A Shot in the Dark

by L. J. Stock

  I shook my head as I forced the tears back. I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to be the strong one and face up to what I’d done. I owed it to Dustin to be the one that held it all together and answer all of the questions he asked and give him every bit of truth I had left in me. This might have been the only time I’d lied to him, but it was the biggest lie I could have ever fed him. That was on me.

  “It kills me that you went through all of this alone – all of that fear, all the worry, all the panic and the financial shit. You did all of that on your own when I would have been right there with you if I’d just known.”

  Lifting a hand, I cupped his cheek and took a deep, steadying breath. “Don’t you see though, baby? That’s exactly why I couldn’t tell you. You would have stayed here or dragged me to college with you. You wouldn’t have given your future or your academics the attention they needed. You would have been too focused on me and the baby, and in five, maybe ten years down the line you’d have resented me for it.”

  “Wasn’t that my choice to make?”

  “Of course it was, but—”

  “There is no but here,” he ground out, his palm slapping against the bed in frustration. “You took my choices away from me.”

  The pain in my chest was immediate, and the agony twisted and constricted until I felt like I was choking on the oxygen I was gulping in. I had taken his choice away from him, but that had been done out of love. For all I had rehearsed what I was going to say in my defense, every word left my brain and was replaced by the reality of what I had actually done. All of those moments like the first kick, the first craving, and the other weird shit that came with pregnancy, the scans and the sound of the wet thudding heartbeats… I’d taken all of that away from him. He’d needed to live his life and see what his future held, but that should have been his decision.

  “Why, Mik?” he asked earnestly. “I love you so fucking much. You have to know I wanted to be here.”

  I must have started talking four different times and stopped myself, leaving my mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water before I finally found my voice again. “Because I love you enough to let you taste what your life should be. I love you enough that you can look at these past months and know exactly what your future could look like. I needed you to know what you would be sacrificing when I did tell you about the baby. I saw that pregnancy test and my life with my dad flashed before my eyes, all of that pain and hate because he and my mom had been irresponsible. I didn’t want you to resent our daughter or me like he resents me. Like he blames me. I never want our child to think she isn’t loved or wanted. She may be an accident, but she was made out of love. I want her to feel that.”

  “Daughter?” he choked out emotionally, tears filling his eyes and glistening in the dull light. Rocking forward, he pushed his forehead against mine and gave a watery laugh. “We’re having a girl?”

  I merely nodded in response, so overwhelmed by my reaction to his emotions I couldn’t find the words I needed to respond properly. Any lame attempt at an answer I could come up with became lodged in my throat the moment Dustin dropped his head into my lap and cried. I left him alone because no words of wisdom or comfort came to me, and chose instead to run my fingers through his hair as he bled emotionally, while I let my own gather and fall silently in the shadow of his.

  I knew now that I’d been wrong to keep this from him, and that became even clearer when he eventually lifted his head and caught my eyes with his. There was a mixture of anger, understanding, and love in his gaze. He hadn’t forgiven me—he probably wouldn’t for a while—but that didn’t mean he didn’t love me, or he wouldn’t support me. That wasn’t who Dustin was. The realization that he would never be like my dad came only a moment before he spoke to me again.

  “I’m not your dad, Mik.” He released one of my hands and smoothed down my hair with the other, hooking his fingers behind my neck so I couldn’t escape his soul-penetrating gaze. “I never gave you any reason to think I was, but that’s not to say I don’t understand.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but he kept talking.

  “After everything we’ve been through, you should know I wouldn’t give up on my dreams or you that easily. You,” he said then looked down at my swollen stomach. “Our daughter… that’s just going to make me try harder to succeed because I want to make you both proud of me.”

  “Too late,” I mumbled, finally letting out a sob. “We’re already proud of you.”

  “I love you, Mikayla Quinten, and I always will. Come back to College Station with me after Thanksgiving. Let me look after you both. We’ll make this work. You’ve more than made your point now. All I’ve learned is that life without seeing you every day ain’t much of a life at all.”

  I didn’t have to think much about my response. I was on my knees, my lips crashing into his before I could form a verbal response. I’d been miserable being apart from him. I’d been sick about lying to him about the baby, and anxious about his reaction to discovering the truth, and here he was making me look like a fool because he was a better man than even I’d known, and he’d been pretty amazing to begin with.

  “I love you, too,” I said against his lips as one of his hands moved to my stomach and stroked in wonder. “I love you so very much.”

  Dustin laughed gently and brushed my tangled hair over my shoulder, one hand cupping the side of my stomach with wonder in his eyes.

  “I want to—” His words cut out when the rage of a V8 engine growled from the highway just beyond our driveway. Dustin and I broke apart as the streak of light washed over my room and the two of us when it turned, followed by the sound of tires spinning on dirt announcing the driver. “Shit.”

  “Shit?” I asked squinting at the temporary blindness the lights had created.

  “That’s Rett… I think I said something when Libby… Christ, I should head him off before the shit really hits the fan. I’ll be back.” I had so many questions, but I could only assume Rett knew where I lived because of my father and the mess that went down between them. Pushing up from his place, Dustin headed to the window of my room, freezing only when he heard the deep growl of my father’s tone and the cock of a gun in the hall beyond my closed door.

  It was my turn to react. My blood turned cold in my veins as the slow rise of panic sped up the pounding of my heart until I could feel it in my throat. I was on my feet in seconds, my hands planted on Dustin’s back as I pushed him halfway out of the open window. Dustin wasn’t the only one who knew nothing about my pregnancy. My dad was just as oblivious. In fact, he wasn’t even aware of my weight gain. I hadn’t seen him since the summer. I’d avoided him by forcing my growing body in and out of the window. If he discovered the truth while Dustin was in my room with me, I wasn’t sure how he would react. I doubted he would care other than the fact I was about to make him a grandfather before he was forty.

  “Go. Get out of here now.”

  “But…”

  “Just go. You can’t be here if he comes in. He doesn’t know.”

  Dustin’s eyes widened and moved between my stomach and the bedroom door. He stepped away from my outstretched arms and turned to face the door while the stomping of my father passed by as he moved to the front of the house. Now was not the time for heroics.

  “No,” I hissed, shaking my head. “This won’t help a damn thing. If your brother tells him, he’s gonna come in here like a hound from Hell—all hot-headed and mad. You have to go. You will only make the situation worse.”

  “I can’t leave you here to deal with him alone.”

  “You can and you will,” I insisted, giving him another shove before doing the only thing I knew to do. “Please. Do this for me and get the hell out of here. I promise I will pack tonight and stay with the Hern’s until you’re ready to go back to college but don’t be the hero. Not tonight.”

  “What if…”

  “No time for that.” I gave him one last push as the panic made my hands trembl
e. “I love you more than you will ever know, Dustin Hill.”

  “Don’t bet on that. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I grinned, snuck in one last kiss as the key sounded in the lock to my door, and pushed him out of the window, sliding the panel back into place and spinning in time to meet my father’s enraged eyes as he threw the door open wide.

  “Jesus. It’s true!” He raised his hands to his face, the .38 special pressed to his temple and catching what little light there was in my room. The gun scared me, and I knew I had to stall him. I had to give Dustin time to get away.

  “Well, that’s a rather broad statement, Dad. What’s true?”

  His face went burgundy with rage. His eyes, normally so similar to mine, went narrow as they focused on my protruding stomach, which was now poking out between my shirt and shorts. There was no misinterpreting that. I tugged on the shirt, trying to cover up the most vulnerable part of myself while I swallowed compulsively. My throat dried when a look I’d never seen before passed over his face, showcasing his fury.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone,” I said with a calm I wasn’t feeling. I held up both hands in a gesture of peace. “This is between you and me, Dad. This has nothing to do with anyone else.”

  “You knocked yourself up then?” he ground out, one arm swinging limply in the direction of the baby bump.

  “That’s not what I mean, and we both know it.”

  My father laughed without humor, his body swinging violently as he lashed out and caught my tallboy, giving him more momentum as it crashed to the side, scattering every CD I owned over the wooden floors, and thrusting my heart rate up into the territory of absolute panic. I’d never seen him violent before. I’d never seen him this angry when I allowed my second to think about it. He’d just said more to me in one sentence than he had in five years. Stepping back in retreat, I found the window at my shoulders and trembled as the pane moved, and the breeze swept in around my legs.

  Dustin had come back.

  Maybe he’d never left, but my main concern was that he’d only make what was about to happen a hundred percent worse than it already was. I was pretty sure I could talk my dad down, but that would all go to hell if he laid eyes on Dustin.

  “Dad. Calm down,” I pleaded.

  “Calm down?” He spun away from me again, swinging his arm over my dresser and scattering the makeup and pictures over the floor, giving me time to wave Dustin away. “You want me to calm down? I find my teenage daughter is pregnant, and you want me to calm down?”

  My laughter surprised me. Of all the things I expected him to say, that hadn’t been it.

  For years he hadn’t cared whether or not I was coming or going. The only decent things he’d done had been on the back of Jennifer nagging him and threatening to call Child Protective Services and have me taken away. The real and true emotion that I was feeling was accompanied by my loathing, but those emotions didn’t calm the situation. They only escalated the craziness of this odd confrontation that had been years in the making. The bitterness that tainted the sound of my laughter had my dad’s hands balling at his sides and his body leaning closer to mine.

  “You choose now to parent?” I accused, throwing my hands up and tugging at the roots of hair at my temple. Gone was any modicum of calm or reason. Years of pain and anger were coalescing and surfacing to meet his. “You leave me alone for eight years to bring myself up, and suddenly your indignation and disappointment is supposed to cow me? You lost the right to parent the moment you chose a bottle and a whore over me... over Mom’s memory. You never fucking cared, you have no—”

  The last of my righteous speech was cut off as a blast of white-hot pain flashed across my cheek and flared into a fire. My hands flew to my face in surprise, but in the confusion, I hadn’t realized I’d been knocked off balance, and only had a moment to choose what I could protect as the floor rose to meet me. My hands flew to my stomach, and another explosion of pain spread from my temple as it met the upturned dresser and the pain bathed me in darkness.

  I can’t say exactly what happened next with any clarity. With the agony and my tenuous consciousness it all played out like stop animation, huge gaps missing pieces as my cognition faded in and out.

  One long blink and Dustin was standing in my bedroom, hands fisted at his sides, while things rained down around me like shrapnel.

  Warm hands gripped my cheeks, warm and comforting before they were ripped away in a growl of rage above us both.

  Then there was shouting. So much anger and hatred that the noise made the darkness rise around me.

  I was jolted awake by the deafening resonance of the gun going off still hanging in the air. I tried to focus my eyes, which were now filled with reds and pinks that I couldn’t blink free from, and my head was pounding out a rage of anger in my temples. All I could see through the fog were shapes. The light in the room had been smashed, and there was only a glow from the hall light outside of my room to stop all the shadows balling together in an amalgamation of black against gray. One figure fell to the floor, another bulldozed into the door cutting down the source of light. I blinked, trying to clear my vision again, and wished I hadn’t.

  The third man fought his way into the room and was kneeling with his back to me. He was hunched over, and in his arms, he held Dustin, whose eyes were open and glassy as they stared openly and at nothing, devoid of all the passion and life that had always been there in the past.

  My blood went cold.

  My head swam. Sickness washed over me with such violence I curled in on myself as the white-hot pain started in my chest and flashed out through the webbing of veins in my system, and as the darkness of overwhelming sorrow claimed me, I heard a bitter scream of torture and realized too late that it was my own.

  Chapter Twenty

  The pounding in my head was too much for me to take, and paired with the distant screams and wails from somewhere my mind couldn’t follow, I felt as though my brain was perpetually cracked open. Trying to raise my hands to press against my temples and ease the pressure, I found them tied down at my sides, immobilized.

  Only one of my eyes opened easily, and the blinding white light above me forced both closed again. The distant wails that sounded like they were at the other end of a long, metal tunnel weren’t going anywhere and made my chest ache painfully. A knife wound would have been less incapacitating.

  My brain was chugging along so slowly and with such effort that I’d forgotten everything, but the reprieve of lethargy was brief, and the reality crept in on me like a firecracker, forcing the fog in my brain back and releasing all of the horrible details of what had happened into the tentative consciousness I was holding onto. It flooded into my senses, my heart cracking and falling apart as a low moaning cry broke from my throat.

  “Get the doctor, now,” Jen’s voice snapped, and the wailing in the distance grew louder for a moment before the door clicked back into place. “Miki?”

  The pain stopped any words from forming on my lips, and the ache in my chest grew and wrapped around my heart, squeezing like a boa constrictor as my mind brought up the last image I’d seen in consciousness. The tears that gathered stung, as my arms pulled against the restraints around my wrists in a desperate attempt to escape. The straps cut into flesh, but the pain was lost on me. All of my agony was amalgamating in the center of my chest.

  “Let me go,” I growled, fighting the straps as my one eye finally focused on the binding at my wrists. My head felt too heavy as I lifted it off the bed and twisted to try and pull the strap apart with my teeth. “He needs me. I have to go.”

  “Miki, baby.”

  “No!” I screamed. “Don’t you say it.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “No.”

  Hot tracks of tears boiled their way over my cheeks, with flames following the same path as my body twisted and contorted in an attempt to escape the confines someone had put me in. The events of the night played on a loop, over a
nd over again and always ended with those dead eyes staring at me. I could feel myself kicking and struggling. I could feel the flesh of my wrists ripping even though the pain was in my chest and the images pulled me back from reality.

  “Miki.”

  “No.”

  “Baby, if you keep doing this they’re going to sedate you again. I know it hurts, but you have to breathe, you have to fight, the baby…”

  My body went limp as I thought about our daughter.

  All of the pain spread out and covered me like a blanket as the acceptance came with the body-shuddering sobs. Warm hands cupped my cheeks, warm lips brushed against my forehead, but all I felt was cold and empty.

  So very empty.

  “I’m so sorry, baby girl.”

  The comfort was undeserved, but I took it as I gave myself over to the agony of mourning and cried and wept. I was aware of Jen sending everyone away and untethering me from the straps as she crawled onto the bed and curled around me. I cried myself dry, my hands fisted at my sides while I sobbed and dry-heaved until exhaustion closed in and claimed me again. I had nothing left to give anyway. I had nothing left to offer. I couldn’t even process what my heart and head knew.

  The reality of what had happened was there at the tips of my fingers, just lingering at the edges ready to attack the moment I allowed it to, but I was lost to the image of him in death. Saturated myself in it until I was drowning.

  How did you live when the one thing you lived for had been taken from you?

  How did you breathe when you knew that every breath you took carried you away from the last one they themselves had taken?

  Whatever the answer was, I wasn’t ready to hear it or reason. So I gave myself over to the darkness again.

  Chapter Twenty-One