by S. Ann Cole
Please. Help.
Deleting the text messages, I grabbed up my handbag and padded back into the living area, my eyes immediately seeking out Xavier.
He’d donned his coat and was twirling his car keys around his fingers, smiling at Mick and Jacob. All ready to go.
“You left without telling them?” I snapped out, surprising myself with the anger in my voice.
Xavier’s bored gaze found mine. “Was suffocating.”
“And that makes it okay for you to just up and leave without telling anyone? After all they’ve been through for almost half a year? How selfish could you be?!” I was damn near shouting by the end.
Unfazed, Xavier simply kicked up an eyebrow. “Asks the queen of selfishness herself. Told you, I’m changed.”
“No.” I breezed up to him, getting up close and personal, poking at his chest. “No. Stop trying to be me. I’m the worst example. The worst. Don’t change who you are because you can’t help loving an undeserving, pathetic excuse for a woman like me. I need you. I need the good in you. If you become me, then there’s no hope for us, Xavi. None. I need your light.”
Obstinacy pulled his jaw tight. “I’m thinking there was never any hope for us, to begin with.” He wasn’t budging.
Aaargh!
I whirled on Mick, who had Jacob in his lap. “And you,”—they both watched me like I was turning green and growing venous muscles—, “you told them he wasn’t here?”
Mick showed no remorse. “I was kept entirely in the dark while my son was laying half-dead in the hospital. They deserve to feel exactly how I felt, worrying every night about m’boy.”
Shaking my head, I turned away from Mick. Between him and Xavier, I had better chances getting through to Xavier. Mick was a man stuck in his views, and he would probably launch into an analogical tale to support his decision, and while I loved his tales, I wasn’t in the mood for one at the moment.
Attention back on Xavier, I demanded, “Call your sister and let her know you’re alright and not hanging from a tree somewhere.”
One corner of his mouth tipped up slightly into a quasi-smirk. He ceased twirling his car keys and crossed his arms over his chest. “Make me.”
Of course, this was a joke to him. He didn’t know how much I’d grown to love Xena and hated the fact that she was going batty with worry—even though she kind of deserved it for how she treated me. My fingers curled into fists. “Call her, Xavi!”
My balled-up fists attracted his attention, and he full-on smirked. What was that? He never smirks. He just wasn’t the smirking kind. “Or…?”
I was fuming. He was freaking taunting me.
Mick cautioned, “I think you’re in trouble, son.”
“Trobu!” Jacob concurred.
“What’s she gonna do?” Xavier grinned then. “Her arms are like twigs. Even with one leg I could topple h—“
Thwack!
Epic punch fail. I swung up a fist to punch him but he was quicker than I was and smacked my fist to the side before it could reach him. As effortless as the move was for him, I was shifted a little to the side, his force was so strong.
“Gotta try harder than—”
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Fail. Fail. Fail.
He knocked away my punches with such ease, while I was pitifully giving it all I had, exhausting myself. Goddamn, Samson.
“Mhrgrrhhhh!!” I growled in my throat and began slapping at him with wild hands.
With uproarious laughter, he began inching back, mimicking me and combating my slaps with his own, so we were in a full-on cat fight. Or rather, cat to lion fight.
“Look at her, Dad!” he said through a boisterous laugh, louder than I’d ever heard him laugh. “Look at her arms, they’re like toothpicks. Should I snap one?”
That had me swinging wilder, and Xavier laughed harder.
“Let her have at it, son. She’ll get tired in a minute.”
“I’m not….sure I…like you anymore…Mick,” I huffed out through labored breathing. I really was wearing myself out.
“Chloe, bring a glass of water for Chino,” Xavier called over his shoulder, still batting me off. Then to me, “You sure you tryna hurt me, or yourself?”
“Bastard!” I shrieked.
“Look at you,” he kept on laughing at me, “I’m like a tower taller and mountain bigger than you. Chill out before you break your hands on me.”
I slapped and slapped at him until I collapsed against his chest, which was shaking with laughter. His arms came around me, catching me.
As if on cue, Chloe walked in with the water, and at that moment it could have been a water-well I was so thirsty.
With one hand, Xavier took the cup from her while using his other hand to tug my head back by my loose ponytail. Bringing the cup to my lips, he murmured, “Here, drink of my blood.”
I drank, gulp after gulp, until the water was depleted.
He passed the empty cup to Chloe and she ducked her head with a shy smile and scurried off back to the kitchen as if embarrassed by our embrace.
Xavier peered down at me, an amused half-smile on his lips. He tugged my head further back and lowered his head so our lips were aligned. “Now eat of my flesh.”
His mouth covered mine, and I did. I ate of him. Greedily. Probably more than I should have. Legs weakening beneath me. Eating was meant to strengthen, revitalize, invigorate, but eating of Xavier only made me enervated, starved, drained.
He broke the feast, drew back an inch and grinned something mischievous. “Feel born again? Sanctified? Or do you wanna be filled with the”—he made a suggestive thrust of his hips—“holy dick?”
I ripped away from him and smacked his chest. “Jerk! Your father’s sitting right the—”
My words halted when I turned, gesturing to Mick’s recliner and found it empty. Mick and Jacob were no longer in the room. When did that happen?
Xavier prompted, “You were saying?”
I spun back to him and crossed my arms, adamant. “Call your sis. Or you can forget about what I have to show you.”
One stubborn eyebrow went up. “And who’s gonna be losing in that case?”
“Both of us,” I replied sulkily. “But you more than me.”
“Because I love you more than you love me?”
“No.”
“Then why me more?”
Frustration had me huffing like a toddler. “You have to see it to understand.”
He studied me for a beat, two beats, three, before breathing out a relenting sigh and digging out his phone. He tapped the touch screen, brought the phone to his ear, and waited. “Yeah…No, I’m fine…Yeah…I’m with Chino, she forced me to call you…Shit yes, that’s the only reason why…No, you can’t talk to her right now, she’s busy…With me…Don’t know, don’t care, she chose me….Don’t owe Jess anything. She owes me a leg, though…Nope. And now that I’m standing here looking directly into the bottomless pit of Chino’s soulless black eyes, I know the bionic leg is from her and not from you guys…Yeah, I’m sure you didn’t…Whatever, gotta go.”
He hung up and stared at me. “There. Called her. Happy?”
I worried my lip. “They only lied because you wouldn’t have accepted it if they told you it was from me.”
“Wrong,” he said. “Would’ve used it solely for that reason.”
“Why are you so angry with them?”
He breathed out another sigh and slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Not angry at them and not angry at you. Just angry in general about the turn my life has taken and I have no idea what to do with it. Tryna restrain it, but it keeps coming out on its own. Like this morning, sorry about that. The mood comes and goes. But you know to give me space and I appreciate that.” He ran both his hands down his face and emitted a harsh noise. “It’s just that, there are things I wanted outta life, you know. The band was a highway route to getting there. Jumping off that route has mitigated my chances…just gotta kiss those dreams
goodbye, or dream smaller, at least. Pisses me off.”
Moving into him, I circled my arms around his middle. “Xavi, I love you, but I’m not gonna baby you. Life happens. Suck it up, pray for strength, and keep on keeping on. Life is shorter now than it’s ever been, what with the mass deaths, spiraling or missing planes, religious wars…why waste yours wallowing, hating, lashing out when you could be singing, dancing, being grateful you’re still alive? You don’t have to stop dreaming or downgrade because of this. Keep the dream alive. Die with that dream. Never, ever, trade your dream for anger and resentment. The only thing that keeps us going from day to day are our dreams. Without them, we are nothing. There’s no reason for anything. And there we are. Just there. Don’t give up on your dream. It’s yours.”
Drawing back an inch, I tilted my head so I could meet his eyes. “You wanna know what your father told me when I asked him how he felt about your accident?”
“A story?” Xavier asked, lips twitching.
“No,” I snapped with an eye-roll. Such a jerk he could be sometimes. “He said, sometimes drastic things happens to us to humble us, slow us down, give us pause to stop and see all that we couldn’t see when we were moving too fast; all that’s wrong with us on the inside. It’s called an intervention, or a Road to Damascus interruption, he said.
“At some point in life, we all have one. It may come in the form of tragedy, loss, or unbearable pain. Out of nowhere, it crashes into us and sends us careening straight to rock bottom, forcing us to use that grating rock we’re up against as a mirror, and take a good, hard look at who we really are.
“Chances are, we might not like what we see. We’re used to smooth, glossy mirrors showing us what we want to see, telling us what we want to hear. When we’re in that hard place, forced to use the rock for our mirror, we realize that we aren’t as good as we thought we were. We’re hideous, ugly, disgusting—mean, selfish, self-centered, vain, proud, avaricious, verbally abusive, inconsiderate, insensitive, uncaring, unloving, hateful, envious, covetous, jealous—and we hate it, hate what we see, hate the real us.
“We want to change that reflection, because we can’t believe that’s who we’ve been all this time when we were busy criticizing our neighbors, thinking we were ‘good’, thinking we were ‘better’. So we start striving to become the best versions of ourselves that we possibly can. This, he told me, is where we really grow up, have our clearest perspective on life. This is the time when we can truly call ourselves ‘adults’.”
Xavier shook his head in wonder. “Sounds exactly like Dad.”
I laughed. “I don’t know about you, but I love listening to him. I have learned a lot from him in the two months that I’ve been here.”
“He’s smitten with you, you know.”
“As I am with him.”
“When Xhett and I were toddlers, Mom went to the Big Apple for a week to do a show and some interviews. She ran into her ex-fiancé. The man she left for Dad. Don’t know what made her do it, but long story short, she cheated on Dad. She called him and confessed the morning after. When she came home, he hugged her, kissed her, and told her he forgave her.
“He told me this when I was sixteen. I asked him why he forgave her, and he said, ‘this was the fact: Aline is my soul-mate. There’s no other woman in the world for me but her. These were the choices: I could kick her to the curb and be miserable for the rest of my life, spend years and years going through all kinds of empty vessels, trying to find another woman to replace an irreplaceable woman, or, I could appreciate that she confessed and didn’t try to hide it from me, forgive her because I love the hell out of her, and continue to live a happy, fulfilling life—because when you know you can’t live without someone, you don’t ever let them go. Hence, I chose the latter.”
Oh, my God. “Oh, my God,” I echoed my thoughts. “You think that’s why he let me in?”
“Yep.” Xavier nodded. “He honestly believes you and me are some kind of twisted repeat of history.
Horror stretched my eyes. “I hope to hell not. Because their story didn’t end well. No offense.”
“Guess that’s why it’s repeating.” He shrugged. “For a happy ending this time around.”
I made a face. Still completely horrified about Aline and Mick’s history repeating through us.
Xavier’s lips twisted. “So, you were saying now that I’ve lost a leg I’m finally an adult.”
Mouth slightly hanging, I blinked. “Jesus. You totally missed the point.”
He barked out a laugh. “Messing with you. Thanks for passing me Dad’s words. He probably wouldn’t have told me for fear I wouldn’t listen.”
“So you’ll take it from me but not your father?”
“Nah, it’s not that.” He chuckled. “He just takes too long to get to the point sometimes. Plus he’s always mixing in Mom and Xhett, and continually being reminded of them is depressing. You can do the listening for me and then give me the abridged, edited version.” He twirled his keys. “Now, we going to see this mysterious thing or what?”
XAVIER drove, despite my insisting that I get behind the wheel considering I was the one who knew our destination.
Too late, I’d realized that he most likely felt out of control of his own life at this juncture in his life and just needed to hold on to whatever control he could still have. Like driving.
Upon that realization, I’d given up the fight and let him take the wheel. I gave directions while he made all sorts of wild guesses about what we were going to see. One of those guesses being that he’d knocked me up, I’d hid it from him, and I gave birth to the baby while he was in rehab— as impossibly ridiculous as that sounded.
I laughed, but the laugh was fake, forced, as my mind catapulted back to Jessica. Her confession. I wondered if she told him I knew about the cheating and the pregnancy. If she did, then his lack of bringing it up—if intentional—must be on account of my own elevator misdemeanor. Tit for tat, I guess.
“Here?” Xavier sought confirmation when I instructed him to turn off the main road and onto the private road that led to the plantation ranch. “You sure?”
“Yes,” I stressed. “Stop questioning my directions because you know the place better than I do.”
“Only ask ‘cause this is a private road belonging to the owner of the only residence down here.” To prove his point, he accelerated along the sinuous road, fast and furious style, before hitting a sharp brake around the bend in front of the stately white gates. “See. Nothing else down here but Mrs. Pierre’s plantation ranch.”
“Mrs. Pierre?”
“Yeah. Mom told us she took her in and raised her when our grandmother died. Mom was just eleven. Always come visit her whenever I’m here. Mr. Pierre, her husband, left this plantation ranch to her.”
What? Mick never told me that! Had he not remembered? Or had wanted me to discover on my own that this was all “fate”? Oh, that man! That damned man.
“I didn’t know that,” I mumbled. I reached into the side compartment of my handbag and got out the key fob for the gate. Powering down the window, I pointed the fob at the electronic gate monitor on the column.
Xavier glanced at the key in my hand, and then at the grand gates jerking to a lazy open. “Okay, if you tell me Dad brought you here, I won’t believe you. ‘Cause Dad and Mrs. Pierre do not get along. She hates his guts for breaking up Mom’s engagement to her son.”
“What?” Okay, this was getting more and more twisted. So the man Aline had been engaged to was the son of the woman who’d owned this plantation—which we now owned? Was it the son’s grandson who I bought it from? “I didn’t know that either.”
The first time Xavier invited me to meet his father, Mick told me the story of how he and Xavier’s mother, Aline Acy, met. She’d been engaged to another man, and thus ensued a love-triangle, where Mick came out as the winner.
“Then how do you know this place?” Xavier frowned. “And how do you have a key?”
�
��Drive in,” I told him.
He hesitated, skeptical, and I could see the wheels churning. He wanted to ask questions.
I kept my face blank, gave nothing away until he gave up searching my face and drove through the gates.
In silence, we cruised down the mile-long pathway toward the house, tree-clustered, snow-dusted lands on either side.
As we drew up to the house, I could see Izaboch shoveling snow from the pathway. He stopped to stare at the approaching vehicle.
Along with the plantation came Izaboch and his pregnant girlfriend. Apparently, he’d been doing maintenance for the previous owner since he was a homeless ten-year-old. After a while, she’d taken him in and cared for him, and in return, he kept up the plantation. He was living in one of the barn houses at the back with his girlfriend.
Yanking up the handbrake, a trench-deep crease appeared between Xavier’s brows. I could tell there were a million questions running through his head, but I opened the door and jumped out of the vehicle before he could ask one.
Recognizing me, Izaboch abandoned his shovel and doffed his gloves as he strode toward me with a wide grin. He was supposedly in his mid-twenties, but his strong arms bulging under his chocolate-brown sweater, his broad shoulders and insanely sturdy build made him appear older, experienced. His pale face dusted with conspicuous freckles, but they gave him character and worked in his favor.
“Ah, ze beautiful Alina.” He kissed both my cheeks in greeting. “I did not know you were to come. I would, eh, ask Eliza to make you, eh, coffee. Juz like you Americanz like it.”
I shook my head. “No, no. Don’t worry about it. I’m just here to show my friend around.”
“Friend?” Xavier grunted from behind me, and I turned to find him standing right at my back, scowling at Izaboch over my head.
Izaboch seemed to have recognized Xavier at that moment, and he grinned some more; though this grin had a little taunt to it. “Ah, Xander. You arge, eh, friend of Alina?”
“Her man.” Xavier moved beside me and wrapped his arm possessively around my waist. “Put your mouth on her again, Iza, and I’ll knock you out.”