by May Bridges
“Yeah, Romeo looks pretty well restrained and Juliet here can’t hurt me. Now go help Oscar and get her water.”
Both men glared at me on their way out. I smiled to myself when I heard them walking up the steps. As soon as the door shut behind Mike, there was a visible change in Robert. His shoulders dropped, his head hung a little lower. He looked worn and tired. The cast of his face softened and I knew what the difference was. It was the boy in the back of the barn peeking through; the side of himself he wouldn’t show in front of the boys who worked for him. Appearances, appearances.
Robert backed me up to the wall. I chanced a look over his shoulder at Cade, who had his eyes so intently on us, I could almost feel them. He looked angry, and torn, and sad, and I wanted to tell him—no, yell, that there was no way I was going to stay away when I knew he was there. And how dare he think I would. Didn’t he know how stubborn I was?
Robert took my face in his hands and leaned his forehead to mine. “I want you to put your arms around me and kiss me, Alex,” Robert said softly.
“No, Robert. That isn’t who we are anymore. And if I recall that was your choice, not mine.” I knew Robert saw this as one more way to torture Cade.
Robert slapped the wall next to my head, making me flinch away. When he leaned back a bit and I could clearly see his glazed over blue eyes, my heart broke.
“Robert, you’re high, aren’t you?” I knew he sold, but he hadn’t done his own product for a long time, at least not that I’d known of.
“You know why I ended things with us, Alex?” Robert started to pace around the small space. “Because I gave a shit about you. He doesn’t give a shit about you.” He gestured to Cade.
“Are you delusional?” I offered back. “You turned me into a prostitute. Why, because you cared? Stop this. You know this”—I gestured to Cade—“isn’t about Becker, or even Twitch. It’s about me.”
“I tried to fucking help you, Alex!” he screamed, the muscles and veins in his throat strained with the force. “I gave you what you needed, and I got to keep you close.” He rushed back toward me, softening his voice. “Don’t you understand, Alex?” His volatile emotions were frightening and I knew, as high as he was, my chances of reasoning with him weren’t good. I’d never seen him high, but I’d seen plenty of other people as coked out as he was, enough to know he wasn’t thinking straight.
“Robert, think about it,” I said when he paced away, giving me enough room to breathe again. “Are you going to do this to every man I get involved with? You can’t do that, and I’m not working for you again.”
“No,” Robert repeated over and over, wagging his finger at me. He marched across the room until he was in my face again, so close I had my head backed firm against the wall. “He—” Robert jutted his arm out behind him, pointing at Cade—“he is different. He is just a shittier version of me.” I cringed, and felt the moisture of his spit hit my cheek with every word he bit out.
Cade let out a laugh behind us. It wasn’t a humorous sound.
“He does vile things, Alex.” Robert spat. “Did he tell you about that? I’m making his stay in my basement a fucking vacation compared to the shit he does to people.”
“Because men like you pay him to, Robert. Don’t act like you’re above it,” I scoffed.
“Right, men like me pay him to. And he does it because he couldn’t ever be a man like me. He will never have the things I have, never be smart enough to run the kind of empire I run, to get to a place where you can keep your hands clean. I didn’t give you up so you could start fucking someone worse for you than I was. I gave you up so you could find someone better!”
He stood less than an inch from my face. I felt his chest heaving in and out, felt his hot breath. His distant eyes were manic.
“Listen,” I said softly, hoping to bring down the energy in the room. I needed to keep him talking until Sean could get down there and find us. “If that’s what all of this is about, then it is easy to fix—”
“Let me show you how easy,” Robert said, with an eerie calm.
He left me against the wall and went to a table in the back corner of the room. It was covered in crap: tools, water bottles, ashtrays, newspapers. My heart stopped and contracted painfully when Robert pulled out a twelve-inch kitchen knife. It sent ice through my veins.
Without thinking, I pulled my S&W from the back of my jeans.
“Oh, there she is. My feisty won’t-take-shit-from-anyone girl,” Robert said. His eyes were wide and wild.
“Robert, stop fucking around and put the knife down,” I hit the safety on my gun. “Nothing is ever going to go back to the way it was if you do this. Never.”
Cade sat perfectly still, eyes fixed on me.
“I’d take bets that it won’t go back to the way it was anyway,” Robert said.
“Then what’s the point? To make me hate you?” I asked.
My eyes flicked between Cade and Robert. Robert was flinging a knife around like a lunatic, and Cade was watching me?
“Well, Alex, now that you’ve shown your cards by pulling a gun on me, the point of this,” he waved the knife between him and Cade, “has changed. I didn’t want this to be your life, didn’t want you involved in the things that I do, because I care, ya know? But he doesn’t. He’s selfish, where I was selfless. He would ask you to sink to his level, to shoot me for him. Selfish.”
Robert walked around behind Cade and draped the knife over Cade’s shoulder, dangling it over his chest. Panic pricked through my skin and burned a fire in my gut, making it too hot to breathe. In a flash reaction I pulled the slide on my gun. “Stop, Robert. Stop.” It all came out in a sob. I tried to hold it in, but I failed and my cries echoed around the cement room. Pointing it at Robert, my gun felt heavier than it ever had.
“Go ahead, Cade,” Robert said, sounding a sick kind of happy. “Go on, ask her to shoot me. She’ll do it if you ask. Show her who you are! A selfish prick who didn’t care enough to let her go, and now, because of you, she’ll be no better than either of us. Just another person who killed someone to get what they wanted. Go on.”
Cade’s head shook slowly, back and forth. The most apologetic look I’d ever seen was on his face. I wiped my eyes to bring the room back into focus. Cade and I held each other’s gaze for what seemed like a long time. I wanted to say something, tell him it was going to be okay, give him permission to ask me to save his life without feeling guilty, but I couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come.
“Ask her!” Robert yelled.
“No. What I want—” Cade’s voice was calm and steady, soft and sincere, and it broke my heart even more—“is for you to leave, brave girl. Rob is right, I was selfish. This isn’t your life. It shouldn’t be, and I should’ve done what I could to keep you away. Walk out.”
I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe. The gun in my outstretched hand shook visibly. “I can’t. Can’t leave.” I slid my back down the wall and squatted, unable to stand any longer.
“Sure you can,” Cade said. “It’s okay. Just get up and walk out. Keep walking and don’t look back. We’ll be fine here.” He smiled the sweetest smile.
My head was spinning. Why was he asking me to leave? I didn’t want to go, to leave him there with Robert.
“But, I—”
“I know, Doll,” Cade said, stopping me short. “I know because I love you too, but it’s time to go.”
He couldn’t do that to me, tell me he loved me, a man who had seen the darkest parts of me, all of the parts of me, and loved me anyway. He couldn’t do that and then ask me to leave, knowing he’d die. My heart physically hurt, my chest throbbed and sobs racked my body. I managed to stand back up against the wall.
“No! Fuck that. You think you’re so smart,” Robert yelled, “that you can just tell her to leave now and you’ll look like the good guy? You did this. It’s your fault she has to choose.”
The world moved slower as I watched, with horrific clarity, Robert spin the kn
ife in his hand, white-knuckle the handle, and plunge it toward Cade’s chest. I saw the look of sorrow on Cade’s face, his eyes never leaving mine. I saw the wild fire in Robert’s eyes.
The world filtered in, in slow snapshots, frames of still-life before my eyes. The door swung open in the same instant and I heard the shot. My gun kicked in my hand and I braced to hold onto it. The knife fell to Cade’s lap and Robert clutched his hands to his stomach as he hit the floor with a thud. Sean blew past me toward Cade. My gun hit the ground, sounding too loud against the concrete.
With my hands clasped over my mouth, stifling a scream, I moved past Cade and Sean and dropped to the cold floor by Robert. His eyes were open, searching the empty space above him. Crimson spread from under his hands, through his silk shirt. No, I didn’t want this. This wasn’t what I wanted.
Robert looked over at me when I pressed my hand to his face.
“Robert, oh God, I’m so sorry.”
“Alex,” Robert said, and then gritted his teeth in pain.
“Shh, it’s okay. I’ll call someone to help you. I won’t leave.”
“We can’t do that.” Cade said from above me. “We need to go, Doll.”
I curled over Robert, holding onto him. I rocked back and forth, not knowing if it was me or Robert I was comforting. Maybe I was breaking down.
“Alex, listen,” Robert managed. “Cade was right when he told you to leave, and you gotta go now, baby.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Come on. We need to leave,” Cade said.
“I love you, Robert. I know the boy I’ve always loved is still there. Please be okay,” I stayed bent over him with my mouth to his cheek.
“I love you too.” Robert’s sky blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “You’ll always be my girl, okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t okay. I didn’t want to leave him, not like that. Robert might not have always been a good person, but he didn’t deserve to die alone, not when there were people who loved him. I loved him.
“Time to go.” I didn’t know who said it, but I stayed pressed to Robert, feeling his shuddering breaths.
Sean reached down and pulled me up by my shoulders. He turned me so that I had to look at him. “Alex, we gotta go now. I have to help Cade up the stairs. I can’t carry you and him. We can’t call for help here. You don’t want us to be here when the cops show up. So right now, if you want to help Rob, you have to leave him. Do you hear me, Alex?”
I heard him, and I knew he was right, but it didn’t make walking out easier. With one more look to Robert, I watched him smile at me, that beautiful smile that lightened his face, and then he closed his eyes.
I left. Walked up the stairs and out of the house. When I thought back on the way he looked, eyes closed with a sweet boyish smile, I knew it was my Robert, the boy with trembling hands and a tentative kiss. I may have shot a criminal, but that wasn’t who I saw dying when I looked at him.
I thought part of me was dying too.
Chapter Twenty-two
One week later
My dad’s smiling face as I walked through the door made my stomach turn. I didn’t know if I could do this, tell them all the things I needed to. He leaned in and kissed me, his whiskers tickling my cheek.
“Hey, honey,” Dad called to my mom as we took a seat in the living room. “Alexandria is here.”
That was the house I grew up in. A place I felt safe and loved. It was also a place where we hid the things that were wrong. I didn’t think my parents ever meant any harm. Perhaps they thought that if we painted on happy faces and showed those to the world, we could pretend our way out of the bad parts of life. It was a good place to live, but we weren’t perfect. You just wouldn’t know that from the outside looking in.
My mom came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. “I was fixing supper. Are you going to stay and eat?” she asked, and came to give me a hug.
“I think so,” I said.
“It’ll be another hour or so before it’s done, if that’s okay.”
“Perfect, actually. I wanted to talk to you guys about some things.” I could feel my nerves, so frayed already, starting to shake. I threw away the last of my Valium a week before. A very small part of me was regretting that, but I knew I needed to be here for this. There in the moment. If it hurt then it hurt, but I had to feel it.
I’d thought a lot about what Cade said, about how I needed to be the one to fix myself. He was right. I’d also been thinking about what Pastor Bill said, about forgiveness. He was right too. For so long I thought it was Becker I needed to forgive, and then Robert, in order to kill June. It wasn’t them. It was me. I needed to forgive me, and give myself permission to be flawed, to be all the broken pieces that I am.
I never told my parents about Becker. I always thought they’d be ashamed of me. For what, I wasn’t really sure. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anything I did. Becker was just a fucked up person and he didn’t need any reason to hurt me, other than that he wanted to.
I took a deep breath. “You guys know Aunt Karen’s ex-husband, Ashley?”
“Good-for-nothing druggie,” Dad said with a snarl in his lip.
“Best thing my sister ever did was divorce that man,” Mama huffed. “What on earth is bringing him up now?”
“So, when I was fourteen . . .” I could feel my voice trembling. It got worse as my dad’s brow furrowed together and they both stared at me intently. “When I would go stay with Aunt Karen, he used to touch me and—” I broke into tears. Everything I’d been holding back from them poured from me. “Um, I—”
“Oh, baby,” mama put her arms around me and started to cry too. “Why didn’t you tell us? We would have never sent you over there if we knew.” I could feel her chest shaking against me.
“I thought you would be mad at me,” I sobbed into her shoulder.
“Mad at you?” my dad said. “What in the world for, honey?”
Dad sat next to me and rubbed my back while my mom hugged me like she hadn’t seen me in years.
“For messing up our family. I felt so dirty, and I didn’t want you to think that I was. I tried so hard to smile for everyone. I didn’t want anyone to know.” My words were a drowned out mess into my mama’s shirt.
“You don’t have to smile for us, baby,” she said. “We love you. You can tell us anything. We’re always on your side.”
“Look at me, Alexandria.” I didn’t want to look at my dad. I still felt ashamed. He pulled me back from my mom so he could see my face. “We would never have thought that,” he said. I looked into his soft gray eyes and saw nothing but love. “It was never your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
It seemed like the only thing I ever needed to hear anyone say, and all I had to do was be honest with them. I felt June dying as I sat in my childhood home wrapped in my parents love and acceptance.
* * *
It had been almost three weeks since everything happened at Robert’s. Cade had all but disappeared from my life in that time. At first I thought it was him needing time to heal. We all needed that in some way. Cade physically, and me emotionally, but I was starting to fear it was a more permanent arrangement.
Heart climbed in my lap, rubbing himself against me and stopping my packing progress. I might have felt like I was losing Cade, but Mr. Heart had definitely found a new friend in Sean. He stopped by once or twice a week to check on me, though I thought it was really to hang out with my cat.
With everything that had happened I needed a support system and a change in scenery. So I took Rachel up on her offer to move in for a while. She needed help with wedding stuff, so until I found a new apartment it seemed like a good plan.
Standing in my boxed-up apartment was bittersweet. I had many good memories there. Rachel and I crashing with fast food–filled guts, still high from our night of clubbing at four a.m.; every dinner date I’d ever had with Mr. Heart. I also had some of my darkest memories there. Some
of the hardest battles of my life: trying to kill June, figuring out who I was, who I wanted to be. It had been my refuge during those battles. I didn’t know what my refuge would be moving forward, but I knew I had a great family and some pretty amazing friends to help me. I only need to ask them.
The moving truck was reserved for the next day and as much as I wanted to spend these last hours in my apartment, there was something else I’d decided I had to do.
My phone rang on my way out to my car.
“Hello.”
“Hi, Alex, It’s Josh Mason. We got a great offer on the loft space. I think this is one you can’t refuse.”
I had barely had the loft on the market for a week. The timing of that call couldn’t have been better.
* * *
I felt sick to my stomach when I parked outside of Cade’s house. The garage door was closed, I couldn’t tell if he was home or not. I got out and walked on shaky legs to his front door. I didn’t know if he wanted to see me, but I knew I needed to tell him some things. I knocked and waited. I tried the knob, but it was locked.
With a heavy heart I gave up and went back to my car. It was five in the evening. I was hoping to catch him before he went out for the night, but it looked like I may have been too late. I put my key in the ignition and started my car up, but couldn’t seem to put it in reverse. I didn’t want to leave without talking to him. It may have meant sitting in my car outside of his house all night, but I didn’t care. I needed him to hear me out.
I turned the car off.
The sun started to sink and the sky turned baby blue and vibrant pink. I didn’t need the clock stereo to tell me I had been sitting there for hours; I’d heard the same set of songs on the radio at least three times, so I knew. I thought about heading home and trying again after getting settled at Rachel’s, but laying my seat back and camping out sounded like a better plan.
My phone buzzing in my lap jolted me awake. I sat up and saw that it was dark outside. The clock read 11:30 p.m. My phone buzzed again. The caller ID said Cade. I answered, a little confused.