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“Wait.” I’d just started to pass her when I felt her grab my hand. “Maybe you were right before,” she said when I looked down at her. “You’ve already seen it all anyway. Stay. The shower is open.”
She didn’t give me a chance to argue before she let me go and disappeared inside the closet. I scrubbed my hand over my face before deciding to take her up on her offer and use the shower.
Thankfully, by the time I emerged with a towel wrapped around my waist, she was fully dressed and stuffing a textbook inside her Fendi backpack. A congratulatory gift I’d gotten her after getting her transfer into IHU accepted.
She’d gushed over that damn bag for weeks, and no matter how much I spoiled her, Atlas never stopped being grateful. It had only made me eager to give her more. Everything I had to give was hers.
“Can you give me a ride to campus?” she asked without looking up. “I forgot I left my car at the shop last night and won’t have time to get it. Professor Wang gets bitchy whenever students are late.”
“Yeah, I got you.”
“Thanks.” She kept her head down and her hands busy, and I realized she was avoiding looking at me while I wore nothing but a towel and dripping water everywhere.
I grabbed a clean uniform from the dresser before dropping the towel and stepping into my pants. My back was to her while I faced the mirror, so I caught the quick peek she’d taken before inhaling deeply, grabbing her backpack, and fleeing the room.
I chuckled as I finished dressing before grabbing my gun from the nightstand and locking it at my waist. I followed my baby downstairs so I could take her to school, and afterward, hopefully, I could take my mind off this shit for a few hours at work.
I left the car idling at the curb as Atlas unbuckled her seat belt and turned to me. “We need to talk.” I was beginning to think it was her favorite phrase. “I know we agreed on no sex until we get the results, but what about the rest of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“How does this work? With the pandemic, a DNA test could take weeks…months. Do we still go on like we’re in a relationship? Do we remain exclusive, or do we see other people? I don’t know about you, but the last time I checked, a platonic relationship meant friends.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth as I eyed her and forced myself to remain calm. “Is that what you want?”
She shook her head. “No.” Sensing she had more to say, I said nothing as I watched her tuck a curl that hadn’t made it into the bushy ponytail at her crown. The faux locs she’d worn when I first met her was a distant memory, and I’d fallen in love with her natural hair. “I know it’s not fair of me to demand monogamy. If Jada really is my birth mother…” She grimaced at that. “There’s a fifty percent chance we’ll have to break up, maybe never see each other again. But I—it’s…it’s what I want,” she finished quickly. And then she lifted her chin to make it clear she wasn’t backing down.
“All right.”
“All right?” she echoed. “Just like that?”
Her words, the disbelief behind them, and the wariness in her gaze…it all felt like déjà vu. We’d come so far just to be forced back to square one where Atlas needed to be convinced I had her back no matter what.
I remembered the conversation we had eight months ago, the morning after I moved her in with me and fucked her for the first time. When I promised to kill for her.
Fuck, I’d barely known her.
That much was obvious.
I could hear my mother now.“It’s dangerous…how carelessly you young people have sex. You make babies you’re not ready for. You spread diseases without regard. And I know you, son. I’ve known men like you. You use these women, and you barely know their names, much less where and who they come from. Could be fucking your own kin and not even know it. Take care, Owen Rashaad. Or one day, you’ll find yourself in a situation you can’t get out of.”
If only my mother knew how her warnings had come to pass. I knew what she and my father would say.
They’d tell me to let Atlas go.
And I had, but look where it got us? Right back to square one. I knew Atlas better than anyone. Because of her past, walking away would only do more harm than good, so I kept the promise I made to her when she agreed to be mine. I gave her what she needed, even at my own detriment.
Me.
“If I thought for one moment that the test would come back positive, I would have walked away as soon as Jada told me.”
But it didn’t feel entirely like the truth. Because that would imply moving on and forgetting Atlas would be easy when it would be the hardest thing I ever had to do. It felt impossible.
“But you did walk away,” she accused. “You stopped talking to me, touching me…you wouldn’t even look at me, Owen.”
“It wasn’t because I believed it was true! Okay, I’ll admit at first, it fucked me up. I shut down. But once the shock wore off, and I was able to search inside myself—I meanreallylook deep, Atlas—I realized it was bullshit and decided not to tell you. I thought that would be the end of it and I could go back to normal. Loving you, fucking you, and finding new ways to make you smile. But I…I couldn’t. Without concrete proof, a small part of me still wondered, still feared that maybe it was true and what it would do to you if you found out. IhatedJada for planting that seed. You’d already been through so much. Lost everyone you ever cared about, and now there was a chance I’d have to walk away too and leave you to walk this earth alone again. I told myself the answer was simple. You wouldn’t find out.Ever.I didn’t want to put you through that kind of trauma. Because it was, Atlas. Living in a reality where there was even achanceI’d been fucking my own daughter was traumatic as fuck. I didn’t want to imagine what it would do to you. Yeah, there was no way we could have known, but it didn’t stop me from feeling like shit. I dragged you into this fucked-up situation with me. I pursued you, seduced you, and made you be with me. This was all on me, and I wanted it to stay that way. But now I was keeping this huge secret from you, so the guilt tripled until I was just…stuck. I did all of that to keep you from feeling any pain. I switched up, and you didn’t know why. I couldn’t see until too late that I was hurting you anyway by keeping you in the dark.”
By the time I finished spilling my guts, there was a thoughtful furrow in her brow. “You said you hated Jada for planting that seed. You seem so sure that it’s not true. Is there a reason she’d have to lie?”
