Chapter 34

Asher was smiling at that beautiful girl so easily. How rare were his smiles for me!

White hot jealousy flashed through me. For one brief, delirious moment, I thought of bursting through those doors and tackling her as I had been taught at warrior training. But I quickly came to my senses.

It wasn’t her fault Asher smiled at her and not at me.

Maybe it wasn’t Asher’s fault either.

Maybe I only had myself to blame.

I slumped, defeated and still scared from the way those girls had talked about Aimee being pregnant.

What a disgrace, they had said.

I wanted to crawl into myself. Perhaps I could settle for hiding under my blankets for a while.

I turned from Asher and his smile, but only made it two steps in the opposite direction before a voice called out, stopping me.

“Cynthia!”

Then suddenly, Asher was at my side. He wasn’t smiling anymore, a look of concern twisted his features now.

“Where are you going so suddenly? Is everything okay?”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your date,” I said, miserable.

“My date?” He frowned at me.

He didn’t need to deny it. “I saw you through the window,” I said.

He looked at the door, then back to me. “That wasn’t my date.”

“You were smiling at her.”

“Don’t remind me,” he groaned. “Girls like it when I smile at them. It helps get them to open up to me.”

I crossed my arms. He wasn’t doing very well at convincing me this wasn’t a date.

He noticed. “Surely you can tell the difference between my real smile and my fake one.”

Now that he mentioned it, the smile I had seen through the window had been very tight, as if forced. Even with the distance, I could tell it hadn’t reached his eyes.

“She’s the ex-girlfriend of the new player on the hockey team. The one who got called in to fill the spot on the fourth line, after the injury.”

I nodded, encouraging him to continue.

“I can’t prove anything yet, of course, but I’m thinking he might have had something to do with our stolen plays. I’d hate for it to be someone on the team, even someone new. But I can’t shake the feeling.”

He rubbed his forehead. “His ex-girlfriend sure doesn’t think much of him, I can say that, at least.”

So not a date, then. Just Asher investigating.

Guilt coursed through me. I shouldn’t have accused him of anything, especially because we weren’t even dating. This regret weaved with the fear already inside of me and I trembled.

“What’s wrong?” Asher asked at once.

“A lot of things,” I said.

“Come on. Let’s go somewhere more private.”

With his hand on the small of my back, he led me into the dormitory. We passed the girl he had been speaking to, but he didn’t even look at her. Instead, his gaze was fixed on me.

In the safety of his dorm room, I finally felt some of my panic ease away. The space smelled like Asher, pine and leather, and safety.

“Do you know a girl named Aimee?” I asked him and mentioned the name of her dorm.

“No,” he said, but waited for me to continue.

“I have reason to believe she might have been pregnant at one point and I…” I let the sentence trail. I wasn’t ready to give voice to my fears, even with Asher. Even in this safe space.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know anything about that. I can ask around?”

“No,” I said immediately. The last thing Aimee needed was more attention on her. “Thanks, but no.”

Asher pulled free his desk chair and gestured for me to sit. “You look like you’re going to fall over. Is it because of this Aimee girl?”

“Not just that,” I admitted, sitting. “I… told Joseph that I would go home with him this weekend to meet his parents.”

Asher went very still. After a terse moment, he asked, “Is that something you want to do?”

I placed my hands on my belly. “They’re going to be grandparents soon. If Joseph’s trying to step up to be a dad, then shouldn’t I let them in too?”

Holding onto the back of my chair, he knelt down beside me, bringing himself to my eye level. His face was carefully neutral.

“Who are you trying to convince?” he asked. “Me? Or yourself?”

I didn’t know. Both?

I sighed. “I have to do this. For my baby. I want them to have a big, supportive family.”

Slowly, he moved his hand toward me, and placed it over mine, feather-light, on my stomach. A war waged in his eyes, but I couldn’t discern the meaning or the victor.

“If anything happens,” he said, “you call me and I will be there.”

I stared, enamored and lost in the depth of his caring for me.

“Promise me,” he said.

“I promise.”

Gently, he pulled his hand away.

I wished he would return it.

Before I knew it, the weekend had come and I sat in the passenger seat of Joseph’s car as he drove us the hour away from campus to his parents’ house.

We ran out of things to talk about after the first fifteen minutes. He turned up the radio. I got out my phone.

My thoughts lingered on Aimee, so I opened her social media. Picture after picture of her smiling face greeted me. The comments beneath were flooded with compliments.

Then, three months ago, all posts and comments abruptly stopped. Her number of friends now was a paltry four. It must have been much higher, before, to have had so many comments.

Had her pregnancy been the reason she’d lost so much? Or was that only part of the story of what happened to her?

“What are you looking at?” Joseph asked, glancing at my phone.

I tilted the screen away from him. I’d felt comfortable sharing what I knew of her with Asher, but Joseph was an entirely different matter.

He hadn’t yet proved himself trustworthy.

He must have seen anyway. “Is that Aimee?” He burst into laughter. “Why are you looking her up?”

The ridicule irked me. “What’s so funny?”

“Even you must have heard about Aimee’s grand disgrace.”

There was that word again: disgrace.

“I haven’t,” I said sharply.

He either didn’t notice my new agitation, or he didn’t care.

“Everyone still talks about it, Cynthia.” He held up one finger. “First, this bitch gets pregnant.”

I winced at the hard language.

He held up a second finger. “Then she has an abortion, by herself, in the dorm bathroom. Other girls came in. Blood everywhere. They thought she’d died. They had to call an ambulance.”

Stricken, I stared at him, mouth agape. My heart pounded loudly in my ears.

What was he saying? How could he say such things so casually? Like it was all a big joke? Like I wasn’t sitting here right next to him, pregnant, with his baby.

And Aimee could have died!

He continued laughing.

“Can you imagine? She’s such dumpster trash. They should have just left her there to learn her lesson.”

Joseph talked about Aimee so unabashedly – so disrespectfully.

Aimee and I weren’t so different.

If Joseph felt this way about her, was this also how he felt about me?