The Black Balloon Contest

Title: Twenty Weeks

Your pen name: Tampagirl81

Characters: Edward/Angela Edward/Bella

Disclaimer: Legally all characters are not mine. This was beta'd by the amazing Irritable_Grizzzly. This story may contain triggers as it deals with abortion and suicide. Please do not PM me with your stance on the issues because I will immediately delete it. It's not open for discussion, period. You have been warned.

Edward

Twenty weeks.

I looked it up. After twenty weeks we could no longer take care of our problem.

It didn't matter though. We both knew the date of conception. It was my birthday five weeks ago when Angela showed up in a trench coat wearing lacy panties with garter belts and fuck-me heels. The sex was fucking fantastic, but the condom breaking was not.

She swore up and down that she was on the pill and I believed her. We had been together for over a year, and I had no reason to think she was lying. It wasn't until we were in the doctor's office getting confirmation when Angela mentioned the antibiotics she had taken for a sinus infection that everything all fell into place. Or out of place depending on how you looked at it.

When we were in the car after the doctor's appointment , I looked over to see Angela going through all the paperwork her doctor had given us.

"I don't know why you're bothering to look at that stuff." I glanced over at her.

"Well I think it's a little important to know what my body is going through for the next seven months or so," she giggled.

"Hold on a minute." I pulled the car into an empty parking space at a 7-11. I took a deep breath, trying to gather my thoughts. "Do you mean to tell me that you're happy about this?"

"Well I'm not happy about the timing, but I think we'll have a gorgeous baby, don't you?" Her voice was soft, her hair covering her face as if to shield herself from me.

"You shouldn't think about things that won't matter," I stated.

"What do you mean it won't matter?" She was barely audible now.

I took another deep breath and balled up my fists to try and keep her from seeing how I was visibly shaking. "You're getting rid of it."

"Excuse me?" she shrieked. "You are not going to tell me what I can do with my body! I will not kill an innocent child! It's murder!"

"You're going to get rid of it. We can't do this, Angela! We're too young, we're still in school, and let's face it, we're completely broke. Your parents would disown you if they found out and it's not murder if it's under twenty weeks," I pointed out.

"We heard the heartbeat! How can you say it's not murder?" she yelled.

"It doesn't have feelings and it can't think. It doesn't even have a brain."

"Stop calling our baby it, you asshole! Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend, Edward Cullen? My parents would be mad, but by the time the baby was born I think they would accept him or her." She rubbed her belly in a gentle circular motion.

"Besides, we'll have graduated when I give birth, so it won't matter about being in school."

"I will not drop out of our final year of college to work at a place like that." I pointed to the cashier inside the 7-11. "I'm better than that and so are you. We deserve better." I grabbed her hand and kissed the back of it.

Angela slumped down further in her seat, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. "I can't think about this right now, Edward. This morning I woke up excited at the idea we would be parents and now I find out that you not only don't want our baby, but you want me to go against what I was raised to believe."

"When we get married, do you want to have it-our baby - as a ring bearer or flower girl? Wouldn't you rather say that our baby was conceived on our honeymoon?" I used the tone that I knew would calm her down, hopefully enough to listen to me.

"You w-w-want to marry me?" She looked at me for the first time since I pulled the car over. Her eyes were puffy and red, and snot was running down her nose. Her face was splotchy from yelling.

"I was hoping to someday, after we graduated and started our careers. We would have a beautiful baby, Ange. You're beautiful and we'd have a beautiful daughter who would have your features and be a troublemaker." She gave me a small smile. "But, we can't do it right now, we both know that. I don't like the idea of…" I cleared my throat, "'taking care of it' either, but we don't have another choice."

"What about adoption?" She looked pained at her own suggestion.

"I think that you would get too attached and it would go against our plan. It's the only option, baby." I kissed the back of her hand again. I leaned forward to brush the tears off her face but she flinched away. I quickly withdrew and tucked my hands in my lap.

"I'll think about it," she whispered. I nodded in acknowledgement and the rest of the ride home was spent in silence.

Two Weeks Later

I was a mix of nerves. After three days of thinking about what needed to be done, Angela agreed, but made it known that she was not happy about it. I was grateful and so damn lucky to be with a girl who understood sacrifice for the greater good. We could easily have a future together, but our immediate future did not include an expensive drain on our lives. The baby would derail everything we'd planned.

After Angela announced her decision, we called a few clinics to get prices, proving my point about how expensive kids can be. We could barely afford this, what would happen when we had another mouth to feed? Angela took a little out of her savings, telling her parents she needed some school supplies and I managed to borrow three hundred bucks from my frat brother, Jasper. He didn't ask what the cash was for and I didn't tell him.

So now I was sitting in the clinic waiting room, looking at pictures of happy women who took birth control, while Angela was having the procedure done. I had dropped her off a few hours ago and had driven around town lost in my own thoughts.

Part of me was relieved that she had seen my way. Kids were too much of a responsibility and I knew we both weren't ready for this kind of commitment. Our lives would completely change. Our whole focus would be on raising the baby and not on our goals. Every spare dime we had would go to the baby.

The other part of me wondered about other options. We were too young, but maybe adoption would have been a better choice. People our age made this kind of shit work all the time. If we had told our parents, they might have supported us. They would have been furious at first, Angela's parents might have disowned her, but my parents adored her and would have taken her in.

I kept telling myself that I should be with her even though the staff wouldn't let me in the room. They said that she would be out of it for an hour or so after and gave me a time to come back. Thirty minutes before she was supposed to be awake I was back in the hard plastic chairs of the waiting room.

"Sir?" It was a nurse in pink scrubs.

"Is she okay?" I stood and quickly walked to where she was standing.

"She's fine, a little out of it, but that's to be expected." She offered me a warm smile. She must have seen my anxiety and gave my hand a light squeeze. "You can see her now if you'd like." She motioned toward a room with a hospital bed. I could see the bottom of her red sweats.

"When can I take her home?" I had only been there for a few minutes but I was anxious to get out of there.

"When she can sit up on her own it should be okay." She turned and closed the door behind her.

I pulled a chair to the side of the bed and held her hand. "AngeAnge, baby, can you hear me?" I asked stupidly.

She let out a low groan.

"You did so good, baby. I'm so proud of you." I kissed her hand which she pulled back.

Her head lolled to the side and she looked at me with a drugged gaze and muttered what sounded like, "Don't touch me." She closed her eyes again and fell asleep for an hour.

When she woke up, she was much more coherent, but refused to talk to me. "Ba-Angela, we're home." I got out and walked around to her side. I scooped her into my arms and carried her up to my apartment to finish sleeping off the anesthesia.

Two Months Later-Angela's POV

I couldn't look at him.

I could barely stand to look at myself, knowing what I had done because of him. The only two people who knew were my roommates, Jessica and Lauren, who had been extremely supportive and caring during the whole thing.

The more I thought about it, the more upset I got. He was supposed to love me, all of me, but when things got a little too hard, he took the easy way out. Or at least what was the easy way for him.

After I had been physically healed I left his apartment and never looked back. In my mind it was over. I had sacrificed a huge piece of myself; emotionally, physically, and mentally for him and he had given nothing in return. He continued to call me baby, but I couldn't stand it. Jess and Lauren ran interference for me, always telling him that I was busy or that I was gone.

"Ange, honey?" Jess asked softly from the doorway.

"What?" I sobbed.

"I think maybe it's time you talked to someone." She moved slowly toward my desk and placed a piece of paper on my keyboard. Then she came and sat on my bed and ran her fingers through my hair.

Today had been particularly awful. I had woken up feeling a bit better than I had since the day I left the Chicago Women's Center. Jess and Lauren had been encouraged by my attitude and offered to take me out to breakfast saying that I was wasting away and was in much need of pancakes. They were right in the wasting away department. I couldn't bring myself to eat much; each time I kept thinking about how I would not be eating for two.

We had been sitting at the diner for a few minutes when a father came in with a little girl and sat next to us. My heart broke a little, but I kept my calm until the mother came in carrying a newborn nestled in his car seat.

I felt the blood rush from my face and started shaking my head and repeating "No, no, no."

"I think you're right," I sobbed.

"Since you're lying down, will you please take something to sleep?" she asked quietly.

"Okay," I hiccuppedhiccuped. She left and came back a moment later with a glass of water and one of her Percosets. Normally I would have worried about taking someone else's prescriptions, but if it would help stop the nightmares of being judged in hell by my Minister father, I would take it.

Sleep found me quickly.

After that day, it would be years before I saw Edward again.

Edward

"Listen, asshole. She doesn't want anything to do with you! You'd better get the fuck out of here before you do any more damage and leave us to pick up the pieces," Lauren yelled at me, before slamming the door in my face.

I sank against the door and rested my head on my knees.

It was over. I knew the end was coming, but I didn't think that she would let her overly-tan, bleached-out roommate do the dumping. There was so much I wanted to talk to her about. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for forcing her to do something that was against her beliefs, to make her feel like her opinion didn't matter. She never gave me the chance, not that I could blame her.

A few weeks after Lauren unceremoniously cut me off from Angela, I dropped out of school and transferred from Chicago to Seattle. I never told my parents what happened, but they knew it was something serious. Esme, kept putting casseroles in my fridge hoping to fatten me up. Both my parents were upset about my dramatic weight loss.

Alice threatened me with concealer to cover up the dark circles under my eyes if I didn't start sleeping. I couldn't sleep, though. The night terrors of diapers, bottles, and the last time I saw Angela with her stringy brown hair and sunken-in cheeks haunted me wherever I looked. The only thing that helped me get sleep without the nightmares was alcohol.

"I promise it'll just be a few minutes and then we can go," I heard Alice whisper.

"Who are you talking to, Alice?" I looked up to see my sister staring at me wide-eyed in the middle of the hallway.

"Did-Edward, did you pass out in the hallway last night?"

I looked around and saw that I had indeed blacked out in front of my bedroom. "I guess so," I shrugged and started to get up.

"Bella, this might take longer than I thought," Alice called out over her shoulder. I winced at the shrill sound of her voice in my ear.

"Do you need help?" I heard a soft voice say.

Alice instructed Bella to get me a glass of water and some Tylenol and to bring them to my bedroom, and then she helped me to my feet and dragged me to my bed, pulling the covers over me, even though I was fully clothed.

"Here, sit up," Bella instructed me. Alice moved out of the way and I finally saw her roommate. Even in my still-drunken haze, I could see she was beautiful. She looked like Angela in that they both had long brown hair and large brown eyes, but Bella was different. For starters, she was standing in front of me with a look of sympathy instead of hate.

She leaned over to help prop my pillows and I caught a faint hint of her apple shampoo. "There you go."

She smiled at me and handed me the pills. For some inexplicable reason, I wanted to trust her. I wanted to tell her everything that had happened in Chicago. I had never talked to the grief counselors the Center had recommended, but I wanted to talk to Bella.

--

After the day Alice found me in the hall, I made myself a promise to get my shit together and deal with my issues. I wanted to be better for me and for Bella.

We stayed up for hours, talking about my feelings, my guilt and how awful I had treated Angela. She listened patiently and only offered her thoughts when I asked for them.

We wound up spending a lot of time together and one day I realized that I hardly knew anything about her. We had spent months talking about me and never once did she mention herself. The day I had my small realization, she came over and we assumed our positions on my bed.

I was leaning back against the headboard and she was between my legs, her back to my chest. There was nothing sexual between us, but I knew that I cared for her deeply, more than I had ever cared for Angela. Somehow I was able to talk about that with her too.

"You know, I realized that we never talk about you."

"There's nothing interesting about me. You have much more to say than I do," she shrugged.

"I want to know you. I want to know everything about you," I insisted.

"Fine," she sighed. For the next few hours she talked about growing up in a small town outside Seattle, her family, her dreams, college at UDub, and she surprised the hell out of me when she confessed how she felt about me.

I had been too fucking messed up and self-absorbed to see it.. We had been talking for months, but it was that night when we made our relationship official by lightly kissing and touching each other for hours on my bed.

Almost Four Years Later

Angela

I walked past the bakery aisle at the grocery store and contemplated buying a birthday cake. Today, if our baby had been born, he or she would have been three years old. They would have been sitting in my cart, showing me how they could count to twenty and sing the Winnie-The-Pooh theme song, but instead my cart was full of frozen TV dinners for one.

Shortly after Edward left, I moved into a one-bedroom place. It was cheap and it was mine. There were no reminders of Edward or our choice. The walls remained blank and the only reason I had a TV was because Jessica insisted it would be a good distraction and a helpful reminder that there was a world outside my living room.

I was staring at a cake decorated with the theme of Disney's Cars when I felt the handle of my cart hit me in my stomach.

"Oh god, I'm so sorry!" I heard a woman apologize.

"It's fine, are you okay?" I motioned towards her swollen belly.

"I'm good," she smiled, "my balance is even more thrown off nowadays." I was jealous, as I always was around pregnant women, but she just glowed with happiness and love. "It's a cute cake. Maybe one day I'll wind up buying it for this little guy, she said, pointing to her stomach."

"Congratulations," I offered.

"Thank you. I'm Bella by the way." She stuck out her hand and introduced herself. I shook her hand and did the same."Oh excuse me, sorry." She shot me an apologetic glance as she chased after a little girl. She came back to her shopping cart with an adorable little girl with curly brown hair and vibrant green eyes.

"You need to stay put, little missy." She leaned over and kissed the girl on the head. She giggled and shook her head back and forth. "What did your daddy say about running off?" She looked up at me and rolled her eyes with a smile. "Toddlers."

I nodded as if I understood what she meant. I was about to ask how old she was when I heard a voice, his voice. "Bella, love, what's taking so long?" He slid up beside her and slipped one arm around her waist while dropping a box of diapers in their cart. He rubbed her belly and kissed her cheek. I caught a glint of gold on his left hand.

All the air left my body.

"You're just impatient. I accidentally crashed into Angela here and then Carlie took off," she paused when she saw Edward's reaction to my name. His head shot up and all the blood drained from his face.

"Angela," he choked.

"Edward," I whispered, "you're m-m-married?"

"Uhm, yeah, it's been almost two and a half years." He wouldn't look at me.

"How old is Carlie?" My voice growing stronger.

"Sixteen months," his voice was low, eyes still avoiding my stare.

I quickly did the math in my head. "You married her while she was pregnant?" I shook my head. Why her and not me?" My voice was getting louder. People were staring.

I felt pity for Bella and her naiveté. Edward and I had been together a year when he ordered me to murder my child.

My infinite sadness had finally been replaced with new feelings.

Rage.

Anger.

I grabbed hold of these, excited to have something new, like a baby with a shiny new rattle. I inwardly laughed at the irony of my own analogy.

"Why are you even in Chicago? You left me alone to deal with everything on my own. You should leave with your precious Bella and family," I sneered.

"Leave Bella out of any issues you have with me. After Lauren yelled at me on your doorstep, Bella was the one who helped put me back together. I owe everything to her. She brought me back to life, and I'm in a better place now because of her. She didn't do anything to you. I was the asshole," he insisted.

"I'm going to go check out, and I'll meet you at the car. Angela, it was nice to meet you," Bella gave me a sympathetic look and left. I didn't want her sympathy. What I wanted was to let her know what a selfish asshole her husband was. Edward Cullen was no longer beautiful to me. He was a monster who sucked the life and soul out of anyone who got close to him.

He was her problem now, not mine. She would eventually wonder why he left her, why she wasn't good enough. She would have to wash the proverbial blood off her hands just like did every single day.

"Angela." He moved toward me and placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Don't touch me!" I screeched. "You lost the right to touch me-"

"If you want to talk about what happened, we'll talk, but you will leave my family out of it," he hissed. Then his features softened into the boy I once knew. "Have you ever discussed any of this with someone?"

I shook my head.

"Here." He handed me a card with a list of phone numbers on it. "My brother-in-law is a grief counselor, if you don't want to talk to him, his entire office is qualified. They helped me, and it might be good for you too."

Just like that, the rage and anger were replaced with something new, something better than everything I had felt before. Calm.

"I'll never forget what you did to me. I'll never forget how you threw me away without a second thought. Unlike you, I can't move on-" I stopped because I suddenly realized I could move on.

I had finally reached my breaking point and resolved my emotions. I would never forget what happened and how he treated me and I would be damned if he forgot our child and moved on to his happily ever after, the one he had promised to me.

"Thank you, Edward. I know what I have to do," I said in a calm voice that even scared me. I leaned over and gave him a light peck on the cheek and walked away, leaving my cart untouched.

I got back to my apartment and drew all the blinds. I took Edward's card out of my pocket and wrote a quick note.

I pulled the bottle of painkillers I had stolen from Jessica and a large bottle of Jack Daniels from my secret hiding spot. It took a couple of minutes to get all fifteen pills down, but the burning feeling of the Jack helped wash away the after taste.

Edward

Jasper called me the day after we ran into Angela, and left a message saying he needed to see me immediately.

I called him and he told me where I could find him, giving me an address in what I knew was a bad part of Chicago. I pulled into the parking lot of a rundown apartment complex, noting the beat up Honda that Angela drove in college a few spaces over.

I didn't even knock on the door before Jasper flung it open. He handed me the card that I had given her. I swallowed and took it.

"Flip it over."

I did as he instructed and saw the note she had left for me.

Now we are both in a better place.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline number 1-800-273-TALK

After Abortion Counseling Hotline 1-866-4-Exhale.