And the Greatest of These Is Love: A Contemporary Christian Romance Novel (33 page)

“Gabi, what’re you talking about?”

She managed to avoid his arms and escape into the last six inches of space between him and the wall.

She wanted to run, to escape — to go back to the beginning and do everything differently so they wouldn’t come to this moment. He didn’t know. He couldn’t. If he did, he would never be able to even look at her again.

“It doesn’t matter.” She swiped at the tears, sniffing them away. “It’s not important.”

“Not important?” he asked in utter disbelief. “How can you even say that? You run away every time we get close, you won’t even talk to me about it, and now you’re saying it’s not important?” He moved back an inch away from her. She felt it like a sword into the softest place in her heart. “I gotta tell you, Gabi, I’m a little confused here.”

“Believe me, Andrew,” she said so softly he almost didn’t hear the words. “I’m not worth the trouble.”

“Not worth the...? Okay. That’s it,” he said coming instantly to the end of his rope. “Now I want to know what you’re not telling me, and I want to know now. What is it, Gabi? Huh? What’s the big secret? Tell me right now, or I walk right out that door.”

Pain knifed into her, and she squeezed her eyes closed to make it go away — to make him go away. It hurt so badly she might never recover.

“Fine,” he said, and the anger in his voice seared past all the other pain to her very core. “I thought if nothing else we were at least friends. I thought we could at least be honest with each other, but I guess I was wrong about that, too. Huh?”

She couldn’t get her voice to form the words that weren’t even there.

“Yeah, well, I guess I got my answer,” he said, and she felt his presence move away from her.

Never had she ever felt more alone in her life. Even the nights sitting up with Antonio couldn’t match this feeling. He was leaving, and this time he wouldn’t be back. Her one chance was about to walk out the door and be gone forever, and yet if she told him, he might walk out anyway.

Suddenly the walls closed in around her, and the pain of loving someone and getting hurt again overtook every rational thought she had at that moment.

“You’re just like all the rest of them,” she said in wild anger as he turned to leave. “I knew you would be!”

“The rest of them?” he asked almost to himself. “What rest of them?”

“All of them — every one. They all walk out eventually. They get what they want, and then they’re gone.” Huddling over herself, she took on the storm’s force inside and out. She didn’t need them. She didn’t need anyone.

“Gabi?” he began in confusion as he turned back to her.

“No,” she practically yelled as all rationality slipped from her grasp. “Don’t say it! Okay? Don’t even think it!” She spun on him then, furious. “Do you know why, Andrew? Because it’s all lies!  That’s why!  It’s all lies! All of it! Nobody really cares — not when it really counts. They care when it’s easy. They care until things get tough, and then they’re gone! Why should you be any different?”

He stood unmoving, staring at her. “Gabi, what’re you talking about?”

And for the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, she remembered the unbelievable torture of seeing another young man standing there, ready to leave her alone to handle a decision they had both made, and that pain overtook every last shred of sanity.

“Fine, just leave! Go ahead! Go! I don’t need you anyway! I don’t need anybody!” she said as the hot tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Gabi?”

She broke down for real then. “I said, ‘Go!’ That’s what you want to do! You never cared about me anyway! Never!”

“Gabi, please.” He took a hesitant step toward the cyclone that was screaming back at him.

“You’re a selfish, arrogant, egotistical jerk, and I hate you!” she sobbed. “I hate you! Do you hear me?”

For a split second his heart recoiled from the words, but then his brain took over, and he knew she wasn’t saying any of this to him. It was coming from the fear — the fear that kept her from truly being with another person. She loved the kids, but they were different. With them the love flowed out — not necessarily back in.

“Who hurt you like this?” he finally asked, looking at her softly. “Huh, Gabi? Who taught you that love always ends in pain?”

For a second, she could’ve sworn he had yelled the words — simply because everyone had always yelled back when she could no longer be strong.

“What?” she asked, blinking to right her world again.

“Who hurt you, Gabi?” Andrew stepped toward her. “Was it a guy? Some boyfriend?”

His face flashed past her eyes again, and she ducked her head. “I just...” She leaned against the wall in despair. If it didn’t hold her up, nothing else would.

“No,” Andrew said, shaking his head. “You’re not getting out of this one. Not this time. This is important. You’re important, and I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Andrew, please.,” she said suddenly feeling very trapped as he took another step toward her.

“No, Gabi. There’s no reason to run anymore. I’m not going anywhere.”

Slowly her mind began to work again, and she felt very, very tired.

“I’m tired,” she said softly. “I need to go home.”

“It’s why you work at the center, isn’t it?” he asked gently. “Because you want to be loved so badly. Why won’t you let me love you?”

She had no answer for that question.

“You’re afraid this secret is going to kill you, and you’re right. If you keep it in, it will,” he said without wavering. “Why don’t you let someone else help you? You don’t have to always be the strong one, you know?”

“It’s not your problem,” she protested, the strength literally flowing out of her body. Somehow she had to make him see that it wasn’t worth the effort — that she wasn’t worth the effort.

“I think you’re wrong,” he said never losing the gentle quality of his voice. “I think it’s what’s keeping us apart, and that’s very much my problem.”

She thought about that for a long time, and finally her mind lit on something she had been wanting to say to him for a week. “Irvin told me about the bet,” she said as though it were time to change the subject.

“The bet?” he asked, completely puzzled. “Gabi?”

“At first I thought it was a stupid idea, you know?” She sniffed hard. “And then I thought you were totally out of line for even suggesting it.” She stared at the squares between their feet without really seeing them.

“Gabi, what does this have to do with…?”

“I wish someone had made that bet with me,” she said so softly that the words were almost swallowed up in the silence of the room around them.

Confusion traced across his face. “With you? Gabi, what…?”

“I was Irvin,” she said, glancing up at him then, but her eyes couldn’t take the confusion and worry looking back at her, and they quickly found the floor again. “When I was in high school, I was Irvin. I took whatever love I could get from anyone who would give it to me. I didn’t care. I wanted somebody to love me so bad I would’ve done anything to get it. And I did.” She took a deep breath, knowing that one way or another from this point on life would be very different.

“There was this guy at my school. Derrick Miller. I liked him the first time I saw him, but I thought he’d never have anything to do with me — and then one night we ended up at a party together, and he said all the right things, and he did all the right things.

“I’d like to say it was rape, but the truth is it wasn’t. I wanted to be loved, and I thought that was the way to get it,” she said, without looking up. “We slept together that night, and I thought that was it, you know? I thought I’d found the guy of my dreams — the one that would sweep me off of my feet and carry me away to his golden castle away from all the problems in my life — only it didn’t work out quite like that.”

She had always thought the admission would come out as a violent scream, but it sounded more like a whisper — a whisper from the very grave she had buried it in a decade before. “I got pregnant, and at first I was really excited about it, you know? I mean a baby. My baby. Our baby. It was something I had always dreamed of, but Derrick... Well, he was less than thrilled. When I told him about the baby, he said there was no way I could prove it was his, and that if I even tried, he’d trash me so badly that nobody would ever want to hang around with me again.

“I didn’t have very many friends the way it was, and the last thing I wanted was to lose the few I had. So, I thought I’d just take the next best option, and go to my mom. I figured maybe I could go live with my aunt for a while or something.”

It had all seemed so simple at the time, and even now it was hard to imagine how quickly things had spiraled out of control from that point on.

“It’s weird. You know? I can see that kitchen like it was yesterday,” she said, staring off into space. “I don’t really know why I thought she’d be reasonable about it. She’d never been reasonable about anything before. But I thought this time would be different.” Her voice trailed off as the memories came back to her, and for a few moments, she couldn’t even put the scene into words.

He simply waited, taking in the whole story without interrupting.

“I was so excited about that baby — even if Derrick wasn’t — I was. I was so sure I could raise it on my own. I figured how hard could it be? You know? My mom had done it with me, and look how I’d turned out,” she said with a tiny laugh that made him grimace.

“When I told her, I think she thought it was a joke to begin with, and then for a few minutes I really thought everything would be all right. She didn’t yell or scream, she just very calmly went to her dresser drawer and pulled out a number for me.”

“A number?”

“Yeah, for an abortion clinic upstate,” Gabi said, and he closed his eyes against the pain that slashed through him. Gabi watched him, knowing he would never, ever look at her the same way again. “She said she’d used it a few times over the years, and it was really no big deal, and that she’d take me on Saturday, and everything would be fine after that.”

Gabi took a deep breath and exhaled as the poison that had entered her body at that suggestion finally found its way out again.

“I didn’t want an abortion, and I told her so. That’s when I found out how she really felt about things…”

He let that settle for a minute before he asked, “Things?”

“Me,” she said as the searing pain knifed through her heart. It was no use to stop the tears now, and she didn’t even try. “In two minutes of screaming, she told me everything I had felt my whole life — that I was a burden and a problem, that I was a mistake, and she wished I’d never been born.”

He shook his head as his own tears found the surface.

“She told me that if I kept the baby I’d be ruining my entire life — just like she’d ruined hers by keeping me. I didn’t want to believe her. I didn’t want it to be true. But I knew it was. I told her I really didn’t care what she thought, and that I was keeping the baby no matter what she said. That’s when she threw me out of the house.”

“Oh, dear Lord,” he breathed, coming over to her and putting his hand on her arm if for no other reason than to make sure she knew he was still there, but she knew.

In fact, the farther she went into the story, the easier it got to tell — he knew her secret now, and because his leaving was now only a matter of time, it really didn’t matter how much he did or did not know anymore. Therefore, the words came almost on their own — as though they’d been waiting for this very opportunity to show the world what an utter and complete failure her life really was.

“I didn’t really have anywhere else to go, so I slept on the streets the first couple of nights — but I knew for the baby’s sake I couldn’t really stay there, so I hopped a bus to Norfolk. I don’t really know why. That’s just where the bus happened to be going at the time. I managed to find a part-time job when I got there, and some friends I found put me up for a while.

“I was so dumb,” she said, laughing a small sarcastic laugh, “I really thought that somehow everything was going to work out just fine — that somehow, some way I could make it work.”

The memory of those days flooded her mind, and she shook her head to clear it of the images she found there.

“Then one night when I was about eight months pregnant, I went into labor. I was at the apartment by myself, and for a minute, I thought I might actually be dying, but then it hit me that the baby was coming. I called a cab and somehow managed to get myself to the hospital, but when I got there, and the nurse asked if there was anybody I wanted to call…”

Slowly the feeling of being totally, utterly alone in the world descended on her again, and it was all she could do not to let the pull of the floor just take her.

“My baby came about 12 hours later. It was a little boy, and they let me hold him right after I’d had him. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, so tiny. But when I looked down into his little, baby face all I could see was my mother screaming at me that I’d ruined her life. I can’t explain it really, but I knew right then I could never let that happen to my child. So when they took him away to the nursery, I asked to speak with someone about the possibility of giving him up for adoption.”