Truth & Consequences: A Miss Independent Novel

by Leach, Kiki

  His teeth clinched, his jaw locked. And then he looked at her face. Her eyes were becoming red and watery and her lip quivered as if she was trying to speak. While still holding onto her, Maurice whipped his head around and saw Nathan for himself. His arms were crossed, his feet were wide apart, his head was tilted and the grim look on his face let Maurice know that he was more than ready for a battle that would end in actual bloodshed for one or both of them this time.

  Vanessa dug her fingers into Maurice’s shoulder, fearful of what to expect from Nathan after their blow up in the kitchen and the reason behind it. She tried to keep Maurice from reacting, but failed when he released his grip around her body and sat her back down to the floor.

  “Mo, don’t,” she said.

  But he refused to listen.

  Turning away, he fixed his pants and gradually started walking toward his former best friend.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he growled.

  Nathan smiled, his eyes devious as they focused in on Maurice’s, and chuckled. “I was in the neighborhood. Heard there was another late night showing happening upstairs, so I thought I’d stop by and see what it was all about. A little more PG than the last time I saw it--”

  “Nathan!” Vanessa snapped.

  Maurice glanced back at her and scrunched his brows, bewildered. “What the fuck is this lunatic talking about?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “NATHAN!” She moved around Maurice and pulled down on her shirt to cover herself. “I think it’s time for you to finally get the hell out of here and go back home to whatever the hell it is that you currently have with Sheila--”

  “Which is nothing,” he mumbled.

  “Wait a second.” Maurice held up his arm, holding Vanessa back from moving any further. She looked up at him with panic filling her eyes, knowing what would come if he learned the truth. Maurice raised his other hand and pointed straight ahead. “I want to know what this asshole is doing here.”

  Nathan bent forward and playfully widened his arms. “Making amends?”

  “Bullshit,” Vanessa said under her breath.

  Maurice ignored her and continued advancing toward Nathan. His impatience was wearing thinner by the second. “Amends for what?”

  “My part in bringing Adrian to the Hamptons,” he replied, his tone dry as dirt and just as rough. He even yawned to show just how much he didn’t care. “It was a shitty thing to do and I came here to apologize to V for it.”

  “That’s not all you came here for,” said Maurice. “It couldn’t have been. Because I’m guessing that you would’ve left as soon as she came upstairs if that were the truth.”

  He lifted his shoulders, shoved out his bottom lip, and turned his eyes up toward the ceiling. “Maybe I was just waiting for my turn on her merry-go-round in case she felt that a one way ticket beneath you wasn’t enough.”

  Maurice sprang forward then, and violently tackled Nathan to the ground as if they were still on that football field back in high school, this time on opposing teams.

  Fists and blood went flying from one side of the hallway to the other within seconds of each other as Maurice struck Nathan in either side of his jaw, mouth and eyes; he banged his head down against the wood with the intent of popping a muscle or two from place in his neck.

  Enraged that her house was on the verge of being destroyed yet again and realizing that calling out to them only seemed to make the fighting that much more intense, Vanessa grabbed her shorts and panties from Maurice’s bedroom and leapt over the men to run downstairs for the phone.

  The moment she fled from their path of destruction, Maurice picked Nathan up from the floor and threw a fist into his chest and stomach so hard that they both went tumbling down the stairs and straight through the railing. Vanessa let out a bloodcurdling scream and jumped out of the way as wood and bodies flew all around her and crashed down hard on the floor.

  Panicked, she bent down to a groaning and sore Maurice, who was covered in slithers of the wood and his own blood, but was unexpectedly hauled away by a seething Nathan and tossed onto the couch in the living room. He glared down at her and grinded his teeth, silently telling her to stay put before he went after a struggling Maurice. His hand was soaked in blood and throbbing again, but he didn’t care, as he was too fixated on ending things between them once and for all.

  Reaching forward, he picked up a bloody piece of the railing and shoved it hard into Maurice’s stomach. Maurice clutched himself and doubled forward, roaring in pain. But he wasn’t down for long, quickly regaining his strength and retaliating by kicking the wood from Nathan’s hand. A flummoxed Nathan had no time to react when Maurice grabbed him by the back of the head and slammed his face into the front door. Blood spewed from his nose and mouth, splashing across his face and clothes. He slid down, unable to regain footing, and smashed his chin against the knob. Maurice proceeded to hover over him, dragging him back and kicking him down to the floor.

  With the phone still in her hand and afraid that one of them would no doubt kill the other if she didn’t act fast, Vanessa immediately dialed ‘911’.

  She shoved her hair out of her face and shook her head.

  “Idiots,” she mumbled.

  When she heard a clicking sound from the other end of the phone, she cleared her throat.

  “911,” the operator called out. “What’s your emergency?”

  Just then, Maurice hollered out as Nathan shoved one fist, and then the other into his face and sent him flying across the room. He crashed into a chair, which slid back into the coatrack, snapping it in half, and dropped down to his knees on the floor.

  “Hello?” the operator called out.

  Vanessa jumped up from the couch and watched in dread as more blood spewed from Maurice’s mouth and onto the collar of his shirt. His right eye was bloodshot and he spit out what looked like the crown of his tooth. Nathan’s face was swelling by the second, his nose looked as if it might have been broken and his bottom lip was nearly split in two.

  “Ma’am,” the operator started again. “Ma’am, what is your emergency?”

  Vanessa took in a deep breath and tried to remain calm, assured that hysterics wouldn’t be any good in getting her the kind of help she needed. “I have two men in my hallway trying to kill each other,” she spoke into the receiver. “That is my emergency. I need you to send someone over here quick before one of them goes out in a body bag.”

  At that point, she didn’t know or even care which one it could be.

  After gathering all the needed information, the operator agreed to send two officers to Vanessa’s townhouse.

  Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting in the hallway at the bottom of her stairs, staring at the blood now stained on her floors and listening, both horrified and drained, as Nathan and Maurice continued to pummel each other, though the fight had spilled over into her kitchen by then, which in turn destroyed more dishes.

  How the fuck can they not be exhausted by now? she wondered.

  Idiots.

  Before long, the police were banging on her front door and Vanessa was crying out in relief. She dropped the phone and raced to open it, allowing the two policemen inside.

  “Ma’am,” said the first one, tipping his hat. A pile of plates made a loud crashing sound against the floor before he could continue and without saying another word to her, he headed off in the direction of the commotion.

  The other, who quickly identified himself as Officer Joe Stanton, stayed behind to speak with Vanessa about exactly what was happening and why. After relaying the circumstances leading to her current situation, the officer leaned down and admitted with twinkling grey eyes that he immediately recognized her from the same gossip rags in which his wife was an avid fan of reading.

  She almost rolled her eyes after hearing that – it wasn’t the time or place (if ever there were either) to admit something like that – but stopped herself and nodded while mumbling a few swear words instead
.

  He didn’t pick up on them, but she was so done with everything in that moment that she wouldn’t have cared too much if he had.

  “In here, Joe!” the other cop yelled out from the kitchen.

  As soon as Vanessa and Officer Joe ran inside, they found the other cop struggling to break the two men apart. Both had blood spewing out from every part of their faces now and Nathan’s hand, the same one Vanessa had bandaged, was shaking on its own as if he had suddenly developed some kind of nervous tick. Maurice turned and spit more blood into the sink, as well as his second crown, and cricked his neck as if he was ready for another round.

  The first officer grabbed onto Nathan, spinning him away from Maurice, and shoved him down to the counter. He wrestled his arms behind his back while Officer Joe latched onto Maurice and did the same.

  “What the hell is the problem here?” Officer Joe asked, jerking Maurice around and forcing him to stand straight.

  “They’re idiots, that’s the problem,” Vanessa replied. “Like I told you out there, they started going at it upstairs, it spilled over down here and I couldn’t stop it.”

  The other officer yanked Nathan up by his cuffed wrists. “What do you want us to do with them?”

  “I don’t care where they go as long as they get the hell out of my house.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Maurice declared. “My stuff may be gone from that room up there, V, but this is still my house.”

  “One you just damn near destroyed,” she said.

  Nathan flinched, taken aback by Maurice’s news, and locked his eyes on Vanessa. “Your boy moved out?” He leaned his head back and started laughing. “Then you two aren’t together anymore?”

  “No, asshole, we’re not,” Vanessa replied. “All thanks to your continued bullshit.”

  “No, V,” he shot back with a slight smirk gracing his lips. “Thanks to yours.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she murmured. “What happened back then had nothing to do with you! Just like I told you before, it was in the past and should’ve stayed there. You had no place bringing it into the present--”

  “Come on, V,” he droned on. “It was only a matter of time before that truth came out, with or without me bringing Adrian out in the open.” He lowered his head. “It’s just too bad that it led to all of this,” he responded in a scornful tone.

  “You don’t believe that. You’re eating this shit up with a silver spoon and wanting to go in for seconds.”

  “Like you upstairs with him?”

  Maurice tried leaping forward, but Officer Joe held him back from it.

  Nathan turned his focus to him and leaned his head. “If you’re that insecure letting another man from her past get in the middle of your current relationship, or lack thereof now--”

  Vanessa attempted to interject. “Stop it, Nathan--”

  “Then Vanessa probably isn’t the one you should be with. ‘Cause I’m sure as hell not going anywhere this time. And Adrian doesn’t seem like he’s going anywhere anytime soon either. Adding a third to the mix seems to be more than she can handle anyway.”

  Maurice peered and spat out more blood filling up his mouth. And then he smiled, or at least tried to move his face in that direction as much as he could, as red stains covered his teeth. “Adrian had nothing to do with why we’re no longer together.”

  Vanessa glanced up at Maurice and enlarged her eyes. “Mo!”

  “He’s going to learn it sometime soon enough, right?” Maurice responded.

  Nathan chuckled. “Learn what, pretty boy?”

  “That you weren’t the reason Vanessa and I split up. But I’m the reason she dropped you back then.” He bent forward and continued in a low voice. “I’m the reason you’ll never have a chance with her again.”

  Nathan’s entire face filled with unrecognizable rage. His temples flared and his lips tightened. “The fuck is he talkin’ about, V?”

  “Mo, don’t.”

  “After finding you in the shower with Sheila,” Maurice continued, “V came to me in tears. I couldn’t stand to see her in so much pain and thought you needed to have a taste of your own for once. And I knew after all the talks we had over the years about her and your relationship, even as badly as you treated her, that finally losing her for good would do the trick. Going to Page Six was the only way to make that happen.”

  Nathan gulped as a small lump formed between his eyebrows and remembered back when he first saw the pictures of him, Vanessa and Sheila splashed across the front cover of the paper in what was referred to back then as a Triangle DeJour.

  His jaw tightened and he grumbled. “That was you?”

  Despite his pain, Maurice stretched his face into an even wider smile and nodded. “Yeah. That was me.”

  Incensed, Nathan kicked up his feet in an attempt to slug Maurice in the stomach. “Son of a BITCH!” he bellowed. Maurice dodged backward into Officer Joe as red spittle flew out from either side of Nathan’s mouth.

  “THAT’S IT!” Maurice hollered out. “Now we’re making progress here!” He tried scrambling out of Officer Joe’s clutches as Nathan tried doing the same.

  Mortified at what continued to unfold before her eyes and feeling helpless at how to solve the problem without more assistance, Vanessa leaned back on her foot and folded her arms over her chest. “You know what,” she said, “on second thought, maybe sitting in jail for a night would actually be good for the soul.” Her eyes diverted to Maurice. “Both of them.”

  Maurice immediately snapped his head in her direction and stood still. “What?”

  “I’m sorry,” she told him. “But you both started this shit with the constant dick wagging ever since he came back, and won’t stop going at each other like idiots until someone else ends it, so that’s what I’m doing.”

  “You’re ending it by having me locked up with this asshole for a night?”

  “What the hell else am I supposed to do, Mo?” She dropped her hands to her sides, feeling both vulnerable and defeated. “Let you two leave here and roam the streets just so that you can kill each other in a dark alley someplace? I may want to smash Nathan’s face into the ground every now and then myself, but I cared about him for a long time, and you…” She stopped and lowered her head, unable to finish. “You need to cool the hell off. You both do, and there’s no way in hell I’m letting either one of you do it here after damn near turning my house into an underground boxing pit! So jail it is.” Vanessa looked over at Officer Joe and gave him a quick nod.

  He nodded to his partner who did the same with acknowledgement.

  “Let’s go,” he snarled, dragging Nathan from the kitchen.

  Officer Joe dragged Maurice, who shook his head in disbelief. “This is bullshit, V. Complete bullshit, and you know it.”

  “What’s bullshit is everything you both have done to each other tonight, and to me.”

  He glanced back at her, but couldn’t bring himself to stare into the eyes of the woman he loved with his entire heart for too long without feeling an insurmountable volume of hatred building up inside his chest, hatred that would no doubt encase his judgement and lead to more bad decisions just like this if it remained inside his heart for too long.

  As they exited her house, Vanessa followed outside and watched as the officers walked both men to either side of the car.

  Maurice kept his eyes focused on the ground as he was shoved inside the back, but Nathan turned back to her and gave a quick wink with the one eye that wasn’t swollen just as his head was pushed beneath the roof.

  Vanessa may not have known much anymore where Nathan was concerned, but was convinced with just that simple gesture that there would be more trouble and maybe even a little extra hell to pay for all of them once he was free.

  Part Fifteen

  Later that night, Vanessa found herself sitting at the kitchen table, staring at her now empty wine glass. Reclining in the chair and running her fingers through her hair, she looked all around at the glass
and blood still covering her floor and started to wonder if forcing Nathan and Maurice to mutually sit inside a place in which having access to weapons at the base of their fingertips was actually the smartest thing to do.

  Not to mention, after having some time to really think about the surreal moment of them being shoved into the back of the police car like legitimate criminals, she was convinced that more than Nathan’s payback, someone within the walls of the NYPD would leak their information and arrests to someone else on the outside, which would in turn lead to all three of them being splashed across every paper in New York City by the morning. She could just see it all right before her very eyes, her picture shoved between those of Nathan and Maurice, and beneath the headline Torn Between Two Lovers.

  Only she wasn’t – not by any stretch of the imagination had she been torn between the two men.

  She admittedly didn’t care so much about Nathan anymore, at least not in the way he still wanted, nor did she give a damn that he could possibly be publicly humiliated again. In fact, she thought it would serve him right for the shit he had pulled since returning to the city.

  But the last thing she wanted was for any negative press to come Maurice’s way, especially press that could affect his job and livelihood. She was still pissed and in her mind rightfully so at what he had done, but it didn’t mean she cared any less about his well-being. In fact, she started to wonder if she cared a little more than she should.

  For a few seconds she closed her eyes and shook her head, fearful that if word managed to spread around the city, what her mother would say about all of it when she found out for herself, much like she always managed to find out everything else Vanessa wished she hadn’t.

  Well, almost everything.

  She prepared herself for the worst in a few hours and felt that guarding herself by being semi-intoxicated when she waltzed into her office, thus able to remain numb, might be a good start. She latched onto the neck of her wine bottle and popped the cork, tossing it in the trash across the room and poured until the red liquid hit the rim. Just as it was about to spill over, she pulled the bottle back and sat it back down on the table.