The Trap (Trapped Prequel)

Chapter 5

Paige

The second Mitch comes back, I don’t sense something’s wrong, I know it. When he walks over to the bed and hands me the plate of crackers, his expression is carefully blank. Accompanying his return and clinging to him like a second skin is a draft of wintery air.   

Wholly unnerved, I accept the plate slowly and watch him with mounting apprehension. Instead of resuming his seat on the bed, with a fleeting glance at me, he moves and stations himself in front of the window. There he shoves his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and peers through the vertical blinds out into the backyard. There’s not much to see back there but a square, concrete patio and a small lawn that my mom’s boyfriend, Randy, insisted on mowing last week.

“What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring out the window but it’s obvious he’s not looking at anything in particular. Plus his jaw is tight and his shoulders are bunched, which is the way he gets when he’s tense.

“Mitch?” I prompt, my anxiety climbing at double-digit increments.

“Are you still on birth control?”

My heart jumps at the question. My stomach promptly sinks at the cold flatness of his tone.

He knows.

It takes me a few seconds to work up the nerve to reply. “Not anymore.” My voice is so faint it’s almost nonexistent. I know exactly what’s coming and it’s fear that has me by the throat. Fear that’s making it so hard to breathe and too easy to hyperventilate.

He angles his head toward me, one eyebrow quirked. “Games? Alright, I’ll play. Were you taking birth control the last time we had sex?” he asks with exaggerated patience. But that tone is contradicted by the prominence of the bulging vein running down the side of his neck.

Had I an hour to prepare myself for this question, I don’t know that I’d be able to answer it. Not to his face. The guilt however, I’m pretty certain, is clear as day on my face.

Hands still deep in his pockets, he advances to where I’m sitting frozen on the bed. I can see the delineation of every muscle in his arms—tanned, taut and hard. Tense.

“Your mom thinks you have the cramps and she says if you hadn’t gone off the Pill you wouldn’t have to deal with them.”

It’s an affectation, the conversational tone he employs. His jaw is working as if it’s cracking walnuts and in his eyes is an emotion I’ve never seen directed at me.

Loathing. Disgust. Seething anger. A ticking bomb ready to explode.

For the first time in my life, I wish I had lied to my mom. She’d been poking around in my bathroom looking for eyeliner when she’d found my pills—two untouched containers of them, the date of the prescriptions months old.  When she’d asked me if I’d stopped taking them, I’d had no reason to lie to her. She knew the problem I’d been having finding the “right” pill—something without the side effects I’d been experiencing since I’d gone on birth control. Plus, with Mitch in New York most of the year, I wasn’t having sex all that much. Better to go back to using condoms, which I’d planned on telling him the next time he came home.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d gone off the Pill, Paige?” Every word of his question is painstakingly enunciated. 

I gulp hard and briefly avert my gaze from his.  

Slowly I swing my legs from the bed and onto the carpeted floor. It takes all the courage in me to stand and look him directly in the eye. “I wasn’t thinking. I swear, Mitch, I forgot.”