Page 85 of The Auction
“Jules,” Creed said, again. “Tell me.”
The man was holding a sleeping kitten in a towel tucked into his arm, for heaven’s sake.
If I couldn’t trust this guy…who could I trust?
And I was sleeping in his bed. Sharing his room. He wasn’t going to use condoms so he’d be watching to see if I got pregnant. Maybe counting the fucking maxi-pads in the cabinet under the sink.
“For my eighteenth birthday, Herb let me have the truck for a day. Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t a present or anything. Maybe just an acknowledgment that I was legal, so I could leave if I wanted. Maybe it had been a test to see if I would come back.”
“What did you do with your day of freedom?”
“I went to the free clinic in Jefferson and I got an IUD. That’s for-”
“I know what it’s for,” he said, cutting me off.
I gave him a minute to process. “You mad again?”
“Yeah.”
Figured. Maybe it was their ego or something. Maybe he was more conservative than I realized and he thought a woman’s only purpose in life was to breed the next crop of humans for this planet.
“Not going to lie, Jules. There are days I’d like to dig up your pathetic excuse of a father and kill him all over again.”
That wasn’t expected. “You’re mad at Herb?”
“I’m guessing he didn’t know?”
“Of course not. He would have killed me. No, he wouldn’t have killed me, he would have had some unqualified medical person from the church come and try to remove it. If I would have died from that, oh well. It would have been nothing less than I deserved.”
He sighed. “I’m not mad at you. You were protecting yourself. Are protecting yourself. That’s just fucking smart. I’m mad you had to basically escape for a day to fucking get it done.”
“You’re not going to ask me to take it out?”
He shook his head. “Not unless you want to. Not unless you’re ready for what that might mean.”
It was probably the rush of relief that made the tears spring to my eyes. Covertly, I tried to brush them away.
“I thought you were going to be mad because I didn’t tell you when you were trying to have the birth control conversation.”
His face scrunched up.
“At the restaurant on my birthday,” I reminded him.
“That wasn’t a conversation about birth control, that was just a conversation about having kids in general.”
“Oh.”
“But if we’re going to do this…”
“Attempt to have an exploration of a committed partnership wherein both parties are mutually emotionally, sexually and financially satisfied?”
He laughed. “Yeah, that. Then you need to tell me the important shit. Whether or not we have kids, that’s a big deal.”
“But you want them,” I said. “You said as much when we first got married.”
He looked down at the bundle in his arm and pulled the towel up tighter around her ears.
Yeah, he wanted them.
