Raina's Story by Lurlene McDaniel Read Free Book Online Page B

finishing their formula. Thump them on the bottoms of their feet if they doze off.” Betsy smiled. “That's it. Hey, you're good at this. You've got five babies.”
    “Thank you,” Raina said.
    Betsy shrugged. “You're my best student.”
    Holding the babies calmed Raina. They were so small and helpless and they needed her. Well, maybe not
her
exactly, but they needed the care and food she offered. She hummed to them, offering each one a special song. She cuddled every baby, kissed each forehead and traced their tiny features with her finger, a finger that looked gargantuan beside their miniature hands. She already knew that newborns thrived on being held and touched, that without such touching, a baby seemed to wither and dry up.
    Grown-up girls need touching too,
she thought. Hunter hadn't called her in more than a week and she missed him terribly. She longed to feel his arms around her. She missed the way he toyed with her hair and the way he rubbed the small of her back when he held her. Hunter was atoucher, and she thrived on it. Their separation was a physical pain that nested inside her almost every minute she was awake.
    The baby in her arms had emptied the bottle, and Raina held him to her shoulder and gently tapped his back. Tears blurred her vision. Although she and Hunter saw each other in the halls at school and spoke, there was a wall between them that she couldn't breach. “He'll get over it,” Holly had told Raina confidently. “I mean, it's not like you cheated on him or anything.” But Raina knew that in Hunter's mind, that wasn't necessarily true. He felt betrayed, not so much by what had happened in her past as by his dreams of what could have been theirs and now never would be.
The first time. The first one
.
    The Harvest Ball was coming soon, right before Halloween, marking the end of football season. So far, Hunter hadn't mentioned their going together, and naturally, if she couldn't go with Hunter, she wouldn't go at all. No one at school had picked up on their estrangement yet, but if he asked someone else, everybody would know something was wrong.
    As she lowered the baby into his incubator, his little hand caught on the necklace Hunter had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She gently untangled the baby's fingers, shut the plastic lid and fingered the heart-shaped pendantwith a diamond chip at the heart's tip. Nestled inside the heart was a cross bearing a second diamond chip. “The two most important symbols in my life,” he'd said when he'd first fastened it around her neck.
    On November twenty-fifth, she'd turn seventeen. With or without him.

eight

    “H UNTER AND RAINA broke up? Are you kidding?” Carson stopped chewing in midbite and stared at Kathleen across the table in the pizza parlor.
    “I didn't say that. I just said they were having serious problems.” Kathleen poked at her slice of pizza, suddenly not hungry.
    “That guy's crazy about Raina. They'll work it out.” Carson resumed eating. “What happened?”
    “I guess it's no secret now.” Kathleen told him briefly about Raina and Tony.
    “And Hunter's pissed at Raina about something that happened before they even met?” Carson shrugged. “Seems unfair.”
    “You'd have to know Hunter better. He sets the bar high. I think it's because he's religious.”
    “I know religious people, and they don't write off someone for things that happened before they ever met that person.”
    “Holly says he's more hurt than mad.” Kathleen plucked a black olive off the slice of pizza and put it aside on her plate.
    “Holly doesn't seem that way. She comes across as kind of wild and crazy.”
    “She struggles with keeping all the rules, but deep down she's got a lot of faith. She's told me that Hunter is thinking about going to seminary someday and becoming a minister.”
    Carson grimaced. “That would be the last thing on my list.”
    “Don't you believe in God?”
    “Sure. Mom goes to mass every week. Me and Dad, not