Unstoppable (Fierce)

by Voight, Ginger

  She stood rigid in the doorway as she glared at him. “You tell us. Since you seem to get so much joy out of sharing this story.”

  “She wanted to move in with me, but clearly that wasn’t going to work. I never wanted kids either, and we were all of seventeen. This meant she couldn’t get an abortion without parental consent.”

  My eyes shot to my devout, Christian, by-the-book mother. She had dropped her head and was staring at the floor as Shane continued. “So she got a little back alley help. Then she got an infection. Then the choice whether or not to have children was out of her hands.”

  I pulled my hand from Jace’s to cover my mouth. What the hell was he saying?

  “When she got together with your dad, she kept mum about her sordid little past. If he knew that we’d been bumping uglies, he’d have never married her. Instead he thought she had just lost the natural baby-bearing lottery and suggested they adopt a child instead. He was so caring and understanding,” Shane added with a snide grin.

  “But adoption was going to take too long. So they got a surrogate instead. Someone else got fat and stretched out, Joe got his baby and Marianne got… what was it you called it, hon? A prison sentence?”

  I stared at her through tears. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Shane pushed the footrest to his recliner down with a slam, which made Jace straighten as he perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to kick Shane’s arrogant ass in. “You can blame me for that. She had a chance for freedom, but by the time Joe took his dirt nap, I wanted to try family life out for a bit.” His eyes glittered as he stared at me. “Didn’t last long, though.”

  Jace stood. “So that means you forced yourself on Marianne as well as Jordi. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Shane was nonplussed. “Take a seat, cowboy. This is family business.”

  I stood next to Jace. “Apparently this is not my family.” I turned to the woman I always knew as my mother. “I guess it never was.”

  When her eyes met mine, I understood in a second that we had not been so far apart. She had an Eddie of her own, and no self-worth whatsoever to cut him loose. Her demons had made a permanent home in her head. She hadn’t spent all those years punishing me for my shortcomings… she had punished me for hers.

  In the end she was just as much a victim as I was.

  “I guess this explains everything,” I said softly. Now I knew why she resented me, I knew why she’d allowed Shane to move in, even though she probably knew better than anyone my accusations were true. She hadn’t protected me because she couldn’t protect herself.

  I turned to Jace. “Let’s go.”

  Before we made it to the door, Shane called out, “Gonna leave without giving your Uncle Shane a hug?”

  That was all it took. Jace swiveled on his heel and stomped over to where Shane scrambled from his chair. He grabbed the older man by the neck. “You worthless piece of shit,” he growled as he flipped him end over end, planting him on the floor. Jace held him down with the heel of his artificial leg on Shane’s throat.

  “You think you got away with something,” Jace said. “But you didn’t. You couldn’t. No matter what you did, she triumphed. You stole nothing. You corrupted nothing. She’s still able to love and to trust, despite everything you did to destroy her. I hope you watch every milestone she hits as she rockets into the stratosphere. And I hope you choke on it,” he said through clenched teeth before he kicked him away and joined me at the door.

  Before we left, I turned to Marianne Hemphill. She said nothing and neither did I.

  It was a poetic footnote on our relationship.

  Right as we walked out onto the porch, we ran right into Eddie as he was ambling up the steps. Jace pulled me to him and walked me right past the man who had made our lives a living hell for so long.

  We stopped at the cemetery that afternoon, so I could say goodbye to my dad. Though losing him meant I lost the only true family tie I had in my childhood, I was so glad he never lived to see what became of the family he had treasured. Jace stood by quietly as I sobbed on my knees at his gravesite. The loss was even more painful now than it had been when I was six.

  There was a big difference between feeling alone and truly being alone.

  After my tears were exhausted, I joined Jace in the rented car pointed out of Oswen. We didn’t stop driving until we reached Des Moines, where we stopped for the night before flying home.

  Where that would be now, I had no idea. The only home I had left was the one in Jace’s arms, and that was the only place I wanted to be.

  We lay beside each other on the hotel bed. Jace’s embrace was strong and true. I cried for a while, before getting lost in my thoughts. My history had been rewritten in an afternoon, and I didn’t quite know how to process it.

  Jace let me sort it through. Before we went to sleep, he finally asked, “So what are you going to do?”

  I ran my finger along his dad’s wedding ring, still dangling from the gold chain around his neck. Maybe one day I would wear it again, but the next time it wouldn’t be as a substitute for anything else. I wanted to go to him free and clear of any baggage from the past. I owed him that much, especially after all we had been through. “I can’t go forward if I have so many questions in my past.” My eyes met his. “I have to find my real mother.”

  He nodded and he took my hand in his. “Not without me,” he announced.

  “Never again without you,” I agreed as I snuggled close into his arms.

  It would be the journey of a lifetime, and I had no doubt that it would be epic simply because we were finally free to embark on it together. I was writing my tale one page at a time, but I no longer wrote it alone.

  ###

  Jordi’s epic journey continues in “Epic,” Book #3 of the Fierce Saga, due out in November of 2013. Enjoy Chapter One as a preview of what lies ahead for Jace and Jordi:

  CHAPTER ONE

  Los Angeles, California

  May 23, 2012

  “Tell me about Shane.”

  I bit at my fingernail, tearing off metallic polish in the process. This must be what shame tastes like, I thought with a perverse inward chuckle as I stared at the middle-aged man who issued the uncomfortable request. We sat in a non-threatening room decorated in muted, comforting hues, with affirmations on the wall and children’s books scattered across a table in the corner. It was a safe space, so there was no way he could ever understand how dangerous this simple directive was for me. This wasn’t just asking some random fact about my past that I could emotionlessly dictate and analyze like some piece of arbitrary data. This was asking me to open a door I had slammed shut and bolted, packing nearly a hundred extra pounds of fat in front of it so that I would never – ever – have to face it.

  It evoked a name that, whenever it was spoken, rendered me that same terrified six-year-old, lying in a darkened room, naked from the waist down, whose innocence was repeatedly shattered with only the sliver of moonlight to bear witness. Worse, every time I spoke about this devil, he appeared. He didn’t even have to be in the same zip code and I could still feel his sweaty, warm hands on my skin, and see that hungry look in his eyes that threatened to chew me up and swallow me whole.

  “Don’t be scared, now. Big girls don’t get scared. Show Uncle Shane how much you love him.”

  Wisps of long-buried memories floated to the surface, so real it was if his breath was still warm and moist in my ear. Most days I could fake that it happened to someone else entirely, but not now – not when someone looked me in the eye and asked me what happened nearly fourteen years ago.

  This wasn’t just a question. It was a lasso that yanked me back in time until I was at my most helpless and vulnerable.

  And since the question was a threat to my personal comfort, anyone who posed it became a threat by default. Up until this point, Dr. Challis had been perfect. His gray-haired, milquetoast demeanor wasn’t threatening in the least, even with the way his studious blue eyes watched ever
ything behind dark, horn-rimmed glasses. This grandfatherly man was as gentle as Mr. Rogers and as benign as a teddy bear. From the moment we met I knew I was in the hands of a consummate professional. So at my very first appointment three weeks before I had laid it all bare on the questionnaire, listing everything that I thought a therapist could help me fix.

  I knew eventually I would have to tell this man, this kind and unsuspecting stranger, my deepest and darkest secret. His eyes would watch every emotion cross my face as I said, out loud, what that pig did to me, hoping my skin wouldn’t crawl right off of my bones in the process. Even though logically I knew that what Shane had done was not my fault, I still harbored the shame of these horrible sexual experiences. It had damned me in some way, sullied me… made me lesser than. These sick and perverted actions still involved my body, and parts of me that I shared with no other person aside from my love, Jace Riga.

  There had been a reason for that.

  I couldn’t trust just anyone with what little good remained.

  In fact, I could barely mull over what had been done to me in the safest spot of all – between my own two ears. I couldn’t imagine reporting it to another person in a clinical setting, as if that would make the whole thing an easier load to carry.

  We talked about the binge eating, and that had been hard enough. We talked about the abuses I suffered at the hands of Eddie, which had been more difficult still. Now he wanted me to tell him, in vivid detail, what Shane had done to me… to my body… to my spirit.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I shook my head. “I’m not ready to talk about Shane.” Maybe not ever, I added to myself. “It’s over. It’s in the past.” And that’s where I, for one, wanted to keep it.

  Being face to face with the asshole just scant weeks before had been enough, thank you very much.

  “I think the very fact that it scares you is reason enough to talk about it,” he reasoned. “Especially if it’s still driving self-destructive impulses.”

  Self-destructive impulses? What self-destructive impulses? Just because I could eat a whole cheesecake in one sitting, loaded with strawberry sauce and whip cream, or anything to ease those memories back into their hole with the cunning use of fat and sugar, was simply a coincidence.

  The fact that I wasn’t stuffing my face to dull the ugly feelings I was experiencing indicated to me I was on the right track.

  “Then let’s talk about Jace,” Dr. Challis said, switching tactics.

  “Jace is wonderful,” I said at once. “He’s almost done with his first album. He’s planning another tour by the end of the year.”

  “Will you go with him?”

  I paused. “I want to.”

  He was quick to pounce on my hesitation. “But…?”

  I shrugged. “I’m still getting over the last tour,” was all I could say.

  “Let’s talk about that,” he said. “What was that tour like for you?”

  “Considering I was married to Eddie the whole time, pretending to the world that I was someone I’m not, it was a chore. And it backfired anyway, because people are determined to hate someone like me,” I said, thinking of the paparazzi group PING and the blogging king of pop culture, Miles O’Rourke, both of whom had had a field day over the drama that surrounded the struggling tour.

  “What does that mean… ‘someone like you?’”

  I shrugged again. “You know. Not like Shelby. I’m not thin. I’m not beautiful. I’m an easy target. The butt of the joke.”

  “Is that what you want to be?”

  “Of course not,” I snapped.

  “Then why let it be your identifier?” he challenged.

  “I didn’t label myself. These were the labels given to me.”

  He eased back against his chair. “Let’s say I had an open bottle of poison so toxic that if it merely touched your skin it could kill you. If I tried to hand this to you, would you take it?”

  “Of course not,” I repeated.

  “Then why accept the same poison from these other people?”

  I sighed. He just didn’t get it.

  He sat up and leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees. “When people look at you, they don’t see you. They see a reflection of themselves, through their own prisms, for their own purposes. For some, this is a good thing. For Alicia,” he reminded me of the teenager I had honored at the Fierce finale, “you are a role model of everything she can become. For critics, you’re a reminder of what they can’t or won’t become. The labels people throw at you has less to do with you and more to do with their own limitations.”

  “The only way they win is if I accept them,” I repeated dutifully, thinking of Vanni Carnevale and his well-meaning advice. “Yeah, I know that in my head. And if the critics weren’t so loud, I could possibly convince my heart, too.”

  “You’re a bright light,” he pointed out. “The brightest lights always attract the most bugs.”

  I had to laugh. Dr. Challis was a good man with good humor, it was one of the reasons I decided to stay with him rather than insist upon a female therapist, like I originally wanted. I knew one day I’d have to dig deep and deal with the Shane stuff. I just wanted it to be on my timetable.

  Today was not that day. Tomorrow didn’t look good either.

  But as long as Dr. Challis didn’t push the subject, we’d be golden.

  “So have you found anything new about your birth mother?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve hit another dead end. Ancestry records only go so far with limited data, and since Daddy had no living relatives by the time I was born, it’s nearly impossible to track down information without going back to my moth… I mean, Marianne. God knows I don’t want to owe anything more to that bastard, Shane.” The minute the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. I didn’t want to have to explain why I wouldn’t want to see either of these two people again in my life, even if it meant I couldn’t fill the holes in my family tree.

  I’d do it alone or I wouldn’t do it at all. And that was just the way of it. I had hired a private investigator and I had done all the DNA tests. Time, and science, would have to take it from there.

  Thankfully he let the topic drop our remaining twenty minutes together. Instead we talked about the possibility of my going on the road again with Jace, and more importantly – how I felt his skyrocketing popularity since the tour, even with the scandal of shacking up with a married woman.

  He suddenly became the most eligible man in music, despite having a significant other. I guess for many fans, I was a far less threatening obstacle than Shelby had been.

  Best of all, I was proof he liked fat chicks. This was good news for every “average” groupie daydreaming about getting her chance with a rock star. It suddenly vaulted Jace back into their league. And I knew this because I had scoped the Internet thoroughly since the tour, to ensure that his reputation hadn’t been tarnished by his affiliation with me.

  Instead, his groupies zeroed in on Project Lay Jace. They figured if he was stuck with me, anything lower than a size 18/20 was an improvement.

  They were, in fact, quite vocal about it.

  Since Jace never read his own press, he was blissfully ignorant of it all. I inhaled it like it was covered in whipped cream.

  It was all I really could gobble up, since I was back under Maggie’s wing. There were no opportunities to fill my self-loathing with cookies or soda, so I masochistically read anything and everything on Jace and me in cyberspace.

  To say it was self-defeating was a bit of an understatement. There was a lot of commentary on Jace and me, and it had cast me as the villain in the scenario. Where he became more desirable, I ended up shouldering much of the blame for my failed marriage, Shelby’s heart attack and the troubles we had had on the tour. So my sales stagnated where Jace’s skyrocketed. Thanks to my fairy godmother, Iris Kimble, I still had a lucrative clothing endorsement with the plus-sized store Tempestuous, so my celebrity still had value. She even landed me a
voiceover gig for an animated feature to be filmed in the fall. But I knew it was going to be an uphill climb. I was going to have to work my ass off to ensure I could make a name for myself as an artist outside of Fierce.

  Every time I thought I had “made it” I ended up having to essentially start over from scratch.

  This made turning down my usual vices for comfort even more difficult. As I drove from Dr. Challis’s office on Wilshire toward the studios in Hollywood, I passed every single one of my favorite drive-thru temptations with great effort.

  “Tell me about Shane.”

  Can I order a double-double with an extra large order of fries and a chocolate milkshake first? Therapy with food service – now that was a million dollar idea.

  Just thinking about Shane left me feeling dirty. I could feel his hand in my hair as he pushed my head toward his lap. I could feel the calloused fingers as they slid up my bare leg, under my nightgown. My skin crawled so much it was as if he was right next to me in the car. I could feel those eyes on me, watching me, daring me to fight him.

  I shook my head from such thoughts as I pulled into the studio parking lot. I had other things to do. That life was not mine anymore.

  That Jordi Hemphill was no longer. Someone new and powerful had taken her place.

  Right?

  I slung my handbag over one of the chairs as I entered the control room. I had nearly finished my album, there was only one track left to record and it featured one of Graham’s other top-selling artists, Griffin Slade, as the accompanying musician.