"Hold on." He gripped her arm to stop her from sliding off to leave. "Chill. It's just weird that you're talking to me first. But I'm totally cool with it."
The fight crumpled out of her spine. Tears flooded, dripped over. What kind of guy would he be if he didn't comfort her? No big deal. A friend thing. He patted her back. Safe. Still friend stuff.
A really soft curvy friend.
He clenched his jaw tight. Ditch the thoughts, dude. Remember the mess with Miranda. Shelby's current mess. Hell, his parents' mess.
Couldn't anybody besides him keep their pants zipped?
Shelby sniffed, pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
It s not like we were stupid or anything. We were always careful used condoms."
That was so much more information than he needed. "Uh-huh."
"But no kind of birth control is a hundred percent, you know?"
Not really. But now didn't seem to be the time to mention his virgin status. "Says so on the box."
"We haven't even been doing it all that long."
So she'd held out against John Murdoch. Marginal balm for an aching ego. "Oh, um…"
"John wanted me to be sure."
Hell. Now he couldn't even hate the guy. "You must be really important to him."
A small smile broke through for the first time. "That's what he says." Her smile drooped. "But he's already pissed at me because I won't go to the same college as him, and now he's going to use this to make me do things his way. I'm just a senior in high school. I don't want to get married yet."
Married? "Whoa. Hold on. Why worry until you know for sure? No need to get all fired up and mad at him." Way to go, sap. Help the guy. Except in this case, helping Murdoch meant helping Shelby. "Why don't you get one of those home tests?"
"They're not a hundred percent for sure."
"It's a place to start."
"Maybe I don't want to know for sure." She snapped a hair band on her wrist, then again and again. "God, my dad's going to be so disappointed in me. I don't know how I'm going to face him."
"What about your mom? Can you go to her place for the weekend, talk to her first?"
Shelby snorted, yanking the band off her wrist and twisting her hair back. "She'll either totally freak out and just call my dad to handle it, or pretend everything's fine and offer to take me shopping at the mall."
"Maybe you could go to your stepmom."
"Julia's cool," Shelby conceded, giving her hair a final twist in the band. "But she'll tell Dad, because that's the way they are together. Tight, you know?"
"Hmm," he grunted, because he didn't know. His parents weren't that way, never had been, and it pissed him off that no amount of extra "alone time" together seemed to make any difference. "What do you want to do?"
"I want to scream. I want to cry." Her hands dropped from her silky black hair into her lap. "I want somebody to hug me and tell me it's gonna be okay."
"Well, I can help you out with half of that."
Chris wrapped his arms around her, tucked her under his chin and let her cry. Finally, he was holding Shelby Dawson against his chest– and he couldn't do a damn thing but comfort her while she crushed his Heath Bar.
J.T. creaked back in the office chair in his den, rubbed his hand along his stiff neck, stared at his computer screen offering nada, zip, zilch in the way of info. Damn it, that bumper sticker on the back of the hit-and-run van had to mean something, red circle with a black triangle inside. If only he could identify the damn thing and trace it.
The walls of the small paneled room started to close in on him. He needed progress. Action. Anything to shake the freaking inactivity.
He thumbed along the pages of the discarded book beside the computer. Even the Bard couldn't quiet the storm in him tonight.