Page 24 of Can't Win 'Em All
“What the hell?” I was irritated when I got up from the couch and stomped over to answer. I didn’t look through the hole to see who it was before I threw it open. I was looking for a fight. Perhaps I’d found one.
I pulled up short when I recognized the diminutive figure facing me down as being my sister. My mouth went suddenly dry. “Livvie.” Her name was barely a squeak on my lips.
That’s not suspicious or anything,I chided myself. I decided to try again.
“Livvie.” This time when I said her name, it wasn’t raspy. “I’m not in the mood,” I repeated for her benefit.
“What, exactly, aren’t you in the mood for?” she challenged. The fire kindling in her eyes told me she was mad. Why was she mad, though?
I could think of one very big reason for her to be angry. Would Ruby have told her the truth, though? She said she wasn’t going to tell anybody about me being the … well, me being involved in her current predicament. I had no reason to distrust Ruby. Sometimes she was blunt to the point of no return. She almost never lied.
“I don’t feel well.” The second the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. Livvie could always see right through me. She was the one person in this world—even more than Zach—who knew when I was full of it. Would she call me on that today?
“You don’t feel well?” The way Livvie cocked her head told me that I was in trouble. Big, big trouble. “Maybe you caught something from Ruby,” she suggested.
I grabbed her arm and dragged her into my suite. I wasn’t interested in hurting her, but I wasn’t as gentle with her as I would’ve been with somebody else. Siblings didn’t play games nicely no matter how old they grew. “Can you watch what you say?” I hissed.
Livvie’s eyes were narrow slits of disgust. “So, it is true.”
I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” Anger I didn’t know I could feel coursed through me. “Were you fishing?”
“No. I had confirmation from Ruby. I thought, maybe, I was still wrong or something.” Her intensity petered out. “It’s not like Ruby lies, so I knew it was you.” She slapped my arm. It was no love tap either. It was a deep, hard slap. “You’re really irritating the crap right out of me,” she complained.
“Well, right back at you.” My eyes fired. “Why are you here?”
“Why do you think?” Livvie prowled through my living area. It wasn’t overly large, but it was neat. “You do realize a baby can’t spend any time here, right? It will die. This place is all sharp edges and open electrical sockets.”
My heart plummeted to my stomach. “She told you.” It wasn’t a question.
She didn’t say anything, which only served to infuriate me more.
“She told you and she promised she wouldn’t.” I was irrationally angry. Sure, deep down, I recognized I had no right to be angry. That wasn’t stopping me, though. No, I was angry at the world, and Ruby made a convenient scapegoat. “What is wrong with her?”
The look on Livvie’s face had me taking an inadvertent step back. “What?”
“If you didn’t weigh a hundred pounds more than me, I would totally beat the crap out of you right now,” she hissed. “How can you sit there and blame Ruby when you knocked her up and abandoned her?”
I didn’t like the way she was phrasing it. Not one little bit. “I am not abandoning her.”
She folded her arms over her chest and gave me a “yeah, right” look. She said nothing, though.
“I’m not,” I insisted. “She doesn’t want me involved.” Something twisted in my stomach when I said it. I pushed forward anyway. “She wants to do this herself.”
“Oh, is that what she told you?” The icy turn to Livvie’s demeanor suggested I’d said the exact wrong thing.
Uh-oh. My sister was often indulgent with me—as I was with her—but when she got mad, there was no holding back Hurricane Olivia. She looked positively pissed off.
“Livvie—”
She cut me off with brutal efficiency. “I didn’t realize that Ruby had all the choices in this relationship,” she growled. “How did she manage that magical feat?”
“That’s just it. We don’t have a relationship. We had one night together—one drunken night that was a very bad idea—and now she’s having a baby.”
“You’re having a baby.”
“No, she is. She doesn’t want me involved.”
Livvie stared at me for what felt like a really long time. “Is that really the way you’re going to play it?” she asked finally. “Are you going to stand there and pretend you have no say in how any of this works out?”
