He cleaned us up a second time and surprised the hell out of me when he tucked me close to his side and pulled my arm over his stomach.
I was mellow and starting to drift to sleep when Clark’s phone rang. He muttered a curse and plucked it off the nightstand.
“Everything okay?” he answered. There was a short pause before he said, “yeah, she’s right here.”
Clark rolled again so we were both sitting up, giving me a chance to look at the clock – ten p.m. not as late as I thought it was. After all our bed gymnastics it felt much later.
“Jasper,” Clark said and held the phone out to me.
“Hello?”
“Hey. Sorry to bother you so late. I tried your phone, but you didn’t pick up,” Jasper said.
I was thankful this conversation was taking place over the phone and Jasper couldn’t see what I was sure was a nice rosy blush. “Sorry about that. I think I left my phone in the living room. Umm. So. Anyway. What’s up?”
Damn. I was stuttering.
“No need to explain,” Jasper chuckled. Why did I just feel like I’d been caught making out on the couch by my dad? “After you left the Riverfront called. You know the place that Emily picked.”
“Yeah. The new wedding venue.”
“Right. Well, they called to tell her there was a mistake and the date they said they had available, they don’t. Em has been upset for hours. I finally got her up to bed but not before she muttered something about this being the universes way of telling us we shouldn’t get married.”
“What? That’s crazy.”
Poor Emily had to be so upset. She loved the Riverfront.
“That’s what I told her. Is there any way you can come over here tomorrow and talk to her? I’d really appreciate the help.”
“Of course. I’ll be there. We’ll find you guys another place. Don’t worry Jasper. I got your back.”
“I know you do. You always did. See you tomorrow?”
“With bells,” I told him, and he laughed at my silly comment.
“Night.”
“Night.”
“What happened?” Clark asked, but before I could answer his phone rang again.
I swiped the screen thinking Jasper had forgotten to tell me something. Boy was I wrong. I placed the phone up to my ear, and my world imploded.
“What’d you forget?” I laughed.
“Excuse me,” a woman said.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
I looked at Jasper and didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I wanted to toss him the phone like it was a hot potato, but before I could, the woman spoke again. “Clearly. Is my husband there?”
“Who?” I squeaked out.
“My husband,” the woman demanded. “Nolan.”
I’m sure my eyes were bugging out of my head when I turned to Clark to hand him the phone.
“Hello?” he answered. “What in the actual fuck?” he growled. “Have you lost your goddamned mind? Hold on.”
Clark turned to me, pulling the phone away from his ear and placing it on speaker, clearly not caring that his wife had caught him in bed with another woman.
“She tell you she was my wife?” he asked. I wasn’t sure who he was speaking to so I remained quiet until he added, “Reagan?”
I didn’t want to speak so instead I nodded.
“You have. You’ve lost your mind telling my woman that you’re my wife. Bitch, I got shot of your cheating ass over a decade ago.”
His woman? Did he tell her I was his woman?
“Nolan,” she whined.
“Do not Nolan me. You have some balls calling my house. I have not one thing to say to you.”
I didn’t want to listen to this conversation; I started to get up, and Clark pulled me back to his side and pinned me with a stare.
“Well, I have something to say to you. I’ve been arrested, and unless you want your son to go into the system, you’ll come pick him up.”
Nope. I couldn’t listen anymore. I was intruding on a private conversation; I was getting ready to bolt when the smallest of tremors started in Clark’s hand. I watched as the phone shook in his hand and I didn’t know what to do, but I knew what I couldn’t do. No matter how uncomfortable I was, I couldn’t abandon him.
“My son?” Clark whispered.
She hadn’t heard or wasn’t willing to repeat herself because his question was met with silence. Clark looked like he was ready to commit numerous acts of violence, the first being against the phone that looked like it was ready to be crushed in his hand. No one was speaking, and I remembered she said she’d been arrested.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m not speaking to you. Where’s Nolan.”
I instantly despised that she called him by his first name. No one else did, everyone else called him Clark, leaving me the only one in the privacy of his room to call him by that name. It was special. He’d told me to use his first name when we were intimate. This woman saying it made me want to wash her mouth out with soap and tell her never to say it again.
“He’s getting dressed,” I lied. “You’re stuck talking to me. Where are you?”
“Hayward Police Department,” she answered.
Hayward? I wasn’t from around here and had only ventured out a few times, but I thought Emily and I went through a town called Hayward yesterday.
“Georgia?” I asked. I don’t know why, but I’d thought she’d live in his home state of Nebraska, not here.
“Aren’t you a smart one. This was my one call. Tell Nolan that if he doesn’t want Nicholas in foster care, he better come down here and get him.”
The small tremors had turned into violent shaking. Oh shit. I needed to end this conversation.
“Okay. Um. It takes about twenty minutes to get there. Is Nicholas at the police station with you?”
I wasn’t sure if I should commit to picking the boy up. Surely Clark wouldn’t leave his child at a police station to get taken by CPS, even if it was a child he didn’t seem to know he had.
“No. The cops left the kid on the side of the road when they brought me in.”
What a fucking bitch.
The kid? She called her son the kid. Who does that?
Clark remained quiet, and I didn’t think it was my place to scold this craptastic mother so I, too, didn’t say anything.
“Great. See you in twenty,” I told her.
“You better not come. I called Nolan, not his side piece.”
Clark was going to blow; the hold he had on his temper was rapidly deteriorating.
“You’ll be lucky if I show up and not Clark. I have a feeling you’d be better off dealing with me at this point.”
I pried the phone out of Clark’s hand, disconnected the call, and slid out of bed.
I thought he was broken. He looked much like he did when he was in the middle of a nightmare.
Dead eyes.
Unseeing.
Fuck!
“Clark?”
Chapter Fourteen
Furious didn’t begin to describe what I was.
For the second time in my life, Stephanie Clark had planted a nuclear bomb in my life and sat back to watch it explode, uncaring about the collateral damage she was inflicting. I actually believed she got off on it. That was part of why she’d always plotted and planned, playing a long game of deception, so when the truth came out, everyone suffered.
Nicholas.
Nick.
Fucking bitch.
Reagan’s soft voice pulled me from my thoughts, and I watched as she started to pull on her clothes.
“You should go.” Her eyes narrowed as she buttoned her jeans. “Back to the guest room. Get some sleep.” I added.
“Why?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Yes, Clark. Why? Why do you want me to go back to the guest room? Do you want privacy? Do you want to be alone because you’re in shock? Do you still love her and you’re hurt? W
hy are you pushing me away?”
I wasn’t sure why I’d told her she needed to leave.
Except I did.
“I am out of my mind pissed, and I don’t want you to see me lose my temper. The last thing I want to do is scare you.”
“Lose your temper,” she told me. “As long as you’re not mad at me, you won’t scare me.”
Honesty. That’s what this woman inspired. I couldn’t hide a damn thing from her when around every turn she was there giving me truth and hope. Now was not the time to be pondering all the reasons why and how this woman had brought me to my knees. Warning bells were blaring, cautioning me to pull away from her, yet all I wanted was to run at her full-steam.
“Fuck,” I yelled. “Fucking bitch. She cheated on me. With my brother. Nicholas.”
I could barely get the words out without bile wanting to come to the surface.
“What?”
Reagan was already dressed, standing across the room waiting for me to follow her so I could go and pick up a son I never knew I had. A son that bitch had named after my brother.
How was this my life?
How was I supposed to face a child that by no fault of his own had been born into this fucked up mess and call him Nick?
“I caught them together when I came home from deployment. The bitch smiled when I yanked my brother out of my goddamned bed. She cried for him when I kicked his ass and tossed him out the door. And she blamed me when Nick’s helicopter was shot down and he died. She said it was my fault for wishing him dead.”
“Bitch!” she said.
By the time I had finished my story I was dressed and ready to leave, or as ready as one can be when they’ve come to learn they have a child.
We walked out to my Jeep, and I was halfway to the police station before I realized that Reagan was in the truck with me. I didn’t have to ask her to come; it was a foregone conclusion she’d be by my side. She also hadn’t pitched a fit about some crazy person calling and claiming to be my wife just to be a bitch. And she hadn’t run out the door when she heard I had a son. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with those realizations. I decided there was nothing to do but be grateful to have her strength and understanding.
Reagan didn’t seem to mind the silence or try and fill it. She sat quietly and let me try and sort my head out, not that it was going to happen in the twenty-minute drive, but I appreciated it. I realized I hadn’t asked Stephanie what she’d been arrested for or why she was in Georgia. After our divorce and Nick’s funeral, which she insisted on attending, I hadn’t spoken to her again. There was nothing left to say. Stephanie had announced graveside in front of all the mourners I’d wished Nick dead. She aired our dirty laundry in front of everyone; telling them I was a horrible husband and it was Nick who she’d loved. She was planning on leaving me to be with him – the love of her life.
Of course, she’d been drunk, and everyone was appalled by her outburst, but that was typical Stephanie. She was a selfish attention whore that was known for her out-of-control fits, especially if she wasn’t getting her way. She put me through hell. The last eleven years without her had been bliss. Now it seemed I’d stepped back into the fiery pits of the underworld. The first time I’d barely escaped, now she was going to own me forever.
Fuck.
I parked the Jeep in the lot in front of the station, but as I pulled my keys out of the ignition something started to nag in the back of my mind.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“What doesn’t?” Rea asked.
“She was drunk at my brother’s funeral.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t add up. None of it. My brother’s funeral was two months after I found them together.”
“Okay,” she said, still not understanding.
“I had come home from a six-month deployment. Nick died two months later. That would’ve put her at least eight months pregnant with my child – drunk at a funeral. She had no belly at the time. Not to mention I saw her fully nude the night I caught them together. The image is forever burned into my brain. There was no way she was over six months pregnant. The boy cannot be mine. There’s no way. Come to think of it, I hadn’t touched her for at least a month or more before I’d left. Our marriage was over by then; the very sight of her repulsed me. The last thing I wanted was to fuck her.”
“So, he’s not yours. Do you think he could be Nick’s or were there other men?”
Just like that, she believed me. There was no second-guessing or accusations; she simply took my word for it and moved on.
“I have no idea. I hadn’t realized she’d been fucking my brother. I still couldn’t tell you how long she’d been doing it.”
“What do we do now?”
We.
Not you, but we.
“We’re here. I should go in and at least ask if the boy is Nick’s. I won’t leave my family behind. If he’s not, then I guess I’ll help the kid find his real dad.”
I didn’t know what the fuck I was supposed to do. The only thing I knew for a fact was that Nicholas was not my son. The knowledge should’ve made me feel better, but it didn’t. My gut was telling me that the Nicholas was my nephew and the poor kid had been saddled with an evil bitch for a mother.
“You’re a good man, Clark,” Reagan told me and squeezed my bicep.
“You wouldn’t think that if you knew what was going on in my head.”
“But you haven’t acted upon it or even said it out loud. I don’t think I’d be as in control if I were in your shoes. Let’s go get this done so we can get Nicholas taken care of.”
We walked side-by-side to the glass doors of the station. When I grabbed the handle to pull open the door - Reagan grabbed my hand and held tight. Once we explained to the desk sergeant why I was there, we sat and waited - Reagan held tight.
When a uniformed officer came and got us and walked us back to the bullpen – Reagan held fast.
We sat, and the man explained that Stephanie had been arrested for drunk driving and possibly vehicular manslaughter if the couple she ran off the road didn’t pull through. Both the driver and passenger had been flown from the scene. Through that all – Reagan held strong.
“Where’s Nicholas Clark? Was he harmed in the crash?” Reagan asked.
“He is uninjured. There was no collision. The other car swerved to avoid a head-on crash with, Mrs. Clark. The driver lost control when he overshot the shoulder and flipped his car,” Officer Landers explained.
“Christ,” I muttered.
“Nicholas is in the Captain’s office. He’s a good kid. Like so many other children of alcoholics, he is more the parent than the child. I became increasingly concerned when an eleven-year-old knew words like drunk tank and bail.”
“What can you tell us about him?” Reagan asked.
“What do you mean?” the officer asked.
“Stephanie’s call tonight was the first I’ve heard about Nicholas. I didn’t know she was even in Georgia.”
Officer Landers flipped through a file and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Nicholas Brady Clark. Date of birth October 15th, 2007. Last known address 10235 North Street, Baylor, Nebraska. Father – Nicholas Brady Clark. Mother Stephanie Lynn Clark.”
“Come again? Who is the father?” I asked.
“Nicholas Clark – deceased March 1, 2007,” Officer Landers clarified.
“Bitch,” Reagan muttered. “Stephanie told Nolan that Nicolas was his son.”
“No. She said she was calling the boy’s uncle to come and get him.”
“Un-fucking-real. May I see her before I take Nicholas home?” I asked.
Nicholas, my nephew, not my son.
“She told you that?” the man asked.
Fucking bitch.
“Yep. After she told my woman, while we were in my bed, that she was my wife.” I watched Reagan’s cheeks pinken. Maybe I should’ve left out the bed part, but I was pissed, and he was a man, he’d understand.
“Then she told me I had a son. Something that I thought was true until I got here and remembered one of the last times I saw her skank ass was when I pulled my brother outta my bed. She was butt-ass-naked and not six months pregnant, which she’d have to be if it was mine, considering my ass had been in Afghanistan for that long. So, after all of that, I’d like a word.”
“I bet you do. I’ll take you down.”
“I’m thinking it’s a good thing she’s behind bars,” Reagan mumbled.
“You’d be right.”
“I’ll wait here.” Reagan smiled and unfolded her hand from mine.
“Thank you.” I kissed her quickly on the lips, a peck, which left much to be desired. I wanted to properly thank her for the support she’d given me but now was not the time.
She tilted her head back to look up at me. “Always.”
Always. I believed she meant that and another piece of heart came alive.
The officer made small talk as he walked me farther into the precinct to the hold cells. She hadn’t been transferred from booking yet.
“I hope you understand I can’t leave you alone with her,” he said.
“Completely.”
He pointed to the cell in front of me, and I was momentarily shocked. The woman holding onto the bars was not the same woman I’d married.
Stephanie might’ve always been a bitch, but she was a gorgeous one. This woman was not gorgeous. Forgetting everything I knew about her and the crimes she was being held on, physically there was nothing pretty about her. Dull brown hair, lifeless green sunken eyes, her skin had a greyish hue to it. Nothing. There was no trace of the woman I fell in love with.
“Hey, baby, I knew you’d come down to see me,” she slurred.
How had I missed that on the phone?
“I’m not here to see you, Stephanie. I’m here to pick up the boy. You know, my nephew.”
“Oh, come on. He should’ve been ours. He can be now that Nick is gone. Me and you and Nicky.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? I didn’t want your ass before I left on that last deployment. I didn’t want you when I came home, and I don’t want you now. I only came down here to tell you face-to-face never to contact me again.”
Freedom Page 10