Page 40 of Forgotten Prejudice

“I’ll explain everything later. I promise.”

“Who are you talking to?” Kai asked from where he was sitting.

Ignoring him, I turned around and went back to the phone.

“Who’s that?” Soren sounded even more annoyed than before.

“My friend.”

Kai was still bothering me with questions, so I waved at him to shut it while holding the phone tighter. “I’ll explain everything when we meet. Okay?”

“Fine.”

After explaining where we were to Soren, I hung up and pocketed my phone. It would probably take him around thirty minutes to get here. Hopefully, I’d given him good enough directions to track us.

“Soren will be here soon. Try not to get us killed until he does, and when he arrives, please don’t do anything embarrassing,” I told Kai.

“Who’s Soren?” Spitting Soren’s name, he couldn’t have sounded more dismissive even if he tried.

“My boyfriend.” Ready to climb back into my truck since it was freezing, Kai stopped me by grabbing my arm and pulling me back.

“Your boyfriend? You have a boyfriend now?” He pinned me against the car, his hands on my shoulders.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Since when?”

He stood so close to me that our noses nearly touched.

“Since a while ago. If you weren’t so caught up in drugs, maybe you wouldn’t have missed it.”

His brows pulled into a deep frown.

“In fact, if you weren’t wasting your life on that crap, you wouldn’t have missed many things, like the birth of your son.”

His jaw clenched, and he pushed me hard before letting go and walking away. “I never wanted that thing to be born in the first place.”

That was it for me. If until now, I held some sort of understanding or empathy, now it was all gone.

“That thing?” I took a step toward him. “That thing is a child. A child you helped to create, you fucking asshole,” I shouted, unable to bear listening to him speak that way. “You need to pull your head out of your fucking ass, Kai, because you’re fucking pathetic.”

“Shut up.”

“Why? Can’t handle the truth?” I tilted my head at him, my lips curling with spite and rage. “You’re pathetic. That’s what you are. Blaming everyone and anyone for your crappy life. Fuck.” A broken laugh escaped me. “You’re even blaming a newborn baby for your shitty choices. Do you realize how sad that is?” My words were mean and hard to bear, but they were true nonetheless. And Kai needed to get a cold, hard slap from reality.

“Like you’re the one to lecture me. You disgusting homo. Who the fuck you think you are?”

I stopped where I stood and smiled at him. “Yeah, I love men, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can throw snarls at me all you want, Kai. I honestly don’t care. What I do care about is seeing you ruining your life because you can’t accept the fact that you, too, might be one. A homo.” Kai had started going down this fatal path because he couldn’t accept that part of him. My confession, which he forced out of me, might be the reason he’d started realizing he liked men, too, but everything that had happened ever since was his fault alone.

“Listen to you,” he hissed, stretching his neck. He looked so thin and unwell, even more so with the moonlight hitting his pale face. “Suddenly, you’re so sure of yourself. Is that what getting a dick does to you? Is it that good? That life-changing?”

Understanding that speaking to him was of no use, I turned around and went back to sit in the truck until Soren arrived. I had no intention of getting into more fights with him.

Now seated inside the car, I could still hear Kai speaking to himself. His mumbling went on for a while until he shut up, and I worried that he might have left, but peeking through the mirror, I saw he was still there, sitting on the same rock as before.

Not long after, the lights of a car flashed in my mirrors, and I stepped out just in time for Soren’s Range Rover to park behind my truck. The door opened, and Soren walked out dressed in the same clothes he’d worn to work.

“Dear heavens, are you okay?” he asked as he reached me, his hands moving over my arms to ensure I was unharmed.