“It does to me. Were you afraid that I’d be mad if you told me abouthim?”
“No.” Matthew sounded like he was one question away from screaming. “Maybe I didn’t want to tell you because I know you’d stick your nose in my business and ask me a million questions like you are rightnow.”
Laurence withdrew the tenderness from his voice and spoke firmly. “Matthew.Tone.”
“You know what?” Matthew wrenched the pillow from his head and sat up abruptly. He was trembling with rage. “If you didn’t have to tell me all about how you’re banging some guy who looks like he’s not all that much older than me—how you like it when he calls youDaddy,like some perv—then I don’t have to tell you anything about my goddamn relationship. I don’t have to tell you a single fuckingthing.”
“This is your last warning.” Laurence kept his voice level even though he was a few words away from blowing up. For the most part, Matthew was a good kid, but when they got into arguments, he knew how to get under Laurence’s skin. “I made a mistake tonight, and I came here to apologize for it. If you don’t want to talk about this like adults, then I will have to treat you like achild.”
“Oh, really?” Matthew’s cheeks were red, and his voice was hoarser than it had been before. The low notes of his words crackled. “What are you going to do? Send me to my room? Forbid me from going out? Well, guess what? I’m already here, and there’s no one left out there who I’d want to gosee.”
“You need to take a few moments to catch your breath and come down from this,” Laurence told him sternly. “I know that you’re hurting. That’s okay. What isn’t okay is lashing out at other people when you’rehurt.”
“No. No,youaren’t getting out of this, either,” Matthew said. The pitch of his voice rose, nearing shrill. “You were banging some trashy, barely legal boy on the kitchen island. I eatbreakfastthere. How long have you been doing that for, huh? The house belongs to you, yeah, whatever, but you were the one who decided to have a kid! You brought me to live here and I have nowhere else to go! I don’t want to eat on the table my dad’s been banging sluts on.I—”
“Being angry is fine.” Laurence’s tone was cool and collected, but it cut through Matthew’s statement and put an abrupt end to it. “Expressing yourself is fine, too. But starting to call people names? Insulting people? That’s never been fine. You know better,Matthew.”
Matthew’s fists trembled. “Okay, then what other word should I use to describe a no-name random who lets you fuck him on the kitchen island? Because to me, slut fits thebill.”
“You’re angry and you’re lashing out. We’ll talk about this—about all of this—in the morning.” Laurence couldn’t keep engaging if Matthew was going to press his buttons. He was too close to exploding with anger to be rational, and right now, rational was what Matthew needed. “It’s been a tough day for both ofus.”
Matthew laughed. It was dry and hopeless. “You thinkthisis tough?Really?”
“Matthew,” Laurence warned. “Both of us need time to cool down. Don’t try to make thingsworse.”
For a moment, Matthew said nothing. He locked eyes with Laurence, then shook his head slowly. “Dad, you don’t even know what worse is. You don’t even know what’s goingon.”
It was a set-up. Matthew was going to try to make a dig at him one last time before he left. Laurence braced himself for whatever vitriol was about to spew from his son’s mouth. “Then why don’t you tellme.”
Matthew dragged his hands down his face, then shook his head and plopped back onto the bed like he’d given up. He laughed. “What’s worse is that I’mpregnant.”
“You’re…” Saliva pooled in Laurence’s mouth, and he had to stop to swallow it. “You’rewhat?”
“I’mpregnant.” Matthew stared at the ceiling and laced his hands over his abdomen. “My boyfriend told me that he wanted to take my heat, and when I told him that he couldn’t, he told me that he didn’t care if I got knocked up… that he’d care for me, and for the baby, and that if I did get pregnant, he’d marry me and we’d live together and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything ever again. So I lethim.”
“You let him… take your heat.” Words were a struggle Laurence’s tongue wasn’t prepared to undertake. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought his whole body had been pumped full ofnovocaine.
“I mean, it wasn’t like we were trying to have a baby,” Matthew said as casually as he could, but even though Laurence’s thoughts were scrambled and his pulse rushed in his ears, he heard the underlying strain in Matthew’s voice. “He just wanted to have some fun with me. He said that heat sex is the best sex, and that it’d feel even better without a condom on, because it was what nature wanted us todo.”
The urge to throttle Matthew struck quite suddenly, and Laurence’s hands twitched. They’d had conversations about safe sex. He’d made sure that Matthew had access to contraceptives—condoms and birth control pills both. There was no reason for him to be pregnant. “Why weren’t you on thepill?”
“I just…” Matthew closed his eyes and sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly through his nose. “Ididn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to be a family with him! Okay?” Matthew scowled. He turned his gaze on Laurence, looking like Laurence had betrayed him. “I loved him and I wanted a family with him. You wanted a family once, too, didn’t you? You knocked up mom so you could have me. And now it looks like history is repeatingitself.”
“Who is he?” Laurence demanded. “Who did this toyou?”
“He’s gone. I toldyou.”
“Even if he transferred schools, I can find him,” Laurence said. He wouldn’t let this go. “I’ll get in touch with hisparents.”
“No.” Matthew let out an exasperated sigh and tugged the drawstrings on his hoodie tighter. “He doesn’t go to school. I tried to call him today, but the phone wasn’t ringing, and so I went to hisapartment—”
“You were dating a grown man?” Laurence demanded. His tone sharpened. “How old ishe?”
“Dad—”
