“No,” Cherry says, too fast. “No, they threatened me. They knew where my sister lived. They sent pictures of her job, her car, her kid’s school. I didn’t have a fucking choice.”
“Everybody’s got a choice,” Shady says.
His voice is quiet.
The room shifts toward him.
Cherry breaks at the sound. Her hands fly to her mouth, and fresh tears spill down her face.
“You didn’t answer me.”
That confession drops into the room like a dirty glass.
Shady finally looks at her.
There is nothing warm in his eyes.
Cherry folds in on herself, but she keeps talking, like pain is a faucet she can’t turn off. “You didn’t answer. You let me think, Shady. You let me think maybe she was just another girl. You let me think I still had somewhere to go.”
“I never promised you a place,” Shady says.
Cherry’s mouth trembles.
“Didn’t you?”
The room changes.
Not loud.
Worse.
Every man in it goes still because Cherry says it like she isn’t talking about a bed anymore. She says it like she is dragging a body into the light.
“You found me on the bathroom floor,” she whispers. “You remember that?”
Shady’s face doesn’t change.
His hand falls from the chair.
Cherry looks at him like the whole room has disappeared and left only the wound. “Everybody else was outside drinking. I was bleeding through a towel, scared out of my mind, and you picked me up. You wrapped me in your hoodie. You took me to the clinic because I was too scared to go alone.”
My stomach drops.
Diablo goes completely still beside me.
Cherry’s voice cracks. “You sat there while I lost your baby.”
Silence.
Awful, ugly silence.
Not a clubhouse girl inventing promises out of kindness. Not a jealous woman turning a flirtation into a love story. Not an almost.
A baby.
Shady’s baby.
My eyes go to him before I can stop myself.