That Reckless Night

She sent him a withering stare. “Last I checked you aren’t a doctor, so shut up.”

“Don’t have to be a bitch about it. Just trying to help.” Johnny took a long drag off his cigarette. “You buy any food when you went to the store?”

The thought of food made her stomach rebel. “No, and don’t talk about food,” she snapped, just as she ran for the toilet yet again to lose the remaining contents of her stomach.

At first she’d thought it was the flu. But then she realized she rarely got that sick. And one thought led to another until she was staring at the realization that her troubles were not caused by a virus. She took a test the next morning. It’d been positive.

“So you’re saying I’m going to be a daddy?” Johnny had asked when she told him the news. But the moment she told him she’d wished she could have taken the words back. She didn’t want Johnny to have any part in raising her child. Johnny wasn’t the kind of man who should’ve been around children, animals or even plant life.

It was at that moment that she realized she couldn’t keep living the way she was living. Not if she was bringing a child into the world. A child deserved more. Certainly more than Johnny could ever offer. She’d considered lying to him and saying she was going to get an abortion. But lying was a temporary fix for a permanent problem. The minute Johnny knew she was still pregnant he’d want to have contact with his kid. The dilemma kept Miranda awake at night. Until one day, her problem resolved itself. Johnny got busted for drugs—and it was his third strike. Miranda knew she shouldn’t revel in someone else’s misfortune, but the day they took Johnny into custody, she’d experienced a sense of relief. And when she’d received the call that he had died in prison, it was the most that she could do to work up a single tear. The fact was Johnny was a bad person who’d probably done the world a favor by taking a dirt nap.

The only residual regret that Miranda experienced was when she had to explain to her son why his father wasn’t around. She wished she could tell him a story about how his father had died some noble death. The kind of death a soldier, a cop or a fireman might have, saving others, perhaps. There just wasn’t a way to pretty up the fact that Talen’s father had been a selfish, rude and wholly self-centered man who’d done and said bad things nearly every day of his miserable life.

God, she’d been so stupid to hook up with Johnny. At the time she’d been on a self-destructive streak and Johnny had seemed just the right amount of dangerous to satisfy her need for chaos. She met him shortly after Simone had died. She’d been heartsick, guilt ridden and overwhelmed with regret. Johnny must’ve homed in on those markers because he moved in on her like a bird of prey after a mouse.

The first couple of months had been great. Their sex life had been the stuff of X-rated movies—exciting and dirty—and for a while she really thought she loved him. And even if she wasn’t sure about her true feelings for Johnny, she knew for certain that she loved his mother. Likely, it’d been her relationship with Mamu that had kept her around longer than she should have stayed, but there was no point in guessing at this point. By the time Miranda had started to pull herself out of the skid and realized that Johnny wasn’t a healthy choice for a partner, it’d been a challenge to break ties.

Her pregnancy had allowed for a certain sense of clarity that’d been missing before and enabled her to think clearly for the first time since Simone had died.

Johnny had been proof that anyone could father a child but not every man was cut out to be a dad. And although Talen looked so much like Johnny, Miranda was ensuring that they were nothing alike.

It was hard to look at Talen’s face and see anything but the sweetest, most amiable boy ever created. And she couldn’t imagine life without him.

Thank God, Johnny had never had a single day of influence on the boy. For that, she was immensely grateful.

Talen was the reason she never brought men home with her when he was home, why she never introduced Talen to any of her boyfriends—though the term boyfriend was a stretch, because she rarely allowed them to hang around long enough to require stashing a toothbrush at the house. She didn’t want anyone getting the wrong idea. She wasn’t looking for a daddy figure for her son, which was a change from the usual single-mama drama that happened in town. Nope. Not looking for daddy material. Just a friend with benefits.

Her thoughts strayed to Jeremiah, and for a moment she allowed her mind to drift over the details from the night before. Jeremiah’s friendship would’ve been a wonderful benefit. Just remembering their time together made her shiver with awareness.