by Rebel Hart
“If you can just get Connor out of the mix, you two will be much better off.” She scoffed. “Hell, half the country will be much better off.” Then she slapped my shoulder. “Show me this girl. Cherri. You’ve talked about her nonstop.”
She wasn’t telling any lies. Sometimes I felt like as long as I said Cherri’s name from time to time it would keep her near me somehow. It was just like when I was behind bars, I did whatever I could to remind myself of the incredible woman that I once had. With any luck, she’d have moved on by now, but I’d always love her. Nothing would ever change that.
I navigated through Nathan’s friends list to Cherri’s page. There were no new pictures of her, and the most recent one was the selfie she took on the day of Nathan’s birthday party first semester. Her signature, long blond hair and crystal blue eyes were just as perfect as I remembered, and I would have given up anything in order to just hold her and talk to her.
“Oh wow,” Felicity said. “She’s a knockout.”
“Tell me about it,” I replied.
“Oh my god,” Felicity whined, then she pinched my cheek. “Look at you. Your expression got all soft and sweet. I didn’t think you were capable.”
“Shut up,” I grumbled, but a small smile came to my face anyway. “You see her. How could I not?”
“I hope I get to meet this girl someday. I gotta give her my mom once-over. How does your real mom feel about her?” Felicity asked.
“Adores her. You would too. I know it sounds cheesy and cliche, but she’s perfect.” Felicity put her hands to her mouth and I closed the computer. “Alright, we’re done with that.” I missed Cherri too much to continue having that conversation anyway.
“Do you feel better at least?” Felicity asked. She walked from behind me and went and sat down on the couch, with Concrete following her in search of head scratches.
“I wish I could call Nathan,” I said honestly. “The last time we spoke, Connor’s goons grabbed me, and he probably thinks I’m dead.” I looked at Felicity. “Nathan’s careful. He has to be using an untraceable phone at this point. I won’t share any information. Just call him from your phone and tell him I’m okay.”
“It’s not a good idea, D,” Felicity said. “Even if one person immediately knows that we contacted them, if Connor has people watching them, which he no doubt does, if they change pace at all in a way that would suggest you’re okay, they could snatch him, and then they’re just a call log away from knowing where you are.”
“We’ll tell him to del—”
“You know as well as I do that anything is recoverable on a phone,” Felicity said. “Unless you have a hyper hacker at your fingertips.”
A friendly face immediately came to mind. Technically, Nathan did have a hyper hacker at his fingertips, but whether or not the two of them were even speaking to one another was a mystery to me. If he was working with Sicily, he’d probably already advised against answering unknown numbers, so it probably wasn’t going to work to call from Felicity’s phone regardless once I thought about it.
“Yeah,” I settled for.
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said, and her voice had true anguish in it. “Hopefully we’ll be done with all this nastiness soon and you can get back to your family.”
“Well, even if I can go back to Cherri and Nathan, I still won’t have Venom. That sucks,” I said. “I wish there was a way to get him out too.” Felicity went eerily quiet at that. She took a deep breath in, opened her mouth like she was going to say something, and then stopped short. “What?” I asked.
“Well… There is a way… technically, but…” She looked at me sadly.
“But what?”
“You… love Venom, right? Like a dad?” Felicity asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good, then hopefully what I’m about to tell you won’t change your opinion of him.”
I shook my head. “After everything he’s done for me and my shit-for-brains sperm donor, that’d be pretty fucking difficult.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” She lifted the remote from the couch and turned off the television which had been droning in the background. “Venom would kill me if he knew I was telling you this, but I think you deserve to know. You and his paths did not cross by chance.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There’s a lot that you don’t know about how you and Venom found one another, and I have a funny feeling you aren’t going to like this story.”
6
Cherri
Once Brayden agreed to tell us what he knew, he asked for a few minutes to speak with Kyle alone. That was nearly an hour ago and Nathan and I were still standing far enough back to not be invasive, waiting for any sign of our ride being ready to go.
It was the first time I'd been alone with Nathan since his attack in the bathroom, and that must have been what was on his mind as well, because he was keeping his distance. For as awful as that was and as much as I wasn't about to give Nathan a total pass for raping me, I didn’t really blame him for what happened. His father was as sociopathic as they come, and I knew firsthand the pressure he was under. Deon told me that Nathan had been under that level of stress since they were kids. He barely handled it as a teenager; how on earth he managed to survive up to that point was beyond me.
“Are you uncomfortable?” Nathan asked finally, breaking the silence between us. “Around me, I mean.”
“I won't lie, it’s a little weird, but I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean,” I replied.
He tipped his head back and forth. “In a strange way, that's better than I thought.” He turned to look at me properly. “Would it make you really uncomfortable to be alone with me for an hour or so?”
“You mean an additional one?” I asked.
He chuckled. “Yeah. By design.”
“Um, I think that would be okay.”
His eyes widened, but then softened. “Cool. Let's give these two some space and I can explain a little bit.”
“That'd be good.”
Nathan lifted a hand and called out towards Kyle and Brayden, “Hey, we're gonna Uber back. Just come along when you're ready.”
Kyle stood up and shook his head. “No, sorry, here we come.”
“Seriously,” I interjected. “It's fine. Take your time.”
Kyle looked at Brayden, then us, then Brayden, then us, then quickly shuffled over. He dragged his keys out of his pocket and handed them towards Nathan. “Take my truck at least.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “You good?”
“Yeah, I'm good." I set a hand on his arm. "Go. What's a few more hours?”
“Thanks, Cherri,” Kyle said, then with one look back at Nathan, he ran off to return to Brayden, where the two easily fell back into conversation. At one point they smiled at each other, and my heart leapt.
“Okay, let's go fast, because I need to understand,” I said.
Nathan and I turned our backs to Kyle and Brayden and made our way back to the parking lot of the park. We climbed into Kyle’s car, this time with Nathan in the driver’s seat and me in the passenger’s, and then Nathan started up the car.
“Question. Why did you say we’d be alone for an hour? Your house is only like fifteen minutes from here,” I asked.
Nathan looped his hand over the back of the passenger’s seat in order to back up. “Yeah. I was hoping we could just cruise and talk for a bit? I won’t put us in the disgustingly awkward situation of sitting in a room face to face or anything. This way the road can be a nice buffer.”
“Oh. Sure.”
Nathan pulled out of the parking lot, but instead of turning right, which was how we would get to the highway to head back to his house, he turned left. I recognized it as the direction one could go to take the backstreets towards North Postings. It was how I got home every day when I was still living with Ciara. The backstreets into North Postings instead of the highway were about a 20 minute trip, and then taking the highway from North to South Postin
gs would be about 30 minutes, bringing us close to that hour.
Once we were well on our way, Nathan cleared his throat. “So… Thank you, for being willing to talk to me. I know there’s some things that I have to say, I just haven’t had the courage to say it.”
“I know. I wanna say some stuff too,” I replied.
“It’s weird, right? It doesn’t feel like we’re exes, but all that nastiness is still there. Not hostility, just muck. I know that’s mostly my fault, but you know, Cherri. I think you’re pretty amazing. You’re strong and smart and funny, and even in the midst of all this shit, you refused to break. I broke several times. I don’t know how you do it.” It shocked me to hear a stream of such positive, genuine compliments coming out of Nathan’s mouth. He didn’t even seem like the same man that I’d dated for four years. “Sorry. Did I start off too strong?” he asked when I didn’t respond.
I shook my head. “No, I just… You’re different. No offense, but the only time you used to compliment me like that was when you wanted something from me. You’re so, I don’t know, genuine and down to earth all of a sudden. I honestly think that’s why being around you guys is making me so uncomfortable. You’re totally different people.”
“So’re you,” Nathan responded.
I watched the blur of colors pass outside the window. “Well yeah. It’s this feeling, deep in my gut, that if you all were the people you are now and I was the person I am now, back when we all met, we wouldn’t be friends at all. It’s hard. Like I’m forcing it.”
“I mean, you’re probably right,” Nathan said. “But I think that’s true for all of us, not just you versus The Royal Court. I mean, you saw Kyle and Brayden back there. Part of the pull for me with Brayden was that he’d do whatever I wanted. He’s a whole person now. I feel like I’m just now getting to know him.”
“What is that about?” I asked. “Are they…?”
Nathan blew out a sigh. “Yeah. Kind of.”
“Really?” I turned to look at Nathan, shocked. “Okay. I’m sorry if I go a little gossipy right now, but fuck, I did not see that coming. Who started it? What happened? How? I didn’t even know either of them, ya know, swung that way.”
“I think the general consensus at this point is that Kyle is pansexual and Brayden is gay, but not out. I actually couldn’t say for sure who started what. I was going through all of my own shit with my mom dying and my dad cutting out, Deon disappearing. Plus I was trying to navigate this really weird relationship with Nikita. I didn’t think we were even going to make it. While all that was going on, one day I show up and I notice they’re giving each other these looks and Kyle is talking about how often the two of them talk and see each other. It was clear out of the blue. Then when prom came, Kyle asked Brayden to be his date.”
My jaw dropped and I hated that I cost myself seeing that. “Seriously?!”
“Yeah. At first it seemed like it was just a joke. We were talking about going as a big group or as pairs, and Brayden got kind of snippy because, you know, Nikki and me. Alistair and Avery. Jaxon and Colette. All couples, so even if we went as a group, it’d be obvious what was going on. Kyle up and asks him to be his date. We kind of laughed it off at first, but Brayden didn’t think it was a joke ever and got really upset about it. When he stormed away from the table we could all see it, Kyle was shattered, like he’d just been rejected. I asked him about it later that day, but he wouldn’t say much. It was Avery who told me she thought Kyle was pan, but didn’t think he liked Brayden. Kyle later told Nikki that wasn’t true.”
“Why would you guys think he didn’t like him if he asked him to prom?” I asked.
Nathan’s face got a little more sullen. “Turns out, Brayden was in love with me.”
I went silent with shock as hundreds of tiny moments clicked into place. Random fits of what could only be described as jealousy, and any time Brayden would get all too excited to hang out with Nathan. It never clicked with me because I never even considered Brayden in that way, but once I thought about it, it occurred to me that I never once saw him date or even look at a girl.
“Wow,” I murmured. “You know, that actually makes so much sense.”
“Yeah. Nikki said the same thing. I had no clue. It wasn’t until just last week that Nikita even told me that. I guess Kyle realized it and tried to serve as something of a distraction and ended up catching feelings.”
“Aw. That’s kind of cute actually.”
“I think so. They’re good for each other, but it seems like, whether out of guilt or something else, Brayden just won’t put his wall down. I hope it works out for them though.”
“Me too.”
Silence filled the car for a few seconds before Nathan started up again. “Cherri, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for… what happened. In that bathroom. I…” His hands strangled the steering wheel. “I have nightmares about it. Fuck, I shouldn’t even be saying something like that to you. I’m not the victim, but I hate that I hurt you. Maybe I didn’t have feelings for you like the way I did for Nikita, but you were there for me. Always.” I was surprised when tears filled the corners of his eyes. “Losing you felt like losing a part of myself and I didn’t know how to reconcile that with the fact that there was a woman I was really in love with, or the fact that I’d hurt you so badly, and never really treated you like a person.”
There were tears in my eyes before I could stop them. “Nathan.”
“Sometimes, I have these dreams, that Deon is back and the four of us do like brunches and shit.” He laughed as a few tears slid down his face. “I love you, Cherri. I really do. You’re like family to me. Not being able to just talk to you last semester killed me so much more than I was even willing to accept myself. I just wanted to tell you that I was sorry and make it up to you somehow. Not that something like that can ever be made up. Even Nikki struggled with it. Knowing what I’d done to you. It was only after Sicily told her that you don’t blame me that we made it. You’re the reason I get to be with the woman that I love, because your depth for forgiveness is so much more than it should be.” He took a quick moment to glance over at me. “Thank you.” Then his eyes were right back on the road.
“Fuck!” I snapped. “You made me cry, you dick.”
“I know, I’m sor—”
“No!” I smacked his arm. “Not then, right now. What Sicily told Nikita is absolutely true. I’m not going to tell you what you did was okay, because it’s not, but I even told Deon that I didn’t feel like that was you. The shit your dad put you through, no person should have to endure. You just snapped. The fact that you didn’t snap sooner is amazing. I don’t know how you do it. There were times when I saw glimpses of who you really are and I thought to myself, ‘If I got this Nathan all the time, I’d be happy with him.’”
“You have to stop. Your blind compliments are making me feel more guilty.”
“Sorry, but it’s true. You said you aren’t the victim, but you are, Nathan. I’m really sorry about your mom, by the way. Your dad, he did a number on all of us. As far as I’m concerned, it was Connor that did that to me.”
We pulled up to a stop light and Nathan looked over at me. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.” Then I threw out a fist and clocked him across the face.
“Fuck!” he screamed. “Shit, that hurt!”
“Now we’re even,” I said.
Nathan blinked a few times to clear his vision. “It still feels like I’m being let off the hook a little too easy.”
“I could hit you again if you want.”
“No,” Nathan replied quickly. “Please don’t.”
I smiled. “I’m sorry too. For the past six months. For what I did to Colette and for… allowing Nikita to kick my ass. I saw the look on her face when you covered for me. I’m sure that led to some unpleasant conversations.”
“Yeah. We didn’t talk for a little bit after that. I deserved it though. Because I wasn’t being honest with myself about my complicated feelings towards you,
it led to me hurting Nikita, which she didn’t deserve either. It was… a trainwreck.”
“I was so angry about losing Deon and about knowing he was out there and I couldn’t get to him that I let that blind me to the fact that, regardless of the fact that we were all being kind of fake, we were friends and had been for years. You and me aside, Avery, Alistair, even Colette. They’d all been such amazing friends and I blamed them for something they couldn’t control any more than I did. I hate the monster I was.”
“Everything happens for a reason though,” Nathan said. “If you hadn’t been like that, I don’t think we would have had the room to grow into the people we’re supposed to be. Any of us, not us or you. We’re all raw and new now. It’s going to take some doing to gel again. It’s been awkward for all of us. Don’t worry.”
“Good to know,” I said. Nathan pulled onto the freeway to get from North Postings to South Postings where Nathan’s house was located.
For the first time since reuniting with The Royal Court, I was actually comfortable. Despite the fact that Nathan and I had never been totally honest with one another about who we were, there was a closeness that was bound to develop with how much time we had spent together and how intimate we’d become. It felt like I’d finally gotten a piece of my old life back, and though I didn’t have romantic feelings for Nathan by any means, it was nice to have him as a friend again.
If Nathan and I could make nice, the rest of The Royal Court should be a cakewalk.
We continued to catch up and laugh over the few good old times we had until we finally made it back to his house. Brayden’s car was already parked in the driveway, and as soon as we pulled up, everyone came running out, led by Nikita, followed closely by Avery.
Nathan and I climbed out of the car, and Nikita threw herself into a hug with Nathan while Avery wrapped her arms around me. “Where were you?” Avery yelped. “Kyle said you left the park before they did. We were terrified. You weren’t answering your phones.”