Page 99 of Your Pucking Mom

My heart hurt so much from how much I loved Ledger, and at the same time, if I bore this to him, he would be disgusted by me and run away. No one had ever loved me enough for me to share this, and I never felt like it was something important to share, so he would be the first. Well, aside from the many years of therapy I’d had to do in adulthood.

“Can we sit down?” I asked, pointing at a small bench in the corner of the garden. We were surrounded by blooms of bright-purple wisteria. I looked at the bench, then back at Ledger.

“If you fit,” I added for jest. The bench was tiny, and it was impossible not to notice how tall he was compared to it. But I was trying to avoid the conversation with him, using humor to deflect.

He smiled, and I wondered if he sensed my apprehension, like an animal picking up on my nervousness. We both wandered over to the bench and sat down, holding hands as his thumb gently traced the top of mine.

We sat quietly facing outward, watching the wind and fog blow softly and listening to the fair chirp of a bird in the distance.

You are safe, I repeated. Despite the quiet external world, my thoughts were brewing. I was running through every possible scenario of how he might react. Only when he squeezed my hand was I grounded back to reality.

“You can pace if you want,” he said, nodding ahead with his chin. I cracked a small smile.

“No. It’s okay.”

His thumb ran over my hand.

“You also don’t have to tell me anything?—”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t understand. I need this.”

Ledger nodded, and I swallowed and slowly turned my body to face him. My shoulder was pressed against the wooden edge of the bench, and the pain of it pushing into my back was actually helping me remember that I was…safe.

“I know it’s pretty obvious that Austin’s father isn’t ever at his games, and I know I’m young so it’s pretty easy to deduce without having to say it. I had Austin when I was seventeen.”

All I felt when I was talking was Ledger’s thumb which alternated between giving me soft circles around my palm and squeezing. “Austin’s biological…sperm donor wanted nothing to do with Austin.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. “I don’t remember him.”

“Sunshine—” Ledger reached over toward me, but I inhaled deeply.

“Let me finish,” I said, and he nodded but never let go from the movement of his hands upon mine.

“I never had many friends except for Emma growing up. We were the nerdy kids in high school…”

18 years ago (TW: on-page sexual assault)

May be read past

“This is our junior year and the first party we’ve ever been invited to. We have to go,” Emma insisted. “Plus, your mom is out with her boyfriend, so she won’t notice that we left.”

I was reluctant. I was a teenager who preferred to stay in the background of our high school in our town. It wasn’t like it was big, everyone knew who everyone was, but I preferred to stay out of the drama of it all.

“I don’t want to,” I groaned as I walked over to my bright-pink vanity. I’d been blessed with a huge pimple right by my lip that was red and angry. My mom insisted I needed to put a Band-Aid on it when I left the house because she was embarrassed to take me out in public.

She was known to chastise me for putting shame on our family. Because she was a single mom meant that we had to keep up with appearances harder than most in the town, and having an oozing pimple-faced teenager was too much for her. Truthfully, it made me pick at it more.

“I promise, just one party. Greg is going to be there, and normally, I would never push it, but he’s the first guy who I actually like who says more than three words to me in school.”

I turned around to see my best friend lying on my bed. Lately, my mom had been convinced that Emma and I were secretly hooking up behind her back. Because of this, Emma, who used to be able to sleep over and hang out freely when my mom wasn’t home, was no longer allowed in my room, so she’d snuck in.

Emma was already dressed in a pair of low-rise jeans and a halter top she’d stolen from Hot Topic.

She giggled as she dug underneath my bed. I jumped up from my vanity. “Emma!” I shouted.

“I’m going to do it,” she said, pulling out a box I had hidden beneath all the junk at the back of my bed. Only Emma knew about this box, because we had put it together ourselves. We made it during our freshman year, packing it with a cute top, another item stolen by Emma, and a notebook that we had both signed. The note inside essentially said that if one of us pulled out the box, we had to go to a social event without asking any questions.

She grabbed the fluffy pink box and pulled out the small tube top. We’d figured it would be a style that wouldn’t go out of date in the four years we were in high school.

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