Page 23 of Fire

“That’s on you!” She stabs an angry finger into my chest. “You made the choice not to be in her life.”

I grab her wrist and lean close. “You never gave me the luxury of a choice.”

Her eyes meet mine, flashing with anger, with adrenaline, with whatever the hell happened to lead us to this moment. It boils inside her, scorching me with its heat.

I dreamed of having Ivy this close again, but not like this.

Never like this.

I release her wrist and step back.

“It’s funny you would say that,” she hisses, hands on hips, eyes burning with defiance. It’s the first time she’s seemed like the Ivy I remember, and I have to look away. “In my world, not stepping up when you get your girlfriend pregnant is a choice.”

“Nope.” I cross my arms and glare at the floor, the wall, the ceiling, anything that isn’t her. “Don’t make this my fault. I made a promise to you, Ivy.” My voice breaks and I clamp my jaw shut.

A promise I intended to keep.

To be there for her, no matter what.

And I keep my fucking promises.

I risk a glance in her direction.

“A promise you broke.” Ivy looks disgusted. “I texted you, Micah. Over and over. You never responded.” Her voice cracks and she turns away, covering her face with her hands. “Can you imagine how I felt? Because you did promise to be there for me, no matter what, and I was naïve enough and in love enough to believe you. I stood up to my father, defending you. I put it all on the line with him, confident you’d step up, he just had to wait and see. Then you proved to him how big a fool I am. Can you even, for one second, put yourself in my shoes and understand how humiliated I was? How betrayed?”

“You wanna talk about betrayal? Hmm? Put yourself in my shoes. I loved you, Ivy. I loved you with everything I was and believed you when you said you felt the same. Then, what? A week after you move to Seattle? Two weeks? You break things off with me with two shitty texts, hide my daughter from me, then just come back home and blame me for the whole thing?”

“I didn’t hide your daughter from you, Micah.” Her lips curl in revulsion. “You never responded to my messages.”

It’s like she’s told the lie so many times, she believes it. “I never got any messages about you being pregnant, Ivy. Not one.”

“Well, I sent them. Every day. Before school. After school. Any time my dad would let me have my phone. I begged you to respond.” She swallows hard, frowning. “And what are you talking about? I didn’t break things off with you. I did spend weeks screaming into the void and then, three months later, you text me from a new number like nothing happened and everything’s normal.”

“If you sent me texts, I didn’t get them. In fact, I got so few texts from you, I started to lose my mind. You were my everything, Ivy! And you were just gone.” I rake a hand into my hair, then pause, frozen as the timing of it all starts to make sense.

…from a new number…

Oh, fuck…

Fuck, fuck, fuck…

“You’d already started school?” I ask, my voice echoing and bending through my head. “When you found out you were pregnant?”

She nods. “And Dad thought he’d teach me a lesson by homeschooling me for my senior year. Ask me how easy it was to make friends…”

Oh, shit no! You’ve got to be kidding me. When my parents refused to replace my phone, I put up a hell of a fight. I screamed and cursed, certain they were ruining my life while they were adamant they were saving me from falling off the edge. I almost told them to go to hell, but Uncle Caleb stepped in and talked me down with a heavy dose of tough love. He explained that my parents wanted what was best for me. He helped me see myself through their eyes. Then asked what was the worst that could happen if I accepted the consequence. Never in a million years would I have come up with something like this.

“I didn’t get your texts, Ivy.”

Guilt lands on my chest and crushes my heart.

She scoffs. “So you keep saying.”

“No, listen.” I step forward, reaching for her, suddenly questioning every angry thought, feeling, and word over the last twenty minutes because if she sent texts I didn’t get, I understand what happened.

And it’s the shittiest timing.

“Remember how hard it was to talk back then? With the time difference and your dad taking phone time away and…?” I swipe a hand over my face as it all comes into focus. “I was going fucking crazy, waiting to hear from you, missing you so bad I could barely breathe. The day you broke up with me, the day you stopped responding, I lost it. I mean I really, really lost it. I threw my phone at the wall and shattered it beyond repair. My grades were shit. My attitude was worse. My parents refused to replace my phone until I got things under control and when they did, I got a brand-new number…for a fresh start…”

---