Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Oh, he knew.
Nico’s guilt and everything else he felt about the situation permeated the room with heaviness and turmoil. Salvatore did not think for one second that it had been easy for Nico to get in his car, drive here, and tell his girlfriend’s father that he’d gotten her pregnant.
But he did it. Sal respected that. It counted for something.
“I tried. I did everything right, Sal. I—”
“Not everything,” Salvatore countered, but not unkindly. “At some point, things were not as they should be, if this is where we find ourselves.”
Condoms, he meant. He wasn’t going to spell it out. Who the fuck was Salvatore to talk, anyway?
He bet, in fifty other lives where the two of them existed, they would still have somehow come together, and this exact thing would’ve played out repeatedly. From day one, neither had any say or control between the other. Two moths chasing the same brightly burning flame.
“Fucking inevitable,” Salvatore muttered to himself, then.
Nico’s head bobbed up, and his teary eyes watched the man across the room. “W-what?”
“Oh, this whole damned thing. Just inevitable. Bound to fucking happen, wasn’t it?”
Nico’s shoulders shuddered with his next rattling breath. “I don’t understand.”
“You’ve got to get yourself under control. The tears won’t make a plan for you and Frankie.”
A harsh breath left Nico. “I know.” He wiped harder at his face, almost seemingly disgusted that he had to do it at all. “Boys don’t fucking cry.”
Salvatore could guess who told him that nonsense. “Perhaps boys don’t, but men do. You’re sure she’s going to want to keep it?” he asked carefully.
A low, pained cry crawled out of Nico.
“Y-yeah,” the kid mumbled around a hiccup. “If she didn’t fucking want to, she would have taken the Plan B I got for her, and she wouldn’t have kept it hidden it for a month and a half after she knew for sure. I’d say so, Sal.”
Salvatore cleared his throat, ignoring the attitude that bled into Nico’s words. But, he didn’t take it personally. He should have his feelings. This would be, undoubtedly, something that rocked his entire world. He’d turn twenty before he became a father, but that meant little when the mother was still a teenager herself, and a whole world of trouble piled around the boundary of their happy little bubble.
From the moment he invited Nico into the house, taking him up to the study where the two of them could have a private conversation about whatever happened, honesty came first. From beginning, to end, Nico told him everything.
How it happened, when it happened and why it happened. How he tried to fix it, how he did the right, responsible thing, and how it hadn’t happened again. He made sure of that.
And yet...
“We can only control ourselves, and our own choices and actions,” Salvatore said, folding his arms over his chest. “So, you did what you could, but you can’t control her path. Take a breath, and let yourself calm down, Nico.”
“I’m tr-trying,” Nico mumbled, still crying.
“What bothers you most?”
“There isn’t one thing.”
“Well, start somewhere,” Sal urged.
He was not going to get past whatever he was stuck on if he just sat there with it and didn’t let someone else hold onto the weight for a while. Sal could hold it, if Nico just gave it to him.
“You want the whole fucking list, or what?”
“Nico...”
“It happened. I’ve fucked more girls than days of the year, probably, and that’s never happened to me.”
Salvatore drummed his fingers against the side of his face, mulling the statement over. “Okay, so that explains why you’re pissed at yourself, anyway.”
Nico scoffed brokenly. “A fucking joke.”
“Not a funny one, though.”
“You think?”
Oh, there came that attitude again. “You know, you get mean when you get mad, kid.”
Nico folded his arms across his chest, and his gaze drifted to Salvatore. “Better I’m mean to you than her, right?”
“That’s fair,” Salvatore replied quietly.
Nico laughed a heartbroken sound and fell back into the couch all over again. His hand slapped against his face in a way that sounded painful as he muttered, “For six weeks, she knew...she knew, and she didn’t tell me. Is that what it’s going to be like for the rest of our fucking lives together? She hides shit she knows is going to upset me until she can’t anymore?”
“This is not quite the same as—”
“It’s not a very good start!”
Salvatore sighed loudly. “Yeah, I know.”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
A beat of silence passed. Nico’s tears slowed.
Then, he asked, “What the fuck am I gonna do about my father?”
Salvatore needed time to work on that. “As of now, nothing.”
“What?” Nico asked, incredulous. “Didn’t you just open a safe to give me a fucking r—”
“That’s between you and I, and you and her. Your father has nothing to do with us knowing what the right thing to do here is. He wasn’t in that bed between you. He didn’t throw the second pill away and he didn’t show up to my home today, asking for help. This is not about him. And besides, if you think Giorgio won’t throw the biggest fit you’ve ever seen because his nineteen-year-old problem child knocked up his consigliere’s daughter, think again.”