by S. Ann Cole
Eyes swinging back to Xena, I opened my mouth to ask about the cops, but she went ahead and explained, “Chaos outside. Dramatically weeping, prostrating fans.”
Oh. “Any news on Xavi?”
Heaving out a breath, she shook her head ‘no’ and lowered to sit in the chair beside me. “I had to bribe a nurse with a hundred dollar bill for an unofficial update that he was rushed off to surgery and back to the ICU an hour later.”
I couldn’t control my erratic breathing. I couldn’t control my racing heart. I couldn’t control the panic. “Surgery?”
Xena blinked back tears and dropped her head in her hands. “I’m so scared, Alina. Xavi and Dad are the only family I have left. He takes care of Dad because I have no idea how to deal with that madman. If I lose him…”
Finally able to move without spinal pain, I flung an arm around her and rested my chin on her shoulder. “Do you know what I call him when I’m happy with him?”
Head still in her hands, she mumbled, “What?”
“Samson,” I told her. “And sometimes I think of him as ‘My King’. That’s his name in my phone.”
Raising her head, she gave me a befuddled look and repeated, “What?”
“I regard him as this unbeatable being, an impenetrable city, and an unconquerable warrior, superior to every other human on earth. To me, he’s high and mighty and incontestable. A king. That makes me feel safe, knowing I have a man like that on my side. A Samson. That not even a lion could defeat.”
Eying me like I was ludicrous, she pointed out, “They gouged his eyes and killed his strength. Samson was defeated, Alina.”
“Was he?” I asked. “Was he ‘defeated’ or was he subdued for a little while? Just long enough for his hair to grow back and a pint of his strength to return. Enough that, in shackles and blindness, he sent a temple full of mockers who thought that was the end of him, crashing to the ground in rubbles. Blind and in shackles, he was still the strongest man alive.”
“Your analogy sucks,” Xena said through a bitter laugh. “Because Samson still died in that collapse.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “but on his own terms. I have faith in Xavi’s strength. If he leaves us, it’s because he chooses to. If he comes back to us, it’s because he chooses to. Since you know him better than I do, you know damn well he’ll choose the latter. He’s too cocky to die. Probably flirting with his guardian angel right now, sweet-talking his way out of going to heaven too soon. Come on, you know no angel with blushing wings and heavenly lady bits can resist that face. Plus, I’m sure Michael, the archangel, isn’t looking forward to having anyone hotter and sexier and taller than him stealing the affection of all the female angels in heaven. Look, you saw what he did to Lucifer. Just imagine what he’ll do to Xavier.”
Xena erupted into a fit of giggles. Yes, giggles. “You’re an idiot.”
My work here is done. “He’s coming back because he loves you and he loves Mick. I don’t know if he loves me, but he knows I love him, and he knows better than to leave me hanging like that.”
“Yeah,” Xena agreed, fighting a grin, “he’d be an idiot to leave knowing you love him. I mean, does he have any idea how exhaustingly difficult it is to get Alina O’Hara to admit she loves someone?”
I punched her thigh. “Shut up. Tell me, how’s Jess?”
“Crap,” she muttered, straightening. “I totally forgot why I woke you up in the first place. Jess is doing fine. Benny went in to see her earlier and left. We took turns seeing her, but she’s been pressing to see you. I told her it might not be a good time because you’re kinda pissed Xavi left to see her, but she insists on apologizing to your face.” Long sigh. “She feels terrible, Alina.”
Just before I could respond or react, Davian broke around the corner balancing 4-cup trays of Starbucks coffee in both hands, and Starbucks paper-bags hanging off each wrist.
His gaze kissed mine briefly before moving to the opposite side of the hall where the rockers were. He offered coffees to Jake, Styro and Zach of Ice Steam, along with Leo and Mark of Ninety Miles.
Without even a glance at Tex, he crossed the hall to Xena and me and offered us the last two cups. From the paper-bags, he passed us breakfast sandwiches.
“You still mad about that one time I didn’t let you swallow my cum, Davi?” Tex mumbled, yawning and stretching his hands above his head. Everyone was sipping coffees and nibbling sandwiches except him.
“Yep,” Davian replied in a flat, bored voice, digging his buzzing phone out of his pocket and glancing at the screen. “You knew how much I love the taste.”
“Here,” Xena offered Tex. “You can have my sandwich. I’m not really hungry.”
“Nah,” he declined, wagging his head. “What you all don’t know is that Davi’s secretly in love with me. In about five minutes, all of you are gonna keel over in seizure and froth. He’s tryna poison you so he can have me to himself.”
While Xena rolled her eyes, Mark and Leo chuckled.
Davian just ignored him.
Shoving his phone back in his pocket, he crouched down in front of me, searching my eyes, hands rubbing soothingly over my knees. “You okay?”
I nodded. “You went in to see Jess?”
He shook his head.
“You should. She’s in love with you, you know.”
“And I love you.”
“You used to love her, Davian. Enough to ask her to marry you. I believe you still do. Go in and see her.”
“Listen, I’m gonna check in on our son,” he said, avoiding the topic of Jessica. “And I’d appreciate it if you do the same after you get some update on your…‘king’. Jacob misses you.”
Leaning in, he pressed a chaste kiss to my lips before I could stop it, then stood and strode off down the hall.
“Why does he always feel the need to do that?” Xena snapped, irritated. “Make a claim. You chose Xavi and he needs to get the hell over it.”
“Ally ain’t the kinda girl you just ‘get over’, sweetheart,” Jake informed Xena while shooting me a wink.
“Sounds like you daydream ‘lot about getting in Alina’s famous hot panties, Jake,” Mark comment through a chuckle. “Even if you got rid of Xavi and Davi, you still gonna need to get in line, man. Chick’s hot tits right now.”
Jake grinned and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Not dreams. Hot, hot flashes.”
With an unflattered eye roll, I stood and mumbled, “I think I’ll go see Jess, after all. Mind showing me her room, Xena?”
Xena—shaking her head and glaring at the boys as they carried on talking about me, my tits, and my hot panties like I wasn’t there—stood and looped her arm through mine, then led me to Jessica’s room.
Blank stare fixed outside the window, Jessica was propped up against pillows in her hospital bed. Her head turned to us as we walked in. Half her face swollen, her lips oddly lopsided, and there was a long—though not too bizarre—scar running from her forehead, over and through her left eyebrow. The superficial kind of scar that would vanish within a few months.
Other than that, she seemed well. Which, in my opinion, was a miracle.
Hours earlier before I fell asleep, the early morning news had showed pictures of Xavier’s Hummer and it was wrecked.
Eyewitnesses said they believed the driver—Xavier—was intoxicated because right before the accident the Hummer had been swerving all over the place. A delivery truck had been coming down on the opposite side at the same time an impatient driver attempted to overtake the Hummer.
So, when the Hummer swerved back into its correct lane to avoid a collision with the truck, the over-taker, not anticipating that sudden sharp swerve, crashed into the upper left of the Hummer, which sent the Hummer in a single tailspin, and before it could regain control back into its lane, the screeching delivery truck slammed into the overtaking vehicle, which then slammed into the Hummer, and neither of the three vehicles stopped moving until the Hummer crashed and bent around a light post.
&
nbsp; The truck driver got out unscathed. The passengers—three college surfers—of the overtaking vehicle died on impact. Jess was somehow cushioned by the airbag and the fact that most of the hits didn’t happen from her side of the vehicle or something of the sort. Xavier had been pinned; it was reported that it took over forty minutes for them to cut him out of the wreck and announce he was still breathing.
I supposed Xavier got the brunt of it because it was his side of the vehicle that bent around the post. Suffice it to say, if I’d been in that horrifying wreck, I’d be ecstatic if I came out looking like Jessica did.
A niggling in the back of my mind accused me of giving Xavier the benefit of the doubt when he said he didn’t need rehab. Obviously, he’d been driving intoxicated. How foolish I’d been to trust his word. Wherever he’d gone with Jessica, alcohol was involved.
This was the result.
“Hey.” Jessica gave a tentative smile. “You came.”
Xena ambled to the armchair by the bedside, while I stood at the foot, not trusting myself to be any closer.
“Only because I wanted to escape the bands talking about my ‘hot panties’ right in front of me.”
Her green eyes went sad. “I know you must hate me right now.”
“I’m still deciding on that.”
She looked at Xena, and then dropped her gaze to her hands above the sheets. On her right hand, gauze wrapped from her wrist to her index and middle fingers. “You will…when you find out…I caused the accident.”
Xena’s face went pale, her posture going rigid. “W-what do you mean you caused the accident?”
Puffing out a long-winded sigh, Jessica began, “I drove to Davi’s house last night to break the news I’m sure you’re all aware of by now—I was pregnant.” She swallowed. “I’d been sitting on it for too long, mainly because I wanted him to take me back because he still wanted to be with me and not out of obligation.” She raised her gaze to me. “I know he’ll never love me like he loves you, but I wanted him to want me, at least.
“So I tried and tried until I started to break through to him a little. He stopped ignoring my calls, started replying to texts. He wouldn’t give me a definitive answer on getting back together, but it was better than where I was before—completely shut out—so I decided to tell him.”
Again, her gaze dropped to her hands. “Let’s just say he didn’t take the news well. He said it wasn’t his. Said I couldn’t trick him in fathering Xavi’s kid blah blah blah. He called me a liar and a manipulator, told me he needed a paternity test proving the child was his, then he kicked me out of his house.
“Driving home I was such a mess that I ran my car into a ditch. Because Davi was right. I didn’t know if it was his or Xavi’s. I just knew I wanted it to be Davi’s.
“I phoned Xavi, told him I was stuck in a ditch and needed help. He said he would send someone to help me out because he was ‘working shit out’ with you. I don’t know why, maybe it was because Davian had just rejected me, but I got mad and blind with jealousy when he told me that. I knew him. I knew if I begged him and told him I didn’t trust anyone else he would come, so I did. He came to get me.
“On our drive back, I told him about the pregnancy, that we needed to do a paternity test. This wasn’t news he wanted to hear. He got so anxious about losing you again that he couldn’t even drive. He pulled over on the side of the road, jumped out of the jeep and paced up and down the sidewalk, cursing himself for nearly an hour before he cooled down and got back around the steering wheel.
“He agreed to the paternity test, but he looked so defeated…like he was resigned to the fact that that was it for you and him. I felt good about that. At least he wasn’t treating me like Davi. That just reminded me why I loved him. Suddenly—I’m not sure it’s because of the crazy mood swings and fickle feelings from the pregnancy hormones—but I no longer wanted the baby to be Davian’s. I want it to be his. Because I realized how much better of a man he was than Davi.
“I told him that. He said ‘whatever’. I started talking about old times to cheer him up, breaking through his dejection, and in the heat of the moment, all the things I used to feel for him came back and I just wanted…I wanted him back.
“I started touching him, feeling him up…and stuff. He kept swatting me away, told me to stop. Told me he was back with you. I said something nasty about you and he got angry and began yelling at me to stop touching him.
“I got angry, too. Rejected by both men in one night all because of you. So no, I didn’t stop touching him. I fought him. I fought his jeans open, I forced my hand inside. All the while he was both trying to fight me back and steer the vehicle.
“Next thing I knew there was a deafening blare of a horn, blinding lights and…I woke up here.”
With a single blink, I stood as still as a statue. Words, coherency, cognition was remote. Unheard of by my brain. Shock besieged me for a different reason than the most obvious one. Jessica and Xavier had lied to me. Lied.
I blinked again when Xena shot up from the armchair, leaned over and slapped Jessica right across the face, so hard it echoed around the room.
I winced. It was on the swollen side of her face, so that had to have hurt like a bitch. Tears instantly sprang to Jessica’s already puffy eyes, an automatic reaction to the stinging pain.
Xena glowered down at her, mouth opening and closing like a fish. As if lost for words as I was, she turned and stormed out of the room.
Fat tears barreled down Jessica’s face, and it seemed as if wiping them away would need energy she didn’t have.
“You can hit me, too, if you want,” she murmured, blinking up at the ceiling. “I deserve it. Xavi might die and it’s all my fault.”
Rounding to the side of the bed, I perched on the edge beside her, then leaned over and gently did what she was too weak to do herself. Wipe her tears.
Eying me warily, she asked, “Who are you and what have you done with Alina?”
“You told me you were never together,” I whispered, because whispering was all I could manage at that moment. “He said the same. So, how might the baby have been his? And wouldn’t it more be Xavi’s kid than Davi’s, seeing as Davi left you months ago?”
Jessica drew in a shaky breath and shifted her gaze to the ceiling. “I was eighteen weeks pregnant, Alina.”
I stared at her. “Then how—are you saying he…when we were still together?”
She swallowed. “Kind of.”
Scream. Scream. No, I won’t. Scream. Screaaam!
“It was after he returned from France and was waiting for you to ‘choose’ or whatever. Davian had broken off the engagement and moved out a week before, so Xavi was spending time with me at Eye Spy, helping me get through it. He said you weren’t going to choose him. I told him he needed to believe in himself a little more.
“But the more the days passed on with no word from you, the more he was convinced you’d chosen Davian, seeing as you were both MIA. It wasn’t long before we began messing around again, as some sort of consolation to each other. Until one night, he got that text message from you…”
More than anything else, this revelation sliced into the deepest, most vulnerable part of my heart. This truth, this pain, it stole my will to live.
Scream. Scream. No, I will not.
“So…” I cleared my throat. “So all this time, when I thought he’d been waiting for me, he was, in fact, screwing around with you?”
“No. He waited for you,” she defended. “But after not hearin—”
“No. No!” I jerked to my feet and pointed at her like she was the offender. “He did not wait. He promised me he would wait no matter how long it takes! He gave me a frickin’ waiting ring. He told me to take all the time I needed to make my decision. And yet he just gave up after a few days of silence? That’s not waiting! He did not wait!”
Jessica stared, as though shocked I was more upset about Xavier cheating on me months ago than I was about her causing the ac
cident. “He really didn’t believe you would choose him, Alina. And we’re so accustomed to burying our affairs that we didn’t even have to talk about pretending it never happened. We just did. He wanted you, and I wanted Davi.”
Her tone was unapologetic. She didn’t regret it.
Without a glower or a glare, but with a gentle understanding in my voice, I sought the truth. “Feel good now, don’t you? That you have one up on me? Feels good to be breaking this to me, doesn’t it?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, then defiantly jutted her chin out as she admitted, “Actually, it does. It feels darn good, Alina, because you hav—”
“Alina!” Xena’s head popped in the doorway, tears streaming down her face as she beckoned me with a wave.
At once, my heart began thumping in my chest and rushed toward her. “What it is?”
Wrapping her fingers around my wrist, she tugged me out of the room. “There’s news on Xavi. I want you to be there. You’re family now.”
We all but ran back to the waiting room, where everyone was now standing and shifting impatiently, wearing anxiety like it was the new trend.
A stocky, salt and pepper haired doctor was waiting patiently with a clipboard under his arm.
“You may continue now,” Xena told him.
The doctor eyed us with skepticism. “And you are sure everyone here is…family?”
“Yes,” Xena clipped. “Now give me the status on my brother.”
The doctor opened his mouth as if to object, obviously uncomfortable, but as Tex moved forward and daggered him with a glare, he pressed his lips together and made an annoyed shake of his head.
“Mr. Xander is stable, finally, but in very critical condition. He’s suffered a traumatic brain injury. We had to do a craniotomy to repair the damages. There’s still swelling on his brain, but we’ve done the best we can and are hoping this will resolve in a couple of weeks. He is currently on a ventilator, a machine that’s helping him breathe, and he is on seizure and EEG monitoring—”