Page 2 of Cruel Love

“Shane is in class right now.” She gripped my hand again. “He’ll be by later.”

“What happened?” This is so weird. Since when do we call being at school being “in class”?

“Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

“We were playing in the state championships. That monster defensive end broke through the line. I took that hard hit. Why? Did he hit me again? Fucking Jones. He’s let too many through the line. Is that why I’m here?”

Mom obviously tried not to look concerned, but she was shit at hiding her feelings. A spike of alarm shot through me. What isn’t she telling me? I turned to the blond surfer girl standing over me. I still didn’t know who she was. I almost asked, but I had a feeling I might blurt out something about all the different ways I would fuck her, and I sure as hell didn’t want my mom to know about it. But the girl made me hard, and that was going to give me away.

Mom hit the call button, and a doctor in a white lab coat walked in. He looked like a tool, and I wanted to smirk, but damn, I was super tired, and I’d just woken up. This day was out of control.

The tool introduced himself as Dr. Stevens. I said hi but could barely pay attention. It was either sleep to talk to the girl. That was all I was interested in.

“Can you tell me your name?”

I smirked. “Phoenix Bennet.”

“Good. And your age?”

Not cool, doc. “Fourteen.”

Mom froze. She had been fussing with all the cords on my bed, moving the remote closer to me. The color drained from her face, and I watched her as the doc asked me more stupid questions, like “Who’s the president?” and “What year is it?” She started crying again, and the doc motioned for her to follow him into the hallway.

I was alone with the chick and had no idea who she was.

CHAPTER TWO

ASPEN

“Fourteen, Max.” Panic swirled around me in frantic swarms of chaotic energy. “Phoenix thinks he’s fourteen fucking years old and still in high school. He’s explained the injury as being from a helmet-to-helmet hit he took at the state championship game that knocked him out, saying that’s why he’s in the hospital.”

Max sat on a pink-and-silver beach towel while I paced the sand in my pink bikini, fiddling with the waistband of the white wrap I’d tied low around my hips. The beach was the one place where I felt at peace, where there were no worries too great. But this… I couldn’t understand what was happening and why.

“He’s only been awake for a couple of days,” Max said. He was right, and I knew that his brain might still have been healing, but the accident had been more than a month ago. How long does it take a brain to heal?

“It’s not okay. I mean, I’m glad he’s awake, but not remembering… it’s unreasonable.” I yanked my hair out of its messy bun and scrubbed the pads of my fingers against my scalp in a desperate attempt to ease some tension. “He doesn’t know who I am or that I’m carrying his baby.”

Max crossed one leg over the other at the ankles and frowned. Thick strands of his dark hair danced in the wind before he smoothed it back. “Do you think he’s faking it? And maybe for the lamest way possible… trying to get out of being a dad?”

I plopped down next to Max on the beach towel and hugged my knees to my chest. Resting the side of my face on top of them, I regarded his perplexed expression. “I’m pretty sure he’s legit screwed up.” That left me in a weird place. I was fine raising our kid myself, but… “His mom knows about the baby. There’s no way I can fake that to her. She’s a nurse, and she saw the chart, but it doesn’t say who the dad is, so at least there’s that. Then my dad freaked out.”

“What do you mean?” Max squinted. “What did he do?”

A pit settled in my stomach. “After he found out I was okay, aside from minor bruises, the nurse opened her big mouth.”

“Mentioned the baby?”

“Yeah.” I dug my heels into the sand. “He was already wound tight about the entire situation. When she said the baby was unharmed, he freaked. Stepped back and hit one of those metal trays the nurse had set up. It tipped, and stuff clattered everywhere. I think he was embarrassed, and that only fueled the word salad that came out of his mouth when he said I’d survived a potentially fatal car accident but emerged with my problem intact.”

Max’s mouth formed an O. “Oh, wow. He didn’t.”

“I told him to get out.” I swiped at the stupid tear that dared to roll down my cheek. “Mom got in the middle, and it turned into one of their epic arguments but in the hospital with witnesses rather than at home.”

He cringed. “I’m afraid to ask who heard.”

“You should be.” I blew out a breath. “Phoenix’s mom was in the hallway. She paused at my door.”

“Did your dad say it was Phoenix’s baby?”

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