Page 56 of If You Fight

She shook her head and squeezed my hand. “Not just me. You don’t belong there either. I can’t believe you lived in that place at one time. All that broken glass and concrete all over the floor. I hate even thinking of you spending night after night in that place.”

“Don’t think of it then. It’s all in the past. Now I’m here with you and we’re going to figure out somehow to get us away from all this.”

Serena leaned over me and softly kissed my lips. “Here where you belong.”

Where I belonged.

I knew Robert would disagree with that claim. His attempt to show Serena that I was exactly what he called me that first night he brought me here—a stray—had failed. He thought she’d see me fight and be disgusted like her sister would be.

That she’d think of me as some lowlife who wasn’t worthy of her love or her bed and he’d succeed in chasing me away. But that hadn’t happened because he didn’t understand her.

I never worried if she saw me fight that she’d turn away from me. That wasn’t who she was. Serena cared too much, loved too much to just turn her back on us. I knew that.

What I didn’t know was if I could be that fighter I’d been so long ago. Now that I knew I could be, I didn’t fear what Robert threatened me with next. Let him throw fighter after fighter at me. I’d take them all on, and the more I fought, the more I’d win.

See, he didn’t understand me either.

I slowly openedmy eyes as every ache and pain came rushing back into my consciousness. Turning to look at Serena, I found an empty spot where she was when I drifted off last night. The light coming through the bedroom window told me it was daytime, so why wasn’t she next to me in bed?

The events of the night before rambled around my brain as I struggled to wake up. Each hit I’d taken in the fight replayed in my mind, and the corresponding hurt for each one registered as I gradually came alive again.

Fuck, I needed something to take the edge off the pain or I’d be no good until sometime around lunch.

I swiveled my head left and right to look for a bottle, but I found nothing. Not even a glass on the nightstand.

“Serena?”

“I’m in the kitchen. Give me a minute.”

Something in her voice made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, so I eased myself out of bed one leg at a time and slowly made my way out to her. But she wasn’t in the kitchen or in the living room.

“I thought you said you were in the kitchen,” I said, confused why she would have lied.

“I meant the bathroom,” she said in that same strange tone.

So she was lying about something and likely more than what room she was in. I walked as quickly as I could get my aching legs to go into the bathroom and found her standing in a pair of panties and one of my t-shirts with her back turned and looking at something. She covered it with her hand so I couldn’t see.

“Serena, what’s wrong? Why are you acting so weird?” I asked as I tried to peer over her shoulder to see what she was hiding.

She turned to face me but put her hands behind her back. “Nothing’s wrong. I just got up early and had to go to the bathroom.”

Her expression was riddled with guilt, but why? What had she done? “So why did you tell me you were in the kitchen?”

“I just got my rooms mixed up,” she said, avoiding making eye contact with me. “It’s no big deal, Ryder.”

Before I could ask what she was hiding behind her back, she continued, “How do you feel? Are you sore? I can get you something to make you feel better. Why don’t you go back to bed and I’ll bring it in?”

As she spoke, I looked in the mirror and saw what she was hiding from me. I took a step toward her and reached around to grab a white plastic pregnancy test.

Holding it up between us, I leveled my gaze on her. “Why didn’t you want me to see this?”

Serena hung her head and quietly answered, “Because I thought you might be unhappy.”

I looked down at the result and saw two pink lines. Looking up at her, I asked, “Well, what does two lines mean? Yes or no?”

She grabbed it from my hold and sat down hard on the lid of the toilet. “It means yes.”

“Yes?” I repeated as the answer sunk into my brain still muddled from sleep. “You’re pregnant?”

---