before he’d died.
“Anyway, I ended up dating a guy that my parents hated. They were even more conservative back then and didn’t want me dating anyone exclusively—and they especially didn’t want me to be having sex or anything like that.” Which, now that I was older and had experienced what I had, I could totally understand their reasoning. “So, since you know that telling a teenager they can’t do something is basically inviting them to do it, I ended up sneaking around with him all the time and got into partying pretty hard on the weekends and had my first experiences with alcohol and drugs before I was eighteen.”
“Really?” Cole pulled his head back, like he’d never considered me being involved in any of that.
Which I couldn’t blame him for. I had done a pretty good job of pretending to be the perfect girl from Alabama the past few years.
I drew in a deep breath. “Anyway, things got really bad at home after that and my mom and I butted heads a lot. And when I turned eighteen, I decided to exert my new freedom of being an adult and moved in with my boyfriend.”
I studied Cole’s face. Was he disappointed? Was he judging me?
Was he suddenly wishing he hadn’t done all of these amazing things for me now that he knew more of my history?
But when I only found surprise in his eyes and nothing else to make me think he was considering ending the date right then and there, I decided to continue.
Though this was where things would get harder.
Much harder.
I took another sip from my wine.
Man, the expensive stuff really did taste better than the cheap stuff I usually bought.
“So what happened after you moved out?” Cole asked. “Were you gone for long? Or did you go home pretty quickly?”
“I didn’t really see my parents for the next year. Though I wish I’d gone right back,” I said. Things would have certainly been a lot easier to deal with if I’d had my parents holding my hand through it all. “I ended up living with that boyfriend for several months. And things were all right at first. He wasn’t prince charming or anything, but he treated me well enough. But right before we were supposed to graduate, I found out that I was pregnant.”
Cole’s dark brown eyes widened, and I saw a million questions in them. But I knew if I didn’t keep going, I wouldn’t be able to finish.
“It was a surprise,” I said. “I’d been on the pill since my parents found out I was sexually active, but I must have missed a dose or something. I didn’t know how long I’d been pregnant at first, since I had always been irregular, but I ended up going to the doctor and she told me I was a lot further along than I expected. The baby was already, like, twenty weeks along and it was a girl.”
My throat closed up as I remembered that time in my life and everything that had happened afterward.
“D-did something happen to the baby?” Cole asked in a cautious voice. “Or did…” His voice drifted off like he was afraid to ask his question.
But it was obvious that something had happened since I was here now and didn’t have a seven-year-old daughter hiding away at my mom’s house.
So I pulled up my big-girl pants and tried to find a way to get through this next part without crying. Because thinking about it always made me cry.
“I was far enough along that I knew I couldn’t have an abortion even though my boyfriend at the time was pushing me to find a doctor that would give me one,” I said, remembering how dark that time had been for me.
The anxiety in Cole’s eyes dissipated slightly. I could tell that he was relieved I hadn’t purposely hurt my baby.
Though really, she hadn’t been much better off with the damage the drugs and alcohol had already done.
“I still wasn’t on talking terms with my mom and dad, so I was kind of alone in the whole thing. But as soon as I realized I was pregnant, I started going to appointments and stopped drinking and getting high. But…” I pressed my lips together because I really didn’t like this next part. This was the part that still gave me nightmares.
Cole frowned, as if realizing that this story didn’t have a happy ending for the baby—that she hadn’t been adopted and wasn’t living a happy,