Page 10 of Taming Waves

I bring my eyes to him. “We broke up. I took off on a yacht with my best friends and didn’t return,” I say.

“Nah, it was more than that. A woman doesn’t hold a grudge that long over a simple breakup,” he points out.

“Yeah, I should have said I left her without so much as a goodbye.”

He lets out a low whistle. “Damn.”

“You want to know the heavy part?” I say. “That’s harder for me to talk about.”

I sit on the bench across from him and look back to where the charter clients and Anson are gathered, drinking beer and discussing the morning.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Just say it’s none of my business,” he says.

“It’s not that. It’s just hard for me to talk about.”

I blow out a breath and start my tale, but I can see the scene play out in my mind as if it happened yesterday.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I led Audrey from the emergency room door to my truck.

“I think so,” she said, but by the time I helped her inside and made it to the driver’s side, she had started to cry.

I turned and unbuckled her seat belt and pulled her into my arms.

“Shh. I know it was scary, but if you think about it, it was a blessing in disguise. We were not ready. You know we weren’t, and this was nature’s way of saying the time wasn’t right,” I told her.

We’d found out she was almost three months pregnant just after Easter. And we had been working up the nerve to tell our parents ever since. We planned to tell my mom first by taking her out to dinner this weekend. But Audrey started cramping during today’s graduation ceremony. By the time our friends walked across the stage, she was bleeding, so I rushed her to the emergency room. They said she was losing the baby. Since she was sixteen and it was an emergency, they could treat her without her parents present, but the triage nurse told us that since she was on her father’s insurance policy, he would get a notification that she had been treated. Which meant we were going to have to come clean.

“I know, but I wanted it,” she said through tears.

“Look, I’m going to be a senior next year. You still have two years of high school left. Your parents already hate me. They’d have never let us be together when they found out. They’ll probably never let us see each other again once they find out about the miscarriage,” I explain to her again.

“We could run away together. They can’t stop us,” she said.

“Sure they can. You’re sixteen.”

“I’ll be seventeen soon.”

I shook my head. “Your dad would kill me. He already threatened to have me arrested when he caught you sneaking back in your window the night of the bonfire. What do you think he’ll do when he finds out I got you pregnant? He’ll have them throw me under the jail.”

“He can’t. The age of consent in North Carolina is sixteen.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Yes. I looked it up last night. I wanted to have all the facts.”

I sighed. “Where would we go?”

She bit the corner of her lip.

“We have no money, no place to go, no place to live. My mom has barely been scraping by since my dad took off. She works three jobs now just to keep a roof over our heads,” I said.

“I know.”

“I want all of this one day—I do—but not now. It’s too soon. I need to make something of myself first. As much as this hurts, it’s for the best. I wasn’t ready to be a parent.”

She nodded as she swiped at the tears on her cheeks. “Yeah, you’re right. We weren’t ready for it.”

She curled into a ball and faced away from me, clinging to the brown paper bag containing the pain medication the hospital had given her, and we rode to her house in silence.

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