by Emerson Rose
Drake unlocks the door and before he can open it Jayden is pushing his way in. He’s vibrating with anger and his face is beet red as he takes in the scene. His eyes swing from Drake to me in the bed and back to Drake. He sees the gun in his hand and a sick smile spreads across his face.
“You’re kidding me with that, right?” He points at the gun.
“Jayden, don’t,” Drake says.
“You’re pathetic. You know that? Some best fucking friend you are. You promised not to touch her and here you are fucking her right under my nose. Are ya doin’ all that kinky shit you do with your other girlfriends?” He whips his eyes back to me. “I tried to tell you, T, he’s a man-whore, and he’s just fucking you because you’re hot and convenient. You’re never gonna be more to him than a warm place to shove his cock when he’s too lazy to go into town and find one of his regulars.”
“That’s enough!” Drake roars and takes a step toward Jayden the gun wavering in his hand. “I told you last night, I love her, it’s not like that with her. Now take your insulting fucking ass out of my house and don’t come back!”
“Oh my God, both of you stop! Drake, please go and put the gun away before somebody gets hurt. And as for you, Jayden, I’m a grown woman. I know it’s hard for you to see that because you’ve always taken care of me but I don’t need to be taken care of right now. I need you to back off and let me make my own relationship decisions.”
“Ya better do what she says, old man. Go put that gun away before somebody gets hurt,” he says with a sadistic laugh.
What the hell is wrong with him? He doesn’t even sound like my brother, he sounds like a psychotic stranger.
“I told you to stop, Captain. Shut your fucking mouth,” Drake says.
“Or what? You’ll hit me with your cane, or shoot that gun until you blow a hole in everything in the room before you hit me?”
Drake lifts the gun and points it at Jayden. I scream and jump off the bed wrapping the sheet around myself. I fling my body between the men and look from one to the other in utter shock. Drake lowers the gun immediately and steps forward to pull me away from my brother.
“Man, you gonna tell her or you gonna let me be the one to break the news?”
“I told you to leave. Legally I can shoot you if you don’t.”
“You couldn’t shoot me if you wanted to and you know it.” Jayden focuses his attention on me. “Sis, has this disloyal, lying, whoring mother fucker told you his secret yet? No, of course he hasn’t or he wouldn’t be threatening to shoot me and you wouldn’t still be fucking him or planning a future with him or whatever the hell you’re doing over here.” He lowers his eyes to the sheet covering my naked body and his lip curls up in disgust.
“Why are you being such a dick about this, Jay? People change, maybe Drake never got into committed relationships before but we love each other. This is different, I have feelings for him that I’ve never had for anyone before.”
He stumbles back a step like I’ve hit him.
“That’s not true. You don’t love him, you can’t.”
“I can, and I do.” I soften my voice trying to get through to him but his eyes are hollow, I hardly recognize them.
“He’s going blind, Tiana. He’s been going blind for seventeen years and it’s gotten so bad lately he can’t even drive.”
“Jayden!” Drake yells. He’s holding me around my waist my back to his front. His voice deafens me in my right ear temporarily and I think I must have heard Jayden wrong. Did he say Drake is going blind?
“What?”
“Yeah, he didn’t tell ya that, did he? That’s because he knows you’d dump him. That’s also why he won’t marry anybody or have kids. He doesn’t wanna ruin some poor woman’s life makin’ her take care of him. But he’s gettin' worse now and he needs a babysitter. What’s that say about you, huh? I guess he don’t care about fuckin’ up your life, does he? Does that sound like love to you, Tiana? Huh?”
“I…” I shake my head back and forth unable to speak. Is this just a ploy to get me away from Drake or is Jayden telling the truth? Drake is going blind.
“Baby, listen to me, I’m not blind. Your brother is pissed and he’s trying to turn you against me. Let’s get dressed and I’ll take you somewhere so we can talk.” He’s speaking directly into my ear in a soft reassuring voice, but my mind is buzzing with confusion. I’m trying to put these pieces of information in an order that they make sense, but I’m a mess, I can’t think.
“He can’t take you somewhere to talk. He can’t drive, he can’t shoot, he can’t text with his fingers on his phone and soon he won’t even be able to work. So there goes your pretty future! No job, no income, no nothing.”
I bend my head down and cover my ears holding the sheet against my body with my upper arms to keep it from falling.
“Stop! Just shut up, Jayden!” I scream and step out of Drakes embrace. Angry tears spring to my eyes but I don’t want either of them to see me cry. I shuffle across the room and grab my clothes off the floor and barrel past them toward the hall.
“You two go ahead and kill each other. Do whatever you want, just leave me alone.” I exit and slam the door but when I try to walk away I realize the sheet is stuck.
That’s the last fucking straw. I let out a frustrated scream and drop the sheet. I don’t care who fucking sees me naked at this point. I stomp into the bathroom where I slam that door so hard it rattles a giant blown up photograph of a camera lens that’s hanging on the wall behind the door.
Amid all this chaos, I stop and stare at the picture for a second and think it’s an odd way to decorate a bathroom. What the fuck is wrong with me? I yank on my shorts and button my shirt up with no bra underneath. I didn’t have time to search for underthings, I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.
I look in the mirror. Good God, my hair is awful. Where am I going to go looking like this, braless with just-been-fucked hair sticking out all over the place? And no shoes, damn it, I forgot my shoes.
I hear the bedroom door open and one person descending the stairs. The front door opens and closes and I’m left alone with one of them, the question is which one?
I didn’t hear any gunshots so nobody’s dead. That’s good I guess. I need to get out of here and get some distance so I can think.
I hear a click behind me and turn around to find Drake standing on the threshold of another door that has access to this bathroom. I glance beyond him and see a spare bedroom. Great, a fucking Jack and Jill bathroom. So much for sneaking out unseen.
“I was going to tell you.” He takes a step toward me. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Two more steps and he is standing right in front of me. “I should have told you sooner, but I never expected you to steal my heart the way you did.”
I look into his eyes and see that tiny bit of vulnerability that I’ve always seen there but now it’s not so tiny. And now I know why it’s there. All at once things fall together. His tendency to never look at me straight on, wanting to walk into town instead of drive, the spelling mistakes in his text messages, the lack of furniture in his house. All of it can be easily explained away by his failing sight.
“Why?” There are so many whys, that he isn’t sure which one I’m referring to.
“Why didn’t I tell you?”
“No, why are you going blind? Were you injured, is it genetic? What’s causing it and can it be fixed?”
He lowers his eyes to the floor, “It’s called macular degeneration. Usually there is a cause but with me, they have found none. It started when I was nineteen or twenty. It was hardly anything the first ten years, a little blurry vision, difficulty driving at night but nothing glasses couldn’t help. I thought it was a misdiagnosis or that they were overdramatizing it until I hit thirty. Then a spot appeared in the center of my vision making it difficult to see anything directly in front of me.”
“And now?”
“Your brother wasn’t lying about that
part. It has gotten worse over the past couple years and especially within the past few weeks.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.” He looks up with a sad smirk.
“What are you going to do about your job? I thought you were being promoted soon.”
His jaw tightens when he clenches his teeth.
“I thought so, too, but the past few weeks have been bad. The week before I met you, I woke up with a significant setback and it’s happened again since then. I have perfect peripheral vision. That’s how I’ve gotten by, keeping my job for so long. No one knows. Only Jayden and my eye surgeon, and now you.”
“Not even your mother?”
“No, it’s going to kill her. She’s so proud of her Marine Corps son. Now she’ll have to tell all of her socialite friends that her perfect son is a pathetic blind man.”
I frown so hard I feel my forehead wrinkle. “Is that how you feel about people who are blind?”
“Not people, me. I’m a fucking Marine, Tiana. I lead, I organize, I am respected, and looked up to. When I’m blind all of that will be gone. I’ll be dependent on others for basic shit like driving and grocery shopping. I won’t be able to do anything alone, I won’t be able to work or go for a run…” His words trail off and he sits down on the closed toilet seat with his elbows on his knees and covers his face with his hands.
I kneel in front of him and remove his hands. My overbearing, take charge Marine has tears in his beautiful blue eyes and defeat written all over his face.
“Drake, do you really love me? I mean we have only known each other a short time, but I am positive of my feelings for you. I know I’m in love with you.”
“Yes, I love you.”
“If something happened to me would you leave me?” I ask him.
“No.”
“What would you do?”
“I would take care of you.”
I cup his cheeks with my hands and a single tear escapes his eye and rolls down his cheek into his scruffy beard.
“Then why do you think I would leave you?”
He leans into my hands hard and thrusts his fingers into my hair on either side of my head. He is a man desperate for acceptance and understanding, but he’s been unwilling to ask for it so I offer it to him freely with a kiss.
His mouth is warm and his kiss tentative. His familiar scent and taste cloud my mind and pull me in deeper and deeper. With every second that passes, he is less cautious and more responsive, his fingers become tangled in my hair and he leans into me for more.
Anguish and torment radiate from his body and my heart aches for this man who has been suffering for so long. If anticipation is the worst kind of punishment, Drake has been tortured for seventeen years.
I look at him with a question when he pulls away from me suddenly.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I wasn’t hunting for someone to take care of me while I deteriorate, I swear to God, Tiana. You were unheralded and I couldn’t resist you. I tried, God, how I tried, but I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’m sorry…” He pulls me against his chest and strokes my matted hair.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for and for your information I had some say in all of this you know. I had no intentions of giving you up. I was just waiting for you to bring your stupid stubborn ass home.”
I feel the vibration of his laugh against my cheek and feel the release of at least a little of his anxiety.
“So sassy,” he remarked.
“And your point is?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too. And I’m not going anywhere. This isn’t just your struggle anymore, it’s ours.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, baby, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”
Chapter 22
Drake
It’s been four days since Jayden learned that I love his sister. I expected him to be upset, to rant and rave about what a horrible friend I am and how disrespectful his sister is being. What I didn’t expect was a thorough decline in his physical and mental health.
Jayden’s fucking gone off the deep end. Tiana has been staying with me for the past two days. I haven’t see Jayden on base, his truck hasn’t been moved and no lights have been going on at night in his house.
Tiana purposely never went to get her things at the house. To allow Jayden time to cool off for a couple days, she’s been washing her clothes after work and much to my pleasure, spending all her free-time naked in my bed with me.
Mary Conley who lives on the other side of Jayden called me this afternoon to tell me she thought she saw Jayden wandering around in the backyard in his underwear toting a rifle. I asked her if she was sure and she seemed pretty shaken up. I told her to call the police if she hadn’t already.
Max picked me up and I called Tiana from the car to warn her to stay away from her brother’s house. Naturally, she freaked out and started walking home. It amazes me how disobedient she is in day-to-day life. In the bedroom, she is the perfect submissive but as soon as she takes one step out she’s a hellion with opinions and attitude galore.
Luckily Max can drive like a maniac, and we caught her before she got home and picked her up. Now we are sitting in the street four houses down watching Jayden pace back and forth on his porch--smoking a cigarette--in his boxers—with a gun.
“What the hell is he doing? I need to talk to him, maybe he will put the gun away if he sees me,” she says, holding onto my arm with both hands and hoisting herself up to see over the front seat.
“Or maybe if he sees you he’ll shoot you. There’s no fucking way you’re getting out of this car, so don’t even think about trying it.”
“But we can’t just sit here and do nothing. What if he’s going to hurt himself? What if a kid comes along and he accidently shoots them? Or Mrs. Conley decides to see if he’s okay.”
“Believe me, Mrs. Conley is probably hiding in her bomb shelter with her husband. She was frantic when she called me. She doesn’t take kindly to guns. She didn’t even want me to move onto the block. She said one gun-toting Marine on her street was more than enough.”
“Drake, this is freaking me out. Jayden doesn’t smoke and I’ve never seen him with a rifle in the house before. Do you think he’s cracked?”
“Maybe having you stay with me right next door was too much for him. I have been thinking about his overprotectiveness. It’s not normal. It’s excessive. I mean I get that you’re his only family and someone’s threatening you, but he hasn’t been himself since the day you called from New York.
Tiana sits up straight and puts her hands on the back of the seat straining her neck to see her brother better. I look, but it’s hard for me to see so far away. “What’s he doing?”
“He stopped pacing, I think he’s talking to himself.”
“Where’s his rifle?”
“It’s still hanging on his back.”
So, he’s not preparing to shoot, but he’s an expert marksman, he can have that weapon in his hands ready to fire in seconds. I don’t trust him. In fact, I’m not so sure we are safe sitting here.
“Sir, I think we should move to a safer distance until the police arrive.”
“Max, you read my mind. Can you back away without him noticing?”
“As soon as there is some traffic, either way, I can. I don’t want to be the only thing moving out here.”
“Where are the police? Are you sure Mrs. Conley called them?”
“No, but I can’t imagine her not calling them. She calls the police when somebody cuts their lawn too short, or throws a ball in her yard. They’re probably taking their sweet time because they didn’t find anything the last time they were called out here. They’re a bunch of bumbling idiots with badges. None of them know how to search a house or run an investigation.”
“Here comes a car,” Tiana says but the car slows and turns into Jayden’s driveway. “Wait, oh my God, somebody’s pulling into the driveway. No, no, no, go away.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen that car before. We don’t have many visitors and Jayden almost always goes to his friends’ houses to hang out, they don’t come to us.”
The driver’s side door opens and a woman steps out. She waves at Jayden and seems to pause before going around the front of the car. I imagine she’s wondering why the hell he’s in his underwear and toting a rifle in the middle of the afternoon. He waves back and smiles dropping his cigarette and grinding it out with his bare foot.
“Do you know her?” I ask. I can make out the shapes but details are blurry and gray.
“No, oh shit,” Tiana, says gripping the leather seat until her knuckles are white.
“What?”
“There’s a kid in the car, she’s going around to let her out.”
“That’s it, Max. Take us closer so I can get out.”
Tiana’s grabs ahold of my arm, “No, you can’t go out there, he hates you right now. Who knows what he’ll do to you.” She turns to Max, “Don’t move this car,” she spits the words like venom.
Max’s eyes go wide for a fraction of a second, but then he turns his head to me and I nod.
“Are you fucking crazy? You can’t see well and you’re going to walk out there with no protection. What if this is a trap?”
“I don’t have a choice. I’m not going to sit here and watch innocent people get killed.”
“Take me with you. He won’t hurt me. I’m positive. This is all about me. He has developed some weird fixation with me. He told me last week he’s afraid of disappointing mum and dad. In his mind, I am still his responsibility and if he allows me to screw up my life somehow, he’s failed them. Use me as a shield. He won’t shoot.”
Max drives slowly toward Jayden’s house and the woman from the car becomes clearer, there’s something about her, something familiar. She opens the passenger door and a young girl dressed in a bright orange sundress and sandals hops out with a broad smile for the woman I assume is her mother from their similar looks.