Girl, Forgotten (Andrea Oliver 2)

Emily had never claimed otherwise, but she had no idea why he sounded angry.

“You were really fucked up,” he said. “You could barely remember how you got home. You didn’t even know it until your grandmother told you.”

“Okay?” she asked, wondering where this was going.

“I mean, so, technically, what Blake is saying isn’t that far off base.” Clay looked down, watching the toe of his sneaker dig into the earth. “You’re into drugs. You’re into partying. You played the game. You need to take the loss. Have some dignity.”

Emily’s only surprise was that she kept being shocked every time this happened. They had all turned on her in the exact same way—first Dean, then Ricky, then Blake, then Nardo and now Clay. They really were all following a script. Friendliness. Obsequiousness. Fury. Contempt.

Clay stood up. His hands were still in his pockets. “Don’t talk to me again, Emily.”

She stood up, too. “Why would I want to talk to you when all you do is lie?”

He grabbed her arms. He wrenched her forward. She braced herself, expecting a threat or a warning or something—anything—other than what he actually did.

Clay kissed her.

He tasted of nicotine and stale beer. She could feel the roughness of his skin against her own. His tongue probed her mouth. Their bodies were practically clamped together. It was Emily’s first real kiss. At least the first real kiss that Emily could remember.

And it felt like nothing.

Clay pushed her away. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Goodbye, Emily.”

She watched him leave. His shoulders were hunched. His feet scuffed the ground.

Emily’s fingers went to her mouth. She gently touched her lips. She had expected that a kiss made you feel—something. Nothing tingled. Her heart wasn’t lurching. She had felt the same passive disinterest she’d felt when Blake had drunkenly tried to kiss her in the alley two years ago.

She watched Clay turn the corner of the house. His shoulders were still hunched. He looked guilty of something but there was no telling what.

Emily felt a laugh come from deep inside her soul. If only she could get back all the time from the last decade she had wasted obsessing over how Clayton Morrow was feeling.

Emily used her foot to cover up the gouge he’d made in the gravel. She looked up at the house. By chance, she caught a glimpse of her father walking back into the bedroom. He had been on the balcony that overlooked the shed and garden. She had no idea how long he’d been there or what he’d seen. She tracked his progress through the windows. He went to the sideboard table and poured himself a drink.

Emily looked down. Without realizing it, she had put her hand to her stomach again. She had thought of herself as alone in all of this, but there was someone else making the arduous journey alongside her. Or inside of her, to be accurate. She felt no attachment to the cluster of cells, but she did feel a sense of duty. It was exactly what Melody had written in her letter—

Your weirdness comes from your LOVE and ACCEPTANCE of all kinds of people.

Emily felt no love for the cells, at least not yet, but she had resigned herself to acceptance. Clay was not altogether wrong when he implied that Emily’s pregnancy was her problem to deal with. She was the one who was going to live with it for the rest of her life. She sat back down on the bench. She stared out at the fallow garden.

She cleared her throat. She said, “I will—”

Her voice gave out.

Again, Emily felt strange to be alone and speaking out loud, but she needed to hear the words as much as she needed to say them. It was a wish list, to be honest, enumerating all of the precious things that she had lost in the short span of a few days. It was also a promise to give all of those lost things back to her eventual baby.

She cleared her throat again. The pledge came freely this time, and loudly, because it mattered.

“I will protect you. No one will ever hurt you. You will always be safe.”

For the first time in days, Emily felt as if some of the stress had finally left her body.

Behind her, she heard the balcony door slam closed.