by L. B. Dunbar
“We have a practice concert a week after your wedding. Maybe you could come?” I asked hopefully, attempting to change the subject.
“I plan to be on my honeymoon still. We have three weeks booked in the Greek Isles.”
I couldn’t stand the thought of Ireland, my Irish Isle, on another island with a different man.
“Sounds wonderful,” I choked.
“I plan for it to be just that,” Mark replied with a sly smile on his face, as he glanced at me one more time, before dismissing me to purchase a wedding band for his future wife.
Chapter 34
[Ireland]
Lovers are determined to find a way
It was a week before the wedding when I got another text.
Meet me in Central Park at the Gapstone Bridge.
We hadn’t spoken much since the walk in Central Park, but just knowing I would see him refueled the ache that I had been trying to squelch since the bathroom incident. I longed for him.
I had no preconceived notions of meeting him in Central Park, though. This would only be to talk again. I’d missed talking to him. He’d seemed to understand me. He knew some of my darkest secrets, and he didn’t judge me. He listened to me ramble about plants and their purpose, knowing he wasn’t one bit interested in what I said. It wasn’t just talking that I missed. I missed everything about him.
Which was all the more reason not to let him kiss me again.
I missed the sound of his voice. I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a Nights’ song. I could pick out his playing from the hours he practiced and wrote lyrics while we were away. Away I thought of it like a vacation together, when it had all turned out to be a coincidence.
I approached the bridge slowly, wiping my hands on my jeans to steady their shaking and remove the nervous sweat. It was a rather old bridge, made of stone and restored over time. Covered in vines, the bridge had an antiquated look to it compared to the Bow Bridge, renowned for lovers’ affairs. Tristan and I were no longer lovers. It would not have been appropriate to meet there. My heart pinched at the thought. One I had been fighting for weeks. I would never hold him inside me again.
He stood like the statue of a thinker, peering out into the pond below. His elbows resting on the stone baluster, hands clasped tight as if in prayer. His sandy brown hair was pushed back like he had run his hands through it several times. He had a habit of doing such a thing. His mossy green eyes matched the natural surroundings. I hoped the specks of gold would be present when he saw me. His eyes would have matched the algae covered pond below, reflecting golden in the sunshine.
He turned at my approach and smiled a crooked smile. My breath hitched. I noticed, not for the first time, how gorgeous he was. Male models would be jealous of his natural good looks. Female models would simply swoon. He was a gorgeous specimen of a man, in his dark jeans and a green t-shirt. Aviators dangled from his shirt collar.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come, when I didn’t hear from you at first.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“Well, you’re a busy woman lately…planning a wedding and all,” he added sarcastically, but quietly.
“Yeah,” I shrugged and joined his position of leaning against the stone barrier on the bridge. My hands rested on the cool pebbled edge as Tristan returned his elbows to the support, holding firm to his own hands.
We were silent for several minutes. I wondered what he wasn’t saying. He called me, I reminded myself as I waited out the quiet.
“How are things going with Mark?” he bluntly began.
I shrugged my shoulders, despite him not looking at me.
“What does that even mean, when you shrug your shoulders at me?”
I wrinkled my nose instead.
“I’ve missed that,” he whispered with a laugh to the water, but I knew what he was talking about. I’d purposely not worn much make-up today, hoping he would notice the freckles across my nose. I didn’t know why he liked them, but he did. I wanted to tell him that I’d missed him, but I didn’t dare.
“I’ve been thinking about your situation,” he started again. “I was wondering if you’ve thought of the fact that Marshall’s dead. There shouldn’t be a debt any longer.”
“I have thought of it, but there seems to be something more. My mother hasn’t let the issue die along with Marshall. She’s taken a new angle of it being a necessary business merger.”
“You aren’t property,” he exclaimed.
“I do recall someone saying I was his,” I tried to joke. Tristan only glared at me. I cleared my throat and stared at the murky water below.
“Did I treat you like I owned you?” he demanded.
“No.” The tone of his voice made me jump. We were silent again for several minutes.
“I don’t want to argue,” he tried again, gentler. “I want to help.”
“I don’t see how you can, Tristan. This is my issue not yours.”
“You’re right, it is yours. Maybe you need to stand up for yourself.”
I eyed him carefully, pinching my brows in the process.
“Is that what you think? That I haven’t stood up for myself?”
“Have you? Have you told them how you feel? Your parents? Mark?”
“Almost daily.”
“And how do you feel, Isolde?”
“Don’t,” I demanded. The way he said my name made me feel disconnected from him. He was using it as an insult.
“Don’t what?”
I didn’t want to explain. I didn’t want to have to tell him my feelings only to be rejected again by him. I didn’t want him to call me Isolde, like it was someone other than who I was. I didn’t reply to his question.
“My parents seem generally unconcerned with my feelings.”
Tristan paused before trying a different strategy.
“Have you talked with your father? Without your mother or Mark? Can he explain to you how this is all connected and still relevant?”
I hadn’t gone directly to my father. Our family was a matriarchy. My mother had all the power and the final say-so. My father rarely intervened when it came to my mother’s wishes.
“You don’t understand, Tristan.”
“I think I did a good job of trying once before,” he recalled. I had to smile and bit my lip at the memory. He didn’t understand at first what I meant when I said it was complicated, but he knew the truth. He knew most of the truth.
“This wedding thing is very real, Ireland.”
“Do you think I don’t know that? This is my life,” I replied, the stress in my voice equaled the panic in my heart. I didn’t meet him to talk about these things. I didn’t know what I wanted to happen, but talking about all this wasn’t it.
I stared into his face, knowing that he was just beginning to grasp what I had known for too long. This was not a whim of my parents. They were serious in their desire for me to marry Mark for business.
“Tristan, are you offering to whisk me away from your uncle?” I boldly asked.
“I can’t do that to Mark.” He paused before looking directly at me. “He’s all the family I have, Ireland. I owe him a great deal, despite the questionable things he’s done to me. He gave me food, clothing, and shelter. He gave me money that I secretly spent on guitars, he didn’t approve of. He gave me a college education that I almost didn’t complete because of a band he disapproves of. He gave me leeway to not participate in his business, despite his desperate desire for me to do so. He’s all I have.”
I blinked at him; the hurt a sharp scrape across my heart. I would have been something to him, if he let me. I wanted to be all he had, but that was silly.
“Then you understand me after all, Tristan, because like you could not go against your uncle, I did not feel I could go against mine. Despite how sick and disgusting he was, he was still my family and my mother loved him. She did what he wanted. I couldn’t go against
him because of her. We are both victims, Tristan, and it isn’t fair.”
Tristan ran his hands through his hair, as I assumed he had done several times already.
“I can’t take you from Mark.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“But I don’t want you to be with him.”
“Do you want me to be with you?” I questioned, looking at him with eyes I knew displayed my hope.
He didn’t reply and there laid the answer. He wasn’t concerned because he wanted to be with me. He was being kind and generous, almost chivalrous. But it was not because he loved me and couldn’t live without me that he wanted me away from Mark.
I looked back out at the pond water that stood still. Constant and controlled, so different from the rolling ocean waves near where we had met. It all became clear to me. That time was a wild ride, like the Caribbean waters, but reality brought me back to what my life really was like: stagnant and flat, like the pond below. Things would not change for me.
“I don’t need your help, Tristan,” I stated firmly.
Angry clouds formed in his green eyes.
“Have you slept with him?” he blurted.
I glared at him, anger rising in my voice.
“How dare you? I’ve…”
He reached for me and pulled me close to him, crashing his mouth against mine. After several seconds of control, he slowed to take his sweet torturous time to peck, stroke, and re-discover. He ran his tongue over my bottom lip. I opened to allow him in, but he continued his ascent to climb my top lip before kissing me on the side of my mouth. On instinct, I turned to catch his lips, but he had moved to the other side of my mouth. He was teasing me without touching me. I whimpered with my desire for him. A realization came to me. That’s all he’d been doing these last few times together, teasing me. I was a game to him.
His mouth finally claimed mine, and I moaned with the fluttering within my lower stomach. It reached deep within me, where I ached the most for him. His hands slipped to my hips, tugging me gently to meet him in the middle. My hands slid to his neck, and I wrapped my arms around him, like I had before, to raise myself and greet his hardness. He groaned against my mouth and I opened to take him in.
We were not in a struggle, like we had been during the night of my birthday. We were not in a rediscovery of one another, like we had been days ago. This was the taste of a long missed flavor that seemed twice as sweet when reintroduced.
We continued for several minutes before I pulled back. My heart was racing. I looked at Tristan for any sign of what he was thinking, when a flash from behind him blinded me momentarily. I quickly released him and he turned to follow my gaze. A person near the bushes disappeared immediately.
Tristan still held my hips with his hands.
“What was that?”
“A camera.”
He dropped his hands and stepped back from me, as if the photog were still present. I searched his face. He looked over his shoulder again to the empty space behind and returned a blank expression to me. I would be added to his many flavors: a list longer than 31. My heart sank that it was just captured in a snapshot how I was a fool.
“I need to go,” I said, looking down at my hands.
“Don’t leave,” he pleaded half-heartedly.
“You’ll be all over the papers with another flavor,” I bit sarcastically. I’d seen the gossip page lately. He was returning to his old ways rather rapidly. How dare he accuse me of sleeping with my future husband when he was, most likely, sleeping with half of Manhattan. The half he hadn’t already been with yet.
He narrowed his eyes at me.
“That isn’t what concerns me,” he said slowly.
I continued to look at the tips of his shoes as I spoke.
“It concerns me. Mark will see that photo all the same.”
“Don’t go to him,” Tristan pleaded this time.
“I don’t have another solution, Tristan.”
“You could…you could…” He didn’t finish.
“Marry you?” I laughed softly, “Don’t be ridiculous.” A flash of us making love for the second time crossed my mind. We had been in the tub together. These had been my words, and they were met in the present, like they had been met in the past. No response. I wished I’d counted all the times we were together, but it didn’t really matter. The only times that counted in making love to Tristan Lyons were the first and the last.
I willed my legs to walk away without saying goodbye to him.
I finally found the strength to discuss my fears with my father. I went to him as a last resort. Hurmon Ireland was a weak man. He didn’t give his wife his name, but rather took hers, because she had more social recognition than him. He had money. His family was well off, but he didn’t have the prestige, which marrying Isa Ireland brought him. At the time, her family had questionable connections through her younger brother, Marshall Ireland, who changed his name to Marshall Dragon to match the street gang he inherited and ruled. Marshall climbed the ranks to become more public and prosperous over time, earning a position of greater respect than a street drug lord. Hurmon was needed as a means to assure that Isa would reproduce a child to inherit her maternal queendom, Trinity Modeling. He was also needed as a calm force within the growing storm of Marshall and his questionable connections.
My father had been seduced by Isa. How could a quiet man decline a beautiful woman who taught him the sensual ways of love, despite not loving him? She was persuasive and their premarital experimentation resulted in a pregnancy. The times were different twenty-two years ago. Isa needed to be married, which Hurmon was not inclined to deny. The connection would be good for both of them. He hoped to have a son, as well, and divide the power of the women in his life, but he wasn’t quite so fortunate. Isa had no other children with Hurmon once I was born.
I came to my father in hopes to play on his sympathy, something he had often given over the years, in small doses, without Isa finding out. But he was adamant when it came to marrying Mark Cornwall. At first, it had been because Marshall had helped Hurmon with something, something that I knew nothing of. Marshall, on the other hand, owed Mark.
My father didn’t exactly know what kinds of trouble Mark got Marshall out of, but he sensed that Marshall believed the one person he owed in life was Mark. He used my father’s debt to pay his own. I was the fee. With Marshall dead, I used his passing as my weapon of defense.
“I don’t see why I have to marry him still. Marshall cannot pay on a debt once he’s dead, and Mark cannot collect from a dead man. This is the twenty-first century, not medieval times. I don’t see why I have to be the pawn in your business mergers.”
I had never felt so bold in all my life, but time was ticking. Seeing Tristan renewed my resolve that something had to be done. I couldn’t simply run away again. Mark would always hunt me. Besides, I had no proof that Mark was a bad man. He was dutiful and doting in public. He showered me with gifts and compliments to make up for what he did in private. He never hit me. He wasn’t stupid. But he’d grab me hard enough to bruise, or verbally assault me enough to shake my confidence.
I was a beautiful woman by other people’s standards. I’d been told that my whole life, but I didn’t feel beautiful. I felt watched, but not seen, until Tristan. I was looked at through a glass bubble. Not to be touched. Not to be loved. Admired, but not appreciated. I wasn’t a dumb blonde like the newspapers wanted to portray. I had straight A’s in botany and the study of medicinal purposes of plants. I enjoyed learning, but the magazine rags only saw a pampered young woman about to marry a powerful older man.
My father refused to hear my logic.
“Mark Cornwall is a good man, and he is owed a great debt by this family.”
“What debt? Whatever it is; is it over? Marshall’s dead.”
My father’s Irish skin turned pink. I looked at him for a long time before I spoke again.
“What have you done? What did you do to owe him, as well?”
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Hurmon turned a brighter shade of red as his lips fought a smile. It was a sign I recognized that he had a great secret, one that both embarrassed and thrilled him.
“It is none of your concern, Isolde, sweetheart. Let the adults worry about everything.”
“That’s the problem. It is my concern. It’s me that has to marry him, and I am an adult. I’m twenty-two and plenty old enough to make my own decisions.”
“That’s just it, darling. You’ve never had to make a decision in your life. We’ve always guided you in what you needed to do. What we thought was best…for you. You’ve had your little rebellions; of course, when you dyed your hair light purple as a teenager and signed up for college classes without our permission. And ran off to the Caymans. But none of these decisions were particularly hurtful to you. We let them go. But marriage is an important decision for the family and the business.”
“The business? You and Mother both know I don’t care about the business.”
“Yes, well, you’ve made it clearer as you’ve grown, but we do care about the business, and this is an important move for it. You should care about Trinity. One day it will be yours.”
Hurmon Ireland turned pink again with irritation.
“What is it you are trying to do? Or prove?” I inquired. I had so many questions I didn’t know which one to ask first. It came to me slowly after a minute.
“That’s it. You’re trying to prove something. What will you really get out of this? You know you are important to Mother and Trinity, but you can’t ever have it. What are you trying to do?” my voice betrayed my surprise, as clarity began to form slowly.
My father turned bright red.
“I don’t need to answer your questions, Isolde. It is not your concern, as I said. I have given my blessing for you to marry Mark Cornwall and the date is set. End of discussion.”