by Hazel Parker
“Fair enough,” I said.
Mama nodded to me and walked back to a meeting room of sorts, closing the door behind her. I waited for the feeling of relief to wash over me, the feeling that usually came when I would get a fresh start. The kind of warm glow of excitement for an open-ended future.
But that glow never came. Instead, I just felt stressed. Really fucking stressed, actually. When I’d have to tell Brett that it wasn’t five months from now, but perhaps five days that I was heading out, what would happen then?
To be abandoned by a loved one so abruptly twice in a lifetime… that was fucking brutal. It would be too much even for someone as strong and as tough as Brett.
I knew this was a bit spoiled to say, but I was already feeling so stressed, and this was only making it worse. It was all self-inflicted, of course, but Jesus.
And then I had a startling realization that I feared would soon make things much, much, much worse.
I’d missed my period this month.
Chapter 17: Barber
Whatever promises I had made to myself to be productive and find something else to do were promises that, apparently, I wasn’t very good at keeping.
The alarm woke me up around two in the afternoon. I slammed my hand on the table to the side, trying to shut it up, thinking that I had used this alarm as a “wake in case of an emergency” deal—the type of thing meant to signify that I had way overslept, not that I was trying to get my day started in a timely manner. As I did so, I also nearly knocked over a bottle of Grey Goose vodka that, apparently, I had taken with me to the nightstand.
Though my head rung, I didn’t feel terrible, certainly not as bad as the morning after I’d quit the Savage Saints. Nothing would ever top—or maybe bottom out?—that morning. The two things I most cared about in life, out the window just like that. You could get one of them back if you weren’t so goddamn stubborn. Maybe if you offered to work with instead of trying to dominate BK.
Probably too damn late now, though. He’s probably the new sergeant-at-arms.
I kicked the covers off of my naked body and grudgingly put on some boxers. I was about to grab some gym shorts when I heard a loud, emphatic knock on the door.
That was not the knock of a delivery man or the landlord. That was the knock of someone who needed to see me at this very instant. I half-expected to see the police on the other side of the door, demanding to investigate my room.
“Goddamnit,” I grumbled.
Could they at least have said something so I could know if it was someone I knew?
Apparently not. I headed over, my shorts still not on, and peered through the fish-eye hole. I could only make out the vague shape of someone close to my door handle, but they stood too far to the side. Well, if I’m going to die, at least I won’t have to deal with this shit with the club and with Cassie anymore.
I yanked the door open and saw Mama standing there, her arms crossed, her hair a mess, and her eyes looking hollow.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” she said. “I know you like the nightlife, but two in the afternoon and you barely have any clothes on?”
“There’s a lot wrong with me,” I said.
“Well, start by throwing on some shorts, would ya? I’m not a lady you need to sexy yourself up for.”
“I didn’t realize I was,” I said with a half-smirk.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
I rolled my eyes as Mama entered and took a seat on my couch. I headed back into my room, found black gym shorts, and threw those on. I looked for a shirt, only to realize that my pile of dirty shirts had gotten so large the only thing I had left that was clean was a white button-down shirt. It would look absolutely ridiculous, but it was that or smell absolutely horrid.
“What are you, a hobo?” Mama said as I walked back out in a style that would never actually be in style.
“These days, it sure feels like it,” I said with a groan. “I haven’t done shit since I quit. Told Cassie I was going to be a bartender or something. Something—”
“Yeah, you know why I’m here, right?”
To get my shit together. To tell me to grow up. To tell me to come back.
“Tell me,” I said as I stared at the ceiling.
“We need you at the club, Barber.”
I laughed.
“No, you don’t. You have BK.”
“What the fuck you talking about, dumbass?” she said with an eye roll. “BK is from Green Hills. You think he was going to stay this whole time? He left about three weeks ago. He’s going to come back for a few days in a couple of weeks, but he doesn’t live here. Are you that fucking stupid that you thought he was going to live here?”
Boy, pride is a blinding emotion, huh? Gets in the way of the obvious.
“Whoops,” I said.
“You don’t fucking say,” Mama said with a snort. “Now listen. That’s why Richard wants you to come. But I’m here for a much different reason. Cassie—”
“She said she’s leaving,” I said with a groan.
“You know?”
I bit my lip. Oh, to revisit these abandonment feelings once again. At least this time, I had someone to speak to about them. I didn’t have to go into the tank for fifteen years, keeping it a massive secret from anyone and everyone.
“The night I quit, she came and spent the night,” I said.
“She told me you were a flame,” Mama said. “I figured as much.”
“Yeah, well, the next day, she came to me and said her future wasn’t in Vegas. I always knew she was too smart for this goddamn town. But I just figured that time wouldn’t be for a couple of years, you know? I figured that if we got back together, we’d have enough time to either be long-distance or make something work. We… well, I guess when Christmas rolls around, I’m going to be celebrating with you assholes.”
“Christmas?” Mama said.
Uh, yeah. Would you rather me pick Thanksgiving?
“I mean, that’s about six months from now, right?”
Mama did something that I hadn’t seen often from her.
She went quiet. She bit her lip after opening her mouth as if about to say something. She fiddled with her fingers in her hand. She leaned forward.
“Mama, what the hell—”
“It’s not six months,” she said. “It’s two weeks.”
God… really?
“I may be able to persuade her to stay an extra week, maybe longer,” Mama said, but she didn’t sound like she believed her own words. “I got her to agree to stay an extra week at a fifty percent raise in return for the right to recruit her. I tried all day today, believe me. But if I am being honest, the only person that can keep her here is you.”
“Here?” I said. “She’s not just leaving the club but all of Vegas?”
“Hell if I know, but do you really want to put your money on it?”
No, I did not. And I also did not want to put my emotional state on it.
I’d done that twice now, and both times, the relationship had ended with Cassie moving somewhere else. First, it was some small town in Arizona; now, it was who the fuck knew. Actually, both times, it was “who the fuck knew.” I wasn’t about to put my heart on the line a third time, most especially since by now it was so fragile and so cracked that one single blow would likely shatter it beyond putting it back together. My heart was more like Humpty Dumpty than it was a castle on a bedrock of solid stability.
“She chose to disappear from my life a month ago,” I said, leaning further back into the chair. “If she made that choice—”
“Bullshit,” Mama snapped. “I’ve seen her this month. She misses you, Barber. Whatever happened that morning, you chose to push her out, you—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
I had never gotten so triggered in my life, but boy was I furious at Mama right now. How fucking dare she say I pushed her out! Did she know a goddamn thing about my world?
“You want to know who pushed who out?” I said,
turning to Mama and waving my hands in a fury. “You wanna know who walked away from who? Go talk to her. Ask her about how she just ran away from me. Ask her who never revealed the secret of a miscarriage until now. Ask her who would never have seen the other if not for some serious fucking luck. You’ll find damn well it’s not me. So if you want to blame me, then you go right on ahead. But you’ll be a fucking idiot for doing so.”
Mama reeled back, bowing her head. I snorted, like a bull about to overturn all my furniture. The temptation was there—it would have made for some stress relief at least.
“So fuck Cassie,” I said, even though I knew that was the dumbest thing I had ever said. I knew damn well that if she showed up suddenly to my apartment, I’d hug her and kiss her and beg her not to leave so soon. “Fuck her, fuck her for leaving me behind, fuck her for not telling me about my child, and fuck her for coming into my life and being afraid to say anything and everything to me.”
But by the end, my strength and fire were fading quickly. The bull had mellowed out into a cow, more prone to just a life of being nothing but a body in space. I didn’t want to do anything; I didn’t want to fight anything, I just… I just wanted a mulligan on it all.
“You think I don’t know what it’s like?”
Mama still looked down at the couch, her words very, very soft. I gulped as I felt the tension in the room rising, but not tension between us—tension within Mama.
“You think I don’t know how scary it is, how soul-wrecking, how fucked up and horrible it is to go through what Cassie went through?”
Oh my God… Mama…
The longer I spent with the other officers in the club, the more I realized just how little I knew about them. We all did very well at throwing up barriers, and Mama was not only no exception, but she was probably the most reserved of all of us. Maybe not in mannerisms and speech, but certainly in closely guarded secrets.
“In those moments of pain, in those moments of darkness, you want nothing more than to be held and told that you’re loved. You want nothing more than to cry in your man’s arms, to know that you’re needed, and to be told that someday, things will be alright, even if you never believe it.”
She sniffed, but I didn’t see tears fall.
“Whatever you think Cassie did to you, I promise you she paid a price you can never imagine when she was alone,” Mama said. “I know this because it was a price I paid. But do you wanna know something? Do you know what the difference between Cassie and me is?”
I had no idea, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to interrupt Mama’s words to make some dumbass statement or claim that would draw a justified glare from her.
“Cassie still believes in you,” she said. “She may not have known that you would be here when she started. But she could have just as easily looked at you, said ‘hell no,’ and never interacted with you again. Even if you treated her right, she might not have wanted the reminders. But instead, she chose to get closer to you, knowing full well she’d have to reveal her darkest secrets and atone for her past.”
Mama shook her head, still not looking up at me. The pain on her face, what little I could see of it, left me feeling like an absolute idiot for what I had said earlier.
“I am well past redemption,” Mama said with a chuckle. “I’m too old to find love. Definitely too old to have children. I am what Cassie would be in ten years or so if she never found anyone else.”
So if she doesn’t come with me. She’s the same way I am. We’re both attached, for better or for worse, to each other. Her fate is my fate, and if we split those apart, neither story ends well.
“Cassie, though, she’s yours. I don’t know how serious you two are right now, but the way both of you have hinted at things makes me think that you need to get off your ass and quit this bullshit, Barber.”
Finally, she looked up at me. As if by magic, all of the emotion on her face, all of the scars she had shown, had vanished. The typical tough-ass, blunt Mama we all loved and partially feared now sat before me.
“It’s up to you whatever you do,” she said. “But look at you right now. It’s a Friday afternoon. You just woke up, and you look like shit. You have no job. You probably haven’t gotten laid since you pushed Cassie out.”
Truth. Too much truth.
“And now the woman you love—I can see it in your eyes—is leaving in three weeks. If you try, you might get hurt, sure. But you might also get the thing you’ve wanted since you were a teenager. So.”
She then stood, came over to me, and gently patted me on the cheek.
“I’d smack the shit out of you, but I think you don’t need me to do that,” she said. “You know exactly what you need to do. Good luck, Barber. Cassie wants you back. I want you back. We all want you back.”
Without another word, Mama turned and walked out the door, shutting it without looking at me. In the silence of being alone, I could only mutter two words.
“Holy shit.”
Mama was right about one thing. If I reached back out to her, I was going to get hurt. Even if I convinced Cassie to stay in Vegas, I was going to be hurt by the fact that she’d decided to leave before.
But wasn’t that the point of it all? Wasn’t the point of the pain that because I could feel it, I could also feel enormous pleasure too? Wasn’t the reward worth the risk?
I sat up suddenly and headed for my bed, finding my phone on the nightstand. I had a couple of texts from Mama—I guess she’d told me she was on her way, but I obviously missed those—but nothing from anyone else. That’s what happens if you close yourself off. Eventually, no one will want to reach out to you.
But today, I was doing the reaching out.
I scrolled through my contacts, got to the Cs, and dialed the first number that popped up.
“Brett?” Cassie said on the other side, her voice tinged with concern.
“Hey, Cassie, how are you?”
“I’m good,” she said, a little bit of nervousness in her voice.
“Can I come over?” I said before she said anything else. “I just want to see you again. Talk about some things.”
“Um, sure,” she said. “Sure, yeah, that’d be great. Absolutely. Come over anytime.”
“Great,” I said, already grabbing my keys. “I’ll see you soon then.”
Chapter 18: Cassie
As unexpected as Brett’s arrival was, his condition was even worse.
He showed up in what could only be described as walk-of-shame, jock-hangover outfit, with sandals, gym shorts, and a button-down.
And yet, when I saw him approaching through the window of my apartment, I couldn’t help but feel that small surge of excitement. Even if this might be the last time I’d ever feel that surge and get to see Brett, I wanted to hold onto it as much as I could. I didn’t know if I’d ever get to feel that surge with anyone else.
I sure hadn’t in the last decade and a half.
He knocked, and I didn’t even pretend that I was doing anything else by delaying his entrance. I opened the door, smiled at him, and hugged him tightly, remaining in his arms for several seconds. He may have looked like shit, but he at least had the decency to put on some nice cologne.
“So… do I dare ask what’s with the outfit?” I asked as I stepped back and put both of my hands on his shirt.
“It’s what you expect,” Brett said. “I turned into a hobo, you know, and these were my only clean clothes. Actually, funny enough, half of that is true.”
“I’m going to cautiously assume it’s that these were your only clean clothes.”
Brett chuckled and stepped inside. I moved to the left to let him in, locking the door behind him.
“They are clean, right?” I asked as Brett headed to the base of my bed.
“Yes, yes, don’t worry, I’m not that dirty,” he said. “But anyway, enough about how dirty I am. What’s going on with you?”
“Well…”
Tell him the truth. There’s nothing to lose right now
. You aren’t even friends with him right now. He’s just around because… I don’t even know why. But he’s here and won’t be for long.
“I put in my two weeks at the club.”
I had to almost vomit the words out. I waited for Brett to hang his head, to walk out as soon as he entered, to curse me out for abandoning him again. All of those responses would have been perfectly valid and reasonable, and I wouldn’t have argued with them in the slightest.
Instead, he gave a compassionate smile.
“I know. Mama told me.”
“She did?” I said with a groan. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
I was a little annoyed, but that dissipated quickly. I loved Mama, and if she had told Brett, she had to have a good reason for it. She had to have thought it would be better for him, me, or both of us.
Hopefully, she’ll be proven right.
“Yeah,” Brett said with a reassuring smile. “Mama came to me and ripped me a new one today. Told me I needed to stop being a little bitch, more or less. Showed me that if I wanted something, or, perhaps, someone, I needed to make the effort and not just accept it.”
My chest tensed and a chill went down my spine as I desperately fought not to show Brett my nervousness.
“Let me ask you something, Cassie,” he said. “And forgive me if I don’t word it well. I’m not very good at these hard conversations.”
“That makes two of us,” I said, scooting forward, so I was within touching distance of him.
The only time I’d had these hard conversations was when I was in an altered state or extraordinarily tired. The weed and the lack of sleep had torn down my initial barriers. I had no such excuse now.
Thank God for you, Brett. Pulling me out of my comfort zone.
“I know you’re leaving in just a couple of weeks,” he said. “I know that you’re going to law school next year or at some point in the very near future. But, just answer me honestly. Is there any part of you that wants to be with me?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Absolutely, Brett, I—”
“Let me ask you something else,” he said, raising a hand.