He glanced up at her. "Do you have to do this right here? This is really not how I planned on having this conversation."
Her eyes were so wide it might have been comical if the circumstances were different.
"Derek!" she whined again. "I'm carrying your child!"
"I know that," he said, lowering his eyes. "We'll figure something out concerning...the baby. But we broke up for a reason, Kayla, and a baby isn't going to magically fix all that. If anything, it will just complicate things."
"So what, you don't want to have a baby now?" she asked, glaring at him. "If you would prefer, I can just go get an abortion, really clear the way for you and your whore."
Derek shot her a look. "We've already had that discussion, Kayla, you know that isn't what I want."
"Why should I give a damn what you want when you obviously don't care about me at all?"
At this point, there were several people from the surrounding tables watching the drama unfold.
And they had already discussed other options? For some reason, maybe because I hadn't been involved, I didn't realize that they had already discussed their predicament. That made me feel strangely out of the loop, and I wondered if Derek would even clue me in later. Was I supposed to be clued in? What was my role, exactly? Now there was going to be another little life brought into the whole situation? What was I getting myself into? Was Derek, Kayla and a baby more than I could handle? After all, I wasn't even graduated from high school yet, so should I really have to think about all of those things?
If you want to be with Derek you do, I answered myself.
Right. He had to complicate my life.
I decided that I would think about it later, when Kayla wasn't standing in the middle of the cafeteria, yelling at Derek and calling me a whore as she jabbed her manicured finger in my face.
My eyes narrowed and I resisted the urge to grab that nail and rip it right off.
Must be civil.
"Could you please stop jabbing your finger in my face?" I requested, looking up at her with what I hoped wasn't a hostile expression.
She narrowed her eyes at me and poked me in the chest.
I pressed my lips together so tightly that I was sure they were turning white, but when she poked me again I couldn't resist smacking her hand away.
"Don't hit me!" she said. "Derek, did you see that?"
Oh, how I longed to really hit her.
"Kayla, go sit down," he said tiredly.
She huffed one last time, telling one of us –or maybe both of us—that she wasn't done yet, then storming away.
Once she was gone I looked over at Derek, who looked back at me.
"Seriously," I said, shaking my head, "what the hell were you thinking?"
We didn't have to deal with Kayla for the rest of that day, but after school Derek had to go home and change before work, so we didn't really get a chance to talk.
I needed to think it over anyway, because I was kind of torn. I told Derek I wanted to move slowly, but I almost felt like I needed to hurry up and figure out where we were heading, because if I wanted to get into a relationship with Derek again, it wasn't something I could do halfway.
I hated to be one of those girls always needing to know "where do we stand?" but at the same time, I had the obnoxious ex-girlfriend who was pregnant with his kid to deal with. I wasn't just trying to decide if we sho
uld go to prom together, I was trying to decide if we had anything worth all the crap I was going to have to deal with.
Kayla had the power to make the next several years of my life hell if I decided to be with Derek. Did I really want to tolerate her? No. But did I want to be with Derek? Yes. So I was left trying to decide if it was all worth it.
There was also the fact that I was still a little miffed that he knocked her up in the first place. It might have been different if we wouldn't have been together prior to that, but that asshole actually slept with her after he slept with me.
My more sensible side acknowledged that if Derek and I were going to go anywhere, I was going to have to forgive him for that and move on.