Captive Hearts

by Harper Bliss

  “It must be after ten if you’re coming out with the hard questions,” I joke.

  Laura looks at me. “Why is it a hard question?”

  I push out my bottom lip. “I don’t know. Because I don’t think about things like that, I guess. I’m shallow that way.”

  “You’re anything but shallow, Tess. I’m just curious and I’d like to know who in their right mind ever had the audacity to dump you.”

  “Okay.” I lean back in my chair, thinking. I’m not really one to dwell on past heartbreaks, but there is one instance of it that I’ve always carried with me as a reminder of how things should never turn out again. “Her name was Chelsea. She was in my English Lit class in my first year at college. She came from this big family in Florida and, especially next to me, she was tiny. But full of life, you know? A real spitfire. I fell in love with her. Like really properly in love. But, as you would have it, she was straight. Which didn’t stop me falling for her harder every day, no, every hour we spent together. We hung out a lot, studied together… I watched her drunkenly make out with way too many guys at parties, until one night we just ended up in bed together. It just happened. One of those college things, I guess. But of course my immature, vulnerable heart didn’t see it that way.” I pause, look at my empty glass, decide against opening another bottle of wine because I like the way Laura is looking at me right now. She might well be the world’s greatest listener. Her head is tilted, her eyes focused on me, but not staring too hard.

  “I fell deeper in love, of course, and we embarked on this sort of half-baked relationship. We kept it to ourselves, though I did tell Megan, of course. Who, she would have me state for the record I’m sure, told me I was out of my mind falling for a girl like that. Of course, I wouldn’t have any of that. Megan didn’t know what she was talking about. She didn’t know what it was like to be me blah, blah, blah. You know how it goes at that age. I was smitten, well and truly head-over-heels in love. And it was amazing for about five minutes. We had some amazing sex, though I may be remembering that wrong and might have painted it in a better light than it was over the years. Anyway, she was really sweet to me behind closed doors, to the extent that I actually believed it could work between us if I gave her some time. Because this was all new to her, she had to get used to it, she’d never been with a girl before.” I exhale deeply. “I imagine you can guess the rest.”

  “Tell me,” Laura urges, in a voice so soft and gentle, just the sound of it can undo all the wrongs I’ve experienced throughout my entire life.

  “She met a guy. A stupid beefcake wrestler from Denver. Ears like this.” I cup my hands behind my ears and make them stick out. “Abs for days. Three times the size of her. I have no clue what she ever saw in him, but, well, she dumped me for him. Oldest story in the book. A lesbian college affair gone wrong. It might have made me a big fat cliché, but gosh dang it, it hurt like hell. I saw them everywhere, of course. Every single day was a reminder of how I wasn’t with her anymore. It was pretty awful for a while. Don’t tell Megan she was right, by the way.”

  “Don’t tell Megan she was right about what?” Out of nowhere, Megan appears behind us. I was so wrapped up in my story that I didn’t hear them come home.

  “Nothing,” I say quickly, but she’s my sister, and, automatically, I share, anyway. “I was just telling Laura about Chelsea Watts, my college crush.”

  “Ah, stating very clearly I was right about that whole shebang, I hope?” Megan asks.

  “The kids go down well?” Scott asks with his usual matter-of-fact-ness, ignoring his wife.

  “Fine,” Laura says. “Good as gold.” It’s a blatant lie, the way they were fussing and trying to manipulate us into letting them stay up past their bed time.

  “Guess what!” Now that my sister is here, I need to share the next bit of information as well. “Laura asked me to move in with her.”

  Megan looks from me to Laura, then punches the air as though she has just won a big prize. “That’s awesome news.”

  “You’re just saying that ’cause now the kids can each have a room at Earl and Maura’s,” Scott says. “Whereas I, your beloved brother-in-law, am genuinely happy for you.” Awkwardly, he pats Laura on the shoulder. “Congratulations,” he says.

  “We’d better drink to that,” Megan says, and holds up the empty bottle of wine.

  “You know that it’s very unethical to pay babysitters in wine, don’t you, honey?” Scott says, then goes inside to fetch another bottle.

  Thirty-Five

  Laura

  ONE YEAR LATER

  Tracy’s parents were Catholic, but an altogether different kind of religious than my own. They didn’t raise her in the church, nor did they break all ties with her when she came out. They proudly attended our wedding ceremony and didn’t have a kind word to say about my parents’ absence. When the time came for Tracy to be buried—a process I was not very involved in—they opted for a Catholic ceremony and cemetery.

  Arriving at the graveyard now, the religious symbolism jars me only for an instant, but it doesn’t bother me. I had to give up my hatred for the religion that banned me from my parents’ lives a long time ago, before I let it consume me. But, walking along the gravestones adorned with crosses and words of how great the buried were, does make me balk at the hypocrisy of it all. As though death makes everything right.

  It’s the first time I’ve set foot here and Tess is holding on tightly to my arm. After Tracy died, I was such a wreck, such a shadow of a woman, I didn’t have it in me to come here. First, I thought I had no right after giving her that final push—the very last time someone touched her when she was alive. Then, after the anger had set in, I didn’t want to visit anymore. Not long after, I left for Texas. But I know I need to do this now. I didn’t come to Chicago for this purpose alone, but I discussed it with Tess, and it’s an integral part of our trip. Though I never had the guts to stand up to Tracy when she was alive, I can still do so now. It won’t change anything. What happened will still have happened. Her parents will still hate me for the rest of their lives. Our friends, the ones who didn’t know, will never fully understand what went down that night. But to me, it will make a difference. I’ve come here to put the past behind me.

  When we arrive at the spot where her remains are buried, at first, I don’t feel anything. It’s as though that veneer of cold hard steel has wrapped itself around my heart again, shutting everything out. The sun is high in a blue sky. The grass is so green. It’s a beautiful day, and Tess and I could be tourists visiting the graves of the handful of famous people buried here. But we’re not. We’re here for Tracy Hunt. My deceased wife. The woman whose life I took, but who robbed me of life long before that.

  Tess doesn’t say anything, just leans into me a little closer. I left Chicago over a year ago and have told Tess everything I remember. From the very first time I met Tracy, with her asymmetrical bangs, loud gestures but soft voice, to the last time I saw her, her skull cracked and blood pooling around her dead body. And I have cried. I have cried all the tears that wouldn’t come since Tracy died. Her death still haunts me—I will never forget the instant, the shocking silence of it, the immediate knowledge that something terrible, something irrevocable has happened. When you take a life, no matter the circumstances, your own life changes. But the difference is that, no matter how different it is now—and thank goodness for that—my life does go on. I’m alive. I’m still breathing. And I have Tess.

  “Do you know that Al Capone used to be buried here?” I say, just to say something, to fill the silence hanging over us. “Not anymore, though.”

  “She was a criminal too, Laura,” Tess says. “She committed crimes against you.”

  But I never filed one single police report, I think. I know better than to say it out loud. Heck, I even know better than to still think this way. I never breathed a word about their daughter’s true nature to her parents. As far as I know, they’ll go to their own grave believing it was a s
tupid accident, one of those inexplicable twists of fate that life can throw at you. I felt insurmountable guilt for my parents-in-law’s grief for the longest time, because to have to bury a child is not something you can recover from either. But Tracy was their child, without them she wouldn’t have existed, and if they ever knew about her uncontrollable temper, they never let on.

  “She was many things,” I whisper, while I feel that cold fist around my heart unclenching slowly. “I lost respect for her long before she died and I think that was the hardest. Bruises heal, but to live with that toxic mixture of utter disdain and constant fear. It didn’t make any sense. It was like being two people. She was two people, but so was I. I was never a push-over before her. I didn’t let my parents walk over me when they wanted to change me, I just left. But maybe I used up all my leaving power by doing that. And every time something happened, I vowed I would leave her. I would pack my bags the very next night, the next hour, but I never did. Because then Tracy became her other person again, that person I had fallen in love with, and through some strange, defensive trick of the mind, I did respect her again. I respected her remorse. I respected what we had between us, the love that didn’t seem to languish. Being in an abusive relationship is just one endless mind game. In the end, she did manage to change me into someone I wasn’t. Or I was deep-down all along. I don’t know.”

  “I know who you are, Laura.” This is what Tess is so good at. She takes my claims about myself, my guilt and the disdain I have for my personality when I was with Tracy, and tosses them out the window by replacing them with words like this. “You are brave and strong and beautiful and kind-hearted. That’s who you are.”

  “That’s who I am with you.” I turn to face her and kiss her in front of Tracy’s grave, while realizing that this was the reason I needed to come here. To be able to do this. The ultimate act of looking at the future, and no longer be ruled by my past.

  Thirty-Six

  Tess

  FOUR YEARS LATER

  “If I had known in advance you could hear the roar of the crowd from here, I would never have moved here,” Laura says the exact same thing she says every Friday night the Cougars have a home game.

  “You can hear it all throughout Nelson, babe.” I have my same-old reply at the ready. “Rub my feet?” I bring my left foot to her lap.

  “Can’t you see my lap is taken?” She rubs the back of Socks’s head, who instantly pushes himself against her hand. That cat was an attention whore from the very beginning. The biggest difference between when Laura just brought him home to her Aunt Milly’s house back in the day and now, is that now he’s a lazy fat ginger and no longer that spritely kitten with the high-pitched meow who slept on Laura’s pillow.

  “Can’t you see I’m carrying our offspring?” Ostentatiously, I pat my giant belly.

  “How much longer until I have a cousin to play with?” Emma asks. She’s sitting with us on the back porch of our newly-built house, instead of attending the Cougars game, and pissing off her father greatly in the process.

  “Three more weeks,” I say.

  “I’ll rub your feet, Auntie Tess.” She has the sweetest smile on her face.

  “That’s very nice of you, Emma, but rubbing pregnant spouses’ feet is not a niece’s job. Why don’t you go pry Socks from Auntie Laura’s lap, so I can put my feet there.”

  Emma jumps up. Chunkie, our chocolate labrador, follows on her heel—that dog would follow her to school after she has spent the night at ours. In her rough and careless seven-year-old manner, she liberates Socks from Laura’s lap. Socks is good-natured enough to be toyed with like that, but Chunkie gives a jealous little bark.

  “Daddy said that if Socks has babies we can have one,” Emma states proudly.

  Laura and I both burst out into a giggle. Scott can be so cruel sometimes—funny, but cruel to his daughter.

  “Emma, darling,” Laura begins. “Socks is a male cat. He’s not going to have babies.”

  “But you and Auntie Tess are two ladies and you’re having a baby,” she says matter-of-factly.

  I wonder what else my brother-in-law has told her. I’m too exhausted by being with child to explain my pregnancy to Emma. She’s too young to understand it, anyway.

  “Maybe Chunkie and Socks can have a baby as well,” she adds, not giving up hope just yet.

  “That would be a really cute animal,” Laura jumps in. She has finally started rubbing my feet and it feels so good I could do with some peace and quiet right about now. I’ve started respecting my sister much more for going through this three times in her life.

  I close my eyes and block out Laura and Emma’s chatter, and think about the child we’re about to have. The new life we’ve created. I’m almost forty-three. Once Laura and I concluded that we both wanted a child, we had to act immediately. We didn’t have the luxury of time to analyze every emotion, worry or doubt. We just had to go for it and do it. We set the process in motion long before we married a year ago. Another leap of faith. And here we are. In our house on my land, which is now also her land.

  I look out over our back yard, which isn’t fenced off because there’s no one around—and Chunkie isn’t the kind of dog to stray very far from his home. It’s just fields and Texas flatness and ever-changing colors. A good place to raise a child, I think. After all, I was raised in this town, on a ranch only a few miles away, and my family is here. My born-to family and my brand new family.

  “Auntie Tess?” I feel Emma’s little hand on my arm. I guess I’d better start getting used to interrupted rest and endless questions.

  “Yes, darling.” I look into Emma’s bright young face. She’s the spitting image of Megan and, therefore, also of me. For a split second, it feels like looking into the future, and looking into our daughter’s face.

  “What will you call the baby?” she asks.

  The questions are getting more persistent and inquisitive. I glance at Laura and, every time I do, now as much as when we first met, a warmth spreads underneath my skin. We only just decided on a name a few days ago. Laura wanted to start on the design for the birth announcement and she claimed that was impossible without a firm decision on the name.

  “Your cousin will be called Milly.” After Laura’s aunt without whom none of this would have happened, I think. Without whom we wouldn’t be sitting here right now, counting the weeks until our child is born.

  “That’s a pretty name,” Emma says. “Mommy says that she and Daddy…” Emma starts chattering again, as much talking to Chunkie and Socks as to us, and I look over at Laura again. Once we really started thinking about it, coming up with a name was easy. Milly—not short for anything, just Milly—Douglas-Baker will arrive in this house in less than a month’s time, and then our lives will start all over again.

  Laura never had to say it out loud, but I know that one of the reasons why she wanted to have this child is because of some cosmic awareness that if you take a life, you must create a new one. Perhaps, once Milly is born, she can consider herself even with the universe as well.

  As for me, I’ve felt even with the universe since the day my cart bumped into hers at the supermarket.

  “I love you,” Laura mouths, and gives the ball of my foot an extra good squeeze.

  In response, I give a deep contented sigh, as I smile at my wife and overlook our Texas land.

  * * *

  THE END

  Seasons of Love

  About the Book

  Is age really just a number?

  Alice McAllister is a successful solicitor who likes a quiet, disciplined life. But when her business partner Miranda forces her to take a vacation at her holiday home in Portugal, the presence of Miranda’s daughter Joy turns Alice’s world up-side down.

  Despite their age difference, Alice and Joy embark on a fiery holiday romance… until they have to return home to London.

  Will Alice be able to forget about Joy and what she has awakened in her? And how can she face Joy’s m
other without guilt after such a passionate summer fling?

  For my wife, who supports and loves me through all the seasons.

  Chapter One

  I try to recline my seat, but as soon as I push the button and apply some pressure, I feel the knees of the passenger behind me resisting my attempt. Perhaps I should have listened to Miranda when she told me to book a business class ticket. “But this is not a business trip,” I’d said, to which she’d just responded with a sigh. Not that I would ever buy an overpriced ticket just to have some more room on any trip—or that I ever go on business trips.

  “Some more wine, Ma’am?” a female member of the cabin crew asks.

  “No, thank you.” I hand her my empty plastic cup. I’ve had two units already. Despite this being the start of a long overdue holiday, I won’t let go of my health principles so easily.

  I close my eyes, the back of my seat straight again, and think about the two weeks of absolute nothingness stretching out in front of me.

  “At the end of your life, you won’t wish you had worked more, Alice,” Miranda said a few months ago. “As your partner in this company, I demand you take three weeks off this summer.” She’d offered me her phone and had me flick through some pictures of blue skies and a stylish house a few minutes from the beach in Quinta do Lago. “Consider it booked. How does August 1st till August 21st sound?”

  “Three weeks? Have you lost your mind?” I’d glared at her, but had difficulty keeping my gaze off her phone. The last picture she’d shown me was of the swimming pool, which was bathed in the most exquisite light, the water a reflection of all things summer. It didn’t help that she came to me with this on one of London’s more dreary days. “Fine, but it’ll have to be two weeks. Three is just ludicrous.”