Trapped

  I was never one to panic, but some circumstances just called for it.

  Chapter 17—Do the Worst

  I couldn’t even begin to describe what was going on in my head.

  For some odd reason, I remembered the story of The Red Balloon from when I was a kid. Mom had always picked up every book that had won any kind of award for anything and had made sure she read it to me. What I had remembered most about it was asking why everything—the buildings, the clothes, the hairstyles—looked so weird, and Mom having to explain the seventies to me. My reaction to the story itself had been that the kid was a loon and that the red balloon was a symbol of his journey from sanity to insanity. The part when the bullies broke the balloon was just the end of his grasp on reality.

  With my hand clenched into a fist, my mind tried to hold on to the little string tethering the big red sanity balloon in my head.

  Along with the ridiculous mental imagery, I was bombarded with a hundred conflicting emotions. Part of me screamed that there was no way this could be happening—not again and not to her. Pills didn’t just fail to work, did they? And if they did, wouldn’t the company have to fix it? And by fix it, I meant make it not happen in the first place. How could Tria have let this happen? Did she just forget to take them and was now making excuses?

  I knew that wasn’t true.

  Once my head managed to grasp the idea that it had really happened, I knew how much danger Tria was in and that it was ultimately my fault for fucking her in the first place. I mean, she had been a virgin before I got all over her, and my chest tightened with the guilt of knowing this was all because of me and my dick.

  With blame and anger and guilt ricocheting through me, I still couldn’t ignore one more feeling.

  More than anything else, there was fear.

  Sheer fucking terror.

  I couldn’t let this happen. Not again. Not to her. I had been so sure everything would be perfectly fine the last time, and now I knew better. I knew what could happen to her because of that thing I put in her, and I wasn’t going to allow it. Not this time. I was going to do what I should have done years ago.

  I finally managed to move my eyes from the pink plus sign to Tria’s face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, and tore right through me. I realized how scared she had to be about the whole thing and knew she had to be worrying about how much it would cost to take care of it. I wasn’t really sure what the price would be, but I wasn’t going to let her worry about that.

  “We’ll find the money,” I said through a clenched throat. “I’ll pick up a few extra fights or see if Dordy will keep letting me do a few things around the bar. I know they’re pricey and whatever, but clinics have deals or options or something, so we’ll take care of it.”

  “Take care of it?” she repeated. Her voice sounded dead, and it sent a chill up my spine. She had to be in total shock and was probably just minutes away from a complete freak-out. I had to make sure she knew I was going to take care of everything.

  “We’ll get rid of it,” I said with a definitive nod. “I’ll find the money—you don’t have to worry about that. We’ll get rid of it so it can’t hurt you. Shit, the pharmaceutical company will probably pay us back.”

  “Hurt me?” she said in the same lethargic voice.

  I walked quickly to the edge of the couch and dropped down in front of her. I picked up her hands out of her lap and looked into her eyes.

  “I’d never let anything hurt you,” I said to her. “You know that. We’ll get this taken care of, I swear.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I watched as Tria pulled her eyebrows together and looked from one of my eyes to the other.

  “Take care of…of it?”

  “Of course,” I replied. I tried to smile though I really wanted to scream. I kept telling myself it was okay because it was early, and we were going to have someone deal with it right away. “I bet Dr. Baynor could help. I mean, I don’t think it’s really surgery, but—”

  “You want to…to get rid of the baby?”

  “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you,” I confirmed, ignoring the word baby. “Just put it all out of your mind, Tria. We’ll go right now—I’ve got the money for the rent, and I’ll just make sure I manage to make some more before the first of the month. We’ll use that for now, though. I’ll call Dr. Baynor in a minute. I’m sure he knows where to go. Shit, there might even be a place that won’t cost much at all. He can tell us, but you don’t worry about it. I’ll get you something to drink and make a few calls. Then we’ll be on our way, and it will be like this never happened.”

  “Never happened?” Her voice was still distant and sounded confused.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said again. “By this time tomorrow, it will be like a bad dream.”

  “No,” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” I said with a smile that I hoped seemed more genuine. “I’ll take care of it all.”

  “You mean have a…have a…”

  “You don’t even have to say it,” I told her. “I mean it. Just put it all out of your mind, and I’ll do everything. You can even lie down for a while, and I’ll get it all worked out by the time you wake up.”

  “No!” She stood and pushed my hands away from her. “No, Liam! I’m not going to have an abortion!”

  “They’re really quick and easy now,” I told her. I had no fucking idea what I was talking about, but I knew the alternative was a shitload longer and definitely not easy. An image of Tria on the floor of the bathroom took shape in my head, and I had to force it out. “No worries at all.”

  “No, Liam,” she said again.

  I furrowed my brow as I looked at her, and she looked back at me. She worried her lip with her teeth and brought her arms up around her waist.

  “If you don’t want us to keep it, I’ll give the baby to Nikki and Brandon,” she said. “But I’m not going to…to just get rid of it. Not when they’ve been trying so hard.”

  “This has nothing to do with them!” I yelled. The tender hold I had on the big red sanity balloon faltered, and the balloon’s string went tight as a gust of hurricane-like winds grabbed hold of it.

  “It does if you don’t want…don’t want…” Tria tried to take a deep breath, halting her words.

  “No!” I yelled. “You are not going to do this! I’m not going to let this happen to you!”

  “I am!” she screamed back at me. “You don’t get to make this decision, Liam. I do. I am having this baby, and if you don’t want it, I will just find someone else who does!”

  The image of Tria in the bathroom filled my mind, complete with blood, screaming, police sirens, meat, a black plastic bag, and a tiny coffin. The vision was all shoved into the little bitty room where we stood beside each other this morning to brush our teeth. The images and memories were so overwhelming that the idea of her finding someone else didn’t even enter the picture.

  The wind picked up, the thin string broke, and I plummeted.

  I grabbed the closest thing to me that wasn’t Tria, picked it up, and threw it against the wall. It ended up being the coffee table, and papers, books, and the little pen-shaped pregnancy test went flying. Tria screeched in surprise, but I was too far gone to stop.

  There was too much in my head—floods of memories reappearing, and I wasn’t prepared. I couldn’t handle them.

  “Liam, I’m pregnant.”

  “Not funny, Aimee.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  It was all happening again.

  Nearly ripping the still-open door from its hinges, I turned and ran out of the apartment.

  *****

  Sometime later, I barely registered that I was on the subway.

  There were some vague memories of hunting around in my jacket pocket for my transit card to shove into the slot to get on the train, but very little recollection of anything outside of my own thoughts once I made my way to the seat at the very back and plopped down. There was too mu
ch else going on in my brain for me to consider my surroundings. I didn’t really know where I was or what I was doing. There just weren’t enough cycles left in my mind to deal with it.

  Tria was pregnant.

  I shoved the palms of my hands into my eye sockets to try to keep myself from seeing Tria on the bathroom floor, covered in blood. The kind of panic it brought into my chest and stomach had me doubled over in the seat. If I lost her…if I lost Tria…

  I clenched my hands into fists and squeezed my eyes shut.

  I wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t go through all of that again, and I wouldn’t. If something happened to her, I’d head straight for the area of town just south of where we live now, spend whatever money I had on smack, and start banging one after another. I’d make sure there was no way anyone could get me to the hospital on time.

  A choking sound came from my throat, and I tried to swallow a couple of times, which just induced a wave of nausea. My back and neck were sweating; my head was pounding in my temples, and the images in my head kept flittering back and forth between memories of Aimee and the same memories replaced with Tria’s face in her stead.

  I desperately wanted to go back to being numb.

  My stomach clenched, and I pounded my fists on the side of the seat next to me. Part of my mind registered people getting up and moving away from me as the subway continued down its underground passage, but I ignored them. I also ignored it when the train reached the end of the line and started traveling back the way it had come.

  I couldn’t let all of this happen again. I couldn’t let it all happen to Tria, not when I knew what might transpire. As a kid, I had been ignorant of the dangers, but now I knew better. I had to make sure she didn’t go through with it.

  Not your choice.

  I continued to pound on the seats with my fists, and more people moved away.

  She was taking the choice away from me. She wasn’t allowing me any say in it at all. How was that fair?

  Some drunk stumbled down the middle of the subway car, running into other people, and completely incapable of hanging onto the handrails. He made his way to the back where I sat and looked down at me.

  “You’re in my seat!” he exclaimed.

  I looked up at him, saw the look of absolute indignation on his face, and laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound, either.

  “Go fuck yourself!” I said.

  The dude swayed a bit before taking a step closer to me. He dropped his voice a little, lower and quieter.

  “I said you’re in my seat,” he repeated.

  “And I told you to go fuck yourself.”

  He narrowed his eyes, and his hand disappeared inside his nasty brown jacket. He sneered at me, and then pulled a silver blade from his pocket. Right in front of my eyes, his face began to change. His skin darkened, and his hair went from dirty blond to black. Glancing back to his face, the dark, flat brown of Keith Harrison’s eyes gazed back at me.

  I lost it.

  He probably didn’t even realize he had been hit before he was on his back with me slamming his hand into the bottom part of the subway car’s handrail. The knife flew from his fingers, and I released his hand so I could punch him with both fists.

  It felt fucking great, too, even though his head was hurting my knuckles. Actually, that made it even better—it gave me something to focus on other than what was going on in my head. It gave the other people on the train something to focus on, too, which ultimately led to security making their way to the back car, screaming and yelling at people to get out of the way. I didn’t pay any attention as they approached and tried to pull me off the guy.

  The drunk’s yelling was really too loud for me to understand what the security dude was trying to say anyway.

  My fist flew into the drunk’s face once more, and I heard the crack of bone as I connected with his eye socket. He was really screaming now, but it didn’t make any difference to me. I felt hands on my shoulders, but I ignored them when they pulled at me. There was only one thing that mattered—and that was beating this shithead into the ground.

  I jerked forward and backward as the train came to a stop. More yelling and screaming ensued as a couple of uniformed cops entered the car. I ignored them as long as I could and moved to punching the guy’s chest and stomach instead of his bloodied face. He was just cowering and crying now, and I didn’t give a shit.

  All my muscles tensed, froze, vibrated, and screamed as I sat up straight and tried to cry out. It didn’t work, and every one of my muscles went completely rigid as electricity shot through my system. A moment later, the sensation stopped and I slumped over to one side. I wasn’t sure if I could move or not and definitely didn’t want to try.

  I’ve been tased.

  Now there’s something to cross off my bucket list.

  The hands around me were a lot more successful this time as they grabbed onto my shoulders and hauled me upright. My arms were pulled behind my back, and I heard the distinctive click of handcuffs and the cool feel of metal around my wrists. I heard someone asking what had happened, and all the people who had been riding along started shouting out their own versions of what had transpired.

  “The other dude pulled a knife—it was self-defense!”

  “Seen that other guy before,” a woman’s voice called out. “He’s a nut! He’s always yelling at people who sit there.”

  “He wouldn’t stop hitting that guy.”

  “That’s Takedown Teague, the fighter.”

  “Didn’t he bust up a wedding in Northside?”

  I closed my eyes and just let them haul me off the subway and up the escalator. At the top, there was already a pair of squad cars waiting. I was shoved into one, the drunk dude into the other. A moment later, we were screeching past shops and bars until we arrived at the station.

  I didn’t even bother to resist when I was hauled out of the squad car, brought into the police station, and then dragged down the row of cells to a holding area at the end. There were dozens of guys—mostly drunks—in various stages of consciousness in each of the four cells we passed. I was shoved into the last one, which held only one other guy. He looked up from the bench where he was sitting as the officer removed the handcuffs, tossed me in, and locked the door. I glared at him, and he quickly looked away.

  That was the most contact I had with him.

  The little cot on the end welcomed my completely exhausted mind and body, and I could only hope sleep would come quickly. It didn’t work, and a few hours later I was considering picking a fight with the guy just to get him to knock me unconscious.

  “Liam Teague?” An officer walked up to the door and started to open it.

  “Yeah?” I sat up. There was a little flutter in my chest as I wondered if maybe Tria had found out somehow and had come to bail me out.

  “Charges dropped,” the officer said. “You’re free to go.”

  “Dropped?”

  “Yeah. The other guy said he wasn’t going to testify, and there were enough people saying he pulled a knife on you. Just get out and stay away from trouble, okay? I gotta make room for a whole pile of drunken morons from the stadium tonight.”

  I was so tired, I could barely walk, but I managed to get myself out of the holding cell and to a desk chair where I sat for at least another hour, waiting for the paperwork to be done. I had to sign my name about twenty times, agree that I wasn’t going to press charges against the other dude for anything, and then they just dumped me out on the street.

  I was a good three miles from the apartment, and I didn’t even have a dollar in my pocket for the bus, so I just started walking. My head ached, and it seemed every memory I had avoided for years was trying to break through my eye sockets. I counted my steps and then parking meters as I walked by, but images kept popping into my mind. I just couldn’t stop them, and by the time I reached my neighborhood, I was not only wiped out but nearly insane as well.

  I glanced up at the fire escape and our bedroom window, which wa
s totally dark. It made sense because it was nearly dawn and Tria had probably gone to bed hours ago. My legs and feet felt heavy as I climbed the stairs. My side was starting to ache a little, probably from sitting in the same position on the subway and then lying on that crappy cot for so long. I was sure a lot of it just had to do with my own state of mind. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to Tria.

  It’s not like I could look her in the eye and tell her I wanted to have a baby. Maybe I’d want to adopt one someday but certainly not now. Even with the little extra Tria brought in, we could barely support ourselves. With a baby, we would need so much more. That wasn’t even the issue though. The main issue was I couldn’t stand the thought of anything happening to her.

  I couldn’t really imagine her having the kid and then giving it up, either. I didn’t want her to go through with the pregnancy at all, but if Tria had the baby, it was going to be a child of mine.

  Period.

  In my head, adoption was out of the question. In Tria’s mind, abortion was not an option. Ultimately, that meant we were down to only one real choice. It was a choice I couldn’t cope with, but it was all we had.

  Fuck.

  I reached the top of the stairs and looked down the hallway. The door to our apartment wasn’t completely shut, and I silently berated myself for not closing it all the way when I ran out so quickly. Tria would have been completely vulnerable without the door being locked and me gone.

  In the back of my mind, the sharp crack of the door slamming behind me as I left echoed, but I didn’t think much of it.

  I reached out and pushed at the door. I was immediately bombarded with the mess I had made on my way out. The coffee table was still upside down, and most of the crap that had been on it was now on the floor. Tria had apparently picked up her school stuff, but my stuff was all over the place.

  With slumped shoulders, I looked cautiously into the kitchen and wondered how bad she was going to cuss me out. I deserved it. Actually, I wasn’t sure she could say anything to me that wouldn’t have been less than I deserved. Maybe I could beat her to the punch, though. I knew how badly I had fucked up, but the shock of it all was just too much.