Truth & Consequences: A Miss Independent Novel

by Leach, Kiki

  “Melanie.”

  She turned at the sound of Oscar’s voice, just as he came out to join them.

  Then she leaned her entire body back and waved her arms. “OH, WOW! It’s definitely a party now!” She snapped her fingers and danced around in a circle.

  Maurice walked over to Nathan and threw a fist into his shoulder. “How the hell much did she have to drink tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not her keeper.”

  “But you were with her most of the night.”

  “Just as much as you’ve been with V.”

  Oscar shoved between them and stepped over to Nikki, dropping to a single knee and placing a soothing hand on her face. She rested her palm against him, but kept the tears back this time.

  “For the love of God,” spewed Melanie, gagging. “You two are wholly disgusting--”

  “Are you alright?” Oscar asked Nikki while ignoring his wife.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Right now I’m just glad that my parent’s went home tired after the show so that they didn’t have to see that. Only, there’s no telling what the papers will read tomorrow--”

  “Probably something along the lines of ‘Home Wrecking Slut Goes Wild!’” Melanie suggested.

  Oscar looked at her over his shoulder, then wrapped his arms around Nikki and lifted her from the stairs. “Let’s get you the hell out of here before somebody realizes where we all are,” he said.

  “No,” Melanie replied. She shoved Nathan out of the way and pounded her fist into Oscar’s back. “You’re not taking her anywhere. I am your wife, ME. If anyone needs to be comforted after seeing all of that it’s ME! I’m the one that continues to be overlooked, stomped on and neglected. And now you’re wrapping your arms around this bitch like she gives more of a shit about you than herself when it’s not even close to being the truth.”

  “Melanie--” Maurice interjected.

  “She didn’t have the decency to keep your child!”

  Everything suddenly went quiet then. Everyone was immediately still.

  Maurice and Nathan eyed Melanie with bewildered looks. Nikki felt like collapsing to the ground.

  Oscar dropped his hands from her and immediately turned back to his wife. “What?”

  “Jill Schaffer was her doctor, call her up tonight and ask her. She won’t be able to tell you much due to the confidentiality clause, but--”

  “Jill.”

  “Yeah, Jill,” Melanie repeated. “Leggy red head with green eyes. Nikki was her patient.”

  Oscar took his time before spinning on his heel and returning to Nikki. He could see from the devastated look in her eye that everything Melanie had said was true.

  A woman he had vowed to give up his entire life for, his family, his children, his wife, was pregnant with and aborted their child.

  He wanted to rage. And scream. And throw things. And berate her for what she had done.

  But he loved her too much to make her feel worse than she already had tonight. And so he took her in his arms instead of losing his shit at the thought of what she had done like he wanted to. And he leaned into her hair and whispered. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re still going off with her after what I just told you?!” Melanie screeched as her arms flew wildly around her head. “She got RID of your BABY, OSCAR. She killed something inside of her that belonged to you--”

  “ENOUGH!” he roared.

  She dropped back.

  “She and I will deal with this accordingly. Whatever happened has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with you, Melanie. You’re the mother of my kids, and I respect that. But you’ve got no say in this, period.”

  When Nikki’s car finally arrived, Oscar hustled her in the back and quickly shut the door.

  The moment it sped off, Vanessa flew out the back door and slammed it into the wall.

  “The press are like piranha in there. Or swirling shark. They smell blood in the water and they’re not going anywhere until they…” She stopped and looked around the alleyway. “Where’s Nikki?”

  “Oscar got her out of here--” Nathan started.

  “My husband got her out of here, thank you,” replied a sarcastic Melanie as she grabbed her head, which started to throb inside her skull.

  “Where’s William?” asked Maurice.

  “I don’t know. After I pulled him off to the side to give him a piece of my mind, I went to try and calm down the assholes in the bar. Ironically enough, Sheila tried helping me before she and Adrian finally split. But I don’t know how much it was about actually helping as opposed to trying to keep her name involved in the press now that she’s no longer getting married. Anyway, most of the actual people who weren’t paid to be there finally left, it’s just the ones looking for a story who are interested in sticking around.”

  “I could give them a story,” Melanie mumbled.

  Vanessa slightly rolled her eyes and wrapped her hand around Maurice’s.

  “Can you get me the hell out of here?” she asked.

  “Most definitely.”

  “Right, fine!” Melanie called out as they strolled to the front of the building. “Leave me just like he did, I’m fine! No worries about me, that’s just great.”

  “Hey!” Nathan called out. “Maybe if you opened your damn eyes you’d see that somebody actually bothered to stick around for you.”

  “Mr. Manipulator! Like you had any other choice.”

  “I do.” Nathan moved forward and brushed a strand of blond hair from her face. “But right now, Mr. Manipulator doesn’t think you should be alone tonight.”

  Melanie almost lost her balance as she looked into Nathan’s eyes and listened to the cool sound of his voice. She was slightly intoxicated, but not enough to ignore the fact that she was being somewhat propositioned by a handsome man who was willing to look at her and no one else for a good few hours before the sun came up.

  Her eyes traveled up and down his body and she exhaled. “You’re right,” she told him. “I shouldn’t be. I sure in hell shouldn’t be.”

  They stared at each other for a long time before he took her by the hand and led her to the street, and nearest cab.

  Part Thirty-Eight

  “Tonight, was…” Adrian started as he and Sheila traipsed down the hall to his apartment. “Interesting.”

  “Interesting enough that I could’ve completely done without if I had known that I was going to be spending the latter part of it seeing Nikki’s vagina expand on a big screen. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that kind of image.”

  She placed one hand on her chest and the other on her stomach.

  “I’m sorry that our first official night out together turned into this,” he said. “I was hoping for a lot more. Not that kind of more, but”

  “Me too. But it’s not as if it’s the end, right? We still have time. There’s no expiration date put on this relationship.”

  They each smiled at one another.

  When they reached Adrian’s door, Sheila leaned on the frame as he dug around inside his pocket for his keys.

  “You never mentioned what you and Nathan were talking about at the bar.”

  She shrugged. “From what I remember, it was nothing important, really. I think he’s accepted that I’ve moved on. Probably because he’s trying to get back into Vanessa’s pants again.”

  “Hm. Well, after everything I saw tonight between her and Maurice, I’m not so sure he’s going to have it as easy as he might think.”

  “I’m surprised you remember anything about even seeing them together. I still can’t get the images of Nikki and Oscar out of my head. I think I might have to scrub my brain with a Brillo pad.”

  Adrian laughed.

  “I’m serious. I honestly can’t believe that William would do something like that. He just never seemed like the type. What happened with that projector is straight out of Nathan’s hand book of assholery. It’s like he took notes regarding everything that went down at
the Hamptons with you coming out to get at Vanessa.”

  “Maybe just like Nathan, this is who he really is and has always been,” said Adrian, sticking his key inside the lock. “Sometimes you just never know some people like you think you do or hope to.”

  As he pushed the door back and flicked on the light, Sheila’s eyes turned to the couch and she jumped back, frightened, when she saw a large man wearing nothing but grey sweatpants and a black tank top sitting in the middle of it and holding what looked like a picture frame in his hands.

  She quickly moved behind Adrian, but never took her eyes off the man, peeking at him over Adrian’s shoulder.

  “Who the hell is that?” she whispered in Adrian’s ear.

  “My roommate.” He nervously wiped his hand down his mouth and spun around to her. “Why don’t we get out of here? He can get cranky at times like this and I don’t want to have to subject you to that.”

  “No,” said his roommate as he jumped up from the couch. He placed the frame in his hand on the bookcase and sauntered toward them. His hazel eyes burned down into Sheila’s in particular. His light brown skin suddenly turned red hot. “Come in. Sit. Let’s all have a nice chat about what’s really been going on around here.”

  Adrian turned his eyes up to the man and locked his jaw as Sheila’s eyes turned to the picture the man had just placed upon the bookcase. Easing past Nathan, she moved further inside to get a better look at that picture.

  “Sheila,” Adrian called out.

  But she ignored him completely and stared at the picture of a man who looked like a much younger version of the one standing in front of her, as he was holding hands with a child who looked around five or six. They were in Central Park and there was snow on the ground. The girl in the picture looked just like Vanessa at that exact same age.

  And then things began to click inside her head that she wished hadn’t.

  “Oh God.” She turned to the man and peered. “Terrence Brown?”

  As Adrian moved toward her, she backed into the bookcase.

  “Sheila,” he said again.

  When neither man refuted her claims, she reached a hand out and smacked Adrian hard across the face, then ran from the room as quickly as she could.

  Adrian turned back to Terrence and glowered before chasing after her.

  “Sheila!”

  She continued barreling down the hall, but he grabbed onto her shoulders and stopped her before she could exit the building.

  “Let me go!” she hollered.

  Instead he spun her around.

  “This is a long and complicated story. It’s not something that I can just explain to you in a matter of--”

  She shrugged his hands from her shoulders and stood back. “What is so complicated about the fact that your roommate is Vanessa’s absentee father?! Did you two meet in the Congo?”

  “Like I said, the story behind all of that is long and complicated.”

  “I can’t believe that you would keep something like this from her! And all this time, I was so afraid of how you would feel in knowing that I kept the truth about her baby from you--”

  Adrian’s head snapped up and his brows puckered. “What baby?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I have to go.”

  She turned away, but he wrapped his entire hand around her arm and pulled her back hard.

  “The hell you do.”

  Part Thirty-Nine

  As soon as Vanessa walked through her front door, she tossed her keys on the table and chucked her purse in the chair. Maurice closed the door behind the both of them as she moved into the foyer, then dived left and headed into the kitchen.

  She began rummaging through the fridge, but after finding absolutely nothing, she slammed the door shut and moved over the counter and folded her arms.

  “I feel like I should call Nikki or something,” she said. “I feel bad about not being out there with her right before she left.”

  “She knows you meant well, V, and that you were taking care of things inside.”

  “I know, but…” She dropped her face in her hands. “I just feel so bad that this happened to her. I knew that something was up with William from the very beginning. I could just never seem to put my finger on it.”

  “Guess you were right about him after all.”

  “I didn’t want to be. At least not right like this. I mean, who does that? Who does what he did tonight and thinks it’s okay? And why the hell can’t anyone in this group have a decent party or get together without shit going down in the middle of it? We were all having a good time and then WHAM! BOOM! Shit goes flying from one room to the other before eventually hitting up that damn fan.”

  Maurice took a seat in front of the stove and lifted his sleeves. “Modern day ‘Brat Pack’ is what one of those papers called us once.”

  “If only life were as simple as a John Hughes film,” she said. “I’d forgive people forgetting my birthday any day of the damn week if it would keep shit like this from happening to us on a regular basis.”

  “It’s just who we are, V,” he said. “It’s just this life, we can’t escape it.”

  “I know that. I’ve tried. I’ve tried like hell to escape it and every time, I manage to get sucked right back into it. Much like my feelings for you.”

  Maurice lifted his head.

  “I tried like hell to stop giving a shit. I tried to tell myself that it was better this way, no matter how much it hurt. And I tried to pretend, all while saying I didn’t care, that I was confident enough to believe that you wouldn’t even think of giving yourself to another woman, let alone someone like Melanie. And then when I finally realized that the battle I was trying to fight had long been lost along the trail of ‘I don’t give a shit’, I tried like hell to believe that even if it wasn’t tomorrow, that we would somehow find our way back to each other again.”

  “I’ve never stopped wanting to be with you, V,” he said. “Ever. And no matter what you thought on the night of our fight, I never left because I wanted to go. I left because I respected you enough to give you your space. I knew what I had done, how much it hurt you. And I knew that you weren’t going to forgive and forget overnight. I was determined to stay before that. But when you left, it gave me time to think about what you really needed from me, and it wasn’t me being here breathing down your neck, begging for you to take me back. I knew that you needed space, even if you didn’t want it. If I stayed, you would’ve grown to resent me for never giving you that – I know that you would’ve. But I was never, ever giving up on you, or us.”

  Her heart started to sing in various tunes inside her chest. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or do both while kissing him until her face and hands went numb.

  “You said you missed me like hell?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t know just how much I need you to show me the depth of that.”

  The moment she said those words, he was on his feet.

  And before she knew it, he was in front of her and taking her face in his hands.

  As his fingers crawled into her hair, her head dipped back and she shut her eyes tight when she felt him massaging her scalp.

  He bent forward and pressed his lips against the center of her throat. And as she swallowed, and exhaled, his mouth opened even wider and his teeth sank deep into her skin.

  Her legs rattled against him as his mouth moved from one side to the other; her pelvis swiveled allowing her to feel the size of his erection as it grew.

  She moaned as he dropped his hands around the bottom of her dress and began lifting it around her waist and eventually over her head. He tossed it to the floor and stared at her in awe as she donned a pair of red panties with a matching red bra.

  She slinked her body against his and wrapped her hands around him. Lifting to her toes, she wrapped her teeth around his bottom lip and smiled. “Take me to bed,” she told him.

  And without a single drop of hesitancy on his part, he
lifted her from the floor and carried her to his bedroom this time.

  Once he placed her at the center of the bed, he quickly began removing his shirt, dumping it to the floor alongside his pants. When he was in nothing but briefs, Vanessa sat up and trailed her finger around the rim. Maurice bent down to kiss her as she tucked her fingers beneath and pulled them straight down his legs and to the floor.

  She pulled back from him only briefly to look up into his eyes. He removed her bra and panties and fell on top of her on the bed.

  “Love me,” she said.

  And as he pushed himself inside of her, remembering his home; as he licked and bit and nipped her skin; as he dug his fingers deep into every available part on her body; as he rocked her slow and steady, held her long and tight; as he called out her name, drowning out the soft noises she made while calling out his in unison; as the sweat dripped from his forehead and landed on her breasts; as their tongues meshed and molded, twisted and turned, caressed…

  It’s exactly what he did.

  After collapsing onto the bed, exhausted, Vanessa rolled over to the other side of the bed with the intention to wrap her arms around Maurice, but he was already out of bed again and moving across the room as if he was in a hurry to get the hell out of dodge.

  Vanessa was suddenly nervous.

  She wrapped the sheet around her body and jumped up quick.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He rested against his dresser, then turned to look her in the face and smiled. Her heart skipped a few beats, knowing that he had only ever smiled like that just for her. She brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

  “The night you had me arrested--”

  She cringed and turned away. “Why do you have to ruin such a damn good moment by bringing up that awful night?”

  “It wasn’t all so awful until then, was it?”

  She rolled her tongue across her bottom lip and tried like hell to hide her smile. “It would’ve been better without Nathan here, but that goes without saying.”