Love and Gravity by Olivia Connery Read Free Book Online

safer than she really was.
    She felt more grounded after they
started eating. The pizza was probably about as high quality as the hotel room,
but she hadn’t eaten anything substantial in days and Margot wanted to inhale
the whole thing by herself. They were sitting together, cross legged on the bed
with the open pizza box sprawled out between them. Jack was fully dressed now,
since they had finished bandaging his arm.
    “I hope you like pepperoni,” Jack
said.
    “Actually, I’m a vegetarian. But
it’s okay, I’ll just give my pepperoni to you.”
    “Oh I’m sorry, I should have
asked.”
    “Don’t worry about it. It’s not
that I’m grossed out by it, it’s just an ideological thing. I don’t like to
kill things to live when I don’t need to. I would probably kill an animal to
live if I needed to, but when I have the luxury of making a different choice,”
Margot shrugged, “I do.”
    Jack looked at her again. She was
continually surprising him. He’d never met an addict or dealer that cared about
the people around them, let alone the animals. He felt like he couldn’t stop
himself from asking her about her past anymore. It had been eating at him the
whole day.
    “So Margot, I hope you don’t mind
my asking,” Jack paused hesitantly, “and you don’t have to answer if you do,
but…”
    “It’s okay, you can ask. What?”
    “Why did you have all that cocaine
with you 5 years ago?”
    Margot stopped eating. She should
have seen this question coming. A part of her really was angry that he was
asking. She was angry at Jack the cop, not Jack the man. But she’d already
begun to trust Jack more than she’d trusted anyone in a very long time. Who can
you trust, she thought, if not a man who risks his life for you when he doesn’t
even know who you are? He was risking his life to save her and she thought that
gave him the right to know her.
    “I’m sorry, I’ve offended you
haven’t I?” Jack looked at her abashedly.
    “No, it’s okay. I’ll tell you.”
Margot braced herself to go back to an old place she didn’t like going.
    “My father was an officer in the
Army and we moved around constantly. He didn’t have a choice; he had to support
me alone. My mother died when I was being born.” Margot paused and sighed
heavily. She was beginning to feel tired again.
    “I loved my dad, I mean we were
really close. But as I got older I started resenting him for moving us so
often. I felt isolated. I was always the new kid, getting picked on. I never
had time to make any friends. Until I met this one guy. His name was Alex and
he was really popular at this new school I was going to. He noticed me, and
treated me like I was special. He introduced me to his friends and suddenly I
was popular. It was the first school I went where I wasn’t the outcast.
    “So I started falling madly in
love with Alex for all the wrong reasons. My father hated him. He could see
that he was a deadbeat, but that just made me cling to Alex harder. One day I
was driving Alex to a get a bite to eat. We’d been dating about four months
then. I got pulled over for a broken brake light. This cop takes one look at
Alex and tells us to get out of the car. He and Alex obviously had some kind of
history. He starts searching my car and finds this brick of cocaine in the
glove box. I had no idea it was there. I still don’t know how Alex got it in
there without me seeing.
    “So the cop takes us in and puts
us in different interrogation rooms. They start pressuring me to give them
information about Alex’s dealing, like who sold to him and who he sold to. I
didn’t even know he did that, he never told me. The cops offered me a walk if I
ratted on him. I didn’t have any information to give them though. They thought
I was just being obstinate and uncooperative. They said they were going to teach
me a lesson. I was seventeen when they arrested me, so they charged me as an
adult with ‘possession with intent to sell’ and threw