Released

  I scowled over at her.

  “Is that supposed to make sense?”

  Nothing.

  I tried to coax more out of her—both with soft words and harsh ones—but she would have none of it. Apparently slapping my face, glaring at me, and uttering two words were the only actions she was capable of for the night. Eventually I gave up and went back inside. My whole body still felt sore and tired, so I ended up just dropping on the bed and trying not to think about ways of getting more dope.

  I lay back on the pillow and then immediately turned my head to inhale Tria’s scent from the blankets she was always stealing from me in the middle of the night. It just made my chest hurt, so I sat back up and leaned forward over my knees.

  Needs training.

  What would I need training on?

  Hell, what don’t I need training on?

  Or maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe she meant Tria needed some training, but on what? How to be a mother? How to deal with me? Not sure where she’d get that except from…

  …a trainer.

  My trainer.

  I was never one for jigsaw puzzles, but the pieces suddenly fell into place.

  Chapter 3—Reveal the Past

  A moment later I was out of the bed, grabbed my jacket, and ran out the door to find the bus to Yolanda’s neighborhood. She lived out on the west side of town where it was a little nicer. Normally, I would have needed a couple bus transfers, but Baynor had all my money, so I hoofed it. An hour later I was banging on Yolanda’s door, and when it opened, my trainer stared at my face.

  Eye contact with Yolanda lasted nine seconds.

  On the tenth second, she punched me hard enough to send me backwards. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground and she was sitting on my stomach, beating the shit out of me. She went for my gut and kidneys first and then moved up to my chest and head.

  I covered my face, but otherwise let her do her worst.

  It was a little cathartic, really. I closed my eyes and just felt the punches until she realized that was exactly what I was doing and stopped. I glanced up at her only to have her smack me a couple more times before she stood back up.

  “Can I see her?” I asked as I hauled myself back onto my feet.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Yolanda growled. “You are a lost cause.”

  “I need to talk to her.”

  “What, to tell her to kill the baby because you can’t manage to be a man? You’re shit!”

  She punched my gut again. I cringed and rubbed at the spot before running my left hand up and over my head.

  Mistake.

  Yolanda’s eyes widened as she grabbed my arm and twisted it. Her gaze ran down the inside of my arm.

  “You’re high.” She snarled as she practically threw my own hand back at me. “I fucking knew it! I could tell at your last fight!”

  “Not now,” I said. “I…I went a little crazy. I’m straight now—really.”

  “Lost cause,” she repeated. “I’m done with you, Liam Teague. We’re done. I’m not training you or helping you out with your shit anymore. Fuck, Liam! I thought you had some real potential! But you can’t get your head out of your ass long enough to make anything of it!”

  “Please, Yolanda,” I said, “I know she’s here. I just want to talk to Tria.”

  “No.”

  “Tria!” I yelled over Yolanda’s shoulder, and she shoved me back into the hallway.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” she said as she moved herself to further block the doorway.

  “Not until I see her,” I insisted.

  “My building has actual security,” Yolanda said. “I’ll have them throw you out.”

  “Do you think they can take me?” I asked, crossing my arms. “I hope there’s more than one of them.”

  “Get out!”

  “I want to talk to her!”

  “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  Instinctively, I turned my head toward her voice. Tria stood in the opening to Yolanda’s guestroom, wrapped in a long purple robe which was tied around the waist. It was dark in the hallway, and I couldn’t see her face well, but my heart started beating faster at the sound of her voice.

  “Please,” I begged, “just give me a chance.”

  “Why should I?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I freaked and ran out. I’m sorry I reacted that way—just give me a chance to explain.”

  “Explain?” Tria repeated with a harsh laugh. “Explain what?”

  “You going to tell her, Teague?” Yolanda asked with a sneer. She reached out and smacked my chest with both hands. “Are you finally going to tell her why you are being such an asshole? Because there is no way I’m letting you in here unless you are ready to tell her everything.”

  I stared at my trainer and almost wished she’d just go back to punching me. I could take that kind of hit. What she was suggesting—now that was a low blow.

  “Did you tell her?” I knew the answer before Yolanda shook her head. I almost wished she had told Tria—that would have made things a lot easier. In my head, I heard Dr. Baynor asking me if I would take me back. I looked at Tria. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  Tria’s arms crossed over her chest as she leaned against the wall and seemed to contemplate.

  “Everything?” she asked.

  “I swear.”

  “You’ll answer any question I have with a complete answer, hold nothing back from me?”

  “Yes,” I told her.

  Tria huffed a breath out her nose. Yolanda glanced back at her and raised an eyebrow.

  “I’d be happy to just beat him unconscious,” she said.

  “It’s okay, Yolanda,” Tria answered with a sigh. “I’ll give him five minutes.”

  Yolanda looked back at me and then over at Tria. Tria turned around and went back into the guest bedroom, and Yolanda let me past the doorway. As I went by, she grabbed my arm and dug her fingers into my skin.

  “I’m not giving you another chance,” Yolanda said definitively. “I don’t think she should, either. You and I are done. Is that clear?”

  I nodded and swallowed past the lump in my throat. I knew there were a lot more implications to her words than just having to find another trainer, but I was going to have to think about that later. Nothing else was going to matter if Tria wouldn’t hear me out.

  I walked through the living room of Yolanda’s apartment and down the short hallway to her guest room. I remembered the room well—I had lived in it for a couple of weeks when I was getting clean. The furniture and stuff looked pretty much the same though she had painted the walls from blue to green.

  With her hands resting on her thighs, Tria sat in a faded wingback chair next to the window. She twisted her fingers around the little ties that held the robe together. Now that I could see her in better light, she looked different, but I didn’t really understand how that could be when I had seen her just a couple of weeks ago. She did, though. Her face was pale, seemed heavy, and I was pretty sure she had been crying recently.

  Taking a step forward, I brought myself fully into the bedroom. Tria obviously knew I was there, but she didn’t look up at me. She kept her eyes trained on her hands in her lap and sat as still as a statue.

  “Tria…” My voice was nothing more than a heated whisper.

  “I don’t have anything to say to you,” she informed me. “Either tell me what happened that made you act this way or leave.”

  I cringed at her tone as much as her words. She’d been angry with me before, and I knew what she sounded like then. The way she spoke now was completely different, and it felt like getting kicked in the face repeatedly.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said quietly. “It’s going to take longer than five minutes, though.”

  She looked at me, narrowed her eyes, and stared.

  “You know what, Liam?” she finally replied. “Forget it. I just don’t give a shit anymore. Just get out. I have other things to think about
now, and I don’t have time for an overgrown child who can’t deal with himself. I’m going to have an actual child soon enough—one that needs me.”

  I need you.

  “You’re definitely going to…to have it?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes further.

  “Yes.”

  My body went cold, and I dropped my gaze to the floor and squeezed my eyes shut for a moment.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you,” I told her.

  “It’s not your concern anymore.”

  “Please,” I asked as I looked back to her. “I’m just…I’m scared, Tria. I’m fucking terrified of this.”

  “You afraid the baby is going to interrupt your lifestyle?” she snarled.

  I just shook my head, unable to say anything with any meaning or worth. I could taste bile in the back of my throat, but I couldn’t let myself fall apart now—I had to get through to her first. She was young and naïve, just like I had been before. She didn’t realize what could happen.

  “Can I tell you?” I asked. “I just…I should tell you first.”

  “You should have told me months ago!” she cried out, and her hand reached up to wipe away tears.

  “I know. I should have told you in the beginning, but I’ve never really told anyone except Yolanda, and she quite literally beat it out of me.”

  “I know how she felt,” Tria muttered. She tightened her fingers around the edge of the robe.

  “You can hit me if you want,” I told her.

  She tilted her head enough to look up at me and scowled.

  “No, I really don’t, Liam,” she said. “I just want to move on.”

  My gut felt like she had hit me anyway. Of course she didn’t want to do that; it wasn’t her style at all, which was her point. It was just another way she was so much better than me.

  “Will you listen?” I asked.

  “Go ahead,” she responded with a slight wave of her hand. “At this point I might as well at least hear it.”

  “I…” I stopped, not sure how I was supposed to start this now that the time was here. I cleared my throat and tried again. “You see…”

  I faltered, and Tria just crossed her arms and looked at me.

  I have to do this, I told myself. If I don’t do this, there’s no chance—none.

  Shuffling back and forth on my feet, I tried to figure out where the best starting point might be. There really wasn’t one, so I figured the very beginning was as good as anything.

  “When I was in high school,” I started, and then paused almost immediately, wondering how stupid I sounded.

  “Go on,” Tria said. “I’m not going to let this drag on forever. Stop stalling.”

  “I’m not!”

  She glared at me, and I tried to remind myself that her anger was definitely justified.

  “This isn’t easy,” I told her. “Outside of the people who were there, Yolanda’s the only other person who knows anything about any of this.”

  “I can’t stand any more excuses from you,” she said as she shook her head back and forth. “Everything has changed now, and I have to grow up and stop playing around. Someone is counting on me, and I seem to be the only one in this room who realizes that.”

  “I do…I realize…”

  “Bullshit! You just want to take care of it, you son of a bitch.”

  Her voice cracked, and she turned her head away from me as she wiped more tears from her face.

  “I’m…I’m sorry, Tria…I didn’t mean…I’m just…”

  “Yeah, you’re scared. I get it. Fatherhood would suck.”

  “No!” I yelled back. I clenched my hands into fists and felt as if a huge hole in my chest had just been ripped open. “That isn’t it at all! You just have to let me…let me tell you!”

  She turned her eyes back to me—hard, glaring, and full of animosity I had never seen in them before.

  “Do it, then!”

  My knees felt weak, so I dropped down to the floor in the middle of the room. I knelt down and rubbed my sweaty palms on the legs of my jeans. With one gigantic breath, I began to tell her.

  “It was…um…my junior year,” I said. “In the second semester, a new girl started. It was one of those special schools, um…magnet schools or whatever they call them. One that was supposed to be for the brightest kids around, but it’s really for the rich ones. Every once in a while, they had to pick someone for a scholarship, ya know? Um…well…Aimee won the scholarship.”

  Tria leaned back in the chair a little but said nothing, so I went on.

  “She was really smart,” I said, remembering. “She deserved to be there more than the other girls did, I’m sure. She got picked on a lot for being from the part of town the rest of us wouldn’t have been caught dead in. She and her mom lived in a trailer park on the southwest side of town. It’s a little better than the area we…I live in, but not by a lot. Her dad was never in the picture, so it was just her and her mom. People gave her a lot of shit, but she just took it in stride.”

  “We started going out just a month or so after she started going to my school. We went to prom together, all the weekend parties, studied together and all of that. She was…she was so different from all the other girls there. She was real. She was genuine. I never felt like I had to remind her who my father was so she’d remember her parents would be okay with her going out with me. She was more like you.”

  I glanced at Tria, but her expression was unreadable. It was no longer a death-glare, so I took that as progress. I licked my lips a couple of times, swallowed hard, and continued.

  “Of course, my parents weren’t too happy about the whole thing. There was a girl I had been seeing the year before who was the daughter of one of Dad’s lawyers. We broke up, which didn’t go over well in general, but when I brought Aimee home, and they figured out where she was from…well, they weren’t pleased. They put up with it, but I knew they were ticked. They were probably just hoping it was a phase that would pass.”

  “It wasn’t, though. We…um…we got serious. She was the first…you know?”

  Like an idiot, I looked up at Tria again as she raised an eyebrow.

  “Um…yeah,” I stammered. “Sorry.”

  I ran my hand through my hair and tried to go on.

  “We were kids…stupid,” I told her. “I used a condom most of the time, but…well…not always. She got pregnant during the summer before our senior year.”

  Tria’s eyes widened and her hand went up to cover her mouth.

  “You already have a child,” she whispered.

  Pins and needles crept up my legs as my body tensed. At first, I couldn’t answer, and I watched a tear come to the corner of Tria’s eye and spill over her cheek.

  “No,” I told her. “Um…give me a sec.”

  I rubbed at my own eyes and then followed my fingers with my gaze as I dropped my hands to rest on my legs. I gripped my knees a little.

  “I freaked out when she told me,” I admitted, “but my reaction was probably a fairly normal one given the circumstances. We were young and scared. I knew my parents were going to be pissed and that the conversation was going to suck, but I also knew I had enough money to take care of her and still get us both through college. I figured we’d move into my parents’ house and hire a nanny so we could finish high school and then go to Hoffman so we’d be close to home and the baby and whatever. It wasn’t where I planned to go—Dad had already made sure I was set up to study at Harvard Business School—but it would still work out. I mean, I already had a job and a career lined up for me.”

  “Once we talked about all of that, we both felt a lot better. Aimee had grown up with nothing, and it hadn’t even occurred to her that with the money I had, we would be able to completely support ourselves and the baby while we got our lives together. She only knew what it was like for her cousin who got pregnant and married young. The father of her baby turned out to be a real asshole and eventually left her with nothing—no
money, no education. I think knowing she’d still be able to finish high school and go to college is what really helped her.”

  I took a long slow breath in, then let it out just a slowly.

  “We decided to tell my parents first,” I said. “I knew they weren’t going to be happy, but the reaction they had—especially my father—was far more callous than what I thought it would be. He flipped—I mean really, really flipped. He called Aimee every name in the book and claimed she was nothing more than a money-grubbing whore who had let this happen on purpose.”

  I had to stop a second, pressing my fists tightly against my thighs as I tried to hold my shit together.

  “What about your mom?” Tria asked quietly.

  “She just cried,” I said. “She didn’t do anything but take his side. When I tried to get her to defend me, she just turned away.”

  I rubbed at my temple for a second, trying to drive away the throbbing in my head. Even though I had no intentions of seeking it out, my body was definitely letting me know it wanted more junk.

  “Dad said we’d get nothing,” I went on. “No money, no support. He said he would only pay for an abortion, but we had already talked about it for so long, she was already thinking of it as her child—our baby. She didn’t want to do that.”

  Tria’s eyes softened a little for the girl in my past she would never meet. Maybe I had never paid attention before or just never noticed how much like Tria it was to do that—have sympathy for a girl in my past—but now it made me feel warm to know how inherently good she was. I wondered if there was anything she could possibly say about Keith that would make me sympathize with him and decided there wasn’t.

  It was one of the hundred ways she was an amazing, incredible woman.

  “Aimee went from accepting what was happening to panicking about the whole thing. After my parents reacted the way they did, she wouldn’t tell her mom at all. For the next couple of months, she hid the pregnancy while I tried to convince my parents to reconsider. We both thought that if my parents would help us, her mom wouldn’t freak out about it so much.”

  Another deep breath.

  “My father wouldn’t budge,” I said. “Mom wouldn’t go against him and just kept saying how disappointed she was that we hadn’t been careful. Eventually I had it out with Dad and told him we were going to have the baby, and he was going to have to live with that. We had a big fight, and as I was leaving, he told me not to come back, so I didn’t.”