Ripped

A rush of emotion sweeps through me when he shuts the door and just stands there, looking at me with those greedy silver eyes that want to eat me up, inch by inch. Rivulets of sweat drip down his chest. He’s wearing a pair of white jeans with a silver belt—looking very much the rockstar. His wrist is covered in thick cuffs, and the silver ring on his thumb glints in the light. A visceral tug jerks me on the inside as I think of how much I want to feel that silver ring brush against me. My chin, lips, my nipples, my sex. God, yeah—why stop at my lips when I can feel it trail deliciously everywhere?

“You came.” The gruff tone makes my skin pebble.

He takes the first step toward me, but I raise my hand to stop him and blurt out, “Kenna, we can’t have a future if you don’t . . . if you don’t really know who I am. What I did. When you left me.”

He laughs softly and drags his hand over his delicious buzz cut in a way that drives me crazy. “I made a mistake too, Pandora,” he tells me, his eyes shining with regret as he takes in the visual of me like I’m some sort of vision he can barely believe. He spreads his arms out. “Baby, we were young, and that’s all right, we know better now. We won’t hurt each other anymore. I had no future, nothing to offer you, I still shouldn’t have walked away, no matter what you said . . .”

“You! You had you to offer me, Kenna.”

He stares as I extend my hand to show him the ring he gave me. I’m wearing it, proudly, on my finger. And don’t I wish that I could be just as proud of my words.

“I know what my mother did,” I painfully whisper. “I didn’t then, but I do now.”

He stares more, eyebrows pulling low over his eyes.

“Mackenna,” I say, my voice turning huskier and darker, “everything you think you know about me, everything you could possibly feel, it could go away right now.”

A flash of wild grief grips me as I pause for breath and he murmurs, “The way I feel isn’t going anywhere. It’s not changing. It’s not ending. It’s . . .”

“Kenna, I suck. I suck—”

“Whoa, baby.” He stops me with an incredulous laugh. “Call me any names you want, but I’ll be damned if I let you sit there and insult my girl like that—”

“I was pregnant, Kenna.”

The words drop on him like a bomb.

I can’t go on for a moment, a spurt of anxiety seizing me. I measure him for a moment—how still he is.

“When you left, I was pregnant,” I force myself to finish.

The shock holds him immobile, while the pain quietly cracks me open. This is my box. The box of bad things Pandora should never open. Here it is, every last part tearing out of my soul so that the one person I want to love and accept me will know.

“What the fuck are you saying, Pandora?” His voice is distant already. It’s one hundred percent disbelief.

Oh, the look on his handsome face. I will remember it every day to my death. The morphing of his eyes from silver to shocked gray. The lines of his perfect features freezing in disbelief.

It takes every ounce of courage in me to breathe out the rest. “We have a little girl.”

He keeps standing an inch away, his chest not expanding at all, not even for air.

“She’s a little younger than Magnolia. It was a closed adoption.” I can barely look at him, watch his eyebrows slant, his lips thin, his jaw clamp. “I gave her up, Kenna,” I choke out, the hardest five words I’ve ever had to utter in my life.

He hasn’t breathed. Or moved. Nothing. I’m hugging myself just to keep my body from falling apart.

“It kills me not to know . . . ,” I continue in this wretched whisper. “I don’t know if she has your eyes or mine. I don’t know if she’s happy. If she belongs . . . or not. But I know I needed you with me. I needed you to take us away. I didn’t want to be weak and give her up, but I couldn’t do it. Mother said I couldn’t do it. And I was frightened, and I felt betrayed, and so I gave her up . . . like I thought you’d given up on me.”

I can’t look at him. He’s too still, too silent, curling his fingers into his palms at his sides, his knuckles white.

His lack of reply frightens me.

He will never, ever love you again, Pandora . . .

Never call you “baby” again, or “Pink,” as if that’s your name and despite your darkness, you own it . . .

“That’s why I switched schools,” I continue. I scrape my nails over my arms, up and down, up and down. “And met my new friends. Melanie and Brooke, and Kyle.”

He’s staring at me like I’ve just ripped his heart out, for real.

And I’m about to cry for the first time in six years.

“I was going to abort. I had nothing to offer her on my own.” On some level I knew, somehow I knew, once I talked about this to someone, to him, it was going to burst out of me, and now it’s like squeezing the toothpaste out of a tube—you cannot put it back. And like the toothpaste, my confession is oozing out of me nonstop. “But I was underage, and the clinic contacted my mother. That’s how she found out that I was pregnant. And even if what my mother did to keep us apart was wrong . . . using your father against you . . . she’s not evil. She’d just lost my father and she was consumed with worry over losing me too. She wanted me to have the baby. She said there were parents out there, better parents, who could give our baby a better chance. So I said yes, but . . .”

I clutch my stomach.

“But I didn’t know I’d grow so attached to her in those nine months. She was a part of you and I loved her for it, but it hurt having her inside me too because you left Seattle without me.” I glance away and then back at him, keeping my eyes in the vicinity of his throat, where I see his pulse pounding hard and violently.

“I signed a form to say that I wouldn’t try to find her, but I know she’s out there. We will never know if she’s bullied or has friends, or if she knows who she is. Never know if she has a good mother, because no matter how good they might have looked on paper, what if she didn’t get a good mother? She was probably better than me, but I still . . .” I lift my eyes to his, and I think the hurt, impotence, and pain in them mirror the way I feel. “I wonder if she fits. Maybe she’s grumpy, like me, and people don’t understand her. Or maybe she’s restless, like you. Or she could be beautiful and musical and fun, like you.”

Okay, I can’t keep going, but when I stop all I hear is Mackenna’s voice, cracking as he speaks.

“Pink,” he says, then he clears his throat and shakes his head, falling silent for a long moment, dropping his head as he breathes, in and out, in and out. “Your mother came to me—”

“Kenna, I know,” I admit, taking a step toward him. “I owe you an apology.”

“No, Pink. I owe you six fucking years. I owe you being there for you and for her—”

“No, I waited too long to tell you, and then you were . . . gone. And you were famous. You were making your dreams come true, and I couldn’t tell you anymore. If you didn’t want me, I was sure you wouldn’t want her.”

“Baby, I would’ve come to you. I fucking loved you.” He pulls me into his arms, and I feel how hard he’s shaking, how much my news has rocked him. I tighten my arms around his waist and kiss his thick neck, and all I can do is kiss it again, and again, as he stands there holding me, his emotions barely contained in his taut, straining body. “We have a daughter,” he whispers almost reverently in my ear.

“We lost a daughter,” I whisper, hanging my head in shame.

He catches my chin and lifts my face to his.

“We made a daughter,” he corrects.

There’s a spike in my very throat, but I manage to speak through it. “Yes.”

Clouds suddenly darken his eyes. “My girls needed me . . . but I wasn’t there. I was hurting. A rebel, unwanted, writing a stupid song about how much I loathed your kiss.” He rubs my lips with that silver ring that I crave so much, and my whole body shivers. “When really, your kiss was all I wanted. One more kiss from you. For these lips to tell me their owner loved me.”

“We can’t see her . . . can’t talk to her. You have no idea how much I regret it.”

“We will talk to her,” he assures me with steely finality, his ring still skimming over my chin and my neck. “I’ll find a way for us to talk to her.”

Love flows through me. For years I haven’t dared even hope . . . but now I can’t help feel anything but hope. “You don’t hate me?” I hesitate for a second but can’t stop my hands from sliding up the back of his neck to his head.

He laughs bitterly, biting his lip uncertainly for a moment before lifting his gaze to mine. “I’ve hated you, your mother, my father, being apart from you . . . I’ve hated all that I could for as long as I could, but I’m fresh out of hate, Pink.” He’s still biting his lip, his eyes a mix of regret and, above all, acceptance. “I love you,” he whispers. “So we screwed up. We screwed up big. Holy shit, but I don’t want to screw up again. Do you?”