Released (Caged 3)

“There’s more,” I said to her. “I mean—I didn’t tell you everything from before. There isn’t much left, but there’s a bit. I want you to know everything.”

“Now you tell me,” she muttered. She blew out a long breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Go on,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“I told you they took me to the ER, right?” Tria nodded. “Well, I left the hospital before my parents could get there. I knew if my father hadn’t said all those things to her, then Aimee wouldn’t have been afraid to tell her mom. If she had, none of it would have happened. I kind of think if I had seen them at that point, I might have tried to kill them. When Aimee’s mom wouldn’t let me go to the funeral, I just drove around the city for a while, then parked the car near the river and just sat there—I’m not even sure how long. There was a group of people near the river all huddled together, and I watched them for a while. Eventually I got out of the car and walked over to them.”

“As it turns out, they were junkies getting fixed. They were all banging, and when they tried to tell me what it was like, I offered them cash to let me try it.”

“Banging?” Tria asked softly.

“Um…yeah—injecting heroin is called banging. Or fixing.”

“That’s when you started using heroin?”

I nodded.

“That was the first time,” I said. “After that, I pretty much spent my time either doing H or finding money so I could buy more. That is, until Yolanda found me. She…um…she saved me, I guess.”

“Did she?” Tria remarked as she raised her eyebrows.

“Compared to where I had been.” I shrugged. “You know most of the rest. Um…that was the why of it. How I got there.”

My hands were shaking as I sat and waited for her to say something. Tria remained quiet as she kept twisting her fingers around themselves and staring at the floor.

“Tria?”

She looked at me, but her face was blank.

“I knew how fucked up I was,” I said. “I realized it before it was…before it was too late. I went to Dr. Baynor, and he took all my shit—took the drugs, I mean. I didn’t want to be like that—I don’t want to be like that. I didn’t know what to do without you. I asked Elissa if she had seen you, and she said you were in class, but you didn’t talk to her. I wanted to look for you, but I didn’t know where. Then I thought about it, and I thought you might be with Yolanda. Well, Krazy Katie said something that made me think…doesn’t matter.”

I rubbed at my jaw a bit, which was still pretty sore from Yolanda’s first punch to my face.

“I was pretty sure as soon as she opened the door that you were there.”

I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say, so I waited for Tria to respond. She just stared at the closed curtains and didn’t seem inclined to even look at me.

“Please…say something,” I begged and immediately regretted it.

“I don’t want to raise my child with a junkie,” she said definitively.

It wasn’t just my heart that tried to seize up—all of my insides went right along with it.

“I won’t,” I managed to utter through a tightened throat. “Never again—ever, Tria.”

The sound that came from her almost sounded like a laugh though there was nothing funny about it, and tears began to stream out of her eyes again.

“Even if I could believe you,” she said with a heavy voice, “how can I be with you if you don’t want our baby? How can I even consider being with a man who can’t even express his emotions until he’s in the midst of a panic attack?”

My stomach clenched, and I pulled my knees up to my chest. Leaning forward, I covered my face with my hands and let the tension in my muscles hold my body together. I was pretty sure something would just explode right off of me if I didn’t.

She wasn’t going to take me back.

She was going to have the baby.

Without me.