The Trap (Trapped Prequel)

Chapter 4

Mitch

The following day, I arrive at Paige’s house shortly before eleven in the morning.  When Mrs. Nichols answers the door and ushers me in, she’s all big smiles and warm greetings. It’s obvious she still doesn’t know I knocked up her only daughter.

As I follow her from the front to the foot of the staircase, she glances at me over her shoulder and remarks, “And don’t you look tanned and handsome. Is it my imagination or have you grown taller since the last time I saw you. And it looks like you’ve gotten broader in the shoulders. Is that what that university is doing to you?”

I should be used to Mrs. Nichols by now but I feel heat suffuse my face. I swear to God, she’s the only woman who can make me blush. “Yeah, well that and the weights. Gotta keep in shape for football,” I reply, praying she’ll quit with the compliments.

It would be one thing is she looked like a regular mom, but Paige’s mom is the sort of mother who turns heads wherever she goes. Dark-haired, blue-eyed and slim, she’s the older version of my girlfriend. And not even that old. She had Paige when she was twenty-one, which means she’s not even forty yet. My mom was forty-three when she had me. I was one of those late-in-life babies.

“Paige is in her room. She’s not feeling well though, but you can go on up.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Nichols.”

She laughs lightly. “How many times have I told you to call me Maureen? You’re part of the family.”

Boy, she doesn’t know the half of it.  

But I don’t call any of my other friends parents’ by their first names. My parents drilled that into me and old habits die hard. I just nod into her smiling face and head upstairs.

She’s also the only mother I know who doesn’t have a problem with her daughter being alone in her room with her boyfriend. But then Paige said her mother has always been realistic when it comes to sex and that kind of stuff. She promoted abstinence but also wanted Paige to be prepared and protected. Knowledge is power and all that.

Yeah, right. Look where that got her daughter. Still knocked up at eighteen.

Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck.

I give a preemptory knock on the Paige’s door before I enter to find her lying face up on her bed.

Startled, she quickly removes a washcloth from her forehead, tosses it on the nightstand and pushes up onto her elbows. “I thought you said you weren’t coming until after lunch.”

“My sister came home early and took Tess and Doug to their swimming lessons so I didn’t have to stay.” I advance toward the bed. Normally, all I’d be thinking about is joining her there and fooling around for a while. Now all I can think is it was all that fooling around that got us into this mess. Because really that’s what this is. One giant complicated mess.

“Why didn’t you call and tell me then?” she asks, her voice a bit raspy.

Since I don’t know will either piss her off or make her cry, I don’t say anything as I take a seat next to her on the side of the bed. She raises herself to a sitting position. Her long hair is a tangled mess and she’s not wearing any makeup—not that she wears much to begin with.  But today she’s unusually pale.

“How’re you feeling?” I ask instead. “Your mom says you’re not feeling well.”

 “Not so great,” she admits with a grimace.

“Yeah, looks like you had a hard night.”

“More like I had a hard morning.” She gives me this weird look and I stare back at her. “As in morning sickness,” she elaborates.