Page 74 of Black Roses

“No. You don’t understand.”

“Then make me.”

“Mason . . . it’s too hard.”

He rubs my back again while I try to control my breathing that threatens to be out of control. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

I inhale. And exhale. And inhale. It takes me ten whole breaths before I can speak. And then—maybe it’s his soothing hand on my back. Maybe the weight of my secrets has gotten to be too much. Maybe I’m just ready. Whatever it is, I start talking and words spill out of me faster than water from a broken dam.

“You know how hours, sometimes days later, you’ll remember a dream? Well, that started happening more and more after the night of the party. I thought it was some normal part of puberty, dreaming about boys and sex. Then months later, I got the flu. Well, I thought it was the flu, but it didn’t go away. My mom finally took me to the doctor in November, almost four months after the party. It’s then when I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t even know I’d lost my virginity.”

“Oh, God, Piper.”

He tries to comfort me, but right now, I don’t want his hands on me. I scoot away from him and lean on the headboard, hugging my knees to my chest.

“My parents didn’t even believe me at first. After all, they’d been through it with Baylor already. But it didn’t take long to piece it together based on the estimated date of conception they gave me after the ultrasound. I didn’t remember much about the night of the party. I just thought the few shots I took got me drunk. The friends I went with joked around about making out with random strangers and losing track of me for a while. I just thought maybe I’d done the same.

“My parents took me to the police, of course. But they basically told us there was nothing they could do because I didn’t report it immediately. They said they’d go through the motions, fill out the paperwork and check out the residence. However, they said it would be a futile effort. After that, I started having different dreams. Dreams of fighting back. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe it was more memories coming to the surface. But the thing is, I would never know who the father of my child was.”

A sick feeling washes through me. “You’ll never know what I felt the moment I saw that picture and Cassidy accused you of—”

“Shit.” He blanches. He actually loses all color in his face that always seems to be tanned from the sun. “You thought I could have been the father. And then you thought I would hate you for aborting my child. Maybe even as much as you hated me for raping you.”

My hand comes up to my mouth, covering the sob I feel welling up from deep inside me. “I didn’t have an abortion, Mason.”

Tears that have been building for over five years finally fall down my cheeks in an endless stream. Fire chokes my throat as I try to explain. “My seventeenth birthday was the day my daughter was born.” I heave and hiccup my way through the words. I look up with tear-blurred vision to see what his reaction is.

I’m met with a broken face that mirrors mine. I haven’t seen a man cry since the day my dad found out I was raped. I’m pretty sure Mason quietly sobbed into my back the night I told him about my assault, but watching him cry—seeing the sympathy and sorrow flow down his face and drop onto his jeans, that is entirely different. And it wrecks me. All at once, as if I’d been beaten over the head with it, I realize I don’t want to do anything to make this man sad.

Our eyes lock and emotions swell between us. Suddenly and simultaneously we reach for each other, planting our knees on the bed beneath us as we embrace. And we cry. I cry five years’ worth of tears. He cries for me. He cries with me. And oddly, it becomes one of the best moments of my life.

Minutes later, maybe hours, I’ve lost track of time, he lowers us to the bed and I settle into the crook of his neck. My arm swings over his chest.

He sucks in a sharp breath of air that has me wondering if I’ve hurt him. “Are you okay?” I stutter, my voice still thick with tears.

“I’ve never been better. And not even my defensive line could drag me away, sweetheart.” He kisses my hair. “Can you tell me more?”

I nod into his shoulder. “I know I could have kept her. I’d seen Baylor do it. I’dhelpedBaylor do it. But she had loved her baby’s dad. I didn’t even know who my daughter’s father was. He was just some nameless face in my dreams. I knew I couldn’t stay in Connecticut or anywhere near it. I couldn’t stay knowing I could run into any one of them and not even know it. Would they remember me? Ridicule me? Proposition me?

“I wasn’t equipped to raise the baby by myself, or even with Charlie, and don’t think she didn’t offer. But I was afraid the baby would be a constant reminder of what happened. I didn’t want to look at her like that—like she was the product of something horrible. I wanted her to grow up with two loving parents, not a single teenage mom with an ugly past.”

The way Mason’s chest rises and falls with each breath calms me. “So now you know why I don’t celebrate my birthday,” I say. “I didn’t die that terrible night of my assault in August. My seventeenth birthday was the day I died. It’s the day I gave up my daughter.”

He struggles to steady his breathing, exhaling deep sighs into my hair. My smelly, sweaty hair that still reeks from my workout. He runs his thumb methodically over my knuckles, giving me the courage to say what I’ve felt for a long time.

“Ironically, on my twenty-second birthday, the day my daughter turned five, you brought the life back into me.”

“Piper.” He breathes my name like a prayer. He lifts my chin so my puffy, red eyes meet his. “Why did you think I would hate you?”

I shrug into his shoulder. “Because you have a daughter. Because you could have turned your back on her. You could have given her away, but you didn’t. So how can you love someone who did?”

Air spurts from his nose in a quiet huff. “Is that what you think? Because you are sorely mistaken. What you did was the greatest and most selfless act of love, sweetheart. You gave up a piece of yourself so she would have the chance at a wonderful, happy life. It was the ultimate gift. Hate you? I’m not sure I could ever love you more than I do this very moment.”

At a loss for spoken words, I squeeze his chest. He sucks in another painful breath and I shoot a questioning look at him. “Are you injured?”

“Not particularly,” he says.

“What do you mean, not particularly? You keep wincing when I touch you here.” I purposefully press my hand hard to his chest, by the ribs of his right arm.

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