Page 5 of The Broken Beginning: Part One

“Damn, I wish I had a few days from now to answer these questions, Lil. My rage says, ‘hell no!’. I know that’s not okay though. Your mom cheated on me, not you. If you want to see her once she gets herself set up somewhere, that’s on you. The only thing I ask is that you don’t use anything of mine to help her out.”

“I would never,” I told him honestly. He nodded his head.

“Come on baby,” he put his arm around me and started guiding me back to the stairs. “Been a long fuckin’ night. You need to get some sleep.”

“What about you?”

He glanced around the house. “I’m gonna clean my mess up and then go to bed too.” He turned to go back toward the kitchen. “School starts up again in a few weeks, let me know if you need anything specific.”

I’d like to say that my dad was just trying to find anything possible to think about in order to hide from reality in the moment, but the truth was, he had been the one to take me shopping the last few years. Suddenly, I was beginning to wonder if my mom hadn’t been cheating on me too. She stopped doing a lot of ‘mom things’ years ago and my dad picked up the slack whenever he was home. I never complained. Actually, I always assumed it was just because I was getting older, and he was afraid to miss out on time with me before I went off to college one day.

As I climbed the stairs, and went back to my bedroom, it finally hit me that a lot of my life had been sheltered. It didn’t matter that I was a club princess for an MC that wasn’t exactly on the straight and narrow. None of it ever touched me. Nothing bad ever had - at least not until tonight. Tonight, I learned a lot of cold hard truths.

People couldn’t be trusted.

Love didn’t matter.

A heart could break and still function.

My mom walked out without even asking to say goodbye to me.

I didn’t even get to have a mom and daughter talk with her about losing my virginity to the boy across the street. The same one she knew I’d been crushing on for years. The same one that she had tried and failed to talk me out of falling in love with. Mom always said he would only break my heart, but she never warned me that she would break it too.

3 - Testing, Testing

Tiger Lily

Six Weeks Later

Geometry sucked.

“How did you do on that test?” Stacey Chambers asked as we huddled our books to our chests while shuffling out of class toward our lockers.

I rolled my eyes at her and frowned.

“That good, huh?” Her brows drew down in concern. “You don’t look like you slept well. Were you up all night studying?”

I shook my head. “No. I wish that was the reason, then maybe I wouldn’t have bombed that test. I was up most of the morning puking.”

“Again?” Stacey asked with a wince, and I knew what she was thinking. It was why I had another test to take today. This one was way more important though. “Remember what we talked about?” She asked.

I nodded. “I have it to take later.”

“Do you want me to come by and be there with you?”

I shook my head. “I think I need to do this by myself. If it’s…” I couldn’t bring myself to finish that sentence. “He’ll be home for a little while before it’s time to go hit up Friday night parties. If I need to say something, it will be the best time and I think it’ll go over better without witnesses.” It was my turn to wince. I knew if I had someone at my back when I approached Damon with my suspicions about why I’d been throwing up every morning for more than a week, that he would flip out and not take the news well.

What was I thinking? I was only sixteen and he was about to turn eighteen in two weeks. There was no way he wasn’t going to flip out. The truth was, I just didn’t want anyone else to see my humiliation when it happened.

It had been six weeks since the night I lost both my virginity and my mother. Mom never came back, never called, and never even bothered to send a letter or anything. She just left that night never to return. Damon had also done a disappearing act. Sure, I saw him coming or going from his house across the street a few times, but for the most part, he avoided me like the plague. He also got himself a shiny new motorcycle that he’d been riding. It was the only reason I knew he had been home over the past three weeks. Seeing him in school was becoming less of a thing, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that he dropped out eventually, even though it was his senior year.

Getting through the rest of the day at school was pure torture and I just knew that at any given moment, the pregnancy test sitting in my bag would jump out and announce itself to every single one of my classmates. The thing felt like a ticking time bomb sitting in my bag.

“Are you ready for this?”

I shook my head, feeling nauseous again as I headed to catch the bus back home. Stacey didn’t have her license yet because her mom couldn’t afford the insurance for her just yet. It wouldn’t be much longer though. We both had our learner’s permits and I kept my fingers crossed that my dad would help me get a car. Granted, he might just throw me out on the streets if the test I had to take came back positive. Maybe, I’d end up left to whatever fate had befallen my now absent mother.

~*~

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