Page 138 of Sinister

My parents have been busy with a spate of conferences, trade shows, and investor meetings as of late, and their travels have taken them to Europe, all the way across the ocean. Not that I would have confided in them had they been around.

My father might have been sympathetic, but I’m sure Mom would have tried to kill me. She is far too proud to have a teenage mom for a daughter.

The thoughts threaten to overwhelm me again, and the bleakness threatens to suck me down like a bottomless quagmire. I know who I can talk to.

The next moment, I have opened Instafriends and found the Misc Midn8 Meets channel.

There it is, the small green circle next to Amelia’s handle, the cheery sign that she’s online.

Ames, I really need to talk.

Barely a moment or two passes before her reply comes through.

Petra, of course. What’s going on? Tell me everything, girl.

And over the next several book-sized paragraphs, I proceed to do just that.

I tell Amelia about Elias Rutherford’s party, the pool dunking I was subjected to, and how Sin had come to my rescue.

Oooh, knight in football uniform, swoon!

Amelia texts at this point of my story.

Everybody seems to think of him that way.

I write back in complete candor.

You should have seen the way he snapped at Elias. Honestly a bit scary . . . but anyways . . .

And so, I pick up the thread and move on to the more NSFW parts of my tale: our clandestine conversation in the bedroom, where we lounged around in bathrobes over underwear while our clothes tumbled around in the dryer.

Girl, whaaaaaa.

Amelia follows that up with a string of thirst emojis too crude to be reproduced here. But the gist of it is clear.

That is some bodice-ripper level of hotness right there!

It wasn’t like that, Ames. We were actually talking . . . like, I enjoyed talking to him.

Raaaaight, Petra.

She adds several eye-roll emojis in a row.

And now my recounting gets rougher as the story turns into darker corners. I finally arrive at the day I found that I was pregnant.

Holy shit, Petra! Are you okay?

That is her first response, and I love her for it.

What did you decide?

She texts next, and I chuckle out loud, knowing that whatever state I find myself in today was not reached by choice. In other words . . .

I never decided what to do. I-I just got swept away.

What do you mean? You . . . didn’t abort?

Amelia replies, and I can sense her caution. I still haven’t told her how I feel about being pregnant. So far, I’ve just been a narrator of—it feels—someone else’s story.