Until We Fall (Trust Duet Book 2)

by Edyn Michaels

  “You… how can... why are you…”

  She sputtered the words, looking around the room, as if looking for someone to help her, to hold her up, to be the backbone she was needing at that moment.

  “What, Aly?”

  “How can you say I aborted her when you accepted a fucking payment from my dad to keep your damn mouth shut while I carried her, gave birth to her, and gave her up? Where the fuck were you? I needed you, and you weren’t there.”

  “What payment? There was no money offered, and had there been, I would probably have killed whoever offered it.”

  My voice lowered, dangerously low. If she knew me, if she ever knew me, she should have known that this was a warning sign. I had been told in the past that I was sometimes like a wild animal, ready to pounce on its prey.

  “My dad told me. He told me he offered you twenty-five thousand dollars to walk away and you happily took it. That you couldn’t deal with being a dad at seventeen. So, I carried her. Alone. I went through labor. Alone. And I signed her over to a family that seemed okay. Alone. I’ll ask you again. Where the fuck were you?”

  I sat there, breath evading me to the point where I was almost choking with its absence. I supposed you could say that I was hyperventilating, but I would like to keep it that I was choking.

  “You had our baby.”

  Not a question. A statement.

  A statement that changed my entire universe. Everything I had believed for over a decade seemed to crumble before me.

  Everything.

  “You knew I had.”

  “No. I hadn’t.”

  She looked at me, absorbing my words. Trying to understand what I was telling her but not telling her. I knew she had such a strong bond to her dad, and I didn’t want to be the fuckwad who tried to come between them. But, he was such a pompous piece of shit, that it was hard to not just automatically throw him under the bus, run him over, throw that mother fucking bus in reverse and back over his useless corpse.

  “No?”

  Her voice resonated with heartbreak and hope. She didn’t meet my eyes. It was as if this tough as nails chick couldn’t let me see her face. Like, if I saw deep in her soul, I would see her truth, and she would see mine.

  “No. Aly, I wanted you both. I wanted you both so bad.”

  She dropped her head, staring at her hands in her lap, her fingers squeezing themselves so tight, I was concerned briefly that they might break. She shook that beautiful head, and once again, for a moment, I saw my high school love, not the one who broke my heart.

  “Jamie…”

  “We had a girl? I always thought it would be a girl. I don’t know why, but I always thought it would be a girl. Did you hold her? Were you ever in contact with the family?”

  The words just spilled out. It was as if the filter I had held up over my entire life had somehow been lifted, even if only for a second with this woman who use to be the girl who was my universe.

  She nodded.

  Not a word.

  Just a watery nod.

  “I always thought it was a girl.”

  A statement. A second statement. I’d said it already. I was fucking mumbling at this point like a goddamn idiot. But, damn. A girl.

  I should have been there for her. I should have held her hand as she gave birth. I should have held my daughter’s hand as she cried, as she took her first steps. I should have been the one to take my hands off of the bike the first time she tested out her independence.

  How old was she, my daughter? Thirteen, maybe fourteen. My mind was racing, trying to pinpoint the date, the age, and falling short. She might have a boyfriend. Shit. She might be old enough to date. If she did, I would hunt down that boy and slaughter him. I would gut him.

  The rush of paternal over-protectiveness flooded me, shocking me, invigorating me. I wanted to get my hands on my baby girl. MY baby girl.

  “My dad lied.”

  Her shoulders slumped forward, defeated.

  She believed me.

  Holy shit, she believed me.

  I knew I was telling the truth, but for her to believe me, that meant everything.

  “Aly, I’m sorry. If I’d known, I would have been there. I wanted her. I wanted you. I had no idea. Al, I would have married you, raised our baby girl with you. I would have held you both so close. I would have threatened the life of any boy who was like me and gave her a second glance. We would have grown old together. We would have been that couple everyone would have referred to as ‘cute’ as we walked down the street, hand in hand and in matching outfits.”

  She sobbed.

  Her heart and soul had been broken and gutted in front of me, laying splayed out in front of me, bleeding out in front of me. I never thought I would have hurt her. If you had told seventeen-year-old me that this would have happened, that my words would have caused her tears, I would have cut your dick off.

  It would have happened.

  I didn’t know how it happened, but I ended up on her side of the table, holding her close. She fit in my arms like she did so long ago, yet we both had changed so much physically that it still fit uncomfortably. When the past crept up on you, it both felt like home and like the unknown at the same time.

  Jennifer crept into the back of my mind, and suddenly I felt as if I had been cheating on her, although we weren’t anything. We weren’t dating. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. Hell, we weren’t even friends.

  Why did I feel like I was cheating on her, holding Aly close, as if my life depended on it?

  Because she was your perfect nightmare.

  My arms dropped to my side, unbidden. As if they understood. Aly was my past, Jennifer had the potential of being my future.

  “You didn’t take money? You didn’t agree to walk away?”

  Years.

  So many years wasted because we both believed the evil entity that was her father’s lack of a soul. All those years, and here we were, both of our hearts split open, our emotions raw and bleeding out in front of each other and the people around us.

  “No. Never.”

  I didn’t plead my case. I didn’t beg her to believe me.

  No.

  I just sat there, looking her in the eyes, dropping my walls for a moment, so that she could see into my heart and soul, to know that everything I said was the truth.

  “Why?”

  She whispered the word. One heartbreaking word.

  My head dropped forward, once again not wanting to speak to the darkness that filed her dad’s soul. I was a dad. I had a daughter.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He lied to me.”

  “Yup. He lied to me too.”

  Those words were filled with pain, but I was sure they spoke to her splintered soul. I needed her to know that her pain was shared.

  We sat quietly for a few moments, each wrapped up in our version of misery, our own personal tortures that had held us together and filled us with anger and distrust for so many years cracking slightly, allowing light into the darkness.

  But with that light came huge, gaping holes of pain. Stabbing pain that tore at our cores, tearing at the fabric of who we had become.

  “You never took money? You never signed away your rights as a father? How’d you start your little motorcycle empire?”

  I couldn’t help but get my back up a little at her condescending tone when talking about my business.

  “First, back off a bit on the royal bitchiness when talking about my business, okay?”

  She cringed and looked a little sheepish.

  “Sorry, old habits die hard. I’ve got to get used to you not being the piece of shit asshole who signed our love and daughter over for twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Yeah, I get it, and I have to get over the fact that you’re not actually a murderous bitch, but at least try to talk to me without looking down your nose in the process, would you?”

  At the words ‘murderous bitch’ she sat up straighter and started lo
oking for the exits in the room, her eyes darting around wildly.

  “Chill. Okay, do you remember the shop where I was working in high school? Carl helped me learn how to restore bikes. That bike I’d had, the one I’d worked on for so long? I was offered what I thought was a huge amount of money to sell it. So, I did. Carl helped me learn to save my money, and I bought another clunker, restored and sold that one, too. Before you know it, he and I were selling about as many bikes as we were doing maintenance on, and we thought we should make a go at having a dealership.”

  I shrugged my shoulders at her, realizing that I had given her the most condensed version of my past possible.

  “The rest is history.”

  She nodded slowly, absorbing everything. She looked as if she had been slapped across the face, and I supposed that in a way, she had. So had I.

  Everything, everything we had been told and believed for the past decade or so had shaped us. Shaped our feelings, shaped our interactions, shaped the way we saw other people and interpreted their intentions toward us.

  Everything had been wrong.

  “So, where do we go from here?”

  Her eyes searched mine cautiously,

  “We don’t.”

  Her eyes widened, not expecting the answer that was given. I had spoken softly, yet her reaction was if I had shouted.

  I shook my head, trying to figure out a way to figure out how to explain.

  “I will always love the sweet girl from my childhood, my blonde-haired beauty. My Aly-gator. But, she doesn’t exist anymore, except in the memories I rarely indulge myself. Maybe I’ll allow myself the luxury of remembering her more now, I don’t know. But I don’t know Alicia. I don’t know this person who is a raging success in her business, who is her father’s righthand man. I don’t know this woman who can cut grown men down with a look and walk away easily. You’re not the same person, and neither am I. So, we don’t go anywhere from here together. We go separately and figure out who we are now that we both know the truth.”

  She took a long, slow sip of coffee that had been forgotten during our conversation and had undoubtedly gone cold. She was giving herself time to answer, to think, to digest, to strategize.

  “That makes sense. I get it. I mean, I knew Jamie, a tall and lanky boy with an easy smile and a heart of gold. I don’t know Jamison. Although, I don’t think it would be too much of a hardship to get to know you.”

  She grinned wolfishly over the coffee cup, the first light moment between us in a forever. I couldn’t help myself, I just laughed. She joined in, and the tension of our conversation must have been incredible, because the hysteria overtook us, making us the spectacle in the room.

  “Oh, my god, I needed that.”

  Aly, I mean, Alicia, struggled to catch her breath, and she smiled easily at me.

  “Thank you, Jamison. Thanks for finding me and hashing this all out. It will take me a while to get used to not hating you, but I’m glad I have a reason to start trying.”

  She stood up and walked over to me with her arms outstretched. I didn’t know what to do. I was not a hugger. But I found myself raising up without meaning to and pulling her into my arms. Her head rested right under my chin, like it always used to. She fit to my form like she did in my dreams.

  Have you ever had a memory become reality? It was the most disconcerting feeling having your reality and history collide. For a moment, a very brief moment, I allowed Jamie to hug Aly, I gave them both that goodbye they should have had naturally.

  “Goodbye, Jamie.”

  “’Bye, Aly.”

  She turned and walked away, not the high powered clicking that I’d seen her do before, but the normal walk of a woman who wasn’t being chased by demons.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Dane

  “Who is Mari?”

  Fuck.

  Me.

  Great question though, like, yeah… who is Mari?

  I knew I loved her. But did I love…her. I loved the woman she let me see, but I had a feeling there was a version of her she showed the world, and a version that she held tight to herself. I felt like I got to see the real one, but I knew that when I saw her with Kaylie, there was a somewhat different person.

  She was freer.

  Yeah, that was it.

  I pictured the two of them, laughing with each other as Mari shimmied and shook to some unheard song, music that existed only between the two of them. Their connection was stronger than the one I enjoyed with Phoenix, and that was saying a lot. They weren’t related, but truthfully, I would have thought that they were twins by the way they thought the same way. I’d caught times where they would lift their heads and look at each other and laugh at each other over a joke they must have sent to each other telepathically.

  I wanted that Mari. I wanted her to feel that safe with me, that comfortable with me. I wanted her to trust me.

  I had to earn that trust. I’d broken it.

  Me.

  I promised in one breath to hold her together when her pieces broke apart, and in the next moment I had exploded her into a million shards.

  A woman who had let me know of her trust issues. A woman who hadn’t fixed those issues. A woman that I had failed.

  Trust.

  Fuck.

  Something that was so hard to earn, yet so easy to destroy. I wish she’d had the magical power to see inside my head, to see inside my heart, to know what I felt. To know how I felt.

  Instead, I used another woman’s body to try to get her out of my system. I became the type of person I loathed in order to try to exorcise the demons of her memory.

  The look on Janelle’s face as she left my bedroom would haunt me for a lifetime, I was certain. Sadness, disappointment, self-loathing, pain.

  I had misread everything. I had thought we were on the same page, that it was a casual encounter, and she had read it as a completely different thing. She thought potential, I thought momentary.

  I thought back to when I had ‘friend-zoned’ Mari from the get-go. It was my attempt to take what was a definite attraction and see if it had the ability to become more. I had seen relationships that started as friendships grow into lasting long-term things, and at my age, that’s what I wanted.

  Then, the one time I just give in to my testosterone, I cause someone pain who didn’t deserve it.

  What the fuck.

  I pulled out my phone and sent a quick text to Janelle.

  You deserved better. I’m sorry.

  I needed to do that. I needed to be able to look myself in the eyes when I shaved in the morning. I needed to look my mom in the eyes at dinner. I was better than this person that I was allowing myself to become.

  I grabbed my mail on my way back up to my apartment and sorted out the bills and junk mail before coming to a fancy envelope that was clearly sent by a female. I mean, it was frilly as shit.

  You and a guest are cordially invited

  to celebrate in the epic love story of

  Kaylie Mathilde Jacobson

  and

  Mariana Veronica DePina Andrade

  As they join their hands and hearts in

  holy matrimony.

  I almost dropped the wedding invitation.

  Kaylie was engaged?

  She invited me?

  A slow smile formed on my face, and I said a quick prayer of thanks to the big guy and to Kaylie.

  My chance. My only chance to get my girl back, came in the form of a wedding.

  I grabbed my cell phone out of my back pocket and pulled up my brother.

  Dude. I’m going to get her back.

  I quickly filled out the RSVP card, putting it down for two. I would find someone to go with me, either my brother or one of my sisters, and slipped it back in the envelope.

  ???

  Mari’s best friend is getting married. I got an invite.

  Wait, the lesbian?

  Dude, don’t be such an ass. She’s more than just a lesbian. She’s an amazing
person, who is driven, who has accomplishments…

  And she likes pussy. Please, do not ever underestimate that amazing accomplishment of hers.

  You’re fucked up, you know that, right?

  I shook my head at my brother. He really was an ass. I mean, yeah, my brain had been known to short circuit once or twice over the idea of hot lesbian action, but these were people we were talking about. Kay and Mariana were awesome people in love who were going to get married because they were incredible and amazing and all that shit.

  My brother was an ass.

  Please, if you love me at all and value our brotherhood, take me as your plus one.

  Oh hell no.

  The thought of my brother going to a wedding, even a wedding of a man and a woman, terrified me. Add in the fact of it being a wedding for two women and that is a hard limit.

  I couldn’t trust him to keep his damn mouth shut, even in a nursing home filled with ninety-year old women. I half expected that if we were at a lesbian wedding he would be damn near heckling during the whole ceremony, and encouraging a voyeuristic show at the reception.

  You are the worst brother that ever existed.

  I shook my head as I sat down on my couch.

  Okay, I had been given this gift. It had all but fallen in my lap. How was I going to turn this gift into the action I needed to bring Mari back into my arms?

  “Dane?”

  What the fuck?

  “Mom, what are you doing here?”

  “Son, you really should check your phone more.”

  I glared down at my phone, only to see that she had texted me about a half of a second before she waltzed in.

  That was how she rolled. She claimed that she never walked in our homes unannounced, and technically, she didn’t, because she contacted us usually as she was getting on the elevator or walking in the entrance. Just enough notice to not be considered intrusive… in her mind.

  You know that dead bolt I mentioned that I had not given mom the key to? Yeah, it would have helped if I actually used it.