Apollo (Cerberus MC)

Only that love was the biggest lie. Of course he let it linger, let me think we were devoted to each other. I let that communion happen twice more before I began to see the shift in him, before I was able to start noticing the lies, the way his eyes wandered over the other girls at school. Then the whispers started, petty high school students using not quite hushed tones to make it known just how big of a fool I was.

The wedding magazines shredded in my lockers by jealous girls weren’t even the final straw. The football team playing the wedding march when I walked into the classroom didn’t even bother me at the beginning. Cory loved me and was letting everyone know we were planning a future together. Then I got sick in class. The whispers intensified. If I hadn’t overheard someone telling a friend that I was pregnant, I probably would’ve lived in ignorant bliss for much longer.

The test I bought alone—because if I were pregnant, I wanted to surprise Cory in a special way—shook in my hand when those two lines popped up. I was terrified, standing in the middle of the pharmacy bathroom. Any girl my age would’ve been, but then the elation hit. We had always talked about babies. He wanted enough for a football team, and I was going to be an amazing mother. We knew we had to start young for all of that to happen.

Unable to hide my excitement, I grabbed a Father’s Day card, paying for it with change I had been collecting. I was grateful as I left the store that the local CVS started to prepare so early for certain holidays because it was only February.

Cory didn’t wait until the next day when we would see each other at school. He found me on my walk back to the compound. I hadn’t even had the chance to sign the card yet when he stood tall in front of me.

I can still feel the slide of my smile as it fell from my lips that day. I can still feel the warmth of the California sun on my skin. What once warmed me to the bones felt like fire on my skin, and I knew in that very second that we weren’t going to live happily ever after. We weren’t going to get married and have a football team worth of babies. He was not going to be the man to save me from Charles Knight.

He didn’t hold me to his chest and tell me how happy he was. He sneered at me as if he hated me all along and vowed that he would never be a father to that baby. He accused me of getting pregnant by someone else, despite the fact that he refused to use protection the times we’d been together.

He turned into something grotesque and evil right before my eyes, a raging bull with flared nostrils just begging me to make the slightest move so he could run over me and ground me into the pavement.

He was going to college and no little whore was going to keep him from doing that. He’d ruin my life if I so much as whispered the lie that he got me pregnant. College scouts were after him, and he wasn’t going to derail his plans.

Then he walked away, looping his arm over Cherise’s shoulder, not taking even a second to look back at me.

That happened a week before Nate and Legend showed up to take me away. Needless to say, I needed the escape. I welcomed it without asking questions. Surely, any place had to be better than where I was. Even if I had a happy home and wasn’t looking down the barrel of marrying a man my mother was already married to, I would’ve taken the out. I was miserable, heartbroken, and in desperate need for relocation.

“What are you thinking about?” Nate asks, bringing me back to the present.

I look around, noticing Cara and Javier standing on the sidewalk, and it makes me wonder how long I’ve been stuck in my own head.

“I… umm… never pictured myself getting married in leggings and a t-shirt,” I say, because confessing what’s really going on in my head would be a surefire way to get him to back out.

“We don’t have to do this today.”

“It’s fine,” I rush out as I shove open my door.

The longer he has to think about it, the greater chance he’ll decide against it.

Javier is there, taking my hand so I can climb down from the vehicle. Nate climbs out on the other side, stepping up beside me in a territorial way I’ll never admit to liking and takes my hand. Fire shoots down my spine when he raises it to his mouth and presses his lips on the back.