Alex by Hope Hitchens

Author:Hope Hitchens [Hitchens, Hope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

Iris let me in, but she let me get upstairs after saying hi to Hayden and Rick before she followed me up. I couldn’t take the closet with me, but I had to take the chest of drawers and vanity. What would Rick and Iris do with my leftover furniture, anyway? If I didn’t take it, I would just have to buy more, which I would probably have to assemble from Ikea or something.

I let Iris stand awkwardly in the doorway and speak first before I acknowledged her.

“Ollie?”

“Yes, Iris?” I asked her, not bothering to look up from the chest of drawers I was pulling the drawer pieces out of. I could sit it in my car easily enough, but the drawer pieces would fall out during the trip and probably get damaged.

“Can we talk?”

“If you want to say something to me, say it now. I’m leaving as soon as I figure out how to move these things into my car.”

“Ollie, I’m so sorry.”

“Best place to start a story is the beginning, Iris.”

She sighed and came into the room. There was nowhere to sit down anymore, so she just slumped against the wall.

“Before you and Alex got together, he used to date a lot of different girls; older, younger, it didn’t matter,” she began.

“I know. I was there,” I said.

“One of the people that he did date, just before he got with you, was a friend of mine. Leslie. We were in the same year, and they were hooking up in secret. She didn’t want anyone to know she was hooking up with a sophomore. When they were together, she got pregnant.”

My head shot up.

“What? How do you know? Did he know?”

“I knew because she told me. She didn’t tell him. She didn’t tell anyone else. She ended up having a miscarriage before she ever started showing. By that point, he was with you, and he seemed to be sticking to just the one woman.”

“Where do you come in?”

“When I got pregnant, I panicked. It wasn’t supposed to happen. The guy was older. We were dating, and he was sort of… helping me out,” she admitted. Where was this going? When did we get to the part where Alex and I broke up?

“When I got pregnant, he wasn’t happy. He dumped me. He told me to get rid of the kid, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad that I was pregnant by some older guy so… I lied.”

“You said it was Alex who got you pregnant? Alex, my boyfriend? Alex who was two years younger than you? Why would you say that?”

“I had to pick someone. He… no offense Ollie, but when I said it was him, Mom and Dad believed me. I know you couldn’t have been blind to the reputation that guy had.”

“That doesn’t make it okay to do,” I said. What the hell? She sounded like those cops who wouldn’t care that a prostitute was murdered because they live ‘high-risk lifestyles.

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