The Perfection of Love (5 page)

It was a Friday night and I’d specifically booked the weekend off work to recover. By the time we got to the party there were already people outside puking up the alcohol they’d probably saved up all month to buy.  As usual the three of us grabbed our drinks and then made our way to the middle of the dance floor.  We were bumping and grinding like our lives depended on it.  Suddenly I felt large hands wrap around my waist.  I smiled thinking of Mitchell and turned only to find Derek Matthews one of Joe’s rugby player friends.  On a normal day Derek was pretty cool but I could see he was tanked to the roof, probably on beer.

“Dance with me sexy DJ.”  He crooned in my ear.  It was not sexy and his breath suggested that at some point this night he had already seen the contents of his stomach.  Only a few people called me DJ but as I didn’t like my name being shortened like that, not many people said it, unless they wanted to piss me off.

“Um, no thanks, Derek.”

“Come on.  I’m off to uni next term and you have blown me off since we started school how many years ago.  The least you can do is dance with me.  Pleeeeeeeeeease?  I promise I won’t grope or fondle, pinky swear.”  Derek had cocked his head to the side like a puppy.  I sighed and gave in.

“I’ll dance with you but no over friendliness or the dance gets cut short and you’ll find my heel somewhere you won’t forget in a hurry.”

He took my hand and spun me around and we begun dancing together.  Derek was really good and he kept his promise of no wandering hands.  Suddenly there was a lack of close body heat to me and Saz and Mills’ faces looked way more than concerned.  When I looked over my shoulder Derek wasn’t there anymore but a furious looking Mitchell was there in his place.

“A minute of your time, Dana.”

I didn’t have a chance to answer before he grabbed my hand and tore out of the house and round to the back where there was no one around.  I’d never seen Mitchell like this.  Every now and again he might wig out and get a little intense and weird but right now he was scary.

“Mitchell, you’re hurting me.  Let go.”

He looked down at my wrist and tossed it away like it disgusted him to be touching me.

“What the fuck do you think you were doing?”

“What are you talking about?”  I was seriously confused.

“You were dancing with that guy like he was a pole and you were a stripper.  What the fuck?”

“No I wasn’t.  That’s just Derek.  I know him from school.  We’re friends and we were just dancing.”

“Have you forgotten that you’ve got a boyfriend?  Not only did you not tell me you were going out tonight with your slut friend and the other one who has no backbone to stick up for herself, but when I come to find you to see if you’re going to need a lift home, I find you practically fucking a guy on the dance floor.”

Woah!  Someone obviously was smoking some kind of funky shit tonight because I didn’t know where any of that came from.  Well, in actual fact Saz went out with quite a few guys but she didn’t sleep with them all.  Mills is just shy or as she likes to put it “selective with who she talks to” and I definitely was not dancing how he was suggesting.

“Mitchell, you seriously need to chill the fuck out.  I don’t need to tell you where I’m going and give you a daily itinerary and you don’t get to talk about my friends like that.  I don’t know what planet you’ve hopped off but this not the nineteen fifties and I can do what the fuck….”

I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence because while I was getting into the full swing of my rant right back at Mitchell, he’d silently worked himself up as well and back handed me across my cheek.  I didn’t see it coming and went down into the grass.  Before I had a chance to recover he had his knee in my back and his fist in my hair.  His knee knocked the wind out of my lungs and I couldn’t find the breath to scream.

“Don’t you ever try to take the piss out of me, Dana.  I will not be walked over.  If you want to play games and fuck with me  you’ll lose.  You’ve just disgraced yourself in front of all those people.  Now go get in the car.”

I didn’t want to go anywhere with him but I most certainly didn’t want to be hit again. So I got up and while the tears fell down my cheeks I tried to straighten myself out and followed him to his car.  He didn’t open the door for me this time and he didn’t talk to me once he started the car and pulled out the drive.  He drove me home which was a relief.  I got out the car and walked through my gate.  Mitchell didn’t look in my direction and sped off, the wheels screeching as he tore down the road.  I slipped inside the house and crept up to my room.  Lana was out which was another relief because I didn’t want to explain my cut knees and my face which was probably already bruising.  I got changed and took myself into the shower.  I don’t know what it is about showers, but no matter how strong you’ve been, once that water hits you, it releases all your tears and there’s nothing you can do but cry until it’s all out.

I went back into my room and checked my phone.  There were several missed calls and texts from Saz and Mills asking me to call them and asking if I was ok.  I texted them both back.

“I’m fine.  Had 2 talk 2 Mitchell.  Ruined my buzz.  Gone home.  Talk 2 u 2moro. Av a gud nite. Luv u. x”

I got under my covers and cried myself to sleep while I replayed the last couple of hours of the night.

Before I opened my eyes the following morning I could hear hushed voices and feel shadows in the room.  I opened one eye and nearly screamed to death.  My room was full of people.  Saz was in my room along with Mills, Lana, Tara and Mara.

“What the fuck?’

“No. What the fuck happened last night and why the fuck is there a bruise on your face the same size as someone’s fist?”

My hand instinctively reached up to my face and winced at the pain.  Turns out Derek had felt bad about me getting into an argument with Mitchell over him and tried to find him to explain that our dancing had been innocent.  He didn’t find me but he bumped into a couple who had been doing drugs together who had seen what happened.  He then went to find Saz and Mills, told them what happened who then called Lana, hence the congregation in my room.  Mara looked so mad I couldn’t hold her gaze even though I knew she was on my side.  The fact Tara was there as well was huge as nothing tore her away from her desk, which again made me feel bad as she was in the middle of prep work for starting university.

“I’ll ask you again what the fuck happened?.  And do you need a lift to the police station to report his ass?”

“What? No!  Leave this the fuck alone it’s not your problem.  I don’t know why you’re asking me what happened when you know exactly what happened and you know what?  All of you get the fuck out of my room.  It’s not even five am.  Let me compute this shit and deal with it how I see….”

Oh fuck!  I needed the bathroom quick.  I barreled through my friends and my sisters and found the toilet just in time before I puked everything I had into it.  After cleaning up I went back to my room hoping everyone had vacated.  No such fucking luck.  This time the looks were different.

“Dana, honey, when was you’re last period?”

“What the fuck, Tara?  Please just piss off out my room all of you.  Lana you don’t even live here anymore as of September, so you too.”

“Answer the fucking question thick shit.”  Lana really wound me up when she was ready.  Clearly none of them were going anywhere so I thought back.  Which is when I realized that I was two weeks late. 

“Oh damn.”  This was Mills whose face said that she’d seen things dawn on me.

All I could say was, “Fuck!”

“Here take one of these and get yourself in the bathroom now.”  Lana handed me a pregnancy test.  I wasn’t even going to ask but it seems that Mara needed to.

“Lana why the hell have you got a stash of Clear Blues in your drawer?”

“Because dear Mara, there is this thing that all the crazy kids are doing called having sex.  It’s fucking amazing.  Maybe you should let someone’s ding dong in your belfry to clear out the bats and cobwebs.  It might loosen you up a little.”  Saz snorted with laughter and Tara rolled her eyes.  Mills had moved over to me and was holding my hand which was so comforting it reminded me why she was my friend and why I loved her.  She never let herself get dragged into whatever shit was going on and always kept a level head.  I took the stick and went back to the bathroom and took the test waiting for the agonizing minutes to pass for the results.  I couldn’t be pregnant.  Mitchell and I always used protection and I was on the pill, which I never forgot.  Apparently Lady Luck was STILL on her fucking holidays.  I was pregnant.

Suddenly I had more problems than taking my final year of exams.  I had to decide whether I was keeping the baby.  I had to tell Ma and Pops which was going to devastate them and then if I was keeping the baby, I need to talk to Mitchell. Fuck!  My name is Fuckedy Fuck Fukerson and I am well and truly fucked.

CHAPTER FIVE

Ma and Pops didn’t take what happened with Mitchell well.  It momentarily distracted them from the fact that I was pregnant but like I said, only for a moment.  Pops began pacing the living room floor while the rest of us looked on. 
The rest being everyone who was in my bedroom.  I felt so bad.  My grandparents didn’t need this kind of stress in their lives.  They weren’t old when my sisters and I came to live with them but they were certainly a good age now.  They should be enjoying their retirement not worrying about their youngest grandchild getting beaten up by her boyfriend and finding out she’s pregnant.

“I’m gonna kill him.  And then I’m gonna dig up his twisted, too old for my granddaughter, perverted scrawny ass and haul him to the nearest police station.  Let’s see how much of a man he is when he needs to bend over and pick up his bar of soap.  And then when he gets out I’m gonna kill him again.”  Pops had gone bright red in his face.  When we were kids Pops had seemed like a giant.  He was still in good shape but he was a lot slimmer now with a small bulge for a stomach.  He only had a few grey hairs, that you could hardly see in his blond hair, which Ma always complained about as she was pretty much completely grey by now.  His blue eyes still sparkled when he laughed but right now they looked like a stormy grey.  He let out a huge sigh and slumped in his chair.  If I felt bad before, I now felt like shit.  It was my entirely my fault that they had this stress..

“Dana girl, what about the baby.”  Ma’s soft voice brought me out of my own head and back into the room.  “You need to decide what you’re going to do about this baby and you need to decide fast.  We’re all here to support you.  You look around and you’ve got your friends, your sisters , Pops and I   but you need to make a decision that you can live with.”

I knew what Ma would want me to do and I know that Ma knew what I would decide.  It’s not that I’m against abortion.  It was invented for a reason but it’s not something that I would do.  If ten years or more down the line I found out that I couldn’t have children it would destroy me to know that I ruined my only chance at this point in my life.  I wasn’t sure I was ready for kids but I would make myself ready.  I’d just have to study every pregnancy and parenting book ever published and hope that that gave me a good head start.  This brought me to my next problem which was telling Mitchell.

Mitchell never called me after that night.  I don’t know whether it was because he didn’t want to ever see me again because he thought what I had done was so bad, or if he was ashamed of his actions, or maybe because he wanted me to chase him even.  I had no idea.  It was out of both our hands now so I had to call him and tell him he was going to be a Dad.  Pops had said that if I didn’t want to press charges then that was my decision but Mitchell was never to step foot under his roof.  He told us all several times that a real man doesn’t put his hand on a woman for no reason.  If he ain’t happy he makes his apologies and he walks away.  If we were going to be having a baby it would be a pretty shit start for the baby to have a dad in prison.  I didn’t have a conventional upbringing but I wanted my children I had to have as normal of a childhood as possible.  Sometimes at school children had been mean and teased us for living with our grandparents and even for our parents being dead.  Mara always beat them up but the words still hurt.  I wanted to protect this baby from going through anything like that.  After two weeks I had procrastinated about as much as I possibly could when I made my way up to my room to make the call.  I’d seen the doctor in that time who had confirmed that I was about four to five weeks pregnant.  His phone rang.