Page 43 of Imperfections Seduced
“For you, that’s code for you don’t want to talk about what’s going on so you’re going to avoid confronting the problem.”
“What problem would that be?”
“I don’t know yet. You’ve been avoiding seeing me since the night Nick took you home. Every time I call, you send me a text. I finally had to put my foot down and tell you I’m coming over here. So what happened?”
I can’t lie to Ava. I’m a terrible liar, and she’ going to beat me over the head until I tell her the truth. She’s relentless like that. “Your cousin happened. We had sex.”
“Whaaat! Shut the front door! Slam it!”
“Yep. I slammed it. I should have slammed my legs shut too.”
“I was not expecting you to say that.”
“Me either.”
“Out of all the things you could have said, having sex with Nick wasn’t one of them.”
“I still can’t believe it myself, and I was there.”
She leans in close, sitting across from me on the bed like we’re conspiring secretly in some kind of plot, hand covering the side of her mouth. “Girl, how did you go from a ride home to getting down and dirty?”
“I don’t know, one minute we were listening to music the next thing I know we’re having sex in the back of his car with the driver in the front. That is not me; I don’t do things like that.”
“Did you say, ‘driver, roll up the partition please, you don’t need to see Cat on her knees?’” She’s laughing, and I’m looking at her not amused. “Was that playing? If it was, you could blame it on Beyoncé and J getting you caught up in the music.”
“Not funny, Ava. Not funny.”
“I’m sorry.” She puts her manicured hands, one over the other over her heart. “No more jokes, I promise. Go ahead, tell me what happened.”
I tell Ava the whole story, and for once in all the years that I’ve known her she’s speechless. Not one smart remark or I told you so, even when I tell her about Nick and Kate. The only part I leave out is there’s a chance I could be pregnant.
“Cat, this is unbelievable. It’s like an episode ofDays of Our Lives. It’s like Sammy and Carrie, two sisters fighting over Austin. That bitch Sammy would do anything to get Austin but he didn’t want her, he wanted to be with Carrie, the woman he really loved.”
“You’re comparing my life to a daytime drama?”
“Honey, your life is outdoing daytime drama, this is real life drama. I can’t believe she’s pregnant. She probably got knocked up on purpose.”
“Believe it, it’s true, and it takes two people to make a baby.”
“It might not be his,” she says, dragging the last word out.
“What are the chances of that?”
“There’s always a chance. How do you know she wasn’t hooking up with someone else? If she could hook up with Nick that one time, how do you know she didn’t hook up with someone else around the same time? You said they used protection, right?”
“She said the baby was his.”
“Cat, I’m not saying your sister sleeps around, but at the time, she was two weeks out of a five-year relationship with a man we all assumed she was going to marry. How do we know she didn’t get nostalgic late one night and decided to hook up with Michael? It happens all the time.”
“Why wouldn’t she tell Nick if there is a chance this baby could be someone else’s? She wouldn’t do that. What is my family going to say when she tells them they’re not getting married? My mother’s going to go ballistic.”
“You didn’t break up anything; it wasn’t real to begin with. What did I tell you? I know my cousin. I knew he would never in a million years marry your sister.”
“No, but he would sleep with her.”
She nodded. “He fucked up there.”
“Before it got to that point, why didn’t his feelings for me stop him from having sex with her? If he cared about me so much and wanted to protect me from getting hurt, why didn’t he walk away?”
