Porcelain

Chapter 43

"I'm pregnant."

That was what she said, wasn't it? Dally hoped it wasn't. He hoped that maybe she was pulling some sick joke, or that he heard her wrong. Because those were two words he did not want to hear. Ever.

"What?" He whispered.

"You heard me," she said, standing up.

"Don't you leave me here," he said in a low voice, wincing a bit when he realized how threatening it sounded.

She seemed to fight a small battle with herself there, between running and staying put, instinct in instinct.

"You're scaring me, Dallas," she said in a low voice.

He sighed. "Didn't mean to do that. But you said that you-"

"Are pregnant. Yes."

He shifted his gaze from intense on her face to scanning her midsection, suddenly seeing her in a new light.

"How long?"

"Doctor said it'll be born in around five months."

"But you didn't, don't, seem pregnant."

"You weren't there. But you're right. I only found out like a week ago."

She looked so on-edge that it made Dally sad. "It's okay, I'm not gonna hurt you. Calm down," he said, trying to sound gentler.

"You're not mad?" She asked in that same timid voice.

"No," he ground out. He was, but not at her. She didn't need to hear a yes. Even he could tell that.

"Look, I need some time alone," she said, walking away from him again. "Just some time to think about all this. I'll be back later," she said, striding away before breaking into a jog.

Dally let her go without too much worry, she said she would come back.

He wheeled back and punched the tree out of anger. At what, he didn't know. All of it. The situation. Himself. The tragic things that lead up to this.

He tried to wrap his head around it. He was about to be a parent. A father. A dad. He was going to be someone's father.

He recoiled from the thought. He didn't have much experience with kids, he was always the youngest in the situations he got in growing up, and then when he joined the gang, everyone was roughly the same age. But his dad never did a thing for him, and his mother was long gone. He had no idea what the everloving fuck he was supposed to do. And he didn't know anyone who could tell him what he should do.

He didn't want it. Them. Whatever. The kid. The thing growing in Estelle. Sure, he wanted her back into his life, but he didn't want to have to jump back into, whatever he had going on with her, with this.

Whenever his emotions overflowed, they always manifested themselves into violence and cold anger in some matter, and this was no exception. It was something that was starting to change about him, but in this moment he was just an angry teenager again.

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Estelle was mad. She didn't really know why or what she was mad at, or for certain that she was mad. She just felt a knot of anger boiling inside of her, and it wanted out.

"That's a child, dipshit," a sarcastic part of her mind thought.

She pushed the thought away. Not the time.

She hasn't given herself the time to fully comprehend it all. But here she was. She was seventeen. She had no place she truly called home. She was a delinquent, a menace to society. She lived a double life, and had no family that could support her. Nothing in her life could be called stable. And here she was, a few months she was sure in some ways would drag on forever and others speed by as quick as snapping her fingers, away from being a parent. A mother. A mom. She was going to be someone's mother.

She wanted to scream and cry like a child, but her chance to do that was gone forever now. She couldn't look back ever again. She was an adult now. Her time to be a kid was gone for good. She couldn't be the kid anymore.

She and Dally. The charming and mysterious "boy" who fought with a cold intense focus, and lived like everyone were puppets for him to manipulate. The blonde notorious for being cold and hardened, who used hatred as his greatest weapon and had a dark record from New York to Tulsa. They were about to be parents.

It seemed wrong. It was wrong. Who the fuck did they think there are? She didn't even know anymore. She wasn't just carving her own path in life anymore, she was forming the life to cut the path in as well.

Her feet had taken her nearly out of Greaser territory, and she was at the train tracks. Once the symbol to all of the division of people there, but now to her they were an empty promise. To take her away, to take her to. But she was just travelling. To nowhere. From nowhere. It seemed like some sick joke.

She shook her head and tried to snap out of her thoughts. Daydreaming would take her nowhere now. Not that anything did anymore.

What was wrong with her? She had just told Dally she was pregnant, and here they all were now. Back apart and falling to pieces, because they didn't know what to do with themselves any more.

And now, there was going to be another to suffer the same cruel fate of a poor Greaser child, a child like they had used to be.