Truth & Consequences: A Miss Independent Novel

by Leach, Kiki

  “I’m not saying that it does. I just don’t remember your face looking like that last night. I mean it was bad, but your eye looks damn near swollen shut now.” She leaned even further into the cell and whispered. “Did something happen to you while you were in here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, who was it? What was it? Is it something I might need to highlight in the magazine?”

  “Nah. This one was all thanks to your boy, again.”

  He turned his head to the side to gather more spit in his mouth to wash away more dried blood.

  Vanessa puckered her brows and watched him spit on the floor. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Mo, V. He might have been released this morning, but being out of lockup didn’t keep him from coming back to see me.”

  “Why would Mo have come back here to see you – what would’ve been the point?”

  “He had a hell of a lot of them to make, but the main one was telling me to stay away from you once I got out. Guess he wanted to make it damn clear again that you belong to him now.”

  “I don’t belong to anybody,” she said. “I barely even belong to my damn self anymore.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds before nodding. “Right. Well, we came to an understanding about a lot of things, even that. But the one thing I refused to budge on was staying away from you. I’m not doing that, V. If five years and two oceans couldn’t keep me away from you, then he’s damned to think that a jail cell and a few blocks might do the trick.”

  She jerked her entire body away from the cell and started pacing back and forth. Then she laughed to herself and turned her head up to the ceiling. “So he’s the reason why your face now looks like somebody repeatedly bashed it in with a cookie cutter.”

  “Yeah, and I’m the reason he’s no longer pretty,” said Nathan.

  Vanessa laughed even louder. “Oh, he’ll always be pretty, honey. His face could look like mud after it’s been run over a few times back and forth with the wheels of a tractor-trailer – that’s just the way it is.”

  “Is that why you fell for him?”

  “If I had, don’t you think this would’ve happened between us long before now?”

  “Maybe.”

  As they stared at one another, various thoughts of the past, present and even the future running through both of their minds, Vanessa became uncomfortable, much as she had with Sheila the night before, and threw her hand back and forth across her face.

  “You know what, there’s no way in hell I’m discussing anymore of this with you and you are crazy to even think that I would, or should.”

  “V--”

  She raised a hand to stop him. “I just came here to tell you that I’ve left your wallet with the clerk and you’ll be free to leave whenever you choose. Goodbye.” She zoomed straight for the door.

  “Hold up, Vanessa,” he called out. She twisted one hand around the knob and waited, hoping that what he had to say next wouldn’t make her want to go flying right through that cell to get to him herself. “I just want to know a single thing, and that’s it. Just one thing and then you can leave and that’ll be it.”

  She contemplated for a few seconds and then turned back around to look at his face. “What is it?”

  “You still love him after the shit he did in putting you out there like that?”

  She whirled around and leaned her head, puzzled. “Is that a trick question?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s a joke, right? Something meant to make the mood a little bit lighter up in here?”

  “It’s not that either. I’m not trying to be funny with you, Vanessa.”

  “And yet what you’re asking is making me want to start laughing until I can’t stop.” She walked back over to the cell and stood directly in front of him. “Even after I found you fucking my best friend in the shower, I still loved you, Nathan. Was it stupid? Sure. Do I regret it? Oh hell yeah. But what I felt for you was the truth back then -- my truth, anyway. When I look back on it now, I fully admit hand to heart, that it all went on for entirely too damn long. But I couldn’t just turn those feelings off like some light switch inside my house before bedtime. So yeah, I still love Mo in spite of the bullshit move he made in trying to keep you the hell out of my life.”

  “Are you even pissed at him for what he did?”

  “Of course I’m pissed, dummy. Like he told you last night, it’s the reason we’re not together.”

  “But it won’t stay that way for long," said Nathan. "Not with the way I saw you two almost going at it again, I know that it won’t. Shit, V, you knew I was there and still almost fucked him out in the open like that.”

  Vanessa slipped her hands inside her pockets and sighed. She lifted her shoulders and turned her head, moving it back and forth and burning holes into the wall across the room with the glare in her eyes. “My judgment gets cloudy at just the thought of him now. He has my heart, Nathan, and my soul all wrapped up in one untidy little bow. He has everything and no matter how angry I get or how pissed he makes me with the stupid things he does and says and will continue to do and say, he always will.”

  “I had your heart once too, V. I had your soul in the palm of my hands back then--”

  “You didn’t have anything, except for the girl that I was. The one who didn’t know any better, who was still trying to distinguish love from lust and couldn’t understand why your love always seemed to hurt so damn much as opposed to making me feel good and happy like it’s supposed to. He’s got the woman that I am now. The one who grew up to properly learn the difference between love and lust and rage and anger and resentment, and deep, deep sensuality, and understands that even if those things are all wrapped up in each other and twisted in tight knots that hurt like hell when wrapped around your throat, they’re not supposed to cause pain to the point of suffocation throughout the entirety of a relationship. I’m okay with having all of that in one man as long as he doesn’t relish in making me miserable for the better part of it.”

  “I never relished in that shit, V.”

  “Oh yeah, you did. I just don’t think you ever opened your eyes wide enough to see it. And by the time you finally did, I was already gone.”

  “I know.” He turned toward the wall and dropped his head back to reflect on the better part of his life, the part with her. “I’m sorry,” he told her.

  She wrapped her hands around the bars and leaned in. “Thank you for that,” she said. “I know you’ve said it before, but that shit was a long time coming. Now having said that, it seems as if that’s all you’ve been doing lately, apologizing to people for having done shit to them that you shouldn’t have in the first place. Maybe it’s time to finally think about the reason behind that so that you can stop having so many damn things to be sorry about. By the way, Sheila knows that you’re here. I don’t know if you’ve tried to get in contact with her, but I talked to her last night and she knows everything that’s happened. Just a heads up, because I’m not sure how she’s going to react to you when you finally see her.”

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah.”

  As she exited the room for good this time, Nathan leaned back on the wall and folded his arms. Reflecting on his thoughts from earlier, he realized that Vanessa was right. He needed to stop being such an asshole, and now that his apology to her seemed to carry some weight, he was more positive than ever that Sheila was going to accept him again without a second thought.

  Part Twenty-Five

  After returning home from a day she would’ve been more than happy to forget, from the beginning with Maurice and Melanie, to the middle with her mother (who, just as she suspected, disapproved of every sketch she created) to end with Nathan in jail, Vanessa searched through the mail and dumped her keys in the bowl near the door. Once she closed and locked it shut, she carelessly tossed her purse in the chair and kicked off her shoes.

  Seeing nothing in the pile of mail but
junk for Maurice, she thought about leaving it on the table and calling him about it tomorrow, maybe asking him to come and pick it up when she wasn’t there – just in case he felt the need to bring his lapdog along for the occasion.

  The very idea of that woman stepping a single foot inside her house with him made her more sick to her stomach than she had been in seeing her hang all over him like a wet rag that she was certain needed to be wrung and slung.

  She needed to get the images of them together out of her head as soon as possible and knew the only way to do that was through a drink.

  Or ten if she could manage.

  As she headed for the kitchen, she stopped when she heard a chair sliding back and forth across the floor. Unsure of who it might be, and too skeptical to call out anyone’s name seeing as how well that had worked out for her the night before, she dropped the mail near the door and rushed over to her purse. Throwing her hand inside and wrapping her fingers around a small can of pepper spray, she eased over to the kitchen and lightly pushed back on the swinging door. What she saw between the small slither she allowed herself between the door and frame, wasn’t exactly expected.

  Sitting at the table was Nikki, sniffing back what Vanessa assumed to be tears while consuming an entire tub of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

  As soon as Vanessa pushed back on the door completely, Nikki turned to her with puffy red eyes and swollen cheeks. Hovering the spoon over the tub of ice cream, she thought for a few seconds of what to say that would lessen the obviousness of how upset she was.

  And then she pointed behind Vanessa and nodded.

  “Your stairs are broken.” She consumed more ice cream and continued staring at her.

  Vanessa strolled further into the kitchen and carelessly tossed her purse on the counter. “No shit.”

  “What do you think Alexis is going to say when she sees them tomorrow?”

  Vanessa sighed. “She won’t. I convinced her before I left work tonight to have the party at her house instead.” She moved over to the table and rested her hands on the back of the chair adjacent to where Nikki had been sitting. “What are you doing here tonight?" she asked. "Did William kick you out of his house or something?”

  Nikki gave Vanessa a cruel look and sniffed. “That’s not the reason I’m over here,” she answered, returning to her ice cream.

  “Is it the reason you’ve been crying?”

  “No,” she quickly shot back, though not very convincingly.

  Vanessa pulled the chair back and sat down, then snatched the spoon from Nikki’s hand and pointed it between her eyes. “Then why don’t you start by telling me why, hm?” She dipped the spoon into the ice cream and ate some for herself. And then she frowned, thinking. “Where has your mouth been in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “Not around William’s dick,” Nikki replied.

  “What about anyone else’s?”

  She arched her brows and quickly pried the spoon from Vanessa’s fingers, and dipped it back into the bucket. “I don’t want to go there with you tonight, V.”

  “You obviously wanted to go somewhere with me, otherwise why come home with tears in your eyes? As a matter of fact, I’m surprised to see you here at all without me asking first.”

  “I come by all the time without your knowledge, Vanessa.”

  “Okay, right, sure, yes, I guess that makes sense when you live with someone,” said Vanessa. She raised her hands and formed quotation marks with her fingers. “‘Live’. Because the entire point of having a roommate outside of college is living with someone you never see.”

  “Vanessa.” She was growing frustrated but was trying her best to hide it. “I came here tonight because I felt bad about yesterday in telling you about Mo and Melanie when I have no idea what’s going on. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t--”

  “Trying to throw myself into the Hudson or crying my eyes out before bed again after a few too many glasses of red wine? No. I managed to stop doing that a few weeks ago because I started waking up in weird places around the house. But drunk or sober, going to bed alone is always the most difficult. Especially because he liked to hold me when he slept, just to know that I was still there with him.” She stared down at the table, reminiscing. “But anyway…”

  “That’s when it hurts the most,” said Nikki. She licked the remaining ice cream from the spoon, not realizing until she tasted the salt that her own tears had mixed in with the cream. She quickly tried wiping her face and sat back. “It hurts the most when you expect them to be there only to turn over and realize that you’re sleeping in that bed alone again.”

  Vanessa instantly became suspicious of what her best friend was actually getting at and arched an eyebrow sky high. “Yeah… You know, I was being facetious before, but now you’ve got me hella curious.”

  “About what?”

  “About you and William. Are you two having problems?”

  “You would love to hear that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Not if it’s been making you like this, no.”

  Nikki wiped her face again and crazily shook her head back and forth. “William and I are fine. There’s a few adjustments being made with his daughter finally moving in for good, but other than that--”

  “So it’s been made official? Since when?”

  “Since yesterday when he got word from his attorney that he was granted full custody of her. He didn’t tell me about it until this afternoon because he wanted to make sure that she was okay with everything first, leaving her mother behind and only seeing her on the weekends and all of that. And it seems like she is. His ex. doesn’t seem to be taking it all that well though, from what he said.”

  “Wow,” Vanessa replied in a flat voice. “This whole thing seems like it’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun.”

  “It will be fun for him because he’ll have his daughter around full time now. But I’m not sure if I want to even want to continue on with the way things are between us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s been a month and that girl still hates me, V.”

  “She’s supposed to hate you, you’re not her mother.”

  “And I’m not trying to be. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be anyone’s mother, ever. And that means I don’t feel comfortable playing house.”

  “When you date a man with kids, Nik, especially one like William who was fighting to have his kid full time long before you even came into the picture, this is the kind of shit you have to expect.”

  “I’ve never dated a man with kids before,” she said. Vanessa made a face of disbelief, and then she remembered. “Kids that I actually saw and talked to that also knew who I was, I mean.”

  “Is this why you’re so weepy? Because you don’t want kids and he’s going to have his around 24/7 now?”

  “It might be part of it. I’ve just had a lot on my mind lately and everything just seems to be catching up to me today.” She attempted a sincere smile, but Vanessa could see right through the façade. “By the way, I came by here this morning to see you about something and found Sheila instead. Did she tell you I was here?”

  “I haven’t spoken to her today which has been a hell of a relief. What did you want to see me about this morning?”

  “We can come back to that because the reason isn’t really all that important anymore. What I’m really curious to know is what she was doing here this morning instead of you and why? I almost called the police on her because I thought that she might’ve come in unwanted and had done something to you as a result of you trying to kick her ass back out.”

  “Well, to be honest,” Vanessa started, “she exists, which is equivalent to doing something but not enough to actually get her to permanently go away. Other than that, as you can see I’m fine, so the significant amount of damage caused to me is slim to nil.” She reached forward for more ice cream, sliding her finger down into the corner and pulling out a significant amount. “Her, maybe not so much after last night
.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she’s happily fucking Adrian as if Nathan isn't going to give a shit once he learns the truth,” she replied, almost too nonchalantly.

  Nikki almost choked on a few chocolate chips and pieces of dough, and whacked a hand over her chest. “What was that?”

  “You heard me. Now, I didn't actually choke when she first told me the news but I did get one hell of a laugh out of it.”

  "Why? Because you didn't believe her?"

  "No, because I didn't give a shit that it was happening. Or had happened. Or, whatever."

  “How did she react to you not caring about it?”

  “She was pissed off that I wasn’t pissed off. She wanted to get under my skin because I told her about Nathan coming to my office on the night of the reunion. Including the part about us almost fucking on top of my desk.”

  Nikki flew forward in her chair and threw her arms out on the table. “WHOA! What the hell actually went on here between you two last night?”

  “A long overdue truth session of sorts. She told me a lot of shit I didn’t need to hear, and I told her a lot of shit that she had no choice but to hear and agree to.”

  “Shit like what?”

  She sighed while spinning the spoon around the middle of the bucket and dipping out more ice cream. “She wanted to tell Nathan that she boned Adrian and I told her that it might not be such a good idea after the shit that happened here last night.”

  “What else happened here last night? How did the railing get broken on the staircase? I thought maybe Sheila might’ve done something but--”

  “Nathan came by,” Vanessa interrupted. “And long story short, he told me that the whole Adrian thing was in reaction to seeing me and Maurice having sex.”

  Her mouth fell wide open and her eyes stretched to the point of wiggling inside their sockets. “WHA-WHA-WHAT?!”

  “Yeah.” She picked up the spoon and dumped the spoon in the bucket, then fell back in her chair. “That was pretty much my reaction too, followed by a few plates being thrown at his stupid fat head. He probably thinks I was just trying to miss.”