Giving In: The Sandy Cove Series (Book 1) (25 page)

“Holy fuck!” He yells and pulls to the side of the road. His hands fly to his hair and he looks ashen.

“What the hell is wrong with you!” I yell at him.

“We had sex three times today and we didn’t use condoms. How did I let this happen? Please tell me you’re on the pill or something?”

I’m a bit taken aback by his words, but he doesn’t know the truth. Is it a good time to tell him? Do I allow him into the darkness that has plagued my life for almost the last two years?

Yes, because I love him, and he has the right to know.

“No, I’m not on the pill,” I snap, but immediately regret saying it in that tone.

Running his hands thoroughly through his hair, his jaw opens and shuts as he tried to process what had happened. “Oh, my God, Harlow. We could be in big trouble here.”

My mind suddenly goes to the place where I don’t want it to go. I’ve been doing a really good job at hiding it, but he looks so worried. I need to emerge from the dark place before it grips me and pulls me in further. I have to remember to be strong, not to let it bring me to where I so seldom go anymore. That was before Dr. Goldberg, that was before Cruz, my therapy, my only hope.

“No, we can’t ‘cause I can’t be pregnant.”

“Yes, yes you can be. Christ, Turnip, I came in you three times and you never know. You very well could have just gotten pregnant.”

I feel the strain of his words, and they aren’t true. The impossibility of them makes me panic, bringing me further down, sinking deeper and deeper. I rock back and forth in my seat, biting my lip, holding back the tears, ready to implode. So I do.

I can’t hear myself scream the words, but I know I am. It’s the only time in a very long time I say the words out loud.

“I can’t ever be pregnant! Never, ever. It will never happen. I had a fucking abortion and I almost bled to death so I had to have a partial hysterectomy. I’m almost twenty three years old and I will go through my whole life knowing what I did will directly affect me for as long as I live. Are you fucking happy now that you know?! Are you fucking happy?”

My tears turn into sobs, and I’m so afraid to look at him, so ashamed of the consequences that have brought me here. I lean my head against the coolness of the window and between my muffled cries I tell him to take me home. He doesn’t say a word, just pulls away from the side of the road. When we get to the front of my house, I feel a little calmer, but not enough not to let him know the rest of the story if he wants to. I’m in love with him, and he either needs to accept what has happened to me, or leave me. Either way, I’m afraid of losing.

I sigh and look over at him. His eyes stare at the street in front of him, hands resting in his lap.

“I didn’t want you to leave here tonight like this, with this between us. If you want to know the story, I’ll tell you, and you can form your own opinion. It is what it is, Cruz, and I can’t go back and change what happened. It’s taken me such a long time to get through it.”

He turns to me with solemn eyes.

“Can we go inside and you can tell me?” His words are quiet, but not harsh or angry, just soft.

We go into the house and I make us some coffee. We sit across from each other at my breakfast bar. The hot liquid’s scent creeping through my nose, and I take a much needed sip.

“I’m going to tell you the whole story, Cruz, some stuff will make you angry, you may even hate me for it, but if we are going to be together, I need to be honest with you.”

He reaches for my hand, and I’m grateful for it.

“I could never hate you, Turnip. I… Go ahead.”

“In February of last year, I found out I was pregnant. It was Chad’s baby, and I wanted to keep it. He, of course, didn’t. See that would have ruined his dating life.”

Cruz grins sadly at me, and I shrug my shoulders.

“I was still away at school, and when I told Chad I wanted to keep the baby he gave me a million and one reasons not to. It wouldn’t look good for such prominent families in our society to have a child out of wedlock. His parents would disown him, even though our dads are golf buddies. He convinced me I planned it, I trapped him, and he told me that the whole town would look at me as a whore if I trapped Chad Knox into having a child.”

Cruz shakes his head, and his eyes grow dark.

“When I stood up for myself and told him I wanted to have the baby, that’s really when things got ugly.”

He told me I wasn’t worthy of carrying his child. I was worthless, and I believed it. He twisted my thoughts and my feelings, and that’s when I knew that the only way out of this was to do what he said and get rid of it.”

“And you believed all that?”

I nod. “At the time, yes.” Cruz’s stare bores into me, his nostrils flaring. His hands are flat against the top of the bar, but I know him and I can tell his anger is building.

“Just get rid of it? Those were his words?”

Ashamed, I nod, looking down at my hands tangled together and sweaty from nerves.

He adjusts himself in his chair, finding a more comfortable position, probably to tell me he wants nothing to do with me, and that I’m a disgrace.

But again, he surprises me with his actions.

He stands and comes over to where I’m sitting. He places his arm underneath my body and lifts me up, cradling me in his arms, and takes me into the living room. He sits on the sofa as I sit in his lap, forcing my head to rest on the broadness of his shoulder. I feel so safe with him, like nothing in the world could ever harm me again.

“Tell me the rest,” he whispers to me softly.

“He didn’t go with me to the clinic. Willow took me to one near school. I wanted it done there so the risk of my parents finding out would not be a possibility. So we went and after it was done, Willow took me back to our apartment and within an hour I started not to feel right, and all the… All the blood started to pour out of my body. Clumps.”

Cruz senses my panic, so he strokes my hair and tells me to relax.

“Willow called Craw and he came right over. He was at the same school as us, and they took me to the hospital where they performed surgery. They told me that I could have bled to death because the clinic I went to was not sanitary even though it looked it.”

Kissing my ear, then my temple, he asks, “So is that why you looked so uncomfortable when we went to the hospital for Baby Matteo?”

I look up at him confused. “How did you know?”

“Well for starters, you were dangerously pale the whole time and I caught you several times counting the tiles on the waiting room floor. You must have done it a half dozen times.”

“That’s how I calmed myself.”

He smiles at me. “That must have been really hard for you to see Bella in that room, and I’m guessing that’s why you wouldn’t hold the baby.”

I touch the tip of his nose. “Score one for the big guy.”

“So I was in the hospital for a few days, telling my parents I went to Florida for Spring Break with the girls. Willow paid for the whole hospital stay in cash from her trust fund so we didn’t have to use my parent’s insurance then they wouldn’t know.”

He brings me in closer to him, holding onto me for dear life. I hear him say against my ear, “My God what you must have been through.”

“They only left my ovaries. Apparently they work just fine. I’m in therapy. Have been for a while now. His name is Dr. Goldberg. He knows all about you. He even told me once he thought I had feelings for you.”

He brings my face up towards him and looks in my eyes.

“Really? Well I’ll have to meet him someday, won’t I?”

He kisses the tip of my nose. Such a simple gesture, but one that I adore.

“Turnip, your parents seem to be incredible people who I think would have helped you and understood. Fuck Knox and whomever else.”

I agree with him.

“But that’s not all there is.”

He looks startled. “There’s more?”

“Yes. When I came home I told Chad what happened and here I found out he was with someone, and he didn’t want her to find out about me. That’s why he wanted me to get rid of the baby. I didn’t see him again until a few weeks later at the country club with his face bashed in.”

“Why was his face bashed in? Not that I’m opposed to having his face bashed in, but continue.”

“Craw did it after I tried to kill myself.”

He quickly moves me off his lap and rests me on the couch, pacing in front of me. His hands go immediately to his hair, tugging it like he does when he’s upset or nervous.

“I don’t understand how and why you could do that to yourself. Out of all this, Turnip. You… You are so smart and so caring and so fucking beautiful, why you would want to end it all over some mother fucker like Knox. And I’ll fucking kill him, Harlow. I swear it.”

I stand up and take his face in my hands. Willing him to look at me.

“I’m fine. I took pills. Craw found me. They pumped my stomach. I didn’t take enough to kill myself anyway. I can’t even do that right.”

That’s when he walks away from me. Going into the bathroom and slamming the door. It seems like he’s in there forever. I knock on the door.

“Cruz. Are you ok?” The door swings open and he engulfs me in an embrace, squeezing the air from my lungs.

“Don’t you ever joke about something like that, don’t you ever think you’re not worthy of anything, cause you are, you’re everything. Do you hear me? You. Are. Everything.”

I cry on his shoulder, relinquishing so many pent up emotions, months of anguish, but yet a sense of relief.

“Oh, baby, don’t cry. Please, it’s ok. I’m so glad you told me. Please baby, look at me.”

He brings our faces close together, leaving his eyes closed, running his thumbs over my freckles.

“I know. I’m sorry I kept it from you. I should have told you sooner.”

We stand here like this for what seems like forever. He lifts his head and looks at me with such amazement in his eyes.

“You let me call you baby. And you did it without telling me not to.” I smile making it seem to him he made a break through, which in fact he did.

“Want to know why I hated it?”

“Pftt, you might as well. I know everything else right?”

“Chad called me it, and every time he did it made me sick to my stomach. Every time he tried to get me back, even the night I met you last summer, he said it. He was there that night with another girl, but he still cornered me when she wasn’t around. Every time he tried to convince me that he was the only one who would love me, he called me baby.”

Cruz steps away from me, megawatt smile present and accounted for.

“Good, I’m glad you told me, ‘cause I like Turnip so much better anyway.”

CHAPTER 14

When the truth slaps you in the face, make sure you turn your head and take it like a man

Cruz~

I’ll kill that mother fucker. I’ve killed people in battle before, I don’t think I’d have problems killing Chad Knox. As much as it pains me to say, and as much as I hate what Knox did to her, Harlow’s smarter than that. What kind of hold did this asshole of all assholes have on her?

She appears on the outside to be so strong. See, she has this way about her, the kind that makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. No one has ever made me feel like that. Only her and that’s why she’s mine.

It’s not easy being away from her, especially after the last visit when she told me about what happened to her, and the reason why I want to kill Chad Knox.

When I’m on duty, I dig out my phone constantly, so I can look at a picture of her. I miss seeing her face. I’m pretty sure I’m bordering on stalker because I sleep with her pillow from Willow’s parent’s house next door. I stole it once she left for her new job in August.

Huge. Pussy.

Yea, well the girl does stuff like that to me. It smells of her. Even, after all this time, it has a few stray strands of her hair still on it. Before I drift off to sleep, I inhale the scent that lingers, and I feel close to her.

Unbelievable, right?

Renting the house from Porter’s parents is great, but lonely. Max will come down sometimes to hang, or play a gig at Jax when he has a break from school, but mostly it’s just me. On my days off I work out or I take a run on the beach, which is as cold as a witch’s tit. November isn’t kind to Sandy Cove. I pick up overtime when it’s available, just so I have something to do, so that I’m not constantly thinking of her. On my not-so-consecutive days off, I go see my nephew. He’s got to be the cutest damn thing I’ve ever seen. Before, he was just this blob, eating and shitting, sleeping and shitting again. Now he actually smiles at me, even blows those silly raspberries out of his mouth everyone gushes over. I have to be the constant joke between Bella and Tony about Harlow.

Bella knew how I felt about her, that I better not fuck it up, be good to her, and Bella is constantly saying, “See Antonio, I knew it, that girl changed him.”

Truth is, yes, she did. And that fact continues to make me a pussy. Do I care? Do I mind? Abso-fucking-lutely not!

As I sit here in my patrol car in front of Jax, I think back to the night I told her how I felt about her. I would have never pictured us being together. I mean she hated me at one time. Crushing my balls, punching me, and thinking I was a man-whore. Which I was. I was the biggest man-whore known to man, but things change.

Harlow’s ring tone sounds in my ear and it’s freaking one a.m. on a Wednesday. I can’t imagine why she’s awake, but I just have to smile, knowing when I answer it will be her voice.

“Hey there, Turnip. Why up so late? You o.k.?”

“Hey baby. Yes, I’m fine. I just missed talking to you today and I couldn’t sleep. How are you?”

When she calls me baby, I think it’s the sweetest fucking thing that comes out of her mouth. That and that tongue of hers when she’s kissing me.

“I’m bored out of my mind. Did you have a good day at school?”

“Yes. It was great. Those kids are cool.”

“I can’t wait to meet them someday.”

She’s silent, and I can hear the rustling of the sheets beneath her, and fuck me, but I wish I were between those sheets with her.