Page 34 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

He nodded but was already packing up the food he’d brought over."Sounded pretty clear."

"I meant Sue Ellen." I was already walking toward him. "I meant a woman carrying everything by herself while somebody she loves falls apart. I meant that I'm scared, but not scared of you. I'm scared of what people keep telling me is coming."

He let out a whistle and shook his head. "Whew, girl. That's worse."

"Bobby Jo."

"No, that's worse, Rue, and I think you know it." He still hadn’t raised his voice one time. I would’ve given anything for him to yell. "Because to be scared of that, you got to be looking at me and seeing him standing there."

"You know what I did." He picked his keys up off the counter. "I told you myself, at a table in a diner, before anybody in this town got to tell you their version. I ain't never once asked you to pretend it didn't happen."

"I know."

"You can hold every bit of it against me. That's fair. I earned that, and I'll answer for it the rest of my life." He stopped at the door with his hand on it. "But don't look at me and see my daddy."

I wanted to walk into traffic this had gone off the rails. "I don't."

Bobby Jo looked back at me. "You just did."

The screen door shut soft behind him, which was somehow worse than if he had slammed it. I stood in my kitchen and listened to his truck start, and back down my driveway, and go quiet at the end of the street.

I picked up my phone eleven times that night.

But I didn’t call.

Coward, I thought.

I told myself he needed to cool off, and then I told myself he would text me in the morning like he always did. I lay there until two in the morning constructing the versions of the sentences I should’ve said instead.

There was nothing on my phone when the alarm went off. No good morning. No nothing.

Regina took one look at me in the hallway before first bell and stopped walking.

"What happened?"

My throat closed all the way up.

"I think I broke it."

Chapter 11

Rue

Nine days.

Nine stupid days.

We hadn’t broken up exactly. That was what made it unbearable because there hadn’t been another conversation or even text stating that things were done.

There was just a Wednesday night and then nine days of nothing, and I checked my phone so often that my seniors started asking if I was all right.

I missed the stupidest things. I missed the good morning that came in at ten after six because his day started before mine. I missed his truck sitting at my curb with the engine ticking while he came up the walk. I missed him reaching over and pushing my glasses back up my nose without breaking whatever sentence he was in the middle of.

I even missed his texts, which were full of deliberate errors he absolutely knew were errors, written by a man who had graduated high school and was doing it purely to make my eye twitch.

"Call him," Regina said, for the fourth day in a row.

"I will,”