The Perfection of Love

by J. L. Monro

  “What are you talking about?” I was seriously confused.

  “You were dancing with that guy like he was a pole and you were a stripper. What the fuck?”

  “No I wasn’t. That’s just Derek. I know him from school. We’re friends and we were just dancing.”

  “Have you forgotten that you’ve got a boyfriend? Not only did you not tell me you were going out tonight with your slut friend and the other one who has no backbone to stick up for herself, but when I come to find you to see if you’re going to need a lift home, I find you practically fucking a guy on the dance floor.”

  Woah! Someone obviously was smoking some kind of funky shit tonight because I didn’t know where any of that came from. Well, in actual fact Saz went out with quite a few guys but she didn’t sleep with them all. Mills is just shy or as she likes to put it “selective with who she talks to” and I definitely was not dancing how he was suggesting.

  “Mitchell, you seriously need to chill the fuck out. I don’t need to tell you where I’m going and give you a daily itinerary and you don’t get to talk about my friends like that. I don’t know what planet you’ve hopped off but this not the nineteen fifties and I can do what the fuck….”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence because while I was getting into the full swing of my rant right back at Mitchell, he’d silently worked himself up as well and back handed me across my cheek. I didn’t see it coming and went down into the grass. Before I had a chance to recover he had his knee in my back and his fist in my hair. His knee knocked the wind out of my lungs and I couldn’t find the breath to scream.

  “Don’t you ever try to take the piss out of me, Dana. I will not be walked over. If you want to play games and fuck with me you’ll lose. You’ve just disgraced yourself in front of all those people. Now go get in the car.”

  I didn’t want to go anywhere with him but I most certainly didn’t want to be hit again. So I got up and while the tears fell down my cheeks I tried to straighten myself out and followed him to his car. He didn’t open the door for me this time and he didn’t talk to me once he started the car and pulled out the drive. He drove me home which was a relief. I got out the car and walked through my gate. Mitchell didn’t look in my direction and sped off, the wheels screeching as he tore down the road. I slipped inside the house and crept up to my room. Lana was out which was another relief because I didn’t want to explain my cut knees and my face which was probably already bruising. I got changed and took myself into the shower. I don’t know what it is about showers, but no matter how strong you’ve been, once that water hits you, it releases all your tears and there’s nothing you can do but cry until it’s all out.

  I went back into my room and checked my phone. There were several missed calls and texts from Saz and Mills asking me to call them and asking if I was ok. I texted them both back.

  “I’m fine. Had 2 talk 2 Mitchell. Ruined my buzz. Gone home. Talk 2 u 2moro. Av a gud nite. Luv u. x”

  I got under my covers and cried myself to sleep while I replayed the last couple of hours of the night.

  Before I opened my eyes the following morning I could hear hushed voices and feel shadows in the room. I opened one eye and nearly screamed to death. My room was full of people. Saz was in my room along with Mills, Lana, Tara and Mara.

  “What the fuck?’

  “No. What the fuck happened last night and why the fuck is there a bruise on your face the same size as someone’s fist?”

  My hand instinctively reached up to my face and winced at the pain. Turns out Derek had felt bad about me getting into an argument with Mitchell over him and tried to find him to explain that our dancing had been innocent. He didn’t find me but he bumped into a couple who had been doing drugs together who had seen what happened. He then went to find Saz and Mills, told them what happened who then called Lana, hence the congregation in my room. Mara looked so mad I couldn’t hold her gaze even though I knew she was on my side. The fact Tara was there as well was huge as nothing tore her away from her desk, which again made me feel bad as she was in the middle of prep work for starting university.

  “I’ll ask you again what the fuck happened?. And do you need a lift to the police station to report his ass?”

  “What? No! Leave this the fuck alone it’s not your problem. I don’t know why you’re asking me what happened when you know exactly what happened and you know what? All of you get the fuck out of my room. It’s not even five am. Let me compute this shit and deal with it how I see….”

  Oh fuck! I needed the bathroom quick. I barreled through my friends and my sisters and found the toilet just in time before I puked everything I had into it. After cleaning up I went back to my room hoping everyone had vacated. No such fucking luck. This time the looks were different.

  “Dana, honey, when was you’re last period?”

  “What the fuck, Tara? Please just piss off out my room all of you. Lana you don’t even live here anymore as of September, so you too.”

  “Answer the fucking question thick shit.” Lana really wound me up when she was ready. Clearly none of them were going anywhere so I thought back. Which is when I realized that I was two weeks late.

  “Oh damn.” This was Mills whose face said that she’d seen things dawn on me.

  All I could say was, “Fuck!”

  “Here take one of these and get yourself in the bathroom now.” Lana handed me a pregnancy test. I wasn’t even going to ask but it seems that Mara needed to.

  “Lana why the hell have you got a stash of Clear Blues in your drawer?”

  “Because dear Mara, there is this thing that all the crazy kids are doing called having sex. It’s fucking amazing. Maybe you should let someone’s ding dong in your belfry to clear out the bats and cobwebs. It might loosen you up a little.” Saz snorted with laughter and Tara rolled her eyes. Mills had moved over to me and was holding my hand which was so comforting it reminded me why she was my friend and why I loved her. She never let herself get dragged into whatever shit was going on and always kept a level head. I took the stick and went back to the bathroom and took the test waiting for the agonizing minutes to pass for the results. I couldn’t be pregnant. Mitchell and I always used protection and I was on the pill, which I never forgot. Apparently Lady Luck was STILL on her fucking holidays. I was pregnant.

  Suddenly I had more problems than taking my final year of exams. I had to decide whether I was keeping the baby. I had to tell Ma and Pops which was going to devastate them and then if I was keeping the baby, I need to talk to Mitchell. Fuck! My name is Fuckedy Fuck Fukerson and I am well and truly fucked.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ma and Pops didn’t take what happened with Mitchell well. It momentarily distracted them from the fact that I was pregnant but like I said, only for a moment. Pops began pacing the living room floor while the rest of us looked on. The rest being everyone who was in my bedroom. I felt so bad. My grandparents didn’t need this kind of stress in their lives. They weren’t old when my sisters and I came to live with them but they were certainly a good age now. They should be enjoying their retirement not worrying about their youngest grandchild getting beaten up by her boyfriend and finding out she’s pregnant.

  “I’m gonna kill him. And then I’m gonna dig up his twisted, too old for my granddaughter, perverted scrawny ass and haul him to the nearest police station. Let’s see how much of a man he is when he needs to bend over and pick up his bar of soap. And then when he gets out I’m gonna kill him again.” Pops had gone bright red in his face. When we were kids Pops had seemed like a giant. He was still in good shape but he was a lot slimmer now with a small bulge for a stomach. He only had a few grey hairs, that you could hardly see in his blond hair, which Ma always complained about as she was pretty much completely grey by now. His blue eyes still sparkled when he laughed but right now they looked like a stormy grey. He let out a huge sigh and slumped in his chair. If I felt bad before, I now felt like shit. It was my entirely my fault
that they had this stress..

  “Dana girl, what about the baby.” Ma’s soft voice brought me out of my own head and back into the room. “You need to decide what you’re going to do about this baby and you need to decide fast. We’re all here to support you. You look around and you’ve got your friends, your sisters , Pops and I but you need to make a decision that you can live with.”

  I knew what Ma would want me to do and I know that Ma knew what I would decide. It’s not that I’m against abortion. It was invented for a reason but it’s not something that I would do. If ten years or more down the line I found out that I couldn’t have children it would destroy me to know that I ruined my only chance at this point in my life. I wasn’t sure I was ready for kids but I would make myself ready. I’d just have to study every pregnancy and parenting book ever published and hope that that gave me a good head start. This brought me to my next problem which was telling Mitchell.

  Mitchell never called me after that night. I don’t know whether it was because he didn’t want to ever see me again because he thought what I had done was so bad, or if he was ashamed of his actions, or maybe because he wanted me to chase him even. I had no idea. It was out of both our hands now so I had to call him and tell him he was going to be a Dad. Pops had said that if I didn’t want to press charges then that was my decision but Mitchell was never to step foot under his roof. He told us all several times that a real man doesn’t put his hand on a woman for no reason. If he ain’t happy he makes his apologies and he walks away. If we were going to be having a baby it would be a pretty shit start for the baby to have a dad in prison. I didn’t have a conventional upbringing but I wanted my children I had to have as normal of a childhood as possible. Sometimes at school children had been mean and teased us for living with our grandparents and even for our parents being dead. Mara always beat them up but the words still hurt. I wanted to protect this baby from going through anything like that. After two weeks I had procrastinated about as much as I possibly could when I made my way up to my room to make the call. I’d seen the doctor in that time who had confirmed that I was about four to five weeks pregnant. His phone rang.

  “Hello.” He sounded neither happy or upset that I was calling. I didn’t know how to take that. Although there was the small possibility that he had deleted my number and then he didn’t know it was me that was calling him. Grasping at straws but what can I do?

  “Mitchell?” I had to ask to make sure it was him I was talking to. The monotone voice on the other end of the line was making me doubt it was him.

  “Dana.” A little more emotion this time but not much. “You didn’t call me. I missed you.” Wow. Were we at two different parties that night? There is a high possibility there is something not quite right with this boy. His mood swings are extreme.

  “ Mitchell, you hit me! That’s a big reason why I didn’t call you.” Freaking weirdo.

  “Dana, I’m sorry you got me so worked up. I care so much for you and when I saw you dancing with that guy I just saw red. I don’t want anyone else to touch you. You’re the one for me and you’re mine.” Not really sure what I’m supposed to say to that. He’s talking as though nothing has happened that would change things between us.

  “Mitchell, you can’t do things like that. It’s not normal. You don’t hit your girlfriend because you get jealous. You talk. That’s what people do. They talk about their issues or what they’re not happy about and they work things through. Anyway that’s not why I called.” Pause. Swallow. Deep breath. “Mitchell, I’m pregnant.”

  Silence. And then more silence.

  “Mitchell?” Had he passed out?

  “I’m here. Fuck, Dana. I’ve always wanted kids. I want kids with you but not so soon. You’ll need to move into my house with the baby. The second bedroom is cluttered but all I have to do is chuck some stuff away, which is lucky so that can be a nursery. What classes do I need to attend with you? I can…”

  “Mitchell, slow down. I’m not moving in with you and neither is this baby! I don’t want to be with you anymore. We’ll sort out access once the baby’s born but we sure as hell are not living with you!”

  “Dana. Baby. Please. I shouldn’t have gotten so mad. I know this now. You can’t keep a baby with you at your grandparents. They’re not getting any younger. Do you really want to put the stress of a newborn on them?”

  I hadn’t thought about that. Point made. I still felt bad about the stress I’d caused telling them what had happened with Mitchell and the fact I was having a baby. I couldn’t now move said baby in with them. The endless screaming in the night would tire them out even if they weren’t the ones getting up to do the nappy changes. All my sisters had said they would help out while I finished my studies and so had Ma and Pops but helping out while I was studying and still living at home full time were two different things.

  “And the baby needs his dad. We should try for the baby’s sake to give it a normal upbringing where he has both parents around him to love and care for him.”

  Valid point. I don’t know why he keeps saying ‘he’ though. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that it could be a girl.

  “And more importantly Dana, I love you. I want us to be together. I want us to make a go of things for our own sakes as well as our baby’s. I’ll be good to you I promise. And I know you can be good for me.”

  “Mitchell, I don’t know.” Fuck. Why was I even thinking about this? “You hurt me not just physically but emotionally as well. I can’t trust you.”

  “Dana, just give me a chance. I know we can do this.”

  “I’ll think about it, Mitchell. I’m going now. I’ll call you later.”

  “I love you, baby. You know that right?”

  “Yeah, Mitchell I know. Bye.”

  Confused would be an understatement right now. On the one hand Mitchell was this perfect guy that I loved and had made me feel so special and I wanted to spend the rest of my days with him. Next to my family he was the most loving person I had in my life. My favorite memory of us together is when he took me on a blind date. I mean blind in the literal sense. He picked me up and blindfolded me before I even got in the car. He drove us out to a secluded beach and when he took off my blindfold there was a picnic laid out for us both. He’d packed everything we would need; food, drinks, blankets and even a little music system that played a CD he had made especially for me with all our favourite songs. Then on the other he was this seriously messed up person who had physically hurt me and still had the potential to do it again. Ma had always said that people deserve second chances. We all make mistakes and if no one ever got the chance to make right what they had done then we would live in a very sad world. Did Mitchell deserve a second chance? I know he believed that we could be happy together. I could hear it in his voice. The real question was did I believe in him.

  The next couple of days I didn’t sleep very well. Stress coming from not knowing what to do about school, what to do with a baby, what to do about my future and funnily enough the one that was stressing me the most was what to do about Mitchell. I’d told my sisters and Ma and Pops what he’d said. None of them had been supportive of the idea of me living with Mitchell but it’s not that I was surprised. Everyone had been vocal about their disgust in Mitchell and made sure I knew exactly what they thought about the whole situation. The thing was it was easy for them to comment and tell me what they would do but they were not the ones who had to live with whatever decision I made. After my sisters had gone to do their own things and Pops had gone to de-stress, Ma took me into her room and made me sit on her bed.

  “So my little Josephine, what are you going to do?” She stood in front of me for a few seconds while she scrutinized me. She always did this. It was her way of reading you. It used to make me laugh sometimes because she was so small. Lana used to call her the angry pixie because she was short with cropped dark hair (or at least it used to be dark) and ears that kind of looked like they belonged to an elf or a pixie.

&nb
sp; “Ma, I don’t know. I really don’t. I know how you all feel about Mitchell and you’re all right but…”

  “You love him don’t you?”

  “Yes, Ma. So much it hurts. I just want what you and Pops have.”

  “What do you mean?” She looked seriously confused.

  “You and Pops are perfect. You don’t have to live with you to know that you love each other completely. You never fight and if you do it’s never in front of us. You always talk to each other and try to make each other happy. I want that. I want that perfect kind of love.”

  “Dana, there’s no such thing as perfect love. It’s different for everyone. Love just is. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. You can never compare your own relationship to another. There’s no perfect relationship either. Pops and I are the way we are after years of trial and error. Believe me when I say there were times I wanted to hold the pillow over his face and I wouldn’t have felt any sadness over going to jail for my crime. We worked at it. Sometimes a relationship takes work and it’s worth fighting through all the mess to get through it. Other times you need to just walk away and start again. But no one can make that decision for you. If you’re asking me, then I’m saying you keep your ass here where your family can take care of you and this baby. I don’t know Mitchell well but I know enough of him that I don’t want him anywhere near you or my great grandchild. But I know you and if you want to be with him then you’re going to find a way to do just that. Just know that regardless of what the rest of your sisters or even Pops say, we’ll be here for you no matter what decision you make.” She gave my hand a squeeze and kissed the top of my head before leaving me sat on her bed with my thoughts.