Annabelle

 

I’d had more sex in the last couple of months than my last semester at school. Hell, more than my last year at school, if I were being really honest. It wasn’t that I was a prude, but unlike my rather promiscuous friends I didn’t go home with whoever I thought was decently attractive that night. Sex was good, but I preferred consistency over novelty. While Raquel liked to say that this was the time to try out as many guys as possible before settling down with whoever Daddy picked out in the end, I was of the opinion that it was a better idea to keep a guy around for a while. Sure, I had the occasional one-night stand, but I knew the risks of things like that—now more than ever—and erred mostly on the side of caution.

 

Which was really my problem in the end. I hadn’t found a guy I liked enough to keep around long enough to have consistent sex and it left me a little wanting in that particular department.

 

Until recently.

 

I eyed the man standing across from me. He was towel drying his hair, causing it to stick up in thick spikes over the top of his head.

 

He’d just gotten out of the shower and was looking especially tasty. I blamed most of my insatiable lust on the fact that I was already a couple of months pregnant since what little research I’d done told me that some expectant mothers felt a kick in their sex drive. And I already had a pretty healthy sex drive to begin with.

 

Before my thoughts could unravel like a ball of yarn, Matt told me we were going to a cookout.

 

My eyebrows rose in surprise. “A cookout?” I repeated.

 

He nodded. “Yeah. William’s idea.” He hesitated, glancing over at me, but then looking away quickly again. “He, uh, said he’d like you to come. You must have made quite the impression on him.”

 

I laughed a little at that. “I met him for, like, two seconds.”

 

Matt shrugged his broad shoulders, causing the muscles to ripple across his back and arms. He was only just now pulling on his jeans, so his chest was still bare. He looked good enough to eat. Shaking my head a little to clear the cloud of increasingly dirty thoughts, I focused on his mouth and the way his lips formed the words. “You win or lose William in two seconds. That’s just how he is.”

 

I raised a single eyebrow at him, propping myself up on one elbow so my body curved in all the right places. I was still lying in bed, a sheet haphazardly draped across my otherwise naked body. I knew I was tempting him, teasing him even, but I couldn’t really make myself care. “What if someone just makes a really bad first impression?”

 

He looked over at me. He noticed how I was laying, how the sheet was slipping to expose my full breasts and the way my legs were exposed up to the upper thigh. His eyes raked over me almost hungrily and I wondered if he was going to have to take another shower this morning.

 

“It’s not about impressions,” Matt insisted, though his voice had dropped into a deep bass. “William swears that he can tell what kind of person you are in only a minute. He hasn’t been wrong yet.”

 

“I see. And he decided he liked me?”

 

Matt nodded, his eyes still lingering on the curves of my body. “Yes. It’s a good thing; trust me.”

 

I smiled sweetly and then pushed myself up into a full sitting position. The result was the sheet falling from my breasts to pool around my hips. Matt’s eyes watched with rapt attention. I swung my legs out and over the bed, letting my bare feet slip into the carpet for a moment before I stood. With a deliberate sway of my hips, I sauntered over to him. He’d managed to pull a shirt on over his head, unfortunately, but I didn’t let the fabric deter me. My hands went to the hem of his shirt and snaked beneath it, sliding over the hot skin there.

 

I felt his muscles tense and he took a quick breath, holding it for a moment. “I just got out of the shower,” he managed to get out, but even that was a husky tone that belied his desire.

 

I shrugged, unconcerned. “You should have thought of that earlier.”

 

He groaned, but quickly shucked off his shirt and helped me shove his pants back down. He was hard for me. His mouth found mine and he kissed me until I felt like I was on fire. We stumbled into the bathroom together and found the hot shower. Once there, he didn’t seem all that worried about having just taken one.

 

We fucked for the rest of the morning and I ended up taking a long nap afterwards. When I woke again, there was a note on the table by the bed.

 

Gone to work. You’re fucking sexy. I want you naked when I come home.

 

I laughed at it and fell back into bed, happier than I had been in a long, long time.

 

***

 

Despite Matt’s note, I didn’t spend all day just lounging around naked. I actually got dressed in a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt I stole from his closet. It was huge on me but comfortable, and it smelled like him, which I found oddly appealing just then. I padded downstairs to grab my phone.

 

Reaching for it, I quickly scanned it for missed calls or texts. There was one text from Matt: Don’t forget the cookout. Six tonight. It wasn’t the only one, though. There were about fifteen different texts after that one. Five were from Raquel, three from Megan. Two more from Mrs. Hash, my dad’s assistant, who he was likely but not definitely sleeping with. And the rest were from my dad.

 

“Wow, he’s desperate enough to text me,” I mumbled to the empty kitchen.

 

My dad didn’t text to save his life. It was purely a last resort and was usually reserved for trying to “get the younger vote” during election years. I rolled my eyes, but skipped down to his messages first anyway.

 

Where are you?

 

Come home this instant!

 

You are grounded, young lady!

 

I snorted at that one. I was nineteen, almost twenty. He couldn’t ground me anymore. I didn’t care if I did live under his roof. What a jerk. I kept scrolling through the messages until I saw the next one, which made me pause.

 

Please, honey, come home. The dinner is tonight.

 

The dinner. Of course. My father had sporadic dinner parties planned throughout the summer. They were held alternatingly between fancy Mount Rose local restaurants and his own home. The latter of the two was to try to give off that nice “family vibe” that so many of his constituents bought into. And a key part of that family vibe was, well, family. Namely me. He had two wives and both were dead, so really only left was his only child.

 

Unless you count the redheaded stepchild, I thought mildly. Of course, my stepbrother wasn’t a redhead and he wasn’t a child, not anymore, but the notion behind the concept fit. He’d never accepted my father as his and my father had certainly never accepted him either. In that much, at least, they’d agreed.

 

Either way, Mateo was hardly qualified to give my father that family vibe. I could barely remember the older boy, but I knew he’d caused lots of trouble.

 

Breathing through my nose, I tried very hard to not be angry with my father. But it wasn’t really working. Ultimately, I was mad. Mad that, in the end, the only reason he’d tried so desperately to get ahold of me was because there was a stupid dinner tonight. A dinner that was important to his image, his reelection. The things that were really important.

 

“Which is clearly not me,” I muttered.

 

I tossed my phone onto the counter, ignoring the last message from my father. I told myself I didn’t care about it and was angry enough that I almost believed myself.

 

“Focus on something else,” I told myself.

 

Frowning, I went back to my phone. I didn’t look at my dad’s last message, but checked through Raquel’s and Megan’s. Then I made the bold, maybe slightly reckless, choice to call them. I started with Raquel.

 

“Oh, my god!” she exclaimed, all but yelling in my ear as soon as she picked up. “Where the hell are you? Your dad is on full-blown meltdown mode! I mean, it’s like a goddamn volcano exploding!”

 

I rolled my eyes at that. I doubted my dad was showing more than a twitch in his jaw over my “disappearance.” Clearing my throat, I said, “I ran into a little trouble the other day and I needed some time to think about it.”

 

There was a pause. “Is this about drugs? Because I could have hooked you up with some uppers or downers, you know that. No point going all off the grid over it.”

 

I shook my head. Raquel wasn’t exactly a dealer, so to speak, but she sold a little bit to the kids at our high school. I was pretty sure she didn’t still sell in college, but she always had some on hand for personal recreational use. It wasn’t something I liked to partake in myself. “No, this isn’t about drugs. It’s about…” I hesitated. Could I really tell her? Raquel and Megan were my besties, but I had decided earlier that they would also spread any juicy gossip like wildfire.

 

Do I really care? I found some small part of me wondering, a part that I wasn’t even aware I had.

 

I rubbed a hand over my belly. I wasn’t really showing, I didn’t think, but my jeans were a little tighter than usual and I was eating a lot more. And I thought my breasts were a little heavier, though maybe I was just imagining it all because that’s what I knew was going to happen.

 

Inside me, I was growing a baby. A baby that I had never planned for and really never wanted. But after only two days with Matt, I was beginning to wonder if maybe I had dismissed this all too quickly.

 

And if I did, by some strange twist of fate, decide to keep the baby, Raquel and Megan would find out.

 

So, was it really that big a deal?

 

“I’m pregnant,” I blurted before I could reconsider.

 

There was a pause so long I thought she’d hung up on me, but then there was a low, “Oh my god. Where are you? I’m coming there immediately. We’ll fix this.”

 

***

 

Initially I didn’t want to tell Raquel where I was. Part of that was the knowledge that Raquel could be like a tornado when she wanted to be. An unstoppable force of nature and I wasn’t sure if I could deal with that right now. The other part of it was that this was Matt’s house, not mine. Would he be okay with me having someone over?

 

But, in the end, I gave her the address. She told me she was picking up Megan and they’d be there in twenty minutes. Probably less if she drove like the little speed demon she was.

 

True to her word, they arrived in less than half an hour and they looked ready for battle. Well, as ready as you could look when your parents belonged to the country club and owned a yacht. Megan was dressed in her Sunday best, a little white lacy dress that was as innocent as she was not. She’d paired it with heels that were ridiculously tall, but were colored white to make them less noticeable. Raquel looked like some high-priced lawyer, dressed in a three-piece suit that hugged her curves tightly enough that she could be the secretary every wife was terrified to leave their husband alone with.

 

And she probably would be, I thought a little unkindly. It wasn’t fair to be like that to my friends. They, like me, grew up with the sort of parents who majored in absenteeism and we all dealt with it in our own ways. Namely, getting a little reckless between the sheets.

 

Though, despite being the least reckless of the three, I had been the first to get pregnant.

 

“I cannot believe you got knocked up!” cried Megan, still standing on the doorstep. She clutched her small purse in front of her, looking the picture of demure.

 

I shushed her, my eyes widening at her loud tone and blunt words. “Jesus, Meg! A little discretion!”

 

Raquel elbowed her, then glanced behind them. There wasn’t anyone in sight, thankfully, and when she had apparently come to the same conclusion, she shoved at Megan to get inside. Megan barely let out a weak, “Hey!”

 

“You’ve got the brains of a rock,” Raquel told her in annoyance. When they’d both stepped inside, she closed the door behind us and added, “And about half the tact, you know it?”

 

Megan just lifted her shoulders. “I prefer to look at it as me cutting to the chase. No point wasting time, right?”

 

Raquel looked like she wanted to shoot back with something else, but I held up my hands to interrupt them. “Yes, I’m pregnant.”

 

The other girls turned to look at me, suddenly all silence and seriousness. It was weird to see them so solemn, almost like we were about to attend a funeral rather than discussing how I’d managed to get myself into this whole mess.

 

Raquel was the first to speak. “Do you know who the father is?”

 

I gave her a look, raising a single eyebrow at her, then gestured to the house surrounding us. “Who do you think lives here?”

 

Apparently neither of the girls had really thought about where they’d just arrived, because now they were glancing around curiously. Like it was a museum or something like that. I waited patiently as Raquel scrutinized every picture on the wall, every scuffmark on the floor, and every piece of furniture in the living room to the left. Finally, she returned her gaze to me and wrinkled her nose. “Are you seriously staying here?”

 

Something in me sagged a little bit at the disapproval in her voice, but I shoved it aside. I straightened my shoulders and smiled blandly at my friends. “For a little while,” I admitted. Quickly I added, “Just until I decide what to do.”

 

My friends shared a meaningful glance between the two of them, then looked back at me. “What’s to decide?” Raquel demanded. “We take you to that little place over in Fort whatever the hell it’s called, get that little belly muncher out of you, and call it good. Problem solved. You don’t have to be some slave to whatever white trash you had the misfortune to get knocked up by.”

 

It took me several tries to process all that she’d just said—which was good, because my initial response was anger. Who did she think she was to be calling Matt white trash? But then I reminded myself who they were, who I was, and how this all looked. I couldn’t hold it against them when they didn’t even know Matt.

 

At least, not really.

 

I cleared my throat. “And you said Megan had no tact.”

 

Raquel rolled her eyes. “Oh please. You’re standing here in some dude’s oversized shirt talking about what you’re going to do now that you’re pregnant like you’re considering keeping the damn thing. And you want tact? Honey, we’ve moved past the time for tact and into full-blown reality check. You can’t keep it.”

 

I pursed my lips. Just over two days ago, I would have agreed. Of course I couldn’t keep it. I had no business being a mother. And what about my education? Kiss college goodbye. And there was no way in hell Matt was going to stick around.

 

But even as I ran through my initial list, the one that had brought me here in the first place, I acknowledged that little part of myself that wasn’t quite so sure about all of it. I hadn’t wanted to go to school for business and that was the only thing my father would pay for. As for me being a mother, yes, I was young, but my mother was barely twenty-one when she married my father. That was only a year and a half older than I was. And she’d done a fantastic job—while she was alive.

 

And what about Matt?

 

I remembered out conversation at the coffee shop. I thought of the cookout that was going to be tonight and the way he looked at me like he always wanted to devour me whole. But more than that, I thought of the way his hands caressed my stomach, like he couldn’t wait to see it grow.

 

“I…I know it seems like a crazy idea,” I finally said in response to Raquel. “But I just need some time to think about it. Think about what I want.”

 

Raquel blinked at me. For once, she was speechless. She opened and closed her mouth a dozen times, unable to come up with something to say in response to that. Apparently sensing that Raquel couldn’t find something to say, Megan jumped in.

 

She reached out and caressed my arm gently in what should have been a comforting gesture, but was mostly just patronizing. “It’s okay, Annie. I know getting an abortion is totally scary, but I did it last summer and it was completely painless. I went away for a spa retreat and when I came back, boom. No baby. See? Totally discreet.”

 

So much for being the first to get pregnant, I thought mildly. I frowned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that happened.”

 

Megan waved her hand as though none of this was a big deal. “Mistakes happen. Not like you’ve got to live with them the rest of your life. We can go with you and everything. Make a girl’s weekend out of it.” She smiled brightly, nodding her head like a golden retriever.

 

Raquel nodded, too. “That’s right. This is just a minor setback and we aren’t going to let you ruin the rest of your life over it.”

 

I bit my lower lip. I hadn’t even told them about the Reaper’s Thorns or Matt. What would they think then? They’ll be more adamant than ever about me getting rid of the baby. My hand subconsciously went to my stomach. I stroked it carefully, as though the non-existent lump could be hurt by pushing too hard. Letting out a whoosh of air, I said, “Five days.”

 

Both my friends stared at me blankly. “What? Five days?” Megan repeated.

 

I nodded. “Yes. Five days. That’s all I want. Five days to think it over. Then…” I let the “then” trail off into nothing.

 

Raquel’s expression softened and she gave me a gentle smile. Stepping up to me, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Then we’ll take care of this. You know all we want is what’s best for you.”

 

Megan nodded her head in agreement and came to stand with us so we formed a small triangle with our bodies. She threw her arms over either of our shoulders and pulled us close. “That’s what friends are for! Now, group hug!” She squeezed and we laughed, but I admitted to myself it felt good. Yes, they were pushing for an abortion and I was starting to wonder if that was really what I wanted, but they were still my friends. They supported me, no matter what.