Chapter
18
“Hey, Ang!” Nick called from his front door, as Angela climbed out
of her car and hurried up the steps to his front porch.
Nick took one look at her face and knew something was wrong. “What’s wrong, hun?” he asked.
Angela rolled her eyes.
“Just my dad and Lynn being nosy and overprotective,” she said
bitterly. “They don’t want me to have a
life.”
Nick sighed. They had had
conversations like this before. “Ang,
maybe you should just tell them the truth,” he suggested. “Tell them about me. Wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have to
hide this from them?”
She shook her head. “Nick,
they’re strict enough with me, despite my age.
I don’t want them to forbid me to see you.”
Nick sighed and nodded. “I
guess you’re right,” he admitted softly.
“I just don’t want to keep going behind everyone’s backs.”
“Well, what about your mom?
You’ve seen the way she treats me.
Do you think she’d be happy to find out about our relationship?” Angela
asked.
“Look, I don’t know what’s up with my mom. I think she’s just scared. Scared of me getting hurt again.” Angela looked confused, so he sighed, and
then asked, “I guess you don’t really know much about my liver problem last
year, do you?”
Angela shook her head and waited patiently for him to go on.
“Well, it all started when my old girlfriend, Mandy, broke up with
me. Walked out on me, really,” he said
ruefully. “I was real depressed because
I thought I was in love with her. As I
look back on it, I don’t see how I could have been, but at the time, I thought
I was, and she really hurt me. Anyway, I
was depressed and on medication for my depression.” Angela’s eyes widened. “And one night, AJ and I went out to this
bar. It was his idea. He just wanted to get my mind off
things. He didn’t mean any harm. But what happened that night sure wasn’t
harmless. I drank… a lot. Too much.
Anyway, the alcohol reacted with the medication I had taken, and that
reaction, along with just the sheer amount I drank, caused me to pass out and
go into cardiac arrest.” Angela’s
already big brown eyes grew as wide as saucers, and a look of fright and horror
passed over them. “They resuscitated
me, of course, but the alcohol had already damaged my liver.”
“Oh, my God, Nick,” Angela murmured, wrapping her arms around him
and pulling him close to her. “I didn’t
know.”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t
matter. It’s over now, and I’ve learned
the lesson of my life. But my point is,
I think my mom’s afraid of me getting involved with another girl. She’s afraid of me getting hurt again,
because she doesn’t know what I’ll do if it happens again.”
“I’ll never hurt you, Nicky,” Angela said, gripping his hand in
hers tightly. “Never.”
“I know, Ang,” he said. “I
know.”
With that, he took her face in his hands and lifted it to his,
kissing her lovingly, his lips against hers.
She kissed back with passion, as a way to seal her vow to never break
his heart, as other girls had done to him before. She couldn’t even think about it, for unlike
Mandy and his other ex girlfriends, she loved him. She knew it was true now, from the bottom of
her heart.
***
