11
Wesley
When I got back to the cabin that night, my feet itched with that familiar urge to flee. My heart still burned with a kind of strange, sad rage. Quintin had looked at me like a stranger, his fist lifted and his anger radiating toward me. I’d known, in the back of my mind, that asking Remy to carry my child this way wasn’t exactly going to thrill Quintin. But having him find out like that, with the contract flapping through the air between us?
It wasn’t ideal.
At the cabin, I pressed my elbows against the railing and gazed out at the water, which frothed against the sand. At thirty, I knew the subtle intricacies of a woman’s cycle: knew that it’d take a few weeks to learn if our hours of fucking would bring a child into the world. At times throughout the previous night, I’d gazed into her eyes and felt this incredible depth of emotion. As if the entire universe, time and space, was stretched out for the two of us. In the back of my mind, as I’d drifted off to sleep, I’d wondered if I’d have a child with anyone else. Remy and I had always been written in some sort of star system.
Not that I believed in fate or in any of that “meant to be” bullshit. I wasn’t necessarily a man of science, but I’d always considered myself a realist, a man who understood that, due to the frigidity of time, nothing lasted forever. Especially nothing as loose as love.
I lifted my phone and typed out a message to Quintin. “Hey man. I really didn’t mean to upset you back there. If you’ll meet me for a drink in the next few days, I can explain everything. And don’t blame Remy for any of this. As always, it’s me. It’s just fucking me.”
I sent it into the ether, tapping my phone against the speckled beard growing across my cheeks and chin. Hunger filled me, and I turned into the cabin. Immediately, the flowery smell of Remy wafted into my nostrils, and my cock strained against my jeans. Images of her lips—so supple, so goddamn thick, wrapped around my cock as her tongue slipped up and down the veins—filled my brain. I staggered to the fridge and drew out a beer, huffing.
I so yearned to call her, then. To tell her that I didn’t want to wait till we knew or didn’t know. I wanted to hold her tightly against me, to press my hands softly along her stomach and wait, wishing, hoping.
Of course, Quintin didn’t contact me that night. Nor the next. Nearly a week went by with hardly a message sent from anyone I’d known in my many years on and off the road. Quintin had been the one mainstay of my life. Always checking in, ensuring I had a place to sleep. That I’d eaten in the past few nights. Now, with Remy’s name scribbled across the goddamn baby contract, I was trash to him.
Several nights, I stayed up till three, four o’clock, half-dreaming of Remy. My thumb had swiped across the screen of my phone hundreds of times, hunting for her number. But I always held back, knowing that drawing her closer to me would poison us. I couldn’t mix this contract with pleasure, with feeling. And I knew I needed to step back, to give her time and space to work on her script.
It was what her life was meant for. Not me. Not us.
Although I still had that image of her burrowed in the back of my brain: pregnant, stretched out in the sunlight, her belly easing up beneath a white gown. I so yearned to cozy up beside her, to whisper in her ear: “You’ll be safe with me. Both of you. I won’t leave you again.”
But dammit, I would. I always did. I’d darted across the country, a wild man, afraid of commitment. What made me think that this would be any different?
It was Wednesday, an entire week since I’d last seen Remy. Feeling jittery, anxious, I tossed my leg over my motorbike and pulled away, unsure of where the hell I was off to. Time twitched along, guiding me. Suddenly, I parked my bike alongside the graveyard. The stones were ominous, straight, catching light from the sun that blared down to the west. There was something about these ritzier cemeteries. Something that made them creepier, if only because not a single flower, not a single piece of grass was out of line. It wasn’t like my father would ever bury Hank anywhere else. “Only the best for our boy,” had been my father’s refrain, just before the funeral.
I took the unfamiliar path, half-remembering those hazy days just after Hank’s death. I shoved my hands into my pockets and regretted I hadn’t brought the asshole anything. Some flowers? A card? In our youth, we’d traded mini cars, racing them along the wooden staircase at the old house, before the billions came swarming in. We’d almost liked one another. Before we’d split off—him, the golden boy, and me, the dark reject.
I stopped short when I reached Hank’s row. Perched on his knees before the grave was none other than my father. He’d dropped a bouquet of white flowers directly beside the headstone, and his head was bowed, his lips muttering some kind of prayer. I’d never seen my father pray like this before, lost in his own reverie, his own mind. I fell back, trying to find a way to escape. But within seconds, I noticed that my father’s bodyguard, Thomas, was lurking just beyond. He’d spotted me. A tap on his ear alerted that he was speaking to my father through some kind of device. My father’s head turned toward me, his eyes holding mine.
I’d been fucking caught.
Jesus. I splayed my fingers through my hair, striding toward him. The old man looked even more haggard than the last time I’d seen him, when he’d proposed the “I need an heir to my technology throne” shit. He staggered to his feet as I approached, nearly making me stride faster, so as to catch him. But he caught himself, the bastard, giving me a slight smirk.
“Ain’t got the knees I used to.”
I didn’t speak. My own eyes turned to Hank’s grave, with the fresh engraving. Always, when here, I thought about what this grave might look like in twenty, thirty years. Darker, dirtier, aged with time. The way Hank should have been.
“Didn’t expect to see you out here,” my father continued. “Hell, I thought you’d hit the road after my little proposition a few weeks back. Figured I’d scared you off. A single mention of extending our line…” He placed his hand on the top of the grave, his face gripped with emotion.
I drew back slightly, feeling like a caged animal. I wanted to snarl at him, to raise my lips above my teeth. To show him my strength. But I held back, seeing only a dilapidated man at his favorite son’s grave. It was nothing more.
“Let me ask you something, Wesley,” my father continued, just barreling through without my answer. As usual. “Why is it that Hank was so open to things? To building love and a life with a beautiful, faithful woman? To joining me at the company and making it better than when it began? Huh?” He shuffled his feet in the grass now, anxiety fueling him. Thomas, the bodyguard, shifted toward us, as if I were poised to attack.
“Dad, let’s not do this fucking here,” I muttered, my voice gravelly.
“No. It’s the only place we can do it,” my father continued. “I asked you to give me an heir. And all right, sure. It isn’t looking all that stellar for my cause, is it? But if it’s not going to happen, if it’s really not in the cards, then I think I deserve to know why. I think your brother deserves to know as well, wherever the hell he is. Heaven. The in-between. Whatever.”
My head swam with options of what to say. Remy. Remy had been my dream girl, my ticket to the kind of life my father and Hank appreciated. But I was poison, a dark man living in a world that could never be mine. Now, waiting for Remy’s call, I knew I couldn’t give my father the truth. That I was actively trying.
Plus, there was the issue that Remy and I were, at least contractually, just doing this for the money. At the grave of my brother, this turned my stomach even more. Hank had wanted children with his wife. Gobs of them, running amok, their fingers sticky, and their laughs jocular, and their eyes just like his.
“Dad, Hank can’t hear us,” I said, drawing myself taller. “And Jesus, does it really have to come down to reasons why? Can’t a man live without having to explain himself?”
My father took a quick step back, his eyes becoming slits. I imagined the words tumbling out now, just to save him. “Remy. You remember Remy? She’s going to give birth for me, for us. She’s going to carry my son.”
But I held back, watching as my father slid his arm through Thomas’s. He clucked his tongue at me, pressing a final hand against Hank’s grave. “Think of all your brother did for this family. He didn’t do it because he had to. He did it because he was capable of love. Why the hell aren’t you, Wesley? What the hell happened to you?”
My father whipped toward the exit of the graveyard then. He left me gazing down at my black shadow, my hands drawing into fists. My foot dug a slight indent into the dirt in front of Hank’s grave, wanting to feel a part of whatever world was now his.
“Why the hell did you leave me here with him?” I muttered to Hank. Always, I’d spoken to him in a gruff tone. Hank had looked at me without judgment, his own eyes open to the mystery of me. Wanting to understand. Even riding motorbikes with me a time or two, tearing his tire across the upstate gravel and blasting his arm into the nearby tree. God, Dad had nearly fucking killed me after that one.
A wave of grief—something I hadn’t felt since the funeral—fell over me. Straining to breathe, I staggered toward my bike and fell onto it. I kicked it on and raced back toward the Mission. Every muscle in my arms, my legs, ached for her. For Remy. I wanted to count every minute we’d been away from each other. To learn where she’d been.
I’d lost so much time with Hank.
Maybe it didn’t have to be that way with her.