And now I’ve said too much.
I press my lips together, hard, willing myself not to continue.
But, shit, it’s been too long. I’ve been keeping this a secret for too long. All this time and even my mother doesn’t know that I had the abortion. Only Everly and Hannah do. I never got the chance to tell Anders, and I told myself I wouldn’t now because I didn’t want to bring up the past, didn’t want him to feel bad, didn’t want to mess up the precious time we had together.
But since he wants to push me away, well, I guess now is a good a time as any.
“I was pregnant,” I tell him, my voice sounding so small and faint in the room. “It was…it was yours.”
His eyes go wide, mouth dropping open slightly. He stares at me like the world was just pulled out from under him. “What…I don’t…when?”
I close my eyes, trying to gather my nerves, to give myself a spine of steel.
“I think it was the time in the pool. We didn’t use a condom. I found out I was pregnant a week before I found out that you cheated on me.”
Silence is a live-wire between us.
I open my eyes and dare to look at him. He’s staring up at me, brow furrowed, anguish flooding his features. “You never told me…why didn’t you tell me?”
I balk, blinking at him, hackles raised again. “Are you kidding me? Anders, you pushed me away. You wouldn’t return my texts, you wouldn’t even look at me in the halls. You think I was suddenly going to tell you I was pregnant? First of all, I had to make sure with the doctor, and then by the time I did know, I already knew you cheated on me. There was no reason to tell you. You had made your choice. You pushed me away, so I dealt with it on my own.”
“And how did you…deal with it?” he asks, voice low, breaking.
“I had an abortion,” I tell him matter-of-factly, and his face falls just a little, enough to make me defensive. “That was the only option I saw for me. I was scared out of my mind. I only had Hannah, and she had so much riding on her plate with school. I couldn’t raise a baby and keep it, nor have it and give it up for adoption. So I got an abortion because it was the only thing that made sense.”
“Do you regret it?” he whispers.
I bite my lip for a moment before shaking my head. “No. I’ve done a lot of soul searching over the years, and no. I don’t regret it. I wasn’t ready to be a mother. Hell, I don’t know if I ever will be, if that’s ever something I’ll even want. I don’t regret it because it was the right thing to do at the time. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. It doesn’t mean it’s something I was able to push to the side and forget about. I’ve made peace with it now, but for the longest time it weighed on me. I felt…ashamed. And guilty. And because I had no one to really talk to about it, because I was so young and confused, it was just something I had to keep buried inside.”
He stares at me, eyes trailing over every inch of my face, the pain visible in the storm. “You know I would have…I would have been there for you. If you wanted to keep it.”
I give him a sharp look. “That doesn’t help, Anders. What’s done is done.”
“No, I mean,” he says, grappling for the words, “I just want you to know that I wasn’t entirely awful. I know you don’t believe it, but I would have stepped up. I would have tried. I wouldn’t have left you, I would have stayed in New York, we could have made it work. Maybe I could have gotten a job somewhere, my own place…”
He trails off, looking strangely hopeful, as if this is something he can go back in time and fix. But there is no fixing this. There never was.
“You say that now, because you know who you are now. You were a teenager, Anders, and as you’ve said many times before, you were fucked up. We both were. You can’t predict now what you would have done then. It’s not fair to either version of you.”
“Shay,” he whispers, voice shaking slightly as he breathes in deeply. “This is breaking my heart. That you had to go through all of that on your own. All because of me.” He exhales loudly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. I’m sorry it had to come to that. And as angry as I was, it was my fault too. It takes two in this situation. I should have known better.”
“I wish…I wish I had known.” He looks down at his hands, wringing them together. “I know why you didn’t tell me, but even so…”
“Well, now you do know.”
“No wonder you hated me so much,” he says quietly. There’s so much simmering pain in his voice that it’s a little punch to my heart. “I was awful. I was so fucking awful to you.”
The steel walls I tried to put up inside me bend, just a little.
I sit down next to him and put my hand on top of his. The feel of his skin against mine both calms me and makes me sad, because I’m worried that we won’t have any of these moments left anymore. “As I said, what’s done is done. Those people that we were? They’re done too. They’ve moved on. They’ve moved on and they’ve become us. This us.” I gesture at us with my other hand.
“And then what does this mean for this us?”
“It means the same as you said,” I say, tears starting to burn hot behind my eyes. “It means that soon I’ll get on a ferry heading south,
