Pleasure Point: The Complete Series

by Evans, Jennifer

  She inhaled so sharply that I thought all the air in the room had to have been sucked into her lungs. “No.”

  “Yep. Best I can figure, I’m almost three months along.”

  Carissa’s voice was incredulous. “Did you just say three months? Why’d you wait so long to tell me?”

  I stammered out a reply. “I just found out myself. I haven’t been paying much attention. Sometimes I miss my period.” The room spun, and I clutched my stomach. “I didn’t think to get one of those at-home pregnancy tests until the other day. The pink lines came up so fast I thought it had to be wrong, so I did another, and sure enough …”

  She didn’t say anything and when she finally spoke, her voice was low. “I thought you were on the pill.”

  “Yeah, well, I thought I was too. But thing of it is, I’m not that great about taking them every day.” I clutched the phone so hard, the veins on my hand popped out. “They make me nauseated.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “This is awful. Well you’ll have to hurry, but it’s not too late to have an abortion.”

  “No!” The thought of killing this baby, after what I’d seen at the coroner’s office made me want to fall into a deep, dark hole and never emerge. “I can’t.”

  “You should think about it. What about Jax?”

  “I’m not telling him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s just a kid himself. And he’s been through a shock. And, oh my God, Carissa, I can’t ruin his life by saddling him with a baby.” I flung myself onto the sofa and curled my legs tightly to my chest. “If he finds out about this, he’ll want to be with me and the baby. He’ll want to … what? Support the three of us with a minimum wage job? It would never work. I screwed up bad this time.”

  “I think you should consider an abortion,” she said softly.

  My spine straightened. “This is Lydia and Troy’s grandchild.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got a lead on a job in Santa Cruz. My placement coordinator told me to call, and they’ll probably hire me.”

  “And what about Jax?”

  At the mention of his name, I saw his smiling face. “He’ll find a way without me.”

  “Are you inviting him to Santa Cruz?”

  “No! He can never know about the baby.”

  “Seriously? Are you really planning on leaving him and his brother? You know I’m your friend, and I knew your affair with Jax wasn’t the best plan, but come on, you can’t leave them now.”

  “I know the timing’s bad. But what am I supposed to do? Wait around until my belly’s huge? Jax will never let me leave. He’ll never leave me and the baby alone. Oh, my God, how am I ever going to tell this baby who its dad is?”

  “Sounds like Jax cares. Maybe you two can work it out somehow.”

  “No,” I said sadly. “I’ve messed up enough.” The weight of everything I’d done crushed down on me. “He deserves a chance at a real life with someone his own age. I’ll stay for a while, but then, I’m moving. And I’m not telling anyone where I went.”

  “He’s going to find out.”

  I had already done some thinking on this. “I’m changing my name. And don’t ask me the name, because I’m not telling anyone.”

  “I don’t know about this—”

  “It’s the only way.” Leo jumped on my lap, his head bumping against my chin. “And in time, Jax will realize that what we did was just an unfortunate mistake.”

  “And what are you going to tell your child?”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I’ll think of something.”

  “So, when are you moving?”

  “I don’t know. In a few weeks or so.”

  “Oh, honey, I wish I were there to give you a big hug right now. I can’t believe this whole thing. Lydia and Troy gone? And you with a kid? What a nightmare.” She hesitated. “Rosalyn, if you change your mind and stay with Jax, I’ll be the first to support you. He needs family now.”

  I hung my head. “I’m not changing my mind. It’ll be better for him this way. And for the baby.”

  We hung up the phone and I lit my bong. As the smoke swirled through the room I thought that leaving was the only right thing to do in this disastrous situation. I knew it was selfish of me. More selfishness piled on top of the unfair sexual advantage I’d taken of a hormonal teenager.

  It was more than sex, you love him.

  No!

  But maybe this was a chance for me to make things right. Start fresh. I took another toke, and as the cannabis filled my lungs and the delicious high hit my head, I convinced myself that I was doing the right thing.

  Then I set the bong aside, and that was the last time I smoked until well after I gave birth.

  I was pregnant.

  I was pregnant with Jax’s baby.

  Jax

  When Tyler, Rosalyn, and I visited the coroner’s office to identify my parents’ bodies, it was as though I was staring at strangers. My mind couldn’t process the fact that those two dead bodies had, just the day before, been my parents. Nausea roiled through my belly, and bile filled my throat, but it was as though the whole thing was happening to someone else.

  Don’t ask me how we made it through that day with the government forms to sign and the silent ride home in Ol’ Betsy.

  When I woke up in my twin bed the day after the accident, at first I felt disoriented. My chest felt tight, and I could barely catch my breath. Looking around the room, everything was exactly like it always was: my surfboards propped against the wall, our TV set on top of the wooden dresser Tyler and I shared, his guitar placed in its stand in one corner, my sleeping brother curled up in the fetal position in the bed next to mine. I must’ve made a sound because Tyler snapped into a sitting position, his eyes wild.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice croaking.

  Instead of the usual sounds of mom and dad in the kitchen having coffee and the aroma of eggs and pancakes cooking, there was silence. My legs were leaden when I swung them out of bed to trudge into the bathroom. When I came out, Tyler staggered down the short hallway into the living room, his hair a rat’s nest of tangles, his face ashen. When he saw the wild look in my eye as I raced into my parents’ bedroom, he followed at a fast clip.

  Standing in their room, disbelief washed over me. My brain scrambled with thoughts, unable to hold on to one as my eyes flitted over my parents’ neatly made bed, their dresser with family photos lining the surface, including ones of Tyler and me as babies and smiling pictures of the four of us at the beach. There was even one of my mom, dad, and Rosalyn sitting on the sofa together, a picture I’d taken with a disposable camera shortly after Rosalyn moved to Point Loma.

  A sob caught in my throat as I pulled their closet door open, the clothes they’d never wear again hanging in rows. I pulled one of my father’s button-down work shirts from a hanger and held it to my face, inhaling his scent in ragged breaths, Tyler at my side. “You okay?” he said, touching my arm. His eyes were red from crying, a deep worry-crease between them.

  “It cant’ be. They’re … gone. They’re really … gone.” It wasn’t the cool thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself. My legs gave out, and I sank to my knees, clutching the shirt and weeping. Tyler kneeled next to me and the two of us cried our eyes out like a couple of babies, right there in my parents’ closet.

  Tyler’s sobs were especially heartbreaking; slow, sad, shuddering inhales followed by tears. He grabbed at one of our mom’s shirts, a purple halter top that some of the girls were wearing those days. “Mom loved this shirt.” He held it to his face and rocked back and forth.

  We must’ve sat there in the closet crying for a good thirty minutes, a couple of pathetic orphans. Orphans. I did not like the sound of that word.

  Finally, Tyler touched my arm, his tear-filled eyes meeting mine. “Let’s get out of here.”

  On shaking legs, we stood up and ambled toward the door, but when I saw the picture of Rosalyn with
my folks, I lost it. I snatched up the photo. “I never got the chance to explain!” I screamed. “I never got the chance to tell them I love them.” My stomach churned, and a sharp pain doubled me over, my hands clutching my abdomen, the photo crushed in my fist. “I never had the chance …” My face grew hot. I straightened. “I am the biggest screw up! I never had the chance to make things right.” Heat pulsed through my body as blood pounded through my ears. My reflection stared at me in the mirror over my parents’ dresser, and when I saw my sorry form, I swung back and punched with violence, sending glass shards raining over my mother’s perfume bottles and framed photos.

  “Jax! Stop.” Tyler grabbed me in a bear hug. “Look at you! You’re bleeding.” He sprinted into the bathroom and returned with a towel. The two of us shrank to the floor, our bodies crouched over, heads touching, my hand hurting like a motherfucker as blood dripped onto my mother’s white towel.

  My shoulders shook as Tyler’s arms surrounded me. My voice quaked when I spoke, the words barely intelligible. “Mom never knew … how much I loved her.” I thought of all those times that all she wanted was for me to sit next to her on the sofa, watch a dumb TV show, and tell her about my day. “I never got to tell her that everything was okay, that I was … in love. Really in love.” Tyler glanced at me not commenting, his eyes vacant. I sprang up and paced the room, holding my bleeding hand, the blood throbbing through my knuckles, all the way up my arm. “Will she ever forgive me?”

  Tyler sat on the floor, his arms over his folded legs, and looked at me. “I know she’d have forgiven you. Mom and Dad loved you.” But would she have? I was overcome with sadness at the realization that the last time I saw my mother was when she was livid with me.

  The next few days were spent making phone calls to the few family members we had. Mom’s folks lived in a small town in Costa Rica where they could pretty much drop out of society and live on a dollar a day. We’d found their phone number in my mom’s red leather address book she kept in her nightstand. Tyler and I made the long distance call, a shitload of numbers punched into the phone before a long bleating sound, followed by my granddad answering the phone. When he heard the terrible news, the phone was passed back and forth between him, my grandmother, Tyler and me. “No. It can’t be. What happened? Are you sure? There’s got to be a mistake.” When they calmed down, our grandparents promised to fly out and help Tyler and me, but neither one of us wanted strangers—that’s what they were to us—around. We were of legal age, and it didn’t take too much to convince them we didn’t need their help.

  Then we called our dad’s only remaining parent, his father, who lived in Springfield, Vermont and worked for a small newspaper. “I’d come out and help you boys, but with the deadlines and all …”

  Tyler and I were on our own, which was just fine with us.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but a hard protective shell was forming, a barrier that would allow only a very few people through. My brother was one. Rosalyn was the other.

  I needed Rosalyn more than ever. Those first few days, I had to wake up to the deep grief that would be my constant companion for the next several months, heck, for the next several years, but mixed in with that was the overwhelming desire to connect with the woman I loved. But Rosalyn wasn’t easy to reach emotionally. At first, we talked on the phone, brief conversations which included mostly mumbling and Rosalyn’s tears. Finally, I started spending time with her again.

  I swallowed hard as I knocked on her door, and she answered, wearing a wrinkled T-shirt that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. Over the next few weeks, we fell into a pathetic routine of me trying to console her when I hurt really bad myself. I wanted to be the man in the relationship and soothe her, but Rosalyn was inconsolable.

  “Come on,” I said as Rosalyn sat on her sofa, her feet up on the coffee table, and the TV remote control in her hand. “You need to eat something. How about we go to that vegetarian restaurant you like?” She sank farther down into the sofa.

  “Don’t you need to go surfing or do your homework or something?” She leaned away from me.

  I shook my head. “All that stuff can wait.”

  She looked at me, her gaze unfocused as tears filled her eyes again.

  I split my time between school, the beach, my part-time job at a local surf shop, and Rosalyn’s apartment. Every morning when I woke up, the world seemed dull and lifeless. I spent as much time with Tyler as possible, but I wanted to somehow make things right between Rosalyn and me. I tried making love to her, and sometimes we would even go through the motions, but it was filled with sadness, almost like those times we made love would be our last together.

  Sometimes I’d go to Rosalyn’s after surfing and find her standing in her living room, holding Leo and staring out the window. She’d turn to face me, and I could tell that she’d been crying because her eyes were swollen, and her face was streaked with red. “Hi, sweetie,” she’d say in a voice that was barely above a whisper.

  I would have done anything to make things better, but I didn’t know how to fix what was wrong.

  A few weeks after my parents died, I finally decided to talk to her. I was on my way home from my job, and I pulled into her driveway feeling like shit. When I entered her apartment, it looked like she’d been doing spring-cleaning because clothes were out of her drawers and the trash cans were full like she was getting rid of things she didn’t need. She sat on her meditation pillow and whirled around when I walked in.

  “Jax. I thought you had work today.”

  “We need to talk.”

  She stood up, walked into the kitchen, and poured herself a glass of water. “Okay, Jax, I’ll start. I think it’s time that you get on with your life. You’ve been working part time and surfing, your parents are gone … you need to make them proud.” She choked down the water and kept blinking like she was trying to hold back tears.

  “What is it you’re really trying to say?” My heart was pounding.

  “Just that you need to move forward with your life, and so do I.”

  Both of us stood there staring at each other, an emotionally charged silence filling the room. We didn’t speak for what seemed like hours, and finally I said, “I know exactly what I want to do with my future. I want to be with you. Rosalyn, I love you.”

  She shook her head sadly and said, “You can’t know that. You’ve been through a shock and—”

  “And what?”

  “And you’re only nineteen. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. A life with somebody more your age.” She looked down at the floor.

  I rushed up to her and held her by both shoulders. “Rosalyn. Look at me. I don’t want to be with anyone else. I want you. And so what if I’m nineteen?” Adrenaline surged through my system and my heartbeat sped up. “I’m old enough to make my own decisions. Don’t treat me like a kid because I’m not a goddamn kid anymore!”

  She shrugged out of my grasp and ran into the bathroom where I could hear her crying. When I knocked on the door, she said, “Come back later. Maybe we can talk then.”

  When I lay in bed that night, I stared at the ceiling unable to sleep. How had things changed so rapidly? I finally rolled over and fell into a fitful sleep with nightmares of wiping out in sixty-foot waves.

  Rosalyn

  Jax thought that he was truly in love with me, but there was no way he could have rational thoughts after losing his parents. I really did try to talk to him the day he came over. But as usual, I ran away.

  It had been almost a month since Lydia and Troy were killed. On my last day in Southern California, I drove Ol’ Betsy to the Self Realization Fellowship overlooking the Pacific Ocean where I sat on a bench in the meditation garden, inhaling the invigorating scent of the salty ocean air. The crashing of the waves mingled with the sound of a gently babbling water fountain, the scent of blooming garden flowers perfuming the air. My hand gently caressed my abdomen, where new life grew. My thoughts turned to the nightmare of what
had happened. Nausea filled my stomach, my throat tight. Lydia and Troy gone. Jax a daddy to a child he’ll never know. Tyler and Jax orphans. I closed my eyes and sent a prayer up to the Universe. Please help me do the right thing for this child.

  I didn’t want to admit to myself that I’d fallen in love with Jax. But there it was. I had fallen in love. In the year we had been together, Jax was everything I’d ever dreamed of in a romantic partner. He was caring, loving, eager to please, and he was my best friend. I thought about all the times he had put whatever was happening in his life aside, even surfing, to be with me when I needed help around the house or needed something from the market or wanted him to rub my feet after a long day.

  And Jax had become quite the lover. I shivered thinking about the feel of his warm, masculine hands running over my body, the feel of his sensuous mouth on mine. When I was in his arms, it felt like the world shrunk down to just the two of us. I was ecstatic in those moments, and I finally knew what the big deal about love and relationships was.

  But I was filled with remorse over what I’d done. I had taken advantage of an impressionable young man. Much as I tried to meditate my unhappiness away, the truth was, that anything that went wrong in my life served me right as punishment. How could I have done that to Jax? The weight of my actions pressed in on me like a vise tightening on me. I had to somehow make things right and that meant giving Jax a chance at a decent life without me.

  I left the meditation gardens, Ol’ Betsy making the trek south on the 5 toward Point Loma for the last time. I entered my apartment, looking around at the shambles of my life; the few boxes packed for moving. As I bent to pet Leo, the phone rang shrilly.

  “Hey Rosalyn.” Carissa’s voice was serious. I sat on the sofa, my feet up on the ottoman. “I’ve been thinking. You’re not really leaving Point Loma are you?”

  My gaze trailed over the packed items in the room. “Yes.”

  “It’s just that … well, I know I was against this whole affair with …” She stopped speaking.