Shatter (True Believers #4)(58)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Kylie grabbed at me until I either had to drop the phone or push her aside, which I wasn’t going to do. She triumphed in gaining her phone, then turned, tossing her hair over her shoulder. She was heading for the door.

Shit. Shit. And shit.

“Come on, don’t leave like this!” I was starting to panic. She wasn’t really going to just walk out. It was eleven at night and it was March. The temperature was thirty degrees out and there was snow sludge that had been melting during the day, but very possibly could be refreezing now, rendering the sidewalks slick. “There is no way I’m letting you walk home.”

She rounded on me. “You are not my father, okay? You may think I’m an idiot and you may think that I need your big brain to take care of me, but I managed to survive until twenty-one years old without your handling of me, so just go suck it.”

I wasn’t even sure what the hell to say to that. She completely caught me off guard. Her father? She thought I acted like her father?

“I’m not letting you walk home alone at night,” I insisted, ignoring all that other shit.

“Devon can drive me home.”

“What?” Both Devon and I recoiled. “I’ll drive you home!”

“No. Devon can do it as an apology.” Kylie was stuffing her feet into her boots.

“But if he can as an apology, why can’t I?” There was no logic to that.

“Don’t get all f**king logical on me!” she shrieked. “I’m furious with you. So unless you want me to walk, Devon is driving me.”

Oh my God, and then some. Jesus. Since I didn’t want her walking alone, I would bow to her wishes. Now. But then we were going to have a conversation about this and she was going to understand that I hadn’t meant to insult her. I had just been totally caught off guard by my father’s nastiness.

And just what was she doing trying to create some sort of sting operation all on her own? What the hell?

“Fine. Devon, drive her home.”

“But . . .”

“Drive her home!” I paced back and forth, completely pissed off. I scratched at my new tattoo, the numbers indicating the date I’d met her, the same date we had conceived the baby we’d lost, on my forearm, where I could always see them.

It was healing and it was itchy.

“Fine.” Devon made a face but he went for his car keys and his shoes. “This wasn’t my fault. I just want to confirm that everyone knows that.”

“Stop being a selfish douche bag for about two seconds,” was all I could manage to say to him. “Kylie, baby, are you sure you don’t want to stay? Let’s talk this through.”

“What’s there to say? I’m stupid and I’m going home. If you follow me, I will never speak to you ever again.”

That left me so many options. Not.

So I just threw my hands up and sat back down at the kitchen table to grind my teeth and twitch.

The minute they left I called my father and told him precisely what I thought of him. I finished it with, “If you ever even look at Kylie again, I swear, I will rip your f**king nuts off and stuff them down your throat.”

It seemed even I was capable of rage when the woman I loved was a target.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Stupid. The word just echoed in my head. I knew I was overreacting. I knew that Jonathon didn’t mean to insult me but it was just that word that made me crazy. Especially since I had been starting to suspect Jonathon was right. It was stupid to be messing around with trying to get his father to put something suggestive in a text. It had made me feel nauseous, deceptive, and violated in some way. It made me feel like even though I was doing it for the right reasons, I was a participant, a flirt.

Doing something wrong.

Which I was, by keeping it a secret.

There was nothing deceptive about my personality and I was lying, plain and simple. It made me feel super uncomfortable. So what do you do when you know you’re wrong? You get defensive.

But I was telling the truth about Jonathon treating me like a kid. He did that. I was not okay with it.

“This is it,” Devon said, unlocking his car on the street.

I got in the passenger side, and slammed the door shut behind me, shivering in Jonathon’s shorts, sweatshirt, and my fuzzy boots. Spring hadn’t arrived yet. “I live on McMillan. That way.”

I pointed, still annoyed with Devon for calling me an idiot.

“Look, I’m sorry about what I said. That was rude.”

“You’re right. It was.” Sorry, but I wasn’t feeling generous.

“But you know, Jonathon’s father is going to get fired if this comes out. There will be a huge scandal. You probably should have mentioned your concerns to him.”

He was right. “I wasn’t trying to cause a scandal. I was trying to prevent Professor Kadisch from doing this to someone else. Someone who would be afraid to speak out. But I honestly didn’t think he would get this creepy.” And I knew what happened to girls who spoke up without proof. They got dragged through the mud. “I didn’t think anyone would believe me without something in writing.”

“Well, you are right about that. Sad, but true.”

“That’s my building.” I gestured to the right. My shitty, sucky apartment building that was going to feel empty and dark without Jonathon in it with me. I sighed.

“You know he’s a good guy, right? I mean, you’re just pissed right now and you’ll work all this out.”

Tears filled my eyes. “To be totally honest with you, I am starting to think that Jonathon and I keep trying to force our relationship to work when we were never meant to be together in the first place. My stupidity and a cheating ex-boyfriend are the reason we hooked up, you know.”

“Don’t discount attraction and affection.”

“Affection? Yes, he has affection for me. Sort of like you do with your Yorkie.” I opened the door and climbed out. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Sure. Kylie, listen . . .”

But I was already slamming the door shut. When I had gone to the coffee shop and told Jonathon I was pregnant, I had also told him that I wasn’t stupid, that I didn’t expect him to fall in love with me and marry me. But somewhere along the way, I had expected exactly that. Sometimes I was optimistic and sometimes that moved straight on into unrealistic.

It hadn’t been fair to him.

I was still doing it.

I hadn’t even gone to the doctor to get birth control, the one thing he had been asking me to do. Even after hearing Riley and Jessica say it was a reasonable expectation on his part.