Page 17 of Lies and Lullabies
Today, though, Kira had kissed me again. She’d kissed me like our night together was as fresh in her memory as it was in mine. That had really happened.
If she was happily married now, would she have done that?
The weird thing was that I’d alwayswanteda happy ending for her. These past few years I’d been picturing her with a husband and a couple of cute little kids. In my head, that’s how things ended up, and I had been okay with it.
Until today. All of a sudden it wasn’t okay. Because seeing Kira again made me wish for things that an asshole like me wouldn’t know what to do with. I wanted to hold her in my arms and kiss her again. And never stop.
I groaned aloud, flipping onto my stomach, pressing my erection into the quilt on my lonely bed.
We have to talk, she’d said. What the hell did that even mean?
Four
Kira
“Let’s play with all the old toys,” Vivi demanded. “And then I want to catch fireflies. Where is my jar?”
“One thing at a time, toots,” I told my daughter. “And I don’t think we’ll spot fireflies this early in the season.”
“But maybe,” she argued.
I gave her a vague nod, but my mind was elsewhere. Somehow, I was going to have to stumble through the next eighteen hours with my family, even though I was consumed with fear. Telling John—no,Jonas—that he was the father of my child?
Terrifying.
I wished I’d just blurted it out today on the dock. Then it would at least be over with. But that hadn’t happened, because I’d been blindsided. Escaping from him had seemed like a fine idea at the time.
It didn’t anymore. Until tomorrow at noon, I would have a clenched stomach and a bad case of the shakes.
For once, my brother wasn’t much help. Adam had withdrawn to the porch with a beer and a magazine. He didn’t emerge until suppertime when our father came home. The heavy sound of his feet on the porch steps was as familiar as breathing.
“How’s my princess?” he boomed as the screen door slammed shut.
Vivi came running, leaping into my dad’s arms.
I watched my gray-haired father swing my daughter around with the same surprise I always felt when the two of them were together. Because he’d never once called me “his princess.” Becoming a grandpa had softened this man.
And thank goodness. My whole life, he’d been pretty hard to take.
We’d never had an easy relationship, and on the day I’d told him I’d been raped, it became even more strained. Maybe he was just worried, or maybe he blamed me. I’ll never know. But he became even more silent and brittle than usual.
It didn’t help that we were trapped in this house together for months afterward, the cold Maine winter keeping me in sight of his grim expression for weeks at a time. And with Adam away at law school, I’d been lonely. It was the longest winter of my life.
When summer finally arrived, everything got easier. My father and I were both busy at the store, since summer was our high season.
And then John had turned up to distract me. He’d been a charming diversion with enormous consequences. I’d gone back to college right on schedule after Labor Day, thinking that my life was back on track, but six weeks into the semester, I began to feel utterly exhausted and caught a cold that wouldn’t go away. Eventually, I wandered into the student health building and asked if maybe mono was going around.
A very astute doctor asked me a whole battery of questions. The final one was, “When did you last have a menstrual period?”
That’s when I understood just how badly I’d messed up.
The first person I’d told about my pregnancy was Adam. He’d held me while we both cried on each other. Then I’d summoned the nerve to tell my father over Thanksgiving, when Adam was around to back me up.
My father had turned white, and then red. “You’re moving home immediately,” he’d said, slamming a fist onto the table.
“She’s going to finish the semester,” Adam had argued. “Obviously.”
“You’re out of control. Both of you,” he’d raged. The ranting went on for hours, until I ended up in my bedroom sobbing, while my brother handed me tissues, one after another.
