Forbidden

by R. R. Banks

  "I've been looking for her all day."

  "Then why don't you just take that as a hint and leave her alone?"

  I grabbed the back of Javi's chair and spun him around so I could look at him. He looked startled and pulled back away from me.

  "I want to talk to her. Now."

  Javi then straightened his shoulders and glared back at me. I recognized the sharp edge that appeared in Veronica when she was faced with difficult situations and wondered which of them had taught that characteristic to the other. Javi stood, his presence forcing me to step back in a way that I never would have expected from him. I was far larger than him, but in that moment all the glitter, the softness, all the whimsy was gone, replaced by a look that held darkness and emotion I didn't want to think about any further.

  "You think that because everyone knows your name and admires your family and wants your money that you can have whatever you want." Javi's voice was even and controlled. "You think that because you can trace your lineage back to the most powerful families in England and that you own half this area that people should do whatever you want." I narrowed my eyes at him and he nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "I did my research. I know who you are, and I still don't care. You think that because I'm gay and like to wear feathers and high heels sometimes that you can push me around. Here's a surprise for you. You don't rule the world and I'm not afraid of you. Neither is Veronica. Both of us have seen things that would traumatize your lily-white ass right back over the London fucking Bridge so get this straight. You hurt her. I don't know what you've been through, but she's had enough without you coming in and doing this to her. She doesn't trust people and she opened herself to you in a way that I've never seen."

  I felt like Javi was holding me in place even though he hadn't touched me.

  "She already told me that she was a virgin --"

  Javi held up his hand to stop me.

  "No. This isn't about sex. Yeah, she let you kiss her and touch her and that's fantastic, but I know her. I had seen her at her worst and I had seen her at her best before you decided to make her your little plaything. Even when I was helping her through the worst of what she has gone through, I never saw her question herself the way that you have made her question herself. You broke her. Ronnie is an amazing person. Hell, if she had a penis, I would marry her tomorrow. But she isn't necessarily the most people-friendly. She has been shut off for so long that if you hurt her again, I don't know if she would ever come back from it."

  "Hurting her isn't my intention."

  "And what is your intention?"

  "To find her. To talk to her. I made a mistake and I'm sure you know every detail about it. But it's my mistake to fix and it's between her and me. You might think that you're protecting her, but you're standing in her way. If you won't help me find her, I'll find her myself." I reached into my wallet and took out several bills that I tossed onto the bar in front of him. "Thanks."

  Javi looked down at the bills and gave a mirthless half-laugh. Quickly he reached for them, but instead of putting them in his pocket or with his tips, he balled them up and threw them at me. They bounced off my chest and rolled onto the ground.

  "I don't need your money, and she doesn't need you."

  I could feel Javi glaring at me as I turned and walked away. His words were resonating in my mind, but I was focused on only one thing and that was finding Veronica. Finally, I knew that there was only one option. Two hours later I parked in front of Veronica's apartment and walked up to the door. I hoped that she was there. If she wasn't, I had nowhere else that I could think of to look.

  I stepped up onto the porch and knocked on the door, stepping back slightly. I noticed the curtains covering the tall, narrow window along one side of the door rustle and a few moments later I heard the locks release. The door opened a few inches and Veronica peered out. I could see that the chain lock was still in place and she was peeking out from under it.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked.

  I deserved that.

  "I wanted to talk to you."

  "I think that you said a lot already."

  "Veronica, can I please come in? I need to talk to you. Just give me a few minutes."

  She hesitated and I stepped up toward the door leaning close to touch the tip of my nose against hers.

  "Please."

  Finally, she sighed and unlatched the chain. The door opened and she stepped aside to allow me through. I stepped into a tiny entryway and then took the few steps into her living room. The entirety of the apartment would likely nestle neatly in my foyer and living room, but it was warm and welcoming and I felt myself wanting to sit down and spend time with her there.

  "You wanted to say something to me?" she said.

  "Yes," I said. "I wanted to tell you how sorry I am."

  She shrugged, crossing her arms over her chest.

  "Sorry for what?" she asked, obviously trying to sound casual.

  "Veronica, don't be that way. I came here to tell you that I'm sorry for how I spoke to you and for the way I reacted. It was out of line and I shouldn't have done it. I hope that you can forgive me."

  She looked surprised and spent a few silent moments staring at me, then gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "I mean it," I said. "I want you to understand that I didn't intend to hurt you. I was startled when I saw you there and then the decorations... "my voice trailed off. "I don't know how to explain myself. The holidays have been very hard for me for a long time."

  "Because of your wife," she said.

  I looked up at her in surprise.

  "Yes," I said. "How did you know?"

  "The man who let me through the gate and then tried to help me clean up the aftermath told me."

  "Aaron," I told her. "What did he say?"

  "Just that you haven't celebrated Christmas since the last year that you celebrated with her. I found out that she died. I'm sorry that I didn't know before."

  Familiar defensiveness filled me and I felt my chest rising, my hands tingling as they wanted to clench into fists at my side. I talked myself down from the intensity of the reaction, forcing myself to stay calm. She didn't know. She had no way of knowing. Her life had only just begun when Ellery's ended.

  "Nineteen years ago," I said.

  I didn't offer her any further explanation.

  "I'm sorry," she said again. "I didn't mean anything by it. I would never have done anything like that if I had known. I just remembered you saying that you spent the holidays alone because you had no family and I thought that maybe we could change that. I didn't realize that that was why you didn't have a family."

  She didn't ask for any more even though I knew that she had to be curious and that meant more to me than I could have expressed. I had never talked about it. Not ever. Not to anyone. I wasn't ready to now.

  "I know," I said. "I never told you. I appreciate what you tried to do for me. I want you to know that." I took a breath, readying myself to venture further than I had in so many years. "I've missed you."

  Her eyes widened and her arms loosened slightly.

  "You have?" she asked softly.

  I nodded, taking a few steps toward her across the room.

  "I don't know if I can make it up to you, but I'd like to try. Would you come to my house Friday night? I'd like you to actually come inside."

  She laughed softly then drew in a breath, glancing away from me for a moment.

  "I'll think about it," she said. "I'll let you know."

  I nodded. It wasn't the response that I had wanted, but it was what she had given, so I had to take it for what it was and wait for the rest.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Veronica

  I got in the shower after Jude left and stood under the stream of water with my head tilted back and my eyes closed, letting the droplets glide across my skin. I concentrated on the rhythm of each one against my body,
letting the pattern lull me into a state of relaxation so that I could let my mind free to think through what had happened. I felt like I was still trying to process it, to reconcile it with how I had been feeling since before Christmas. Finding out about Jude's wife had given me pause. That was something I felt like I couldn't compete with. I wasn't just trying to reach out to him and get through the cold, hard exterior that so many others saw. I was trying to reach through something that was at once intangible and unmovable. Realizing that he had been married before and that he had lost her felt like closure to me. That moment in the courtyard of his house had been a breaking point and that information had felt like it pushed me to put my time with Jude behind me and move forward. I had thought that in trying to get him to celebrate Christmas, it would be a way to bring us closer and to finally establish a true relationship with him, but instead it had felt like the reality check that I had needed to make me realize that that was never what I was going to have with him.

  Things were different now. Suddenly I couldn't trust what I'd been feeling and I didn't know what I should do next. I had stayed away from him throughout Christmas and even over the new year. I hadn't reached out to him in any way and I hadn't even listened to the messages that he left me. I had worried what they were going to say and how much more deeply he could have hurt me with them, but then he appeared at my house. He did exactly to me what I had done to him, breaking through the barrier of anonymity and privacy that we had maintained to force me to listen to him. When I saw him standing there on the porch I felt for a brief moment that I might understand, at least to a small degree, what he had felt when he realized that I was at his house. It was a strange and unbalancing experience. I felt vulnerable and exposed, as though he were seeing a part of me and a part of my existence that had been kept from him and that had somehow guarded me from making our connection real. That hadn't occurred to me until that moment. I hadn't understood just how much we had kept from one another until I realized that I now didn't have a place that I could go to that he hadn't seen and that didn't hold memories of him. Somehow that only amplified everything else that I still hadn't shared.

  It was what he had said that had an even bigger impact on me, though. He had humbled himself in front of me. He admitted that he was wrong and apologized. Hearing those things from him made me realize that I had never expected he would do that. I never expected him to be the type of man who would say he was sorry. That shift in my perception changed everything. Suddenly I didn't know how I was feeling anymore. Instead of coping with the sense of sadness at closing that chapter in my life, I was feeling drawn to him again. The pull was back in my stomach and the craving to be near him dominated each breath.

  I stepped out of the shower and had wrapped myself in a towel when I detected a strange and somewhat unnerving smell. It was acrid and hot, reminding me of the greenery smoldering on the courtyard stones. I rushed out of my bathroom and into the hallway only to hear Javi letting out a high-pitched scream as he ran past me, leaving a trail of dark gray smoke in his wake. I heard the front door open and close, muffling the sound of his scream. A few seconds later the door opened again and he came back in, silent now. When he walked back into the hallway I saw that he was holding a pot in one hand and a dish towel in the other. He waved the towel around in front of him trying to dissipate the smoke, then looked at me as if he didn't realize that I had been standing there.

  "There you are," he said.

  "Thank you," I said. "I was wondering where I was."

  "Well, I was," he said. "I've been home for more than an hour. I thought maybe you had dissolved away like one of those fuzzy bath bomb things, then washed down the drain."

  "So, you thought you would celebrate with a ritualistic burnt sacrifice?" I asked.

  Javi eyed the pot in his hand and then looked back at me.

  "Oh," he said. "No. That was popcorn. I thought that I would make us up a batch of the old-fashioned kind and we could spend the evening watching the Don Knotts movie marathon on TV. Apparently, though, when the little instructions on the bag say that you should only use a quarter of a cup of kernels and enough oil to cover the bottom of the pot, that's what it means."

  "How much did you use?" I asked.

  "A quarter of a cup of oil and half of the bag of kernels. I thought that that didn't sound like enough popcorn to get through The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, much less all four of them. Unfortunately, the combination of too much oil and thinking that turning the stove on to high would make it pop faster was not an example of my best decision making."

  "Apparently not," I said. Something occurred to me and I looked down the hallway, following the path that he had run. "Why did you go out the front door?" I asked.

  "I thought that it would be better to get the smoking eruption of popcorn out of the house before it burst into full-fledged flames," he said.

  "No," I said. "That was probably a good choice. I just I wondered why you didn't use the back door. It's a lot closer to the kitchen and it would have made less of our apartment smell like a singed movie theater."

  "The back door?" He asked.

  "Yeah," I said. "The back door. The door on the back of the house. The one that you so elegantly covered with the tapestry you brought home from that Renaissance Faire when you thought that you might be able to seduce the lead in Romeo and Juliet? Even though I told you it most certainly wasn't going to happen."

  "Yes," he said. "Because everyone sees a man wearing tights and mascara at a Renaissance Faire and immediately thinks there goes a man who is straight as an arrow. I guess that was just such a traumatizing experience for me that I chose to block it out and it made me forget about the back door."

  It was a ridiculous explanation even for Javi, but I knew that it was probably the best that I was going to get.

  "Funny. I didn't think that you would ever forget about a back door."

  I smiled at him, but he looked back at me suspiciously. He lifted his chin and then glanced me up and down as if he could somehow see into me and was reading my thoughts.

  "Your awkward and deeply uncomfortable attempt at a gay joke leads me to believe that you're not telling me something," he said. "What's going on?"

  I groaned and turned back toward my bedroom.

  "Hold on," I said.

  "Where are you going?"

  "I'm going to put actual clothes on before having this conversation."

  Feeling strangely chilled and wanting to feel comfortable, I stuffed myself into my favorite black sweatsuit and thick socks before coiling my hair on top of my head and clipping it into place. Javi was already sitting on the couch, a bowl of pretzels that I could only imagine was his popcorn replacement sitting in his lap.

  "Pizza will be here in twenty," he said.

  "Good."

  I looked at the screen, nibbling on a pretzel, and felt his eyes on me.

  "What's going on?" he asked again.

  I turned toward him, curling myself onto the couch cushion.

  "Jude came over," I said.

  "What?"

  I nodded.

  "He just showed up at the door."

  "So, the man has an absolute meltdown because you showed up at his house, but then he does the same thing to you? Do you not see a problem with that?"

  "I do," I said, surprised by Javi's immediate negative response. "But I didn't really give him much other opportunity."

  "To do what? Have a little tumble and then pretend like it didn't happen?"

  I narrowed my eyes at him.

  "To apologize," I said. "He came here to tell me that he was sorry for the way he reacted."

  "And you believed him?"

  "As a matter of fact, I did. He told me that the holidays are really hard for him and that he was out of line. He even said that he missed me."

  "Hallelujah!" Javi cried out. "Lay out a mattress for me and get me my good hat because I think I'm about to get the spirit and fall out."

 
; "What's wrong with you?"

  "Can't you see what he's doing?" Javi asked. "He's manipulating you, Ronnie. You stood up for yourself, even if that just meant leaving him alone for a while, and now he's doing everything that he can think of to get back in your pants because it does something for his head. He likes knowing that he has you and he likes even more making sure that no one else knows that he has you."

  "He didn't even try to touch me while he was here. And he asked me to go to his house on Friday night so that I can actually see the inside."

  Javi's expression changed from one of sarcasm and anger to one of concern.

  "Ronnie, please. I need you to think about this."

  "Think about what?"

  "I know that you've been thinking a lot about him and that you've missed him, but don't let that take over everything else. You need to really take some time to evaluate your feelings for him and what you think you could get out of this relationship. Does this really seem like something that could be real?"

  I felt offended and defensive, but also taken off guard.

  "You were the one who told me that I should find out more about him," I pointed out. "After everything that happened at his house, you are the one who said that I should find out about his wife and learn more about him. Then when we found out that she died, you are the one who said that maybe I should think about the fact that that could be influencing the way that he acts."

  Javi nodded.

  "I did," he said. "But not because I thought that it was going to keep you open to him. I thought that finding out more about him would make it easier for you to get over him."

  "You are the one who said that he was the sexiest and most mysterious Professor on campus and thought I should go after him."

  "Part of him being sexy and mysterious is that he's untouchable. Nobody gets close to him. Nobody knows him. Just because I thought that it might be fun to have a little fantasy about him doesn’t mean that I thought you should let yourself get wrapped up in him. I need you to remember how he made you feel."