No Strings Attached

Chapter Eleven

“What is this?”

She didn’t answer him – she opened her mouth to try, and she closed it again, nervously looking around her for a dustpan and brush to clear the mess.”Shannon leave it!” he burst out, the birth certificate open in the album clenched in his hands – his eyes darted between the words on the page and her fidgeting hands. “What is this?” he repeated, in a trembling voice.

“Let me ... I should make you more tea,” her voice was dazed, shivering, and her hazel eyes were trained on the smashed porcelain at her feet.

“Fuck the tea! Who’s Molly?”

Her hand flew to her mouth, holding in the sobs that were threatening to erupt.

“You can see ... you can see there who she is ...” her face contorted with sorrow, and tears sprung to cling to her lashes as she took a seat behind him on the sofa – her controlled movements so at odds with the pain on her face.

“No,” he whispered, his eyes panicked as he read the words over and over, “No! Because see here it says,” he swallowed nervously, his strong hands shaking around the delicate book, “It says I have a child ... and I know you would have said something if I ... if that was true, wouldn’t you?”

She couldn’t meet his eyes when he turned them on her beseechingly – pleading with her to tell him that the entire thing was a huge mistake, he’d got it all wrong. She’d caught a glimpse of the resonant despair in the gun metal depths, she couldn’t see any more. She watched her hands instead – she watched them unpick the thread in one of her designer cushions aimlessly. She watched, but she didn’t really see.

“I uh ...” she brought her thumb nail up to her lips, nervously chewing at the trembling digit.

“You’d have told me,” he didn’t sound as convinced as he collapsed onto the cushions next to her, “You’d have mentioned the fact that we made a baby – even though I was an asshole, you’d have told me, right?”

“I didn’t want to trap you,” her voice emerged as a throaty whisper, heavy and low with the burden of tears, “I wasn’t good enough, you said so ... I didn’t want to trap you when I wasn’t good enough ...”

Clasping his fingers behind his head, and resting his elbows on his spread knees, he looked down at the words between his feet on the certificate:

Father: Nathaniel James Casey...

“But I lied ...”

“I know that ... now. I didn’t then.” She stared at his broad back, at the V of generous muscles that spanned it, and she watched his spine crumble – vertebrae by vertebrae – with the burden of what she was telling him, until he was hunched, and crippled by it.

“Holy shit,” he muttered hoarsely, “This is so fucked up ...”

“I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry, I didn’t know ...” she brought her knees up to her chest, hugging her arms around herself, “I didn’t know what would happen ...”