Hooked

stare.
    She seemed to slip out of the present with a deep sigh, arms crisscrossed around her, as if she were holding herself together. He came up behind her and pulled her close to offer her comfort. He waited maybe two minutes before she started, maybe three. An eternity.
    “Picture the scenario. Teenage girl, innocent to the point of naïve, falls madly in love with the most popular boy in school. Captain of the football and baseball teams, smart, handsome. Every girl in school wanted him, but he chose this starry-eyed novice who thought he walked on water. A virgin, she gave herself to the person with whom she’d spend the rest of her life, never thinking of the consequences. Of course, you know what happened. Stupid teenage girl got pregnant.”
    Tawny drew a long, choppy breath. Linc listened, tightened his arms around her. She was right. This was what he wanted to hear, and part of him hated himself for wanting to.
    “She should have gone to her parents, but they’d put so much trust in her. She’d done everything right. Straight A student, SATs in the stratosphere, acceptance to one of the best schools in the country. How could she let them down by doing something so colossally stupid?”
    She removed his arms from around her body and took a step forward. Linc wanted to keep contact, so he put his hands on her shoulders and gently massaged the tight muscles. She didn’t shrug him off.
    “She goes to the boy for…for what?” Their gazes met in the window. “Help? He loved her, right? That’s what he told her to get her into bed. He’d do the right thing. Not marriage. She didn’t want that. She wanted his support. A hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on. But he was going off to college. There was no place in his life for a stupid girl who didn’t know enough to make him wear a condom.”
    “He turned you away?”
    She didn’t correct the exchange of pronouns and gave up the cryptic references. “You guessed it. I was the one pretty girl in school no boy could bed. Except him. He wore his victory like a badge of honor. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew he wasn’t going to let a pregnant girl get in the way of his life.”
    “So you arranged an abortion.”
    “It was one of those friend of a friend knew this doctor things. I should have gone to my parents, but I was sixteen, ashamed, and humiliated. I hoped it would stay secret, hoped my parents wouldn’t find out. If they did, I’d deal with it. I was going off to Brown in the fall, so it wouldn’t have long-lasting legs.”
    “You were sixteen and going to college?”
    This time he saw her weak smile reflecting back at him. “I started school young and skipped a grade in elementary school.” She released a weak laugh, almost mocking. “Hard to believe someone so smart could do something so idiotic, isn’t it?”
    He turned her around and took in her beautiful face, kissed her forehead. “We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t.”
    “True, but some have much longer consequences. You can figure out the rest. The doctor ran into complications . At least he was smart enough to know if I didn’t get to a hospital, I’d die. He made my friend promise to take me right before he packed up his things and left town.”
    Linc wiped a tear from her cheek.
    “I almost did die. When I woke and found out what they had to do to save my life, I wished I had.”
    He didn’t know the right words to say. Even though he knew he was crossing a forbidden line when he pried into Tawny’s past, he’d been powerless to stop. Now he needed to convince her it wasn’t prurient interest but an effort to understand her life so he could be part of it. He drew her into the warmth of his body, one hand on the small of her back, the other cradling her head. He felt her tears slick on his neck. She stood wooden, arms welded to her sides, unresponsive.
    “And you’d never trust anyone again, would you?”
    She pulled away. He couldn’t read her expression. It was as if all the hurts of the past had hardened inside her, and she had trained herself to keep them there, out of the harsh glare of strangers. Or would-be lovers.
    “That wasn’t a conscious objective. It just happened.” A brief smile, perfunctory at best, found its way to her lips. “I wasn’t playing games or being coy. Men wanted me because they couldn’t have me. They bought me presents to win me over, but I could only be won so far. In the beginning, I never thought of