by Rainey Daye
“So does this mean that Troy is no longer watching the house? That he’s gone home?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah,” Jess said, “’Cause I haven’t noticed him around campus for the past couple of days.”
“I told Troy that I would find out where the pictures came from and that I would make sure that all the copies were destroyed,” Alex said.
“And he just trusted you to do that after spending, what has it been? Four months? Four months trying to solve the mystery? He trusts that Maggie will tell you and you’ll take care of it?”
“He’s convinced that we are Maggie’s very good friends and that we will take care of and protect her.”
“Still…” Jess said.
“Give it a break, Jess,” Alex warned. But it was too late. His tone of voice and Jesse’s questions had captured Maggie’s attention.
“What aren’t you telling us, Alex? You said he seemed upset, so you decided to approach him. Surely you found out why he was upset and that’s why he handed over the pictures, right? Why don’t you tell us all about your visit?”
“Actually,” Alex said, thinking fast, “I want to make sure that disk of Jess’s is still in the house. Come on, Jess, let’s go get it,” Alex said, grabbing his arm and hustling him to the door.
“Don’t think you’re getting off that easy, Alex,” Maggie yelled after them as Alex propelled Jess along the hallway and toward the stairs.
“What the hell, man?” Jess exclaimed.
“Shh,” Alex hissed and dragged him up the stairs.
Once in their room, Alex closed the door. “Get the damn disk from wherever you hid it,” he said as he leaned against the bedroom door with his arms crossed.
Jess automatically headed for his closet but then turned with a scowl. “Not until you tell me what’s going on. Why did you speak to Troy? Why didn’t you tell me about it? What aren’t you telling us?”
Alex sighed and crossed the room, sitting down on the end of the bed. After a moment’s hesitation, Jess came over and sat beside him, offering him silent support and comfort.
“That night that I talked to him,” Alex began, “it was evident that he got a call from Maria when he got in his car and headed in her direction instead of going back to the motel after he climbed out of the tree. So I took a shortcut and got there first.”
“Yeah? Did something happen once he got there?”
“Don’t know. I watched her window and saw their shadows groping each other, so I left, figuring he was there for the duration. But as soon as I got back here, our snitch called and told me Troy was back at the motel.”
“What? So soon? He usually spends the night with her, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, he does. It surprised me that he was back so soon. Don’t think anyone can fuck that quickly and get back to his place in the time that had passed.”
“Okay, it’s odd, but still. Something else had to have happened,” Jess pointed out.
Alex nodded confirmation of his astuteness. “Yeah, our snitch said Troy was cursing up a storm and pounding on his car and kicking rubble in the lot as he stalked to his room. And it was too late to wake either of you up to discuss it, and I was wasting a prime opportunity to observe his meltdown. So I made an executive decision and drove on over to ask our resident pothead and his buddies if they could give me any info that might be useful.”
“And they told you what?”
“Well, I found out that after I got the call, Troy came out of his room and partied with them for a bit.”
“What do you mean, ‘partied’?” Alex sighed. “It looked like whatever had set Troy off was bad enough that he felt the need to numb himself with some weed.”
“Oh, man! Is he nuts? He’s gonna ruin his chances for a career in baseball if he starts doing drugs.”
“Do we care?” Alex asked.
“I think so,” Jess slowly replied. “I mean, as long as he has something to go back to, something he has to get back to, then that’s good for us, right? Means he’ll have to eventually leave if he doesn’t want to alert people that he pissed away his scholarship.”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking about that,” Alex admitted. “But I figured that if his brain was narcotized, he might spill his game plan to me.”
“And that’s how you found out how he’s trying to save Maggie from possible blackmail or embarrassment concerning the pictures I took,” Jess said, nodding.
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“So you don’t want Maggie to know that he smoked some pot,” Jess said, still nodding. “But he’s not her boyfriend anymore, and there’s no chance in hell that he could ever win her back, especially after the shit he’s pulled this term. Maggie currently sees him as unstable, though now she might view him in a different light, conceding that he was trying to protect her, albeit the wrong way. She could start feeling tender toward him again, so if we tell her he’s doing drugs…No, wait, that won’t work. She’ll blame herself and want to help him, and that might draw them closer together, and since they have more of a history together than we do…Shit! Yeah, I see your dilemma,” Jess finally wound down.
“Actually,” Alex said slowly, staring at him, “I hadn’t considered that possibility. You’re right. Shit. It would be just like Maggie to blame herself and want to make things better for him.”
It was Jesse’s turn to stare. “If that’s not your concern, then what is?” he wanted to know.
“You haven’t asked me why he was so upset,” Alex said.
“Oh. Okay. Why was Troy so upset?”
“Because he knocked up his fuck buddy,” Alex said flatly.
Jess stared at him in shock, his mouth falling open. “Fuck!” he finally breathed.
“That about sums it up.” Alex grimaced.
“Is he sure?”
“I haven’t spoken to him since, but she decked him when he asked who the father was, so I’m guessing it’s his and the question royally pissed her off.”
“So how’d you get him to tell you about the pictures?”
“It helped that he was so stoned and so shocked that he just wound up blabbing everything to me.”
“And he just gave you the pictures?”
“Well, even after months of spying on us, he’s convinced that we are Maggie’s platonic roommates and would want to help protect her. So I played on that and told him to concentrate on his own problem and we would concentrate on the picture problem.”
“And you got them all from him?”
“I don’t see any reason why he would keep an extra set,” Alex said. “He acted as if the pictures turned his stomach.”
Jess snorted his opinion of that.
“I agree,” Alex said. “He probably jacked off to them nightly. And if we would’ve shoved the mattress off the bed, we would have found the envelope when we were searching his room that day.”
“Oh, man! Are you serious? They were under the mattress?”
“Yep. In the center of the bed, which is why we didn’t find them. Troy kept the original disk he downloaded the pictures to, and then the pervert went ahead and printed them out.”
“I don’t know whether to be outraged or sympathetic,” Jess admitted.
“Huh?”
“Outraged that he’s been getting off on pictures of our girlfriend or sympathetic because it’s Maggie and he lost her and will never get her back if we have anything to say about it.”
Alex nodded his understanding while Jess finally rose off the bed and retrieved his disk from the confines of his closet. “So why don’t you want to tell Maggie about the baby?” he asked as he rejoined Alex, holding out the disk to him.
Alex took the disk absently as he stared off into space. “Because it’s Maggie. Who knows how she’ll react? But knowing her, she’s going to feel sorry for him eventually, and she’ll want to offer her support or help. And frankly, I want to keep Troy as far away from Maggie as I can. I’m hoping that he’ll pull a scared rabbit and run away from his proble
m. And that he’ll be so scared of accidentally running into Maria that he’ll never come back here.”
“And when Maggie goes home to visit? And she runs into Troy? And he tells her all about it? Then what? She’s gonna be pissed.”
“Damn it, what do you suggest then? ’Cause frankly, I’m tired of coming up with all the plans,” Alex snapped.
Jess narrowed his eyes, his own temper rising, but he bit it back, recognizing Alex’s frustration. “Maggie is happiest when there’s full disclosure between us,” he pointed out.
“You didn’t give full disclosure about those pictures you took of her,” Alex said.
Jess gave him a disgusted look. “We don’t talk about what we do when any of us are alone together. And those pictures definitely fall under that category.”
“I know, I know,” Alex conceded. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right, man,” Jess said. “But sure as shit, Maggie is going to find out about the baby someday. Even if this Maria chick has an abortion, some day in the future you know they’ll be talking, maybe having a beer at Donovan’s Pub when she’s visiting, and Troy is going to tell her all about how he was stupid and he got someone pregnant and she got rid of the kid and how much he regrets that. And Maggie is going to be all sympathetic and lending him a shoulder to cry on, and that’s probably going to give Troy ideas again, and…”
“Okay, okay, I get the point. It’s better to tell her now and work out what, if anything, we’re going to do about it. And maybe reinforce to Maggie how Troy can still be considered unstable so it’s best if she have no contact with him.”
“Yeah, I like the no-contact bit,” Jess agreed.
Alex stood up with a sigh. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, heading downstairs to a clearly impatient Maggie.
Chapter 18
The debate as to what to do about Troy’s situation would have raged for weeks, but Maggie surprised both men by stating that she wanted a quick resolution to the situation. Christmas was in three weeks, the term ended in two, they had finals to study for, and they had Troy to get out of their lives. She did not want him appearing back in town after the New Year to further disrupt their lives.
But since Troy no longer seemed to shadow her around campus where they could grab him for a powwow, she insisted that they either go to his motel and bring him back to the house for a talk or she would start calling around to find which motel he was staying at and go see him herself. Naturally, both Alex and Jess hurriedly told her that they would go fetch him.
Thus the very next day, both Jess and Alex went to his motel. Fortunately, Troy was in and seemed relieved to see them on his threshold.
He waved them inside and looked at Alex askance. “It’s okay,” Alex reassured him. “Jess knows.”
“Did you come to discuss what to do about the bastard who took them?” Troy asked.
“It’s not necessary,” Alex said, Jess wisely keeping silent as per the plan of action they had worked out on the car ride over. “I spoke to Maggie, and she told me everything.”
“Oh?” Troy asked, interested. “What did she tell you?”
“It was what you suspected, just a bit of getting carried away with her newfound singlehoodness. The good news is that the pictures were taken with her camera so he never got a chance to download a set for himself. She thought she had wiped the memory card after the pics were taken, but she supposes that somehow a residual copy remained and tainted that JPEG file on her mom’s computer. Or maybe the computer had some type of bug that was able to leach onto the residual copy. Not our area of expertise, so we can’t be sure how it happened. To be safe, though, we went out and bought her a new memory card and smashed the old one to pieces. And then we let her burn the pieces along with the copies you gave me. So, problem solved, no more pictures.”
Troy sank down into a chair in relief. “Oh, man. That’s a load off my mind. How can I thank you?”
“Well, if you would have just contacted Maggie and told her your concerns, then none of us would have been dragged into this mess to begin with,” Jess said with a hint of anger.
“I know, I fucked up. But, Christ, it was Maggie! I can’t think clearly where she’s concerned. I just wanted to protect her and not embarrass her by letting her know that I found out about the pictures.”
“Yeah, well, she’s pretty embarrassed that all three of us now know about the one time she went a little wild.” Alex did a serviceable job of grumbling, projecting the air of someone who was unhappy with the situation he found himself dragged into.
“She’s never going to talk to me again,” Troy moaned.
“We can only hope,” Jess mumbled but then added louder when Troy turned toward him, “She might never be able to look you in the eye again.”
Troy looked up. His eyes narrowed as he asked, “Did both of you look at the pictures?”
Alex gave him a look of contempt. “After the one picture you showed me, I felt no need to look at the others.”
“Yeah,” Jess echoed but went silent when Alex surreptitiously kicked his shin.
“She’s our roommate. It would be too uncomfortable living together if we had looked. And we had no right to. So I simply told her what you had found and handed the envelope over to her.”
“How’d she react?” Troy wanted to know.
“How do you think?” Alex asked. “She was mortified. And she burnt them to ash. We had to tell her some embarrassing stories of our own to get her to overcome her own embarrassment. And let me tell you, that was not fun!”
“So she now knows I’m in town and what I’ve been doing?” Troy said hopelessly.
Jess snorted. “Dude, she made you at least a month ago. And you are damn lucky she hasn’t sworn out a warrant on you for stalking.”
“Stalking?” Troy was evidently horrified. “I wasn’t stalking her!”
“Then what do you call it?”
“I was watching her to try to determine who took the pictures. Didn’t Alex explain that to you? Didn’t you explain that, Alex? At first I was trying to find out who she’s seeing, because I figured it was a boyfriend who took the pictures. But when she never went out on a date or seemed to be friendly with someone on campus, I realized that she had probably lied to me over the summer about seeing someone. You know, letting me down easy before I embarrassed myself by asking her to give us another shot.”
“So why continue following her if you determined there wasn’t a boyfriend?” Jess asked.
“Are you sure you talked to him, Alex?” Troy asked. “’Cause I’m sure I told you my reasoning.”
“You did,” Alex said. “And I did. But they both still found it a bit spurious.”
“Hmmm,” Troy said thoughtfully. “Well, maybe I should have done something different, but it took me awhile to make certain there wasn’t a boyfriend. And by then my routine was pretty much down pat, so I simply refocused my attention, looking for guys watching her from a distance, you know? Someone with that ‘I’ve seen Maggie naked’ look in their eye.”
Alex and Jess exchanged a startled glance. “And did you see anyone with that look?” Alex asked hesitantly.
“Nah,” Troy sighed. “But that could simply mean that he wasn’t a student, you know?”
“Well, now that we solved the mystery, what are you going to do now?” Alex asked, resteering the conversation.
“Huh?”
“Are you going back to your own campus?” Jess asked bluntly.
“Oh,” Troy said. “Well, I only managed to get a one-term leave. Gotta be back for baseball season if I want to stay on the team and keep my scholarship.”
“So you’re leaving soon?” Alex probed.
“Gonna have to. Expected home for the holidays and then off to school. Only managed to take the bare minimum of online course work, so my schedule next semester is going to be pretty full.”
“What about your other problem?” Alex queried.
Troy gave him a sharp look and then incl
ined his head toward Jess.
“He told me, dude,” Jess said.
“What? It wasn’t your secret to tell!” Troy was indignant.
“Yeah, well, Jess is pretty swift. He caught some holes in my story to Maggie about the pictures and everything. He threatened to point them out to Maggie unless I told him everything.”
“Does Maggie know?” Troy asked, horrified, and then moaned when Alex looked uncomfortable. “Ah, man! You told her? Shit! Why’d you tell her?”
“Because Maggie caught the holes in my story, too,” Alex told him. “And Maggie’s like a dog with a bone when she latches onto something. She wouldn’t let up with the questions until I caved and told her.”
“Fuck. Sorry I put you in such a situation,” Troy sighed. “She can be pretty tenacious.”
“No shit,” Alex murmured.
“So what’s your game plan?” Jess asked.
Troy got up and wandered over to the fridge, pulling out a beer and offering one to the men, who declined. Troy tipped the bottle to his lips and drank deeply before he answered the question. “I went back to see her, like you suggested, Alex. Found out she had taken a home pregnancy test, so I insisted that she go see a doctor. I went with her just to be sure that she wasn’t lying or anything.”
“And?” they asked.
“She’s pregnant, all right,” Troy sighed. Then he gave a humorless laugh. “Looks like I knocked her up the very first time I fucked her.”
“Oh, Christ. Wow. That’s…” Jess began but couldn’t finish, words failing him.
“Yeah, I know. I fucked up real bad,” Troy said. “Just hope I knocked her up in the motel and not the bar,” he mumbled and was unaware of Jess giving Alex a disgusted look since Troy had basically confirmed their suspicions about when Troy had initially hooked up with his fuck buddy.
“So what are you going to do now?” Alex asked softly.
“Well, I told her not to get mad, but she had to admit that we never said we were exclusive or that we were in a relationship. And then I told her that I wanted a paternity test to prove that I’m the father.”
