Stolen Cruise by Naomi West

Author:Naomi West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mc romance, motorcycle club romance, biker romance, bad boy romance, secret baby romance, fake marriage mistake romance, dark romance, contemporary romance
Publisher: MBK Hanson Inc.
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Nancy

I return to my apartment, unable to stop clenching my jaw, my entire mouth aching from the tension. My fist is clenched so tightly around the pregnancy test I’ve crushed the cardboard. I grind my teeth together, feeling enamel flake away. Dad’s gun presses into my waist. I take it out, unload it, and place it in a kitchen drawer. And then I take the pregnancy test and go into the bathroom, heart beating at the back of my throat, cutting off my airwaves, making it difficult to breathe.

I unbutton my shirt, sucking in big lungfuls of air. When I sit on the bowl with the stick between my legs, my body betrays me. I force the pee out but nothing happens. It’s like my body doesn’t want me to know the results. It’s like my body would prefer if I just went on being angry and ignorant. I lean over to the sink and take a drink of water, knowing I must look pretty stupid hunched over with my dress around my knees like this. I drink until my belly aches and then lean back, waiting for the magic to happen.

Finally, my body complies. I pee on the stick and stand up, placing the stick on the sink and pacing into the living room and back into the bathroom. For some reason, my mind is thrown back to one night a long time ago. I couldn’t have been older than ten.

Mom came into my bedroom with a knife clutched in her hand, her eyes wide and full of fear. “I’ve had enough,” she said, kneeling beside me in bed with the knife aimed at the ceiling. “I can’t take it anymore, Nancy. I shouldn’t be unloading on you like this . . . He doesn’t hit me, or hurt me in other ways, but . . . I’m not a babysitter, am I? I’m not a minder! And he scares me. He scares me so much because, one day, he might cross the line. He’s broken enough glasses. It would be simple for him, wouldn’t it, to use one of those broken glasses and slit me—oh, God, what am I saying?”

She dropped the knife and cradled my cheeks. That was when I smelled the wine, heavy on her breath, lingering in the air around her like an acrid perfume. “This is just a dream, baby,” she said. “That’s all. Just a bad dream. Go to sleep.”

But it wasn’t just a dream. When I woke up, the knife was on the floor. I slid it into the knife block in the kitchen and pretended it never happened.

I might be a mother, I reflect, waiting for the test to either smile or frown: smile for positive and frown for negative, though that seems quite presumptuous to me. I might be a mother. Me, with all my problems, with no stable model for what a family should be. I walk into the living room; I return to the bathroom. Only this time, the test is done.

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