Lessons for Lexi

by Charlene McSuede

  “I’ll pay for the dry-cleaning.”

  “What?”

  “For your tux.” Her eyes were serious. “I vomited blood on it.”

  “Alex, I don’t care about the suit.” He plopped back in his seat. “It was my own damn fault anyway. I shouldn’t have upset you.”

  “You didn’t know what would happen.” Lexi lay back in her hospital bed, for the first time noticing the pain in her stomach was different. It wasn’t a constant bubbling burn. Instead, she felt like she’d been cut open. “What did they do to me?”

  “They had to remove three bullet fragments and sew an ulcer shut in your stomach. They couldn’t remove it, because apparently, you don’t have enough stomach left to remove.” JT leaned forward. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “JT, I need to tell you something. I’m not who you think I am.”

  JT gave her a gentle smile. “I already know who you are.”

  Lexi froze, “you do?”

  “I was there when you ran into your father, remember?” He kissed her hand. “The old guard is in an uproar over having the lost Berringer heir in their midst and not knowing it. They’re probably kicking themselves over the missed opportunities to get you married off to one of their grandsons.”

  “Oh, that.” Lexi tensed up. “I’m not really the lost Berringer heir. I gave that up when I left. I don’t want my father’s money.”

  JT crossed his arms over his chest. “No, but you need it. Alex, you’re in the hospital following major surgery with no insurance. The doctor had to remove bullets from your stomach. What kind of stuff are you messed up in and why won’t you let him help you?”

  “He doesn’t want to help me. Just let it go, ok?” Lexi’s sudden urge to confess died when she realized how much explaining she would have to do and how many wounds it would open up.

  “We’re not done talking about this,” JT informed her as Raj came in the room.

  Raj was holding two drinks. “You can’t eat regular food yet, but they said you can have a milkshake.”

  “The strawberry kind?”

  “Yes,” Raj handed the McDonalds cup to Lexi and she took it happily.

  “When can I leave?”

  “You’re here for a week.” JT explained, ignoring her annoyed look. “After that, you’re supposed to be on bed rest for 2 weeks.”

  “Seems excessive.”

  “They removed bullet fragments Alex.” JT reminded her. Lexi rolled her eyes and took a sip of her milkshake.

  Lexi noticed her IV. “Does this thing have wheels?” Raj plopped down on the bed next to her and changed the channel to the TV.

  “You’re not supposed to be moving yet.” Raj informed her absently.

  “I’m a fast healer.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  JT licked his lips and tried to steer the conversation back to her health, as opposed to how soon she could start breaking her medical restrictions. “I was wondering if we need to get a nurse for you when we go back to Althea’s.”

  “I don’t need a nurse.”

  “You need whatever I tell you that you need.” JT stood and stretched, the hospital chair obviously starting to make his back hurt. “Radford is going to help Althea get settled at her new place while I take care of you at home.”

  Lexi’s eyes widened. “Althea is moving out? Then what’s the point of me being there?”

  “I’ve decided that I need a live in companion. “JT leaned over to kiss her. “Now that you’re awake, I’m going to go get some coffee. I’ll be right back.”

  ***

  Lexi turned to Raj urgently. “Now that he knows my real name, it won’t be long before he connects Alexandra Berringer to Lexi Logan, and he’ll know about that whole mess with Ronnie.” She shook her head. “I can’t do it again Raj.” Her voice was low and more than a little desperate. “I can’t keep going through the same thing. If the press gets wind of this,” her chest started to get tight and she tried to slow down her breathing, “it’s going to be a damn circus. I can’t go through that again.” She gestured to her stomach. “It nearly killed me the last time.”

  “What are you saying Lex?”

  Her eyes brightened. “Let’s go to Montana.” She clutched Raj’s arm. “Like that time we worked on a horse farm! It will be great. We’ll get to…”

  Raj suddenly sprung off the bed. “Stop it Lexi. Just stop.”

  “What?”

  “Trying to run,” Raj let out a defeated sigh. “It’s always your first instinct. You never face anything. Your dad, your future, Ronnie’s death,” he finished quietly. “We need to face this.”

  “Raj, I can’t.” Lexi shook her head. “I just need time, to clear my head. We can deal with it all later.”

  “We can’t keep dealing with things later, Lex. You’ve been clearing your head for three months.” Raj shook his head. “I’m starting to think that Andrew was right. You need help Lexi.”

  “I could always count on you to be the voice of reason, Raj.” Lexi and Raj both turned to the door, to where Andrew Flaxman had appeared, choosing to schedule his appearance right as JT walked back in the room.

  Chapter 11

  JT arrived in the doorway right as Andrew Flaxman was appearing as well. He stared at Andrew in confusion. It had been so long since he had spoken to him, so long since he’d thought of Lexi Logan, that he’d almost forgotten about them both entirely. Seeing Andrew Flaxman outside of Alex’s room was completely unexpected.

  “Andrew?” He gave the surprised looking man a brief handshake. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Nor I you.” Andrew turned to Lexi. “What’s JT Hussner doing here, Lexi?”

  He turned to Alex, who was managing to look even smaller and frailer than she had only a few minutes before. He absently wondered if she’d noticed if they started adding protein powder to her milkshakes. “Lexi?” He focused on the woman on the bed. Her mismatched eyes that he’d come to love, the stubborn set of her jaw. He saw past what he’d seen before. Noticed the perfect shape of her lips, the impossibly dark eyebrows that perfectly matched the impossibly dark hair beginning to show in her hairline. She looked down, seemingly nervous at the eye contact.

  And everything clicked into place.

  “You’re Lexi Logan.” He put a hand to his forehead. “I am an idiot. How the hell did I miss that?” His gaze turned hard. “What was this? Some kind of prank?” He glared at her. “Was this some kind of joke?”

  JT was filled with rage. She’d been playing him for a fool the entire time. The girl he though he knew was Lexi Logan, the obnoxious radio host. His rage was spurned by the strange sense of loss he felt over realizing that impossibly sweet, quirky Alex wasn’t real. Instead, she was the sharp as a tack, abrasive radio host who had apparently cooked up some scheme to trick him. He barely heard Lexi call his name when he turned on his heal and walked away.

  He didn’t know where he was going when he got into his car. For awhile he sat behind the wheel, wondering what to do. After ten minutes of staring blankly in front of him, he drove out of the parking garage on autopilot. He ended up at his office. There were still lights on in the building, even though it was the Sunday of a holiday weekend. The doorman let him and JT found himself sitting at his desk, not even entirely sure how he got there.

  He pulled out Lexi Logan’s folder. There was an 8 by 10 publicity photo of Lexi in the front, looking impossibly beautiful, as well as completely cold and unapproachable. He flinched. His Alex hadn’t been beautiful. She’d been adorable. He preferred adorable.

  He started flipping through the pages. Clippings of her, advertising revenue brought in by her, marketing research done on her. She’d gotten more than one award and the file for the past year was thick with records on the rise of Lexi. The file for her first year was significantly thinner. He was surprised to learn that her first show had actually been a two man show. Lexi had worked with a man named Ronnie Redbagger for an affiliate station of K
POX called KLV, out of a smaller Miami office. There were a few pages of market research for the now defunct network, as well as a newspaper clipping that had surprised him.

  Lexi Logan had been engaged to her co-host. JT wondered if Lexi had gotten rid of excess baggage to make her climb to fame. She wasn’t married and she was running a one man show. The woman who lied to him was easily capable of ditching the dead weight. There was nothing that would appease his curiosity in Lexi’s file. He powered up his computer and typed Ronnie’s name into the search engine.

  “I figured I’d find you here.”

  JT looked up to find Radford standing in his doorway.

  “The cleaning lady let me in,” he explained as he took a seat across from JT. “And before we get started, you should know my name isn’t Radford.”

  “No, it’s Raj. You look different, but I remember you.” JT sighed. “So you were in on it too?”

  “There was nothing to be in on JT. Lexi’s lies had nothing to do with you.”

  JT snorted. “Then why was she lying?”

  Raj nodded at the computer. “Why don’t you look at the search results for the name you just Googled? Then you can tell me.”

  JT rolled his eyes, expecting to pull up a poor little rich girl story about a broken engagement. He focused on the screen and for a second, couldn’t make sense of the words he was reading.

  The press had called it the “KLV Massacre.” It was a bit of a stretch. Only two had died, while one was critically injured. He read through the story. A mentally ill man, who had a habit of calling the show, to go off on long disjointed rants, had shown up at the start of a workday. He had shot two radio hosts before turning the gun on himself. Police searched his residence and found a cache of news stories and tapes of Lexi and Ronnie, along with a long manifesto indicating he believed they were in league with the terrorists to take over the country. As he’d put it in his letter, he thought he had no choice but to ‘neutralize the threat’.

  Lexi had survived. JT rubbed his eyes as he thought of Lexi lying in a hospital bed, the bullets from the shooting only recently being removed. A sting of guilt hit him for leaving her there alone and scared. Her behavior made a lot more sense to him. If the same thing had happened to him, he doubted he would have reacted half as well.

  “The girl you met,” Raj informed him, “that’s Lexi. The Lexi on the radio, that Lexi was fueled with bitterness over what happened to Ronnie. She lost a lot that day. It took her a while to come to terms with it.” Raj shook his head. “By the time she did, it was too late to go back.”

  “How can she stand to go there everyday?”

  Raj sighed. “After the shooting, KPOX offered Lexi a full time spot in her old time slot. I thought she’d say no, but she accepted. I think she felt like she owed it to Ronnie.” Raj shook his head. “Problem is, she was supposed to avoid stress. In the beginning, I think the show was cathartic for her. Towards the end, it was making her sick and depressed. She was throwing up before and after every show. I even had to shut her down once when she had a panic attack on the air.”

  “Why the hell is she doing this to herself? Why doesn’t she just quit and give up the show?”

  “I don’t think she can.” Raj responded simply. “That’s why she’s been such a pain in the ass. She wants someone to take it from her so leaving won’t be her fault.”

  JT nodded. “Done. She’s fired.”

  Raj sat up straight. “What?”

  “She’s not going on the air anymore. She’s going to kill herself.” JT stood. “She had a damn ulcer at the age of 28 for god’s sake. She’s so stressed out, she’s making herself sick.”

  “What about your advertising campaign?”

  “I’ll think of something else,” he walked towards the door. “You coming with me?”

  Raj stood. “Where are we going?”

  JT opened the door. “To the hospital to fire Lexi.”

  ***

  Lexi sighed as she slid into her jeans. After Raj had left, she’d gotten a long winded lecture from Andrew, along with a promise that he would be back the following day to go over some ‘legal things.’

  She didn’t really want to know what those legal things were. Not that she had any intention of staying around to find out. The second Andrew had turned the corner, Lexi had maneuvered her way out of bed, yanked out her IV and found some clothes folded in a neat pile in the closet. JT must have brought them for her. Her jeans slid up easily and she was a little surprised to learn that she had lost weight in her short stay. She buttoned her jeans carefully, trying to avoid her stitches.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Lexi spun around, mouth dropping open as JT appeared in her hospital room door. She looked down at the jeans she was zipping under her hospital gown, realizing she was caught red handed. “I was cold?”

  JT was standing in front of her in a couple of quick strides. Lexi let out a little squeak as his hands traveled to her waistband. She stood in front of him as he unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans, then yanked them down to her knees.

  “Take those the rest of the way off.” Heat flooded Lexi’s face but she bent down to do what he said anyway. He didn’t sound like he was in the mood to be argued with. She clumsily kicked them off, at least relieved that she’d been wearing panties when he’d pantsed her. “Get back in bed.”

  Lexi trudged back to the hospital bed she’d abandoned, clutching the gown shut behind her. Right as she was walking past JT, he surprised her by gripping her elbow. She dropped her arms in surprise and JT took advantage of it long enough to give her a hard smack on her backside.

  “You owe me about twenty minutes of that as soon as your healed.”

  If possible, Lexi’s face burned even brighter and she silently prayed for a case of diabetes that would keep her stitches from heeling until she was 90. She silently got back into bed, watching as JT pressed the call button to tell the nurse she’d ‘accidentally’ knocked her IV out.

  He sat in his chair and continued to study her. “I understand why you lied to me.”

  “Raj talked to you?” She questioned without looking up.

  JT nodded.

  “I wasn’t about you, JT. I actually wasn’t even thinking I’d run into you. Then, you showed up on the street that day. I didn’t recognize you, but Raj did. As soon as I recognized you, I took off, with plans to just avoid you.”

  JT smiled. “Your mysterious appointment.”

  Lexi nodded. “Then the next day, we ran into you again. I realized that you didn’t recognize me, and you would probably never recognize me. And Althea’s seemed like the perfect place to disappear.”

  “That’s what you wanted?”

  “More than anything.” Lexi shrugged. “I figured it would be easy. Me and Raj, staying with Althea, who couldn’t even see us. I figured you were getting her companions because you didn’t want to visit her.”

  JT looked down, slightly shamefaced that Lexi hit the nail on the head. He had planned on dumping Althea off on a couple of strangers so he didn’t have to deal with her.

  “Then you started showing up all the damn time. Things got messy.” She blinked back tears. “I was afraid you would hate me when you found out and I was planning on leaving before you ever did.”

  “Do you do that every time something upsets you?”

  “What?”

  “Run.”

  “Yeah,” Lexi nodded. “It’s kind of my thing.”

  JT crossed his arms as he leaned back in her chair, obviously a little surprised by her honesty. “You know you’re doing it?”

  “I’ve been doing it since I was 17.”

  “Why?”

  Lexi sighed. “According to my last court ordered shrink, I’m uncomfortable with confrontation.”

  JT tried to hold in a snort, but couldn’t.

  “No, really.” Lexi shook her head, and plopped back on the pillows with a huff. “The stuff you hear on the radio, it’s not me. I mean, i
t was in the beginning. I was really angry over Ronnie’s death. But then, I got over my anger and the show didn’t feel the same.” She shrugged. “So I faked it.”

  “Oh, about your show,” JT crossed his ankle over his knee and gave her a steady look. “It’s cancelled. I’ll talk to your agent tomorrow, but the settlement offer for the cancellation will be generous.”

  Lexi let out a whoosh of air, despite her surgery, feeling lighter than she had in years. “Thank you.”

  After that, the nurse came in to reattach Lexi’s IV and she faded off to sleep, the lightness still there. She wasn’t afraid, because she knew when she woke up JT would still be there.

  ***

  Lexi was incredibly grateful for JT the following week. He handled things with Andrew. Andrew hadn’t been thrilled with losing his largest client, but when he saw the contract breech offer JT made, he was mollified. His ten percent was easily enough to retire on. Not that he ever planned on retiring.

  He handled the paperwork for her at the hospital and scheduled a nurse to stay with Lexi when she got back to Althea’s house. They argued about who was going to pay, and eventually settled on an even split. Of course, JT was handling the finances so she had a feeling that split never occurred. Apparently, he considered it ungentlemanly to let a lady cover her own abdominal surgery and recovery.

  On the day she was released, JT was there early. “How much work are you missing?”

  JT watched her get settled into the wheelchair for the ride to the parking lot. “I’m the boss. I don’t work, I delegate.” He winked and checked his cell phone, standing up as Lexi was rolled out of the room.

  They drove back to the house in comfortable silence. Lexi was still loopy from painkillers and watched the passing scenery with utter fascination. “I love how you feel like you can see forever here.”

  JT nodded at the steering wheel. “It is pretty. Don’t imagine you got that much in Miami.”

  “Everything was too perfect there. I like it when things are pretty, even though they’re not trying to be.”