1. Maizie #2
Lucy is Jude’s woman. She showed up in Shine with her best friend—Charlie—a few months before the bikers went missing. But we haven’t seen any of the Bone Breakers around town since Jude and the rest of the club took out the cult that Lucy was raised in.
“Do you think the club had anything to do with the missing bikers?”
Mia looks me in the eye. “We know the guys aren’t saints, and if they did have something to do with it, they had their reasons. If that club was dealing in meth, who knows what other shit they were doing.”
I nod and look toward my son, who’s hanging from the smaller jungle gym without a care in the world. Meanwhile, I feel like mine is crashing around me.
“So, dinner tonight?” Mia asks again.
“I can’t.” I offer her a small smile. “I have a ton to do at home.” Like not freak the fuck out that Nolan Dawson is in town and laid eyes on Colby. “But let’s shoot for next week.”
“Sounds good.” Mia releases a frustrated growl. “God, it’s so fucking typical of my brother to show up here, out of the blue, expecting anyone to be happy to see him. I wish his sorry ass would have stayed in Arizona with the rest of the snakes.”
You and me both.
Reading the pregnancy test in the little bathroom of my apartment has my stomach dropping to my feet.
Or it could be the morning sickness I’ve had the last few days.
Though they should really call it all-day sickness, considering my stomach likes to expel all of its contents at any time of day.
At first, I thought it was the flu. But when I looked at my calendar and realized the date, a completely different realization smacked me in the face.
Who the hell gets pregnant their first time having sex? That doesn’t even seem statistically possible.
Obviously it is, considering I’m staring at two very pink lines on a stick.
“Motherfucker,” I whisper to myself before wrapping the pregnancy test in toilet paper and shoving it in the trash can.
Opening the bathroom door, I spot Emily and Taylor walking into the apartment.
“You feeling any better?” Emily asks as she sets her bag on the small leather couch in our tiny living room.
I look around at our apartment. The low coffee table we picked up at a yard sale where we spent countless hours poring over our books and Chinese takeout, the secondhand couch we bought from a couple of seniors who were graduating, the TV stand we made from old wooden crates, and the television we hardly watch because we’re always so busy.
This has been my home for the last year.
My first taste of freedom from my parents’ repressive home.
And now it’s all gone. Tears prick my eyes, but I try my damndest to hold them back.
I’m not ready to say anything to them about what that test said.
It could be a false positive. It could be…
No, I know exactly what it is. I’ve never been one to talk myself out of the truth.
I’m pregnant.
“Yeah, not a hundred percent, but I’m getting there.”
The next day, I walk into the student clinic on campus.
I have no hope that the test is going to come back any different than yesterday’s.
Honestly, I don’t even know why I decided to come here.
Maybe to make sure the test I bought wasn’t a dud.
But in my heart of hearts, I know what it’s going to reveal before the nurse walks back into the exam room.
“The test is positive. You’re pregnant,” she tells me.
The air whooshes from my lungs. Why am I surprised, or shocked, or whatever this feeling is?
She offers me a few pamphlets and a comforting smile before I walk out into the summer sun.
Emily, Taylor, and I live in Boston year round.
We all work near campus, and about a month ago, I got a bartending gig that pays more in tips than their part-time coffee shop jobs.
Not that they need the money as much as I do.
Though my savings help me out during the school year, I rely on working as much as possible during the summer so I have time for classes and studying come September.
Or, I did.
There’s no way in hell I can have a baby and live in a small apartment with Emily and Taylor. When would I work? When would I go to class? How the hell am I going to have a baby, live on my own, and do…anything?
By the time I make it back to the apartment, the girls have left for work. Fall semester is starting back up in a few short weeks, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to make it work.
I walk into my room and collapse onto my bed, looking at myself in the mirror above my dresser.
“You’re in one hell of a shitty situation, Maizie.” Talking to myself is perfectly rational, right? Maybe I’m pregnant and losing my mind, too.
Blowing out a breath, I get up from my bed and open the top drawer of my dresser.
I pull out the phone number that Nolan carelessly tossed at me before walking out of the motel room almost two months ago.
I could go about my life and never tell him what our one night of drunken sex resulted in.
I have serious doubts he’d care anyways.
Or I can put on my big-girl panties and face my responsibilities.
I sit back on my bed and dial the number.
“Yeah?” he answers after the fourth ring.
“Hi, it’s Maizie,” I say.
Silence.
“Maizie Wright. From Boston. Or Shine, too, I guess.”
“I remember. You in town, sexy?”
If I weren’t nauseous before, that would do the trick.
“No. Listen, I need to tell you something. I’m pregnant.” Might as well rip off the Band-Aid. God, that’s the first time I’ve admitted it to anyone else.
“And?”
My brow furrows, and I look around my room as though searching for the answers to his weird reaction on my white walls.
“And I thought you should know?” Why wouldn’t someone want to know that they fathered a child?
“Are you sure it’s even mine? It was just the one time.”
“Yeah, I’m sure. It was the only time for me.”
“Oh, that’s right. You were a virgin.”
He fucking forgot?
“If you want money to get rid of it, I’m broke. Maybe in a couple weeks I can send you something, but I'm tapped right now.”
“No, no. I thought…” What the hell was I thinking? “I just thought you should know.”
“And now I do. That all? I’m kind of in the middle of something.” A distinctly feminine laugh, followed by a long moan, comes through the phone.
Jesus Christ. He has another girl there with him while we talk about this. And from the sound of it, he hasn’t bothered to pause whatever he’s “in the middle of.”
“Yup, that’s it,” I answer with disgust rolling through my stomach.
“Okay. See ya around.”
When I disconnect the call, I don’t bother saying goodbye, and I’m sure he doesn’t care or notice, for that matter. That conversation did nothing to ease my worries, not that there was ever a version of reality where it would have.
I toss my phone next to me and lie down on my side, my palm flattening against my lower stomach.
“Well, I think we’ve established that your father is a complete jackass, and I’m not sure about my parents, but I’ll figure it out. It’s going to be me and you, kid.”
Colby’s loud laughter breaks me out of my momentary walk down memory lane. I look down and see that my entire shirt is covered with bubbles from his bath.
“You little stinker,” I say, smiling at my son.
“Now we’re both wearing bubbles,” he says, grinning as a sudsy crown sits atop his head.
“I could have done without,” I say dryly.
He’s completely nonplussed by my lack of enthusiasm over what I’m sure is the absolute best thing to be covered in—in his mind, at least. Hey, it could be worse.
He could hate baths and run screaming from the tub.
If I get covered because it makes him laugh, so be it.
“You almost done, monkey?” Please be almost done.
“One more minute,” he says as he attempts a bubble beard.
When Colby is finally finished, I help him rinse the suds and dry off until he finds his motorcycle pajamas, which are his absolute favorite.
Lucy got them for him last Christmas, and I’ve had to buy four more pairs since they’re his favorite.
Getting him to wear anything else is not an argument I like having right before bed.
“Three books?” he asks, hoping that I’m willing to forget about my two-book maximum. One of Colby’s favorite times is lying in his little twin-size bed and having me read to him. If he had it his way, we’d stay up for hours past his bedtime so I could go through his entire collection twice.
“Two, son.”
“Cece reads me three,” he says with a little pout.
Cece is Lucy’s sister and Colby’s number one favorite babysitter.
I chuckle. “Way to rat her out, kid.”
“I don’t think she likes rats. She really hates mice. I ’member how loud she screamed when she saw one last summer.” He opens his mouth, presumably to perform a reenactment of the fiasco, but I quickly cover his mouth with my palm.
“We all remember. No need for a demonstration.”
I walk over to his bookshelves and pull two of his favorites, then settle into bed next to him. Halfway through the second book about a brave little caboose, Colby’s breaths even out.
And my worrying begins.
Turning off his light, I shut his door firmly behind me.
This afternoon freaked me the hell out. I know Nolan isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but there was no mistaking the way he looked at my son.
I haven’t tried to reach out to him since the disastrous phone call we had almost six years ago.
I’m not sure how much he remembers, but that little comment earlier makes it clear—he hasn’t forgotten our night together.
Colby mostly takes after me, for now. He has my dark-brown eyes and the same straight, narrow nose.
When he smiles, he looks just like I did at his age.
There’s no doubt that the bigger he gets, the more pieces of Nolan are going to come out, though, at least to anyone who knows he’s the father.
Not that anyone does. I refused to say anything about Colby’s paternity when I showed up here two months pregnant and practically homeless.
My parents kicked me out before I even had a chance to unload my meager belongings when they found out that I had sex out of wedlock and was knocked up.
Don’t even get me started on when I refused to tell them who “tainted” their daughter.
If it weren’t for my grandmother, Rosemary, I would have been sleeping in the little pickup I bought before moving to Boston.
When I showed up at her door in tears and scared out of my mind, she took one look at me and wrapped me in her arms. I lived with her until cancer took her from me and Colby.
We only had two years with her before she passed, but I like to think we made them two of the best years of her life, watching her great-grandson grow and learn every day. I know they were two of my favorites.
I often thought I should give Colby the family he deserves.
It’s not like he doesn't have any. He has an aunt who already loves him and another great-grandmother who often tells me he’s the smartest five-year-old she’s ever met.
Elaine Dawson, Mia and Nolan’s grandmother, was friends with mine, and after she passed, Elaine was instrumental in helping me plan everything since my parents and I weren’t on speaking terms. Shit, even my grandmother refused to speak to my mother for how she allowed her husband to treat me.
My grandmother was never fond of my father.
She thought he was some crazy religious zealot, and she wasn’t far off.
It’s nothing compared to what Lucy went through with the cult she was raised in, but it was no walk in the park, either.
I’ve chosen to stay quiet about who Colby’s father is. As far as I’m concerned, Colby is mine and mine alone.
Walking into my bedroom, I reach under my bed and pull out the small safe I have stashed there.
When Lucy and Charlie came to town, Lucy made us learn to shoot.
I met them both when they started bartending at Thorn and Thistle, and we became fast friends.
Charlie found her happily ever after with Linc, the Black Roses enforcer, and has since quit bartending.
The only time she works is if she’s filling in for me or occasionally one of the other girls, since Charlie is in school getting her degree in family therapy.
Maybe when all is said and done, she can unravel the mess my life is.
I don’t regret my decision to become a mother, not for one second. Losing the freedom I’d finally found when I went away to college, yeah, that still stings a bit. But all I have to do is take one look at my kid, and I know it was worth it for me.
I’d do anything to protect my son.
I open the safe and check the chamber, then head into the living room of the house my grandmother left me.
The three-bedroom, two-bathroom Craftsman-style home is plenty big enough for me and Colby.
I haven’t changed much since she passed.
Personally, I love the floral wallpaper mixed with dark-blue walls in our living room.
It’s her style, and keeping it is sort of a memorial to the woman who loved and supported me no matter what.
I did update the furniture, though. And traded her brown plaid couch and matching recliner for a more neutral couch and two overstuffed chairs that are big enough to curl up in with a glass of wine and a good book.
I kept the low oak coffee table she had for as long as I can remember.
Thankfully, the house has a built-in entertainment center where our TV and all of her books still reside.
After turning off the lights, I sink into the couch that sits in front of the large bay window. It’s not particularly late, but the street my house sits on is quiet after eight o’clock—not that I plan on sleeping.
Nolan saw Colby. There’s no way he doesn’t at least suspect that he’s his son. And every time I think of the look he gave me before he turned to leave, a shiver runs down my spine. I don’t know a lot about the Bone Breakers, but I know they’re bad news, and my son’s father is one of them.
If that asshole has any thoughts of coming for my son while he’s in town, he’ll have to get through me, and I’m a damn good shot.