Page 71 of Romancing in Rot

Junior year changed that. The night I found you on the bleachers after a game.

Everyone else had cleared out. You were sitting halfway up, arms wrapped around yourself, crying like you were trying to keep it quiet.

I sat down next to you and stayed there. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk. I didn’t know if you wanted me there. I only knew I couldn’t leave you alone like that.

Eventually, you told me.

You were pregnant.

You said he told you to get rid of it.

I wanted to find him. I wanted to break something. Him, mostly. But you didn’t need my rage. You already had enough fear sitting beside you. You needed someone to listen, so I did.

You said you didn’t want to ruin his life. Like yours didn’t matter. Like what he wanted had more weight than what was happening inside your body. Like everyone else got a vote before you did.

I wrote something down. Do you remember what it was?

You tried to brush it off. I made you read it anyway because even then, Clair, I wanted you to understand that your wants mattered.

In case you aren’t a creeper like me who has remembered every second of every encounter we’ve ever had, I asked you one thing:

What do YOU want?

A huff of laughter slips out of me because apparently, I’m a creeper too.

The field lights had still been on, buzzing overhead, the metal seats cold enough to bite through jeans. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and the whole stadium smelled like wet grass, metal, and popcorn someone had spilled beneath the seats. Everything was too bright and too lonely at the same time.

I told him, “It doesn’t matter what I⁠—”

Leon shook the paper in front of me. Insistent.

Not angry.

Not impatient.

Certain.

No one had ever asked me that before. Not really. My parents told me what would look best. Russ told me what he needed. Teachers asked about plans and grades and college like my life hadn’t already tilted off its axis.

But Leon asked what I wanted.

My voice came out small. “I want to keep it.”

His lips twitched at the corner, soft and proud in a way that made something cracked inside me ache.

Then he wrote again.

Oh yes, I remember what he wrote.

Then keep it.

I press harder into the paper.

You already knew what you wanted. You just needed someone to say it mattered.

It did.

It still does.