Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 39947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 200(@200wpm)___ 160(@250wpm)___ 133(@300wpm)
I nodded. I’d thought about it a lot, and from the little I’d seen from Connor’s parents, it appeared that his father was just as awful to his mother as he was to me. She was always stick thin, quiet, and subdued.
“From a happy, bubbly young woman, I morphed into someone unhappy and insecure; I hated that I wasn’t skinny, and bright, and pretty enough. That I never had the natural instincts to get things right to make my own boyfriend like me. Our third year together, he cheated on me with one of my best friends from college. On my birthday. I was sick, and he said they’d planned a surprise party for me, so he might as well show up for both of us and have a beer with our friends. Indeed, I was surprised when I managed to drag myself to her apartment and saw my boyfriend’s dick in her mouth. They were the only two people there. Everyone else had gotten the memo and hadn’t shown up.
“At this point I was so exhausted, I wasn’t even sad. I left him and moved out, but he came crawling back. He begged me to give him another chance. Told me he was a changed man. That he’d seen the light. That his mistake was going to reshape our entire relationship, because now I had power over him, too, since I was the one who’d walked out on him.”
“Jesus.” Grant shook his head. “Now I get why you were hung up about moving here. The rhetoric alone to frame relationships in terms of power and supremacy is crazy. He clearly didn’t understand the assignment.”
“Neither did I, apparently.” I offered him a sad smile as I pried my alcohol-free beer from his hand and clinked it with his bottle before taking a sip. “Because I took him back. I returned to our shared apartment. He was right, though. Things weren’t the same. They became much, much worse.”
“Did he ever lay a finger on you?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t get that far, thank God. But the moment he changed the locks to punish me for texting with my male TA about nonschool things, that’s when I broke things off for good. Alas, it was too late by then.”
“What do you mean?” Grant’s voice was thick with emotions.
“I was already pregnant.” I shrugged. “I was on birth control, but I was doing a terrible job being on top of it. I took my pill at irregular hours, and sometimes skipped a day. Looking back, I was depressed. Unfocused. I thought we were safe, because—wait for it—we used the pull-out method too.”
Grant’s face remained serious. “That doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you young and inexperienced. Women just happen to pay for their mistakes much more heftily than men in that department.”
I chuckled humorlessly. “Yeah, well, Connor pulling out had nothing to do with trying to stay safe. He just really liked finishing on my face or chest.”
He closed his eyes, screwing his fingertips into their sockets. His nostrils narrowed with a deep breath.
“I called him after I realized I was pregnant.” My throat began closing around the confession, my windpipe narrowing.
This was the part where I was going to break. I knew it. Because I was sure Grant could already guess the rest of the story. After all, I presently didn’t have any kids.
“I broke the news to him in person. I think the only reason he’d agreed to see me was because the asshole actually thought I wanted him back. When I told him I was pregnant, his entire behavior changed. He pressured me into having an abortion, which I didn’t want. Not because I had anything against it—I had actually contemplated it seriously—but at the end of the day, I didn’t see this as a punishment, but a blessing in disguise. I always knew I was going to work with children and loved babies.”
“I’m going to kill him,” he muttered quietly. In that moment in time, I was even a little worried he’d do something stupid. Connor’s meaningless existence wasn’t something worth throwing away Grant’s precious life for. “Sorry, please continue.”
“When he realized abortion was out of the question, he decided to bully me into reversing my decision. He sent his mother, his father, his uncle my way. First, to try to reason with me. When that didn’t work, they tried to bargain with me. Pay me off to abort the baby. They treated me like I was a gold digger or something. Like this was premeditated.”
It hurt. More than hurting, it took a huge emotional toll on a twenty-year-old girl who was newly pregnant and crashed on her friends’ couch while trying to find an apartment close enough to college.
“I think, subconsciously or not, he knew if he put enough pressure on me, he’d be able to get rid of the baby. So he used every trick in the book. He purposefully started dating some of my so-called friends—the ones who weren’t loyal, anyway—parading them in front of me. He spread vicious rumors about me. The stress was too much.”