The Trap (Prequel) Read online

  I immediately reach out and draw her into my arms. “Baby, don’t cry,” I whisper, my mouth against her hair as I inhale the flowery scent of her shampoo. “I’ll do whatever you want.” Who gives a shit about what I want, right?

  She lets out a soft contented sigh, locking her arms around my waist. Whatever resentment I’m feeling is soon suffocated by my feelings for her. I love her. I’m going to be there for her.

  Whether I like it or not, we’re having a baby.

  * * *

  Well I sure as hell can kiss Warwick goodbye. There’s no way I can go back to New York after the baby’s born is all I’m thinking as I watch Paige pull her tan Honda out of the driveway.

  The second she’s out of sight, I immediately go back to the kitchen and park my ass on one of the stools in front of the island. I rest my forehead against the cool granite instead of pounding it on it like I’m tempted to.

  My life is so completely fucked.

  I could tell Paige wanted to stay but after fifteen minutes of us reassuring each other we’d get through this together, she got the message that I needed some time alone to process “the news”. You know, let it sink in. Her words not mine. I told her we’d talk about what we are actually going to do later.

  Hell yeah I need time to process it.

  Why the fuck did we ever stop using condoms? I can lament that decision for the next year, but it’s not going to change anything. I’m going to be a father.

  Me. A nineteen-year-old soon-to-be sophomore who lives with his sister and her family.

  I’m not ready to be anyone’s father. Shit, I don’t even think I’m ready to take care of myself.

  I’m definitely going to have to find a job. College may need to be part-time and I’m going to have to transfer my credits to one of the colleges here. And no more football, that’s for sure.

  My mind is spinning just thinking about how my life is going to change.

  The sound of the doorbell ringing, followed by knocking jars me out of where I am in my head. Right now, it’s not a nice place to be.

  It’s my best friend Josh. He’s the only person who subjects me to the simultaneous knock/bell combination.

  I seriously think about ignoring him but my car’s in the driveway so he knows I’m home. Which means he’s not going anywhere until I show my face.

  Fine. It requires a ton of mental effort to move but I do it. By the time I yank open the door, he’s rung the bell two more times and I’m this close to breaking the finger he’s spinning his basketball on.

  “What the fuck’s your problem?” Right now, I’m pissed off at the whole world, which happens to include him.

  All my growl elicits is a raised brow. “Why aren’t you answering your phone? I’ve called you about four times,” he says as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “Paige was here,” I grunt as he breezes by me. I kick the door closed behind him. Unlike my girlfriend, he doesn’t give a shit if it looks like I’m not up for company.

  Josh is more like family than friend. He bloodied the nose of a nine-year-old kid who was picking on me when I was five. Josh was eight. He’s kind of watched out for me since. Last year he graduated from Stanford and now he works at his uncle’s computer company as a graphic software designer. He may dress and act like a jock but the guy’s a lot smarter than he looks or lets on.

  “Right, Paige. Is she still friends with what’s her name?” he asks, dropping the basketball on the wood floor and trapping it under his foot.

  I roll my eyes. “As if you forgot her name.” He acts like he can’t stand Paige’s best friend, Erin, but it’s obvious to everyone but him and Erin that he has a major thing for her. I’d call him on his shit if I didn’t have other way more important things on my mind.

  Yeah, like the fact that my girlfriend is having a baby.

  My kid.

  “What’s up with you?”

  Josh’s question snaps my gaze back to him. I shake my head as I walk back into the family room and over to the couch I recently vacated. My friend follows me. He knows something is wrong. And it’s not as if I’m trying to hide it—or can hide it from him.

  Leaning forward, my forearms propped on my thighs, I watch him as he sits in the chair across from me. “Paige is pregnant,” I state simply. There’s no point in beating around the bush, I just rip the Band-Aid off.

  He makes a sound in his throat and his eyes go wide. Been there, done that.

  After several seconds of shell-shocked silence, his back lands against the chair with a soft thump. His gaze hasn’t left mine.

  “Tell me you’re shittin’ me.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Guys don’t ever joke about shit like this. He, of all people, should know that.

  A low whistle emerges from between his teeth. “Holy shit.”

  Yeah, you don’t say.

  Next comes the staring match. Josh blinks first but my announcement has left him speechless—a definite first. You see, Josh is the guy with all the answers. Well, except when it comes to women. Which is why this whole pregnancy thing is out of his scope of knowledge and definitely out of his comfort zone. There’s only one thing he knows how to do with the opposite sex and it doesn’t require a lot of thinking.

  “So, what are you going to do? Is she planning on keeping it?” he asks, finding his voice.

  “Of course she’s going to keep it,” I snap in all my self-righteous hypocrisy. But he doesn’t know that.

  His hands go up in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa, don’t shoot a guy for asking. I don’t know what’s going on inside your girlfriend’s head.”

  I’m being a dick and I know it. Had the situation been reversed, I’d have asked him the same thing.

  “Look, you gotta cut me some slack, I just found out today. And I don’t know what we’re going to do. But there goes football and I’m going to have to transfer out of Warwick.” And just wait till I tell my sister. She’s going to have a cow.

  “You sure the kid is yours?”

  Josh might as well of punched me in the face. Before I can get to him and tear his head off, he’s on his feet, his hands so high this time, he’s waving a white flag. “I’m just asking,” he says defensively. “I mean you’re up in New York most of the time. You don’t know what she’s doing when you’re not here.”

  If he knew how close I am to beating the shit out of him, his ass would be halfway to his car by now. I stand and make a move toward him but the look on his face stops me cold. Something in his eyes tells me he’s not simply trying to get a rise out of me. He knows something.

  I pull back and look him dead in the eyes. “Is there something you want to tell me, Josh?”

  Chapter Three

  Josh visibly relaxes but he’s smart and puts a couple more feet between us. “Only if you promise to calm the hell down. I don’t want to have to hurt you,” he adds with a cocky smirk. That’s his idea of humor and his way of dialing things down a notch.

  “In your dreams,” I say, keeping my temper in check.

  I’d like to think being a football player would give me the advantage in a fight between us, but we have similar builds and at six foot two, I don’t even have an inch on him.

  Yeah, the guy works a desk job but he wasn’t nicknamed “Josh the Jock” for nothing. He may not have been good enough to go professional, but he’s better than average in all the sports that count, which would be football, soccer, basketball and baseball. His mom is a Canadian transplant so he’d include hockey on that list.

  “I’m not feeling your calm vibes,” he shoots back smartly.

  “Cut the crap. Do you know anything about Paige being with another guy or not?”

  In a flash, he’s turns all serious on me. “I just see her with that Calder guy sometimes and I can tell he’s got it bad for her.”

  I relax my stance and breathe easy. “There’s nothing there. They’re just friends.” Believe me I asked her about Trent when we first started going out. The deal
is that their mothers are best friends. Paige said she thinks of the guy as a brother and I believe her because she’s never given me reason not to.

  Josh let’s out a dark laugh. “If you say so.”

  “I think the guy’s got it bad for Erin not Paige.” And just as I thought it would, my bullshit statement takes the wind right out of his sails. I have no idea who Trent is into. But let Josh chew on that for a bit.

  “What? Erin would never go for a guy like that.” Josh’s tone is dismissive but he doesn’t look too sure about that.

  “Whatever. I don’t really want to talk about them.”

  “Yeah, right. Not that I care anyway,” he says. “So are you serious, you’re just going to drop out of Warwick and that’s it? God, man, don’t you guys use protection? This shit doesn’t happen by accident.”

  “She’s on the Pill. It wasn’t supposed to happen.” A wave of sheer helplessness washes over me.

  Josh snorts. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I don’t give a shit what women say, I always come with my own protection. I’m not trusting that to any female.”

  My friend has serious trust issues when it comes to females. But that’s a whole other story.

  “Yeah, well I trust Paige,” I say with conviction.

  “And I’ve heard that before too.”

  I shoot him a look that makes him take a step back. “Fine, she’s your girlfriend. You know her best. But I’m just saying, females have been known to pull shit like this.”

  “Look, I’ve got a lot to think about so…” I look pointedly toward the door.

  His lips thin as he stares at me for a few seconds, then with a sigh, he turns and strides to the hall where he retrieves his basketball. “You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” he asks, staring back at me.

  I bark a laugh. “Yeah, no. I think I’ve had enough of your pep talk.”

  Some emotion I can’t discern flickers across his face. “Hey, I’m just looking out for you.”

  Which is what he’s always done, even when I’d grown tall enough and became strong enough to fight my own battles. Sometimes, I think he’s worse than my sister, who is way overprotective of me.

  “Yeah, well just lay off my girlfriend.” It’s hard to stay mad at Josh because I know he means well—in his way.

  He pauses as if he hopes I’ll change my mind and ask him to stay. When I don’t say anything, he smiles faintly. “Alright, man, I’ll see you around. Give me a call if you wanna talk or shoot some hoops.”

  As I watch him leave and hear him bounding down the stairs, I can’t imagine when that’ll ever be.

  * * *

  Paige

  “So how did it go?” Erin asks the second we’re in her room. My best friend lives in one of the Tolston’s homes in a community where the houses are called estates. Suffice it to say, her bedroom is half the size of the whole main floor of my house.

  She tows me to her bed and I let her pull me down onto the pillow-top mattress. As crappy as I feel, I want to purr when my butt makes contact. If you haven’t slept on one, you haven’t lived.

  “So?” she prompts, tucking her hair behind her ears and leaning in close. So close I can see flecks of dark blue in her light-blue eyes.

  Erin is a natural beauty. And by natural, I mean her dark-auburn hair doesn’t come from a bottle. I used to envy her the four inches she had on me, and her bigger bustline until Mitch made it clear he was more than satisfied with me the way that I am.

  “He was shocked.”

  “Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. I mean what did he say? What is he going to do? Is he going back to New York—to college?”

  My shoulders lift and fall in a shrug that feels almost as helpless as I do. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about that yet.” It’s hard to look her directly in the eyes because she can read me like a book. That’s what happens when you’ve been best friends with someone since kindergarten.

  “Okay, so what did you talk about?”

  “We—we didn’t really talk, he just said it was going to be okay,” I say softly, remembering the pained look on his face. The expression that told me I’d shattered his dreams with I’m pregnant.

  “So did he ask you to—you know…?”

  Get rid of it. Get an abortion. She can’t even bring herself to say it.

  The truth is, I’d barely been able to get the word out when I’d told him I wouldn’t have one.

  “I already told you he knows I won’t. Would never.”

  She’d been skeptical when I’d told her Mitch wouldn’t ask me to have one because he knows I’d never do it. What I’m not going to tell her is that I hadn’t given him a chance to ask because I’d been terrified that he would.

  “So when are you going to tell your mom?”

  If never was an option, that’s when I’d choose. “Soon, I guess. She’s going to need time to prepare.” Figuratively and literally.

  Don’t get me wrong, my mom is fantastic, which is why telling her is going to be so hard. She’s the type of mother who will bend over backward trying to support me and her grandchild. And she’ll do it with a smile on her face. What she’ll try to hide from me is her bone-deep disappointment. I may technically be an adult but I’m still her teenage daughter who lives at home and isn’t old enough to legally drink. I’m her baby.

  “Hey, you’re lucky. At least your mom’s not like mine. Mine would go ballistic. Can you imagine Margaret Jean Bancroft having to explain something like that to her country club friends?” Erin half jokes, arching a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

  My friend mostly refers to her mother by her first name. They’ve got that unmotherly-undaughterly relationship down pat. Mrs. Bancroft criticizes everything her daughter does—this I’ve witnessed countless times over the years—and Erin has stopped trying to please her. It’s been that way between them since about the time Erin was twelve and it doesn’t look like it’ll change anytime soon.

  “Yeah, I know, it’s just that I know she’s going to be crushed. I know somehow, some way, she’ll blame herself and wonder where she failed me,” I say, my voice low and subdued.

  Erin knows my mom well enough to know that’s true so she simply nods.

  “So when are you guys really going to talk about what you’re gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. Tomorrow I guess.” I hope. I’ll call Mitch tonight and see if he sounds more receptive—more ready to talk. I don’t know what I’ll do if he decides to go back to New York in the fall. And then there’s football camp in four weeks.

  “Are you going to tell him…?” She doesn’t say it out loud, just looks pointedly at me, and I feel her gaze like an accusing finger.

  The only sound that can be heard in the room is the rustling of my hair as I give myself a vigorous head shaking.

  “Never?” she asks quietly. Too quietly. There’s more than a little censure in her voice now.

  “What would be the point? I’m already pregnant.” And all it would do is give Mitch a reason to blame me. To hate me.

  She nods slowly but I can tell by her expression that she doesn’t agree with me. In her eyes, I’m lying by omission. In my mind, it’s called not adding fuel to the fire.

  I shift uncomfortably on the bed but force myself to retain her gaze.

  “You know, if he finds out…?” Her voice trails off ominously, her warning and meaning clear.

  Just the thought has my heart beating hard and fast and for a second I feel as if I’m suffocating. I inhale a slow, deep breath in an effort to control my rising panic and the wave of guilt that threatens to consume me.

  “He’s not going to.” This is one omission I’m going to take to the grave.

  Chapter Four

  Mitch

  The following day, I arrive at Paige’s house shortly before eleven in the morning. When Mrs. Nichols answers the door and ushers me in, she’s all big smiles and warm greetings. It’s obvious she still doesn’t know I knocked up her only daughter.
r />   As I follow her from the front to the foot of the staircase, she glances at me over her shoulder and remarks, “And don’t you look tanned and handsome. Is it my imagination or have you grown taller since the last time I saw you. And it looks like you’ve gotten broader in the shoulders. Is that what that university is doing to you?”

  I should be used to Mrs. Nichols by now but I feel heat suffuse my face. I swear to God, she’s the only woman who can make me blush. “Yeah, well that and the weights. Gotta keep in shape for football,” I reply, praying she’ll quit with the compliments.

  It would be one thing is she looked like a regular mom, but Paige’s mom is the sort of mother who turns heads wherever she goes. Dark-haired, blue-eyed and slim, she’s the older version of my girlfriend. And not even that old. She had Paige when she was twenty-one, which means she’s not even forty yet. My mom was forty-three when she had me. I was one of those late-in-life babies.

  “Paige is in her room. She’s not feeling well though, but you can go on up.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Nichols.”

  She laughs lightly. “How many times have I told you to call me Maureen? You’re part of the family.”

  Boy, she doesn’t know the half of it.

  But I don’t call any of my other friends parents’ by their first names. My parents drilled that into me and old habits die hard. I just nod into her smiling face and head upstairs.

  She’s also the only mother I know who doesn’t have a problem with her daughter being alone in her room with her boyfriend. But then Paige said her mother has always been realistic when it comes to sex and that kind of stuff. She promoted abstinence but also wanted Paige to be prepared and protected. Knowledge is power and all that.

  Yeah, right. Look where that got her daughter. Still knocked up at eighteen.

  Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck.

  I give a preemptory knock on the Paige’s door before I enter to find her lying face up on her bed.