Page 70 of No Romeo
“See,” I said to Kyle. “It’s fixed.”
Hendrix left the car running when he got out and slammed the door. His stern gaze met Kyle on his way to the porch. “Time for you to take your Stormtrooper ass back to the Death Star.”
I knew he knew that was the equivalent of a “fucked your mom” joke to Kyle.
Kyle huffed and pushed to his feet. “I would never be a Stormtrooper!” And, of course, of all the times for him to grow a set… This was the hill he wanted to die on. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Thank you for fixing my car.” Then he looked at me with sad eyes. “Goodbye, Lola.”
He stomped off to his car and got in before reversing in what I thought was supposed to be a dramatic fashion but really wasn’t.
“Great,” I said, staring up at Hendrix. “Now you’ve upset him.”
“Like I give a shit.” Hendrix reached for the front door. “I hate his ass.”
Kyle was about as harmless as plankton. Hendrix never necessarily liked him before, but he never hated him the way he did now. Surely, he didn’t really think I’d slept with my best friend?
“I’m well aware of how much you hate him for no damn reason.”
Hendrix whirled around on the welcome mat, his jaw ticcing, nostrils flared. “No damn reason?” He bit his lip as though he was trying to cage the words that wanted to break free. It didn’t last long. “He helped fuck up my entire life. He can eat shit and choke on it.”
“What couldhepossibly have done toyou?”
“I saw you leave the clinic with him!”
There was a beat of silence, a moment of horror that rang through my brain. I’d been too numb to notice much that awful day, but surely, I would have noticed him?
“You told him. You told Jessica. You didn’t tell me. And if you want to know why I really fucking hate him, it’s because he took you to abort a child that could have been mine.”
Not his. I’d told him as much.
His disgusted gaze flicked over me, and I shrunk beneath the weight of his anger. “You were right, Lola. We shouldn’t have unbottled shit. Because there’s a helluva lot to unbottle now that I think about it.”
I tried to remain calm, to hide the bubbling panic rising within me. I hated lying to him. Before that day two years ago, I’d never lied to Hendrix. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell him. I had been both terrified of his finding out the truth and desperate for him to see through the lie.
“I told you; it wasn’t yours,” I managed through my tightening throat.
“And how the hell did you know that, Lola?” He crowded my space, the smell of grease and his faded cologne washing over me. “We didn’t always have condoms. Too poor. Too stupid. Too in-fucking-love.”
Hendrix and Ihadbeen stupid and poor, and God were we in love, but when we couldn’t manage to afford or steal protection, he’d always pulled out.
Johan didn’t pull out.
Johan didn’t care.
Not when I fought and cried and begged him to stop. He certainly didn’t care about coming in me and leaving a traumatized sixteen-year-old knocked up with her rapist’s baby. I guess he thought the money he had tossed beside my crying body absolved him of all morality.
Was there a chance that it was Hendrix’s? According to the dates the clinic gave me, no.
When I went to the clinic to confirm that I was pregnant and the nurse gave me the conception date, I felt everything inside of me die. The seventeenth of June. The date Johan had turned up to screw my high, passed-out mother and raped me instead. The date right in the middle of the only two weeks Hendrix and I had been apart since we were six. He’d been sick the week before, and it had taken me a week to put myself back together afterward.
Tears threatened, and I closed my eyes, unable to look at him. “The dates lined up, Hendrix.”
“That memorable, then? So fucking memorable, you know the damn date?”
“It’s just a date,” I whispered. One engraved on my heart in an ugly scar.
Every line on his face hardened, the betrayal in his eyes saying no one could possibly ever hurt him more than I had.
His damaged fist met the rotting siding of his house, leaving behind a bloodied knuckle print. “Fuck, I hate myself for being so stupid in love with you.” He turned back to me. “And I fucking hate you.”
