She pulled her body from mine and moved toward the lake.
I watched her as she kicked rocks and grass on the way. I pulled my hand over my face as anger and hurt filled my soul.
“What are you saying?” I called after her. “Are you saying you want to have an abortion? You want to kill our baby?”
She didn’t look back at me, but she bent over, sobbing once more. It twisted at my heart, but this time, I didn’t go and comfort her as I fought my own wave of emotions. I breathed in and out several times and then forced my legs to move. To go to her. I pulled her up against me.
“Tell me. Is that really what you’re considering?” I wanted to soothe her, wanted my words to be soft, but they weren’t. Instead, the words were full of anger and sadness and regret. So much regret.
She barely nodded against my chest, but I still felt it.
I stepped back, and she wrapped her arms around her middle.
“I can’t believe you’d do that,” I stormed at her.
“I don’t want a baby!” she wept. “Not yet. I’m twenty-one years old. I’m just graduating, and I want to be able to travel and get drunk and not be responsible for anything but you and me and getting ourselves from one place to the next. I want to see the stars from every single part of the globe, like we’ve always said we would... I don’t want my stomach to be as huge as Edie’s and my boobs to sag…” She broke off, the tears turning silent.
“I get that, ‘Ley. I do. I don’t want us to be parents yet either. But that baby. That’s us. That’s you and me and everything we’ve always been to each other. You can’t just kill it. It’s got a heartbeat already. It’s…” My turn to sob. My turn to break down.
“It’s my choice,” she stumbled out over her tears.
Goddamn it, it was. It was her body. But we’d never done things that way, she and I. We’d always made the choices together. Even the choice that got us into this mess to begin with had been a joint decision.
The one fucking time I didn’t have a condom and had pulled out, and it hadn’t worked. Hell, I knew assholes whose only form of birth control was pulling out, and they’d never ended up getting anyone pregnant.
But that was all it had taken. One time. One fucking time.
Khiley and I had both known better. But Khiley had been wearing that gorgeous blue dress that made her eyes look like the sky instead of storm clouds, and we’d both had one too many, and the closest store with condoms had seemed hours away. So, I’d made love to her like we’d been making love since we’d figured out how all the pieces flowed together. Like the love we felt was even bigger when we were skin to skin, inside each other.
I’d been born to make sure Khiley Marie Abbott had everything she ever wanted in life, and I’d fucked it up by not walking five minutes to buy a goddamn condom. The rest of our senior year at UTK was now going to revolve around plans for a baby instead of plans for traveling.
Asia was probably out this summer, but next summer we could still swing it. The job she’d already claimed at the observatory was all about joint ventures with other observatories around the world. After I finished my student teach
ing and got a permanent position, I’d have the summers off as well. There was no reason we couldn’t still go. There wasn’t a reason we couldn’t bring a kid with us. Sure, it might make things more difficult. More steps. More luggage than our backpacks, but we could do it.
Our kid. The kid she wanted to end before it was even here, and my heart seemed to shatter into a thousand pieces at that thought. I’d rather give up the entire world than the baby we’d made. Anger washed over me again.
“That isn’t a choice, ’Ley!” I barked.
“I’m going to the appointment,” she said, her stubborn streak rearing its ugly head even as the tears continued to stream down her beautiful face.
I didn’t know what to say to her. I didn’t know how to apologize and ask her not to kill our baby all at the same time. I didn’t know how to tell her that I had an engagement ring sitting wrapped on the desk in my room for her and tentative plans to get married over the summer at the observatory.
So, I did the thing I never did. I left her. I shoved my truck keys in her hand and stormed up the beaten path leading to my childhood home. Leaving her hurt me almost as much as the thought of her killing our baby. Almost. But I didn’t turn back. I couldn’t, because the thought chasing me was exactly the one she’d feared. Maybe this would change everything between us.
Khiley
MISTLETOE
“Slip into the games we play,
We're falling apart.”
Performed by Colbie Caillat
Written by Blue / Blue / Caillat
My heart tore into little pieces as Stephen walked away from me. He’d never walked away from me pissed before. He’d always stayed and ranted and raved and fumed until he or I finally relented, or we compromised, or we found a new solution to whatever it was that was eating at us. Those moments were rare because we hardly ever didn’t see eye to eye, and when we did fight, it usually lasted all of two minutes before we figured out a way to fix it.
Him walking away made the tears come harder and faster. I hated crying. It felt weak. Tears were for people who couldn’t cope, and I liked to think I was tougher than that. I liked to believe I was similar to my mama, who’d lived through many different losses with strength. I wanted to be that strong. To be Cam strong.
But I didn’t know if I could do this. Stephen walking away from me or the baby growing inside me. It was unfair. It was so stupid and unfair. I wanted to be mad at him for not putting a stupid condom on, but I couldn’t be. I’d begged him that night. I’d begged him to finish what he’d started after he’d run his hands over my skin and eased down the blue dress I’d worn, knowing we’d end the night just like that.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. We weren’t supposed to have kids until after we’d started our careers, and gotten married, and been almost too old to make it happen. When we had money, and time, and had seen the world together. Once we’d gone to Thailand, and New Zealand, and all the amazing places we both swore we were going to visit so I could see the stars from every angle on Earth.
I clutched his keys in my hand tightly, squeezing the metal and allowing the pain to bring me back to the lake, the bitter cold, and the nausea working its way through my body as it had been for days now. I made my way slowly back to the truck and started to drive home before realizing I couldn’t do that either.
If I went home and Mayson or Mama saw me crying, they wouldn’t leave me alone until they’d figured out why. And I couldn’t tell my brother or my mother. I couldn’t tell anyone. I hadn’t wanted to tell Grandma Marina. Stephen had… He’d wanted someone to know, whereas I hadn’t wanted anyone to know because of what I was planning. Now, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to look Grandma Marina in the eye again, knowing I’d killed the baby growing inside me. Not after she’d lost her child and still mourned him.
I wasn’t sure anyone would understand.
Not anyone who hadn’t been in the situation of having a baby they didn’t want. I didn’t want mine. My heart flipped over because I knew it was a lie. I did want my baby. I just didn’t want it yet. Not yet. Not now. Not when life was really starting for us.
Edie looked beautiful pregnant, glowing even. All I felt was sick, and tired, and my eyes had shadows below them that they’d never had, even when we’d pulled typical college all-nighters. The thought of my body being as round as hers…at the thought of my boobs disappearing into saggy leftovers when the baby was done with them...God. I wasn’t prepared for it. I was only twenty-one frickin’ years old. I was barely able to drink legally.
Stephen said Edie hadn’t been ready either. That she and Garrett had decided against kids, so maybe, just maybe, she’d understand, even if she’d made the choice to keep her baby. I pulled the truck to the side of the road and hit the call button on my phone.
She picked it up after one ring. “Hey, Khiley. What’s up?”
Her voice was soft, but I heard in it what she wasn’t saying. Stephen had gone home without me―like he never did. And he’d been upset—mad―in a way he rarely was.
“Can you meet me somewhere?” I asked, hoarse from tears and fear and pain.
“Sure. You don’t want to come here?”
I shook my head and then whispered, “No.”
She was quiet, and I knew Stephen hadn’t told her about the baby, because in her silence, there was confusion.
“The Dairy Queen?” she asked. I didn’t want to be there either. I didn’t want to be anywhere where people I knew might see me crying.
“Can I just pick you up, and we’ll take a drive?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t come in,” I told her, not wanting to risk seeing Stephen. He had every right to be mad. The thing growing inside me was as much his as it was mine, and he deserved to be a part of any decision I made. And yet, I wasn’t letting him. I was excluding him in a way I’d never excluded him in all our twenty-one years together.
“I’ll be on the porch,” Edie said.
I hung up, turned Stephen’s truck around, and drove back toward the lake and their house. The home that had been mine almost as much as my own had been. The trundle in Stephen’s room being my bed as much as the one with the fake stars above it in my bedroom at the ranch.
When I pulled up to the house, it was drowning in Christmas lights. Lonnie never let a Christmas go by without decorating the hell out of it. Lights and holly wreaths and red-and-white-striped ribbons glistened in the frosty air. From the huge picture window, I could see the flocked tree that Wynn always had up. She liked everything snowy and white, whereas my mama liked all the greens and fir smells. Opposites and best friends. My best friend had always been the boy who’d left me at the lake.
Edie stepped off the porch, her baby belly sticking out of a blue peacoat that made me swallow hard. Maybe this was a mistake. Seeing Edie pregnant was what had started my waterworks at Grandma Marina’s house.
Edie used the handrail to help lurch herself into the truck, her once graceful ballerina body struggling with the weight of the baby, and I looked away while fighting the tears that hit my eyes.
Once she had her seat belt on, I turned the truck back down the drive and out toward the interstate. I didn’t know where I was going. Maybe a town over and a coffee shop where no one would know us—or fewer people would know us. All of us kids had been in the limelight off and on growing up because of our ties to Watery Reflection. Mayson and I’d had less pressure because our dad, Blake Abbott, was just the band’s entertainment lawyer versus being on the actual stage with them. Still, our parents had tried to protect us from the relentlessness of the paparazzi.
“You’re awfully silent for someone who needed company,” Edie said after we’d driven for about ten minutes.
“I need to stop driving before I talk,” I told her.
She didn’t say anything. Her phone was buzzing. She glanced down at it, grimaced, and put it in her bag.
“Was that Stephen?” I ask
ed. My heart tightened, and my stomach rolled over again.
“No. Garrett.”
“I’m sorry. Take it. I promise to close my ears,” I told her.
She shook her head.
“It can’t be easy to talk while he’s in Scotland,” I said quietly, feeling remorseful for so many things.
“He can wait.”
We pulled into a coffee shop at the first exit. Edie ordered something without caffeine, and I went to order my regular but then realized I probably needed to order what she had. That just started the tears leaking out of my eyes all over again.
I left her in line and found a seat at a table without ordering.
She joined me, shoving a cookie my way, and I picked at it.
“What’s going on, ‘Ley?” Edie asked softly.
“He’s going to be mad if I tell you. But I think you’re the only one who might understand,” I told her.
“If you need someone to talk to, and he doesn’t understand that, then I’ll tie his shirt around his neck and give him a wedgie.”
I snorted and sort of smiled through the tears. “That’s more something Mayson and Ty would do.”
Edie nodded, and we shared a weak smile at my brother and our almost football star of a cousin who’d always been simultaneously the protectors and tormentors of the group.
“We screwed up. Stephen and I,” I told her.
She frowned, putting together all the clues we’d left her over the course of the day.
“You’re pregnant,” she finally breathed out.
I nodded.
“Oh, ‘Ley,” she said with a sigh of sorrow but also happiness. It was weird to have both of those emotions come together, but it was exactly how I’d been feeling. Sorrow and joy. Hate and affection. Loss and gain.
“It was one time, Edie. One frickin’ time,” I stormed out.
Edie laughed. “You’ve all had sex way more than one time. Remember that time when I came home and—”
