Be the Full Problem (Don’t Date Him #4)

Prologue

To anyone that I fell out with last year, fuck you this year as well.

—Nettie’s secret thoughts

Nettie

“I’m pregnant.”

Boone, my sweet Boone, looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

“Um, what?”

We were in high school. This should’ve never happened.

But when it came to Boone Daniel Windsor, I had zero control.

I never had, and I never would.

“I don’t…” I trailed off as Boone’s mother came into the room, eyes ablaze.

They were always ablaze.

“Bartholomew.” Gail Windsor, the woman of the house and the keeper of all the money, walked into Boone’s room like it was her right to do so.

And maybe it was.

This was her house, after all.

Well, hers and her husband’s.

Her husband made all the money.

Her husband, might I add, who wasn’t Boone’s father.

Boone was an oopsy baby with the pool boy.

Literally, the pool boy.

Gail got pregnant by the pool boy and Sawyer, Boone’s stepfather, had lost his shit. Gail, however, was all ‘if you kick me out I’m going to take half your fortune with me’ so he kept her.

He also, joy to the world, decided that Boone wasn’t to blame for his mother’s transgressions.

He embraced Boone as a son and took him under his wing.

That was the only thing that saved Boone’s personality from being just like his mother’s.

Though, Boone didn’t see his mother as being the wild bitch of the west.

He saw her as his precious mother that would never hurt him in any way.

He was wrong. Gail Windsor was a fuckin’ nut case that liked to run his life like a drill sergeant.

She scheduled our dates—seriously, she scheduled our dates to work in with her schedule.

She chose what he wore. She chose which school sports he played.

And even worse, she had chosen what he would do with his life after graduation.

She’d decided that he would be a doctor, and as an act of rebellion that was really quite rare for Boone, he’d decided to go into veterinary medicine and not human medicine.

It was the best blowup I’d ever witnessed, and Gail blamed it all on me.

If she only knew just how different his life path would be had he gotten to choose it himself. If I’d actually had a role in helping him figure out what he wanted to do with his life.

In reality, Boone wanted to be a park ranger. He wanted to spend his life outdoors, soaking in what he loved. Instead, he was going to school eight hours away, to do a job that he wasn’t all that interested in, to make his mother happy.

And now we were having a baby and I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

My parents were not going to be happy about the news.

In fact, between Gail Windsor and my parents, Minnie and Barton Wheeler—the pastor and the pastor’s wife of Sawtooth Pentecostal Temple, this was about to become one of the worst times of my life.

My parents were awful. My dad more so than my mother. But my mother did whatever my father wanted, so if he told her to fuck us up, she would. Because she lived to please her man, and her children were subpar to her husband, and always would be.

“Yes, Mother?” Boone asked, looking ghostly white.

“What’s wrong?” Gail asked. “You look pale.”

He would be.

I’d just told him he was going to be a father at seventeen.

“Nothing,” Boone lied. “I’m just hungry.”

“You should’ve eaten your afternoon snack like I instructed instead of coming straight up here with Antoinette.”

Gag.

I hated my real name.

I much, much preferred being called Nettie, and Gail knew it. She took a sick sort of pleasure in calling me by my given name, and always enjoyed watching my eyelid twitching.

“It was important.” I shrugged.

“Well, what was so important that you would call him straight up to the informal living room instead of allowing him to eat after a tough polo practice?”

I kept my mouth shut.

I wasn’t ready for her to know what news I’d just shared.

I wanted to process it with Boone first.

“Just prom plans,” Boone lied.

He saw and read the tension that I had with his mother easily. I’d shared with him multiple times, and had long drawn-out discussions others, about how his mother was unbearable and controlling.

He saw it, of course.

It was hard not to.

But for some reason since she was his mother, he had a hard time reconciling the fact that she was a bad person.

“Oh, you’re going to that?” she asked. “I thought we’d decided that you were to join me at the ball for the business district that night?”

My eyelid twitched.

I wanted to scream, “Why would Boone want to go to some stuffy, rich people function that barely served any food instead of going to his high school prom?”

Yet, I did none of those things, because Boone didn’t like it when I antagonized his mom.

And honestly, he was right.

When I antagonized her, she got worse.

“Nope, going to prom, Mom. I already have my tux.”

I already had my dress, too. But it might not fit in two months…

“Of course you are. That disappoints me.”

Boone’s shoulders slumped.

“We’re going to go grab food,” I announced. “Since Boone’s hungry.”

“He’s having salmon and rice here, prepared by the chef specially for his diet that was planned out by the nutritionist.”

“Actually, I’m not,” Boone said. “We’re going out with friends tonight. Student Council meeting that we’re eating pizza and wings. We’re planning the prom.”

“Oh, well that’s fine then.” Gail smiled.

As long as we weren’t going to be alone, then everything would be fine.

“Bye, Mother,” Boone said as he reached for my hand and squeezed.

His palm was as clammy as mine.

“Do take the Porsche instead of yours. I would like to have Geoff clean it out,” Gail ordered.

Boone nodded his head, but instead of leading us toward the Porsche when we got outside, he took us to his old truck.

“Your mother ordered you to take her Porsche,” I pointed out.

“My mother also has LoJack on her car so she can see where we’re going,” he explained. “We’re taking mine, because I know that it’s clean and she can’t track me.”

My shoulders slumped.

He was right.

Gail always knew where her children were.

Between stalking her son and stalking her other teenager, Felicia, Gail had a full-time job.

Luckily for me, Gail ran roughshod on Felicia and spent most of her time on her. She only reserved stalking Boone when Felicia was at home and duly accounted for.

Boone waited for me to get into the passenger seat before reaching over and putting on my seat belt.

His hand lingered at my belly for a long second before he closed the door softly and walked around.

He was halfway down the road before he said, “What do you want to do?”

I swallowed.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “If I have the baby…my soccer career is going to be null and void.”

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“But I don’t want to have an abortion.” My voice tremored. “How could I ever get rid of something that was made out of the love we created?”

He blew out a breath and reached for my hand, squeezing tightly. “I was thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to make that decision for you.”

I brought his hand up to my mouth and kissed the back of it.

“We’ll figure it out, Boone.”

One month later

We didn’t figure it out.

Mostly because Gail Windsor and Barton Wheeler were on the warpath.

I’d thought that I could handle telling them. Really, I did.

But I was proven wrong.

Over and over again.

By the end of the month after I’d first found out I was pregnant, I was packing my bags at my parents’ house and moving out.

My sister, Eddy, was right next to me doing the same.

We’d always said that we were going to stick it out.

We were going to make sure that we could graduate and do the best we could, then when we were eighteen, we were going to go to college and never look back.

That didn’t work out the way that I’d planned it.

And showing that she supported me one hundred percent, my sister had decided she was leaving with me.

If I wasn’t welcome, then she wasn’t either.

The only saving grace we had was the fact that Sawyer Windsor was such a great man.

He’d heard about the fight my dad was giving us and helped us retain a lawyer who would get us emancipation from our parents. He’d also helped us by getting us an apartment right inside of town so that we could stay there and still go to school.

He was also taking care of all the medical bills that were accruing thanks to the pregnancy.

Though, the only reason they were accruing was because Gail wanted to make one hundred percent sure that this baby was protected and cared for, as well as controlled.

She hadn’t outright said it, but I knew that if this baby came, I’d have the fight of my life on my hands to keep it.

She’d use every dirty trick in the book to make sure that I was gone, and the baby was under her control.

There were some times that I wondered if I should just leave and never look back. Quit soccer. Move to some faraway place where she could never get to me.

But then I thought about how nice Sawyer was being, and how unhappy he’d be if I left with his grandchild.

He would be devastated.

Sawyer was a good man. A good father to two children that weren’t his. And though he may not love his wife, he still stood by her.

Truthfully, I couldn’t do that to Boone, Sawyer, or my sister.

Which was why I was still here fighting.

“It’ll be okay,” Eddy whispered.

I swallowed hard. “I know.”

But it wasn’t.

At some point in the last month, Gail had seen Sawyer’s helping me as an attack against her. An ununited front was not acceptable, and she made it her life mission to terrorize me.

She had our water turned off. She called the city on us. She tried to get me expelled from school. She had the doctor recommend abortion at nearly every visit. She stalked me. She refused to ever let Boone be alone with me. She made my life a living hell.

And the final straw was the night she’d come to my apartment and shoved me. Shoved me so hard that my back had hit the wall and she’d pointed in my face and said, “You’ll regret this.”

I did.