Page 58 of Resilience

A few minutes later, she opened the door and waved her mother into the bathroom. The test stick sat on the edge of the sink. Mom glanced down at it, said fuck, picked up the stick and stared hard at it, said fuck again, and met Athena’s eyes.

Athena looked steadily back. Still she wasn’t frantic, wasn’t traumatized, wasn’t even particularly upset. Her upset was entirely for Sam. Practically speaking, being pregnant was a pain in the ass, but not a trauma. In no part of her brain did she think of the clump of cells inside her as anything but another nasty thing Hunter had done that night.

But she was absolutely furious.

“What do you want to do?” Mom signed.

“What do you think I want to do?” Athena replied at once. “I don’t know if I ever want to have a baby, but I know for sure I don’t want to have that asshole’s baby or to be a mom when I’m twenty-two years old.”

Today. She was twenty-two today. Fuck this birthday into the ground.

Mom nodded. “We’ll make it happen. But not right now.”

“Not right now,” Athena agreed. There was nothing she could do during a lockdown, and she didn’t even want to discuss it much while they were surrounded by their whole family. Most of their family.

She had time to deal with this nasty birthday present after Sam was home and she could see with her own eyes that he was going to be okay.

But GOD, she was pissed. “I want to hurt that fuckhead. I want to make him bleed.”

Mom frowned and tilted her head. “Are you venting, or are you making a plan? I’ve got some things we can do to fuck his life up. I was ready to talk to you about that anyway until we got the call to lock down. But if you want him to actually bleed, we’ll need the club in on it. That’s not my area.”

Her mother was very happy to make bad people suffer, but she attacked their reputation, their financial security, their relationships. Not their bodies.

Athena was angry enough to want Hunter physically hurt, badly—killed would be dandy, in fact. But if her father knew, it could start a chain reaction that led right back to this clubhouse. So she shook her head. “No. Not that. I don’t want Dad to know.”

“This is a lot to keep from him, Athena. I don’t know if we can keep this a secret without lying to him.”

Before Athena could respond, Mom’s head whipped toward the door, and Blanche alerted Athena; there was someone on the other side. Just a minute! Mom called.

Then she crouched before the vanity cabinet and pulled out one of the plastic grocery bags they used to line the wastebasket. “Let’s pack this up like trash. If anybody asks why we’re all in here, I’ll make something up. Then you and I need to go upstairs and find a place to talk some things out.”

Athena took the stick from her mother, and the box and wrapping, and tossed it all in the wastebasket. She wadded some tissues and tossed them in, pulled the bag from the basket, took the bag Mom had gotten out of the cabinet, and put the filled bag inside it. Then she tied it all off. It looked like regular trash.

Despite all the badness of the day, Mom grinned. “You’ve got a knack for subterfuge, starlight. You should come back to work with me.”

“No thanks,” Athena replied, finding a grin of her own. “I like the job I have.”

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~oOo~

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It was Marcella outside the door. “Everything okay?” she signed when she saw both Athena and her mom and Blanche coming out of the small bathroom.

“Yep,” Mom said and signed. “Just had a little woman’s emergency.”

Athena was impressed. That was both perfectly true and inexact enough to be easily mistaken.

Marcella easily mistook it. She turned a sympathetic look on Athena. “Oh, baby. Do you need something for cramps? I’ve got the good weed.”

“No thanks. Maybe later, though.”

“You got it. Just let me know.”

As Marcella went into the bathroom and Athena and her mom headed to the back to get rid of the bag, Mom grabbed her arm.

“The guys are coming out of the chapel. We’ll talk later. You run that bag to the dumpster and get back here.”

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