She skimmed her eyes at him, showing off a cloud of worry. She muffled for a while before she found some words to speak, her face hidden beneath her broken grace. "I also came to say goodbye." She said. He fidgeted in his seat and looked at her strangely.
"Goodbye? Why?"
"I am going away. Back to Mexico." She answered. Ethan joined the dots immediately. He knew a lot about Aunt Macarena from the stories she had told him about her.
"Why are you going away?" He inquired.
She stared at Derreiro who was easily visible from where she sat. He seemed happy as he talked to the older woman across him.
"You know Ethan, honestly you... you screwed me up." He could render the sadness from her sad-toned voice. She was blinking a lot, trying to control the tears from coming out. "I thought that after all that you had done to me, after all the horrors that you did to me, and after I fought for my justice in court, that things would turn out okay in the end." She muffled her lips once again, shaking her head in agony.
"Every time I get out of the house, people can't stop staring at me strangely." She could no longer hold back her tears. "They call me names! I get abused... every day. People call me a whore and a skivvy prostitute and Ethan it hurts so bad. It really hurts! You put me in that situation, Ethan. You. You think I've had an easy time since you raped me?"
"Elena, look at me! I'm not having an easy time myself!"
"That's on you!" Her voice rose suddenly. "That's on you, not me." She growled pointing first at him then at herself. The tears were still stroking her beautiful face. If she had put on any serious makeup today, they would have been washed away with her tears. "You think I'm happy to see you in those uniforms? With those injuries? Like I told you before, I'm not angry at you. I'm just disappointed."
"Elena I'm sorry. I didn't mean–"
"I will not hear it!" She slammed the table shaking her head, eyes closed in a bolt of sudden anger. Some close neighbors trained their eyes at the two. Derreiro wasn't left out of this, and he could quickly decipher that things were not going well with Ethan and Elena.
"I cannot live my life normally anymore, because of you. People call me names, because of you. I am running away to hide my years away in another country... because of you!" She growled.
"Years?"
She shrugged. "As much as you might not believe this, I came here today to say goodbye because I'm never coming back to this country ever again."
"Why? Elena why are you doing this to yourself?" He asked. "I know what I did was ugly... but please, stay and fight!"
She scoffed in agony, face-palming herself. "Fight? Fight? You think that there's a fighting chance out there? Is that what you tell yourself?" She growled bitterly. "Ethan you raped me. I fought you and I thought I won." She remained silent for a while. "I never realized how far I was from winning. Every time I look at myself I realize that there's something wrong with me- and nothing's ever gonna change that!"
He was crying silently, far much more than earlier, as the truth and guilt burrowed inside him. He wiped his tears away but they kept coming back anyway. "Elena I'm sorry, I didn't know how much I hurt you–"
She yelled at him, tears meandering down once again. "I will not hear it, please stop with your apologies. Just stop! STOP! You think it's easy to wake up every day knowing that the entire neighborhood is talking about how you were raped and gotten pre-"
She stopped talking immediately.
Ethan looked up from where he had been hiding his face. He appeared confused and shocked at the same time.
"Pre-?" He asked. "Pre- what?" He inquired suspiciously at her. Elena's eyes were full of shock and he could see the fear in her dark eyes. She looked around, uneasy.
"Nothing," Elena said as she shook her head, avoiding his blinding one-eyed glare.
"Elena, are you pregnant?" He blurted at her instantly.
Elena's eyes opened to the widest as they'd ever been. She felt her body heat up instantly and sweat forming on her brown skin. Her heart did a rodeo inside her chest, trying to fall out of its locale. She gulped and bit her lip in the end as she started breathing heavily, her bust swaying in and out and her body shaking altogether.
"Elena, answer me!" Ethan begged. There was worry embedded all over his face.
"Yes." She finally said, embarrassed, as a tear rolled down her face. She didn't mind wiping it off. Her heaving breaths calmed down after she answered him.
He couldn't believe it at first. She did not look pregnant at all. She was just as simple as she was a month ago. Beautiful and full of life. She seemed so energetic. Pregnant women seemed to have their own characteristics, according to him, otherwise, he would have discovered that his sister was pregnant without her confessing herself. How wrong he was the first time, and how unfortunate he was not to know on his own the second time.
"Whose?" He asked her later on.
She shrugged, eyes locked on him. "Who do you think?"
Ethan closed his eyes in submission. He groaned and let out a painful sigh. "Oh my god..."
"It's yours, Ethan." She told him.
Her eyebrows shot up in a submission maneuver too.
He really had no words to put across. He had forced himself on her and gotten her pregnant in the process. Perhaps that's why she didn't want to have sex with him during that unfortunate day. It all made sense now, like a clear picture in his mind.
"Since when?" He found the courage and words to say. His face was still full of shock.
She couldn't help but tell him the truth...