Besides, it wasn’t any of his business.
“Excuse me?” I tried to step around him, but anticipating my move, he blocked my path.
“Listen, I’m not trying to be a dick—”
“I don’t think you have to try— it just comes naturally.”
“But,” he redirected, away from my insult, “I’m curious. And I feel out of the loop. Everyone else knows and I don’t, so instead of listening to town gossip, I thought I would come straight to you. Set the record straight.”
My mouth went suddenly dry, the truth soaking up whatever moisture was there like a bitter sponge. “How nice of you,” I managed to growl. I tried to step around him again, but he moved in front of me and held out his arms.
“Ruby, come on.” He laughed, a smile pushing the corners of his mouth wide. It was an act though, smoke and mirrors. He wasn’t relaxed. And he wasn’t asking out of some friendly obligation to save my reputation. “I’m sure whoever the guy is, he’s decent. Mercer said you’re not with him now. I’m just curious—”
God, this had to stop. Now. “I don’t know.”
He stilled, his entire body turning solid. He had been bobbing and weaving before, blocking my path and boxing me in. Now he was an impossibly hard, marble statue and I was afraid I’d never make it past him. There was a kind of quiet fury to him that made my hands tremble. “What?”
Needing this conversation to end as soon as possible, I gave a feeble shrug. “I don’t know, Levi. Okay? I don’t know who Max’s dad is. And I don’t want to speculate with you of all people. You’re pretty much a stranger to me now. So just drop it.”
He ignored me—all of my straightforward commands to stop asking questions and my veiled insults. He ignored everything. Instead, his low growl voiced his desperate curiosity, “What do you mean you don’t know?”
I ground my teeth together and resisted the urge to scream for help. Not that anyone would step in to help me. Even Maria could see we were only talking. It wasn’t like I was in danger. I just didn’t want to have this conversation.
Bravely meeting his unrelenting gaze with courage I did not feel, I spread my hands helplessly. “I don’t know, okay? It’s not something I like to admit or talk about. For obvious reasons, I want to protect Max from this as much as possible. But please understand, I don’t know who his dad is.”
This answer had placated everyone before. Even my mom and my closest friends. For the rest of town, they found it easy to believe that I had slept around enough that the mystery man could not be named. The conversations I’d overheard, speculated that he was most likely someone from out of town.
For my friends, I had made enough sketchy decisions around the time I suspected I was pregnant that I was able to cast doubt over when and where and with whom I could have accidentally slipped up. I started going to more parties. I started disappearing at the end of them, claiming drunkenness and confusion.
Besides, I had always been a loner. There were plenty of nights, Coco and Emilia couldn’t account for my whereabouts. I just embellished the truth enough to make it ambiguously shady.
They knew I hadn’t had that many partners, but my inability to confess Max’s father, made it clear I’d had enough to cast doubt on who it could be. And they had supported my decision not to pursue knowledge about the subject. It made sense to them that I would want to do this solo, that I didn’t want to know the father.
And by the time the truth had finally come out about my unplanned pregnancy, they’d both left for fall semester, so they couldn’t exactly cross reference any of my bullet points.
And my mom? She hadn’t cared enough to press the issue. I knew she knew I knew. But she never asked questions. She never pushed. She just… did her thing and let me do mine.
So, it would be easy to understand why I thought Levi would do the same as everyone else—assume I had made a series of poor decisions that led to a forever kind of consequence. He was supposed to believe my reputation over the truth, just like everyone else. He was supposed to think the worst of me and let the matter drop.
Instead, he took a step forward, pointed a finger at me and snarled, “Bullshit.”
For the second time in minutes, I asked a stunned, “Excuse me?”
“That’s bullshit, Ruby. You know exactly who the father is.”
I held his gaze, too afraid to look away and let him see how quickly he’d gotten to me. Breathing through real panic, I snapped, “Get out of my way, Levi.”
He didn’t. “Why are you playing this game? Who are you protecting?”
“Stop.”
“What do you have to lose?”
“Stop, Levi.”
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but you’re only going to end up hurting Max—”
I couldn’t take another second of this. I couldn’t listen to him accuse me and say my son’s name and…. and…. See straight through me. I dropped the box of Hamburger Helper and slammed my hands on his chest to get his attention, fire blazing in my eyes, a storm ten times stronger than the one outside building inside my chest. “I said stop!”
