The Fool

by P. J. Belden

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental. The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited.

  Copyright: P. J. Belden, 2017

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  A special thank you to Mechelle Jackson, Shawna Banker, Tabatha Washington, Stefanie Hetland, Renee Megee, and Maria Silva for reading this book and helping make it the best that it is. I’m in debt to you all❤

  Blurb:

  Waverly Johnson thought she had found the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with in Legend Michaels. That was until he just up and left without a word or explanation. He left her to fight a battle that she shouldn’t have had to fight alone. Her heart in pieces, she seeks solace at a bar when she can no longer stand the silence.

  That’s when she meets enigmatic Alexander Harris. They bond over broken hearts and friendship soon grows to so much more.

  When Alexander calls Waverly by his ex’s name, Jenna Thomas, she must face the woman that holds the man she loves heart if there is to be any future for them. But as she faces a downfall for her future, her past comes back to haunt her like nothing before.

  Not all stories are hearts and flowers. Some stories are heartbreaks and tears. But then there’s the story that Waverly lives through. Even though she gave away her heart so young is there a way that she’ll be anything more in the end than The Fool?

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Other Works

  To the Readers

  Acknowledgements

  About Author

  One

  Waverly

  The chair is beginning to pinch into my thighs, but I don’t care to move. The sun slowly makes its descent from the sky and taking its warmth with it. But still, I sit and stare out over the lake at the woods across from me. The color dotted trees sway in the early autumn breeze. It is almost mesmerizing. Still, I find no comfort, no peace.

  Another traitorous tear makes its way from my eye landing on my chest with a splat. No matter how many tears I cry, no matter how much time passes, my heart will never heal. There used to be a moment that I thought I had it all. The love of an incredible man, but reality shows me that I had mistaken it and cheated out of the happiness I thought I had.

  Legend Michaels and I started dating when we were only in tenth grade. He was my one and only. My heart belongs to him. Yet, after five years of happiness, he leaves me in the middle of the night. Nothing left behind, but a trail of the shattered pieces of my heart.

  Even almost two years later, I still feel the abandonment that he left behind. Foolishly, I believed he’d come back for me until I found out he never would. That was until I finally found out what true pain was.

  Three months after Legend disappeared, I found out I was pregnant. Excitement and sadness filled me at once. Our child would never know their father in person, but I would share the memories with him or her so they could at least know of him. Eventually, though, the joy of becoming a mother filled my heart and the gaping hole that Legend’s departure had left…

  My heart tightens in my chest. It feels as if someone has placed a vice around my chest and just continues to squeeze it tighter and tighter until there is barely room for it to beat. Starving my body from the vital fluid to keep it alive. Pain suffocates me slowly like a snake kills its prey coiling around me taking anything live and killing it.

  Many days, I wish that my life would end. Sitting here and looking out at the water and the nature around my cabin, it no longer provides the healing presence that I bought this place for. Everything keeps my tragic loss in the forefront of my mind.

  In the distance, I hear my phone ring. More than likely my sister, Dani, calling to check on me. I’ve been out here for several months now. Staying in the city, in the apartment I shared with Legend, it just became too much. Everywhere I turned, I could see him, feel him, smell him.

  Dani didn’t handle the move well. She feels that I am too weak to be isolated like this. So, now she calls me every day, several times a day. Though I appreciate my big sister caring about me, she needs to realize that I need to deal with all this myself. Being coddled by everyone is not helping and only makes me resent them. I don’t want to do that.

  I thought coming out here would offer me the opportunity to work through everything. It hasn’t been working out that way. All I can manage to do is sleep when the nightmares don’t hit me. Or sit here on the deck and stare over the lake and pray that everything changes.

  Going through tragedy defines one as the person they are, or so I’m told. I, personally, don’t feel that way. There’s no way that you can justify losing a child. Nothing will ever make it better. My heart broke when Legend left, and it completely shattered when I lost my baby boy.

  To watch your child fight to live, have several surgeries to help save his life, it is all just way too much. Not once did I get to hold him. Not until the day they told me that I needed to make a choice. I chose to remove all the tubes from my boy and leave it in God’s hands to save him. One day later, he passed away in my arms. My heart died inside my chest. Nothing can get it to beat again.

  Not only did I lose the love of my life, for reasons I don’t know, but then I lost our child and had to go through it all on my own. Life is not fair. It’s not fair at all.

  No matter what I try, I remain numb. The day Remy passed away, he took whatever of me I had left. The person that sits here is merely a shell. Nothing inside. Pieces of memories, of times when love was all I had to knowing what having nothing feels like.

  As the night begins to eclipse all the light from the world, I feel a bit of understanding. Darkness is what consumes me. A black hole resides in my chest. When Legend left, I thought that would have been the hardest thing I’d ever have to overcome. I underestimated how cruel life is and how it’s set to prove me wrong.

  Remy was laid to rest, and as I threw the first handful of dirt on top of the tiny coffin, I collapsed. No parent should ever have to bury their child. No child should be taken when they haven’t even had a chance to live.

  With each surgery he went through, I hoped it would be what gave him back to me. Just like my happiness, there was no saving him. Sorrow seizes my breath, and I gasp as the pain washes over me anew. He had been so tiny. I often wonder what color h
is eyes were. Did he have the enchanting blue irises of his father, emeralds like me, or did he have his own color?

  The feel of the feather-like weight in my arms wakes me at nights. I hear a cry that never filled the room or my ears. How is someone supposed to move past losing their child? Three months, Remy suffered. Three months, I didn’t breathe. Now, six months later, and everyone thinks that I should be ‘over it’ by now.

  “Get over it? Ha!” I bark out cynically into the silence of the night.

  The ringing of the phone that had gone silent for a moment interrupts the quiet storm that brews deep inside of me. This time I’m sure that she’s got Jess or Cass calling me now. Jessie and I go all the way back to kindergarten. She and I were inseparable for so long. Jess is now married to her college sweetheart. They are blissfully happy and trying for their first child.

  Cassandra and I hit it off in college. All three of us became the three musketeers and did everything together. Cassandra and her life partner live up in New York and run a very popular restaurant and are in the process of moving forward with creating their family.

  None of them can understand where I’m at in my head and heart right now. None of them have lost anything near what I have. Legend left. That’s fine. That is his problem now. Though my heart is less trusting of men, I’m moving forward little by little. But losing my son… That’s a whole different kind of a pain to ‘get over.’ He was in my belly for ten months. I felt him move, heard his heartbeat, seen him on the ultrasound. But I also watched him suffer. The tender, innocent baby fought for his life.

  My arms begged to hold him. My heart begged to save him. My soul begged God to take me instead. In the end, his complications were too much for him to overcome. And I’m left with the gaping hole in my heart and a scar as a constant reminder of what I lost.

  Though I love my sister and friends, they just don’t understand, and I just don’t have it in me to get them to grasp the gaping black hole that has taken over my world. All I have left of the happiness in my life are pictures. Pictures of Legend and I and of my Remy. My soul shrivels further and further with the more time that passes by.

  That saying that ‘time heals all wounds’ is wrong. Way wrong. Time makes it harder. Your heart counts each moment that passes and breaks even more. It brings the pain further to the front, and soon you lose yourself in the suffocating tendrils that wrap around your being and slowly squeezes the life out of you.

  “Keep calling, and you will only lose your happiness,” I mumble as I take another drink from the bottle of Vodka that sits on the deck next to my chair.

  Actually, the outgoing message on my answering machine is just that. You need to quit calling. Leave me to deal with life on my own. You need to focus on your life before you lose what you have when you’re not looking. It never detours them from calling or leaving messages. I leave the messages blinking. Eventually, it will be full, and they will have no way to contact me further, well at least to leave a message.

  They say that I need to carry on and move forward. There’s no way that I can do that. Moving on would be leaving behind a pain that won’t let me go. Maybe this is the way it’s meant to be. Maybe, I’m meant to sit here alone and isolated from the world while I keep reliving all the things that I just can’t change, but badly wish I could.

  The nurse in the hospital when I was holding my son for the first and the last time had told me that the pain of his loss will remind me of the future that still awaits me out there.

  “Pfft,” I scoff as I take another swig.

  The only future I see is this chair becoming permanently attached to me. I don’t think I could trust my heart after all this. It didn’t make good choices this time, I can’t trust that it ever will.

  The shadows of the night begin to play tricks on me. I swear I see Legend walking toward me. He’s smiling that megawatt smile only reserved for me. The one that shines with all the love I feel from him, and that I have for him. A smile spreads across my face. The excitement running through me is real, it’s tangible. Legend is my forever. The first time we made love…

  “Waverly, do you know what you mean to me?” Legend asks as we cuddle on the couch of his apartment.

  Rolling around, I look him in the eyes. “Is it as much as you mean to me?”

  Tenderly he touches my cheek with his knuckles. “I don’t deserve you, but I can’t let you go either.”

  Legend’s parents were scum. He and his siblings were emancipated when he was only fifteen because of the environment that they were being forced to live in. When we had met, he was getting ready to drop out of school.

  “You saved me, Lee. You kept me in a life I didn’t want to live in just so I could be with you.” Legend whispers.

  “Do you still feel that way,” I force out around the emotions clogging my throat.

  “My life with you is all I want. You are my life.” He tips my head up, and our lips connect in a slow, passionate kiss.

  “You liar!” I scream as I fly up out of my chair. “You fucking liar! I hate you!”

  I kick the chair and storm off the deck and into the house. The phone is ringing as I walk through the sliding glass doors and into the kitchen and dining room. Yanking the phone off the hook, I put my mouth to the receiver.

  “Stop calling! I don’t want to talk to anyone! Leave me the fuck alone! I just want to be left the fuck alone to grieve!” I slam the phone down and yank the cord from the wall.

  Quickly, I grab my keys and storm out of the house. I can’t handle the silence. I can’t handle it anymore. There’s a bar just a few miles up the road. I’ll drink myself into a stupor until I can’t think straight. Maybe then I’ll actually be able to sleep for one night.

  Two

  Alexander

  Standing here, I watch the world begin to crumble beneath my feet with each item being thrown into a suitcase. How had I gotten here? One moment we are planning the future and then today… Today everything is breaking apart.

  “I don’t understand, Jenna. You know I love you. I wouldn’t have asked you to marry me if I didn’t.”

  “That’s just it,” she sighs as she tosses another item in her suitcase and stands to face me. “We’ve only been dating a year, and already you have everything mapped out for us.”

  “Asking you to marry me is mapping everything out?” I ask completely confused, and a little bit hurt.

  “It’s not long enough to be thinking of marriage,” she huffs as she loads more of her clothes into another suitcase.

  “It’s long enough for you to have moved in with me,” I counter.

  “That was a mistake,” she says with no hint of feeling guilty for it.

  The breath is knocked from my lungs for a minute. “A mistake?”

  “Look, I’m not trying to hurt you. I care about you, but I just… I need time to think. This is going down a road that I’m not sure that I’m ready to go just yet.”

  Walking toward her, I pull her in my arms. “Then we won’t get married tomorrow.” I smile. “You don’t even have to say yes yet. It doesn’t mean you must leave, though. You can have all the time you need to think. I won’t push the issue. You don’t have to leave.”

  She pulls from my arms and closes her suitcases and lifts them from our bed. “Yes, yes I do. I need time to think. Away from you. I know this is a cliché, but it’s true here. It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “Oh, come on!” I bark as anger and desperation begin to build. “We’ve been together for a year, Jen. A whole year we’ve been inseparable. Why now all of a sudden is that you feel you can’t breathe!”

  “Don’t push it, Alex. Please. You won’t like the answer I give. Just let me leave. Let me go so your fantasy world can stay intact.”

  Jenna moves past me and heads for the door. For a moment, I’m stunned and can’t seem to get my feet to move. The sound of her setting the suitcases down breaks me from the frozen state I am in and I hurry out to the living room.

 
; “There’s someone else, isn’t there?” I force myself to ask even though I really don’t want to know the answer.

  A tear falls down her cheek. It is all the answer I need, but still, she says, “Yes.”

  My mouth opens and closes several times, but the words are frozen on my tongue. This woman is the love of my life, and now she’s telling me I never was hers.

  “How… long?”

  “Alex,” she says sadly.

  “How fucking long, Jenna,” I yell as I knock the lamp off the end table in my ire.

  A small sob escapes from her chest, and the tears fall quicker down her cheeks. “I never meant for this to happen.”

  “How long,” I demand through clenched teeth.

  “Four months,” she says in almost a whisper.

  “Get out,” I breathe.

  “Alex, please understand…”

  “Just leave. I don’t want to hate you. The longer you stand in front of me ripping me apart, I will hate you. I love you, Jenna. I would have loved you, and only you,” I added, “for our whole lives. I’d stop at nothing to make you happy. Apparently, my love wasn’t enough. I know that now. Now, just go, so I don’t hate you.”

  She looks at me for a moment longer before grabbing her bags and running out the door. The minute it shuts behind her, nothing in the apartment is safe as I break completely. This is more than she needs to think. She’d been cheating on me. Jenna didn’t love me. I’m such a damn fool. How could I not have seen it?

  Because you loved her, you idiot!

  Walking over to the window, I watch as she exits the building. Instead of heading to her car, a man steps out of a red BMW, and she rushes to him. The bastard has gray hair and wears a suit and glasses.

  “She dumped me for an old fart?”

  Disgust runs thick through me. Walking back to the bedroom, I slam the door and shut the world out.