Page 101 of Too Late

I can’t. I open my mouth three times, but I can’t find the words to tell her. I grip the back of my neck and watch her for a moment, waiting for her to look at me. When she refuses to look up, I close the distance between us. I wrap my arms around her from behind and pull her back to my chest. She stops stirring and she grips my arms that are wrapped around her. I can feel her whole body begin to shake with her quiet sobs. My silence is all the confirmation she needed. All I can do is hold her tighter and press a kiss into her hair.

“I love you, Sloan,” I whisper.

She turns around and presses her face against my chest while she cries. I close my eyes and hold her.

This isn’t how it should be. This isnothow a girl should feel when she finds out she’s a mother. And I feel partly responsible for her sadness.

I know we’ll have time to talk about it later. We’ll have time to discuss all of the options, but right now I just focus on her because I have no idea how incredibly difficult this must be for her.

“I’m so sorry, Luke,” she says against my chest.

I squeeze her tighter, confused as to why she’s apologizing. “Why are you saying that? You have nothing to apologize for.”

She lifts her head, shaking it, looking up at me. “You don’t need this stress. You’re doing everything you can to keep us safe and now I’ve gone and made it even worse.” She pulls away from me and picks up the damn spoon and starts stirring again. “I’m not going to put you through this,” she says. “I’m not going to make you watch me carry a baby that you don’t even know is yours or not. It isn’t fair to you.” She sets the spoon down and grabs a napkin, dabbing it beneath her eyes. She turns and looks at me, her face full of shame. “I’m sorry. I can …” She swallows like the next words are too hard for her to get out. “I can call tomorrow and see what I need to do to get it … to get an abortion.”

I just stare at her, letting all of that soak in.

She’s apologizing tome?

She thinksI’mthe one who will be stressed by this?

I take a step forward and slide my hands through her hair, lifting her gaze to mine. Another tear begins to roll down her cheek, so I wipe it away with my thumb. “If there was a way we could find out this baby was mine, would you want to keep it?”

She winces, and then shrugs. And then she nods. “Of course I would, Luke. The timing is shit, but that’s not the baby’s fault.”

As much as I want to wrap my arms around her in this second, I continue to hold her face in my hands. “And if you knew right now for a fact that this baby is Asa’s, would you want to keep it?”

She doesn’t respond for a moment. But then she shakes her head. “I wouldn’t do that to you, Luke. It wouldn’t be fair to you.”

“I’m not asking aboutme,” I say, my voice firm. “I’m askingyou. If you knew this was Asa’s baby, would you want to keep it?”

Another tear falls and I let it roll down her cheek. “It’s a baby, Luke,” she says quietly. “It’s an innocent baby. But like I said, I wouldn’t do that to you.”

I pull her to me and I kiss the side of her head and hold her there a moment. When I find the words I want to say to her, I pull back and force her to look at me again. “I’m in love with you, Sloan.Madlyin love with you. And this baby growing inside of you ishalf you. Do you know how lucky I would feel if you allowed me to love something that was a part of you?” I lower my palm to her stomach and rest it there. “This baby is mine, Sloan. It’s yours. It’s ours. And if your decision is to raise this baby, then I’m going to be the best damn father that ever walked the earth. I promise.”

She immediately brings her hands to her face and begins crying. She cries harder than I’ve ever seen her cry. I pick her up and I take her to our bedroom, where I lay her on the bed again. I pull her to me and I wait for her tears to subside. After several minutes, the room is quiet again.

She’s now lying with her head against my chest, her arm wrapped around me. “Luke?” She lifts her head and looks at me. “You’re the best kind of human there is. And I love you so,somuch.”

I kiss her. Twice. And then I lower my face to her stomach and I lift her shirt and I kiss her skin. And I smile, because she’s giving me something I never even knew I wanted. And as much as I can hope this baby is mine and not Asa’s for Sloan’s sake, it truly doesn’t matter. It won’t matter because this baby is part of the one person I love more than anything else. How lucky am I?

I sidle up to her side again and kiss her cheek. She’s not crying anymore. I brush the hair back from her forehead. “Sloan? Did you know that concrete pillars dissolve into donuts every time a clock falls off a turtle’s head?”

She laughs, hard, and her smile is huge. “Well, a victory isn’t a victory if the empty room fills with dirty socks when the Christmas fruitcake is stale.”

Our baby is going to have the strangest two parents in the whole world.

FIFTY-TWO

ASA

There was a case on the news recently about some dude who raped a girl. He got a few months in jail because he was white, or because he won some medals, or some shit combination like that.

The whole fucking nation went nuts over it. Everywhere anyone looked, his lenient sentence was all anyone saw. It flooded the news for weeks. I don’t know all the details of it, but it’s not like the guy was a serial rapist. Pretty sure it was just his first or second offense, but everyone acted like he was motherfucking Hitler. Not that the stupid fuck didn’t deserve whatever jail time he got, or an even longer sentence. I’m not defending the cocksucker. I’m just a little irritated that my case hasn’t received one single goddamn second of national news coverage. I fuckingmurdereda guy and didn’t even get charged. I ran the biggest campus drug ring since college wasinventedand didn’t get charged. Even after holding a gun on Ryan, the judge releases me on house arrest until my trial.

House arrest. Six whole glorious months of it.

It’s a joke. This entire nation and the racist fucking hypocrites who run it are a joke, and guys like me are the ones who benefit from it. I would be ashamed of this country if I didn’t love it so much for its lack of repercussions.

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