Shatter (True Believers #4)(28)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Jonathon just nodded. “Okay. Just checking. I should head out.” He kissed my forehead. “Talk to you soon.”

A second later he was gone, like we hadn’t been in the middle of having sex fifteen minutes ago before Nathan’s interruption. I stood there, blinking. He’d actually forgotten his iPad. It was still sitting on the coffee table.

Tyler had a pained look on his face. “Well, that was awkward. I need a beer.”

“I need a lobotomy,” I told him, flinging myself down onto the couch.

Tyler laughed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have let Nathan in. He caught me off guard.”

Waving my hand, I said, “Don’t worry about it. This is all idiotic. Where is Rory, by the way?”

“The animal shelter.”

“That’s what I need, a dog. They make more sense than men.”

“Don’t slam my gender because of one dickhead. I seriously am going down to get a beer. Do you want anything?”

“Ice cream.” The thought of its creamy coldness made my mouth water.

“We don’t have any ice cream.”

“Figures.”

“Do you want me to go get you some?”

I hugged the throw pillow and felt sorry for myself. “Thanks, but that’s okay.” It would make me feel even more of a loser to have to borrow my friend’s boyfriend to get me ice cream. Granted, Tyler had been my friend even before he had started dating Rory, but still. Talk about feeling pathetic when he took so much pity on me he would hoof it in a foot of snow in January to pacify me with Rocky Road.

“All right, I’ll be in my room lifting weights if you need anything.”

“I thought you were getting a beer.”

“I am. I’m going to drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, and lift weights.”

“Sounds healthy.”

“It’s a lifestyle, babe. Oh, and just an FYI, even though you’re sleeping on the couch, this isn’t a bedroom. There’s no door and sound carries, if you know what I’m saying.”

Excellent. So he had heard me having an orgasm. “Sorry.”

“Hey, pregnant chicks need love, too, but I don’t want to hear it.” He gave me a grin, then jogged down the stairs.

I stared at the ceiling, a blanket pulled up to my chin.

I was mad at myself for doing it again. Not for starting to have sex with Jonathon. That I couldn’t be upset about, except for the fact that we had been prevented from finishing. No, I was mad at myself for another reason. For hoping. For that little seed of hope that had taken root again, and I couldn’t seem to choke out. This was when being a glass-half-full person just set me up for disappointment. I couldn’t hope that Jonathon would want something, anything, with me.

I needed to be like him and realize that while the glass might be half full of liquid, the rest was vapor. I couldn’t see it, touch it, feel it, smell it, hold it.

It wasn’t mine.

CHAPTER NINE

“So what is going on?” my father asked. “Why are you so distracted? I’ve never seen you have this lack of focus.”

That was almost a compliment coming from the stingy Professor Kadisch. He was actually giving me credit for generally having focus. I had gone to his office to talk to him. To disappoint him, truthfully. “I’m not pursuing the PhD.”

“What? Why the hell not?” He pushed his glasses up. I really thought my nearsightedness and my penchant for science were the only traits I had inherited from him, though I suppose the intelligence factor was nothing to bitch about. Otherwise, though, he was impatient, tactless, and selfish and I sincerely tried to be none of those. He was shorter than me, with a more prominent nose, and sometimes the way he looked at his attractive undergrad students was just a shade too appreciative and made me uncomfortable. I seriously thought he was a man who spent way too much time in his own head, the lab, or on his computer.

There was a lesson there.

“Because it’s time to get a job. I have responsibilities and I need a legitimate income.”

He scoffed at me from behind his desk. His office was neat, stark. There were no family photos or anything like that. Those things didn’t interest him. “What responsibilities? Alcohol and strip clubs?”

Which proved yet again he had no basic understanding of me. “Dad, I drink occasionally and I have never been in a strip club and I have no desire to.”

“So then what? You buying a car? Renting a bigger apartment?”

“It turns out I’m going to be a father in a few months. I need to help support him or her.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Are you shitting me? Well, hell. Can’t she get an abortion?”

I wondered if he had asked my mother that. Most likely, yes. More than once. “She wants to keep it.”

He sighed. “So what does that have to do with you, really? If you’re in school, the court can’t mandate you pay her more than a fair wage out of what you’re earning from your part-time job, and I doubt they can touch your research grant once you acquire it. You’ll just have to tighten your belt a little.”

“That’s not exactly fair to her. I’d be giving her like two hundred bucks a month, if that.”

“So? It’s not fair that you don’t have a choice in what she does with it.”

I had known this conversation was going to be hard, but slowly anger was starting to simmer. I had a whole new appreciation for my mother as I pictured her as a scared nineteen-year-old having virtually this same conversation with my father and him being a callous dickhead then just like he was now. My mom deserved a huge thank-you and maybe some flowers because not only had she forged ahead and raised me on her own, she had done a damn good job. I was proud to be her son and proud that when Kylie had confronted me with the same scenario, my reaction had been different.

“Dad, I was there when she got pregnant. It’s my responsibility. I can’t stiff her the way you stiffed Mom, sorry.”

Now his shoulders went up. “Hey. I did my duty. I paid your mother every month.”

“You gave her a lousy fifty bucks a paycheck until I was five years old! And you never bothered to see me, not once, until I was seventeen.” I had thought I was over all this shit, but suddenly it felt I was choking on my resentment.

“That’s when you got interesting.”

I stood up, throat tight. “You know, my mother discouraged me from coming to college here, even though it was free, and sending me somewhere else would have meant she would have to take loans to pay for it. But I couldn’t figure out why I shouldn’t take advantage of the free education because of your tenure position and the scholarship and why I shouldn’t try to get to know you. She told me that sometimes it was better to just leave things alone and that maybe I wasn’t meant to have a relationship with you because of how busy you are. I have no idea now how she managed to keep her mouth shut and not call you an ass**le to my face like she had every right to.”