Chapter Thirty Two – Will

The last few weeks have been hard. Almost more difficult than the weeks leading up to the shooting. Dealing with Kingpin sucked, but knowing his identity is the roughest thing ever. I still can’t get over it. Everything that I’ve ever known has turned on its head. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust my own judgement again. I keep looking at everyone with utter distrust and I’m not sure when I’ll recover from that.

But at least Cici is okay. She’s still alive. That’s the main thing. Me, Jordan, and Cici are all okay. Cici was injured and she’s been in the hospital for a while as she recovers, which isn’t ideal, but she’s okay now. She’s living, so I’ve got everything that I wished for. I don’t know where my life is at the moment, but I have that.

“Are you okay?” I ask her quietly as I guide Cici to the car. “I bet you’re ready to go home.”

She turns and gives me a thin smile. “I suppose so. But home, where is that?”

Of course, I want her to come and live with me again, I want to pick up where we’ve left off, but since we haven’t exactly had that conversation then I don’t know where we stand. We haven’t had a chance, I’ve been crazy with work trying to straighten everything out to do with this case, and Cici has been focused on her recovery. Our conversations have mostly been status updates about those things and chats about Jordan. All very practical stuff. Things weren’t amazing just before all of this kicked off, we had our issues, so maybe this will be the moment where she chooses to walk away from it all. She could, and I don’t think I could blame her for that.

“Well, we could go to the apartment,” I offer. “All of Jordan’s stuff is there. It makes sense.”

She smiles genuinely down at the baby seat in the back of the car where Will sit. Seeing that we’re here causes Cici’s mom to slide out of the car. “I’ll leave you to it,” she says quietly. “But Cici, call me if you want me.”

I’ve been honest with everyone. After being so hidden away for far too long I feel like I need to be truthful about everything. Cici’s family knows that things haven’t been great so they’re aware that it might all implode now. I’ve been brutally honest about my side of the things, I’ve laid myself out on the table. I want them to know that they might need to be there for her. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but you never know.

Me and Cici slide into the car and she immediately turns around to see her son. “How have things been with you and Jordan? Have you both been okay? Sorry I haven’t been here for you. It must have been hard.”

“Hey, you did it for a while, so it was my turn,” I tell her warmly. “And it’s been good for us. We’ve been able to bond and recover from the time I missed out on. It’s been good. Although we have missed you a lot.”

Cici turns to face the road as we move, and she’s silent for a while. I keep wanting to talk, there’s so much that I want to say, but I don’t want to push it. I don’t want to force her. She’s been through so much already.

“It feels like forever,” she murmurs quietly. “Since I’ve seen the apartment. It feels weird, like a life time ago.”

I know that she’s struggling, it’s obvious it isn’t easy for her to have her whole world torn apart. I might have lost my best friend in a terrible brutal way, be she’s had to find out that her cousin wanted her dead. It’s messed up. I wish I could do something to make it okay again, but there’s only so much I can say.

“It was a life time ago, wasn’t it? Things were so different back then.” Almost perfect, but not really.

When we pull up outside, I immediately go to get Jordan. I’m sure that Cici needs a moment to digest this before she goes inside. She’s been in the hospital forever, I’m sure this isn’t going to be easy. I focus on my son while she has some time. As I grab his car seat I suddenly realize that my heart is racing. I’m anxious, almost sickly so. I have a horrible feeling that this isn’t going to go well at all. I take a second to recall the first time that I brought Cici here, the night of the wedding. Back then she was supposed to be a one night stand. I knew right away that she’d be different, I went for the sweet looking red head rather than a peroxide blonde, but I didn’t know how different. I wasn’t aware that she’d be the one for me. I didn’t know that we’d fall in love, have a baby, and face a life and death situation together. It’s insane. Absolutely crazy.

I don’t want this to be a small chapter in our stories. I don’t want to end up as footnotes. I want us to be each other’s happy ever after. I want to cling onto this, to make it work. I want to do things right this time. I was a bad boyfriend before, I didn’t behave anything like I should have, and I want to make up for that.

“Shall we go inside?” I ask, my voice thick with emotion. “Get things sorted.”

Out here, we can’t do anything, we can’t talk about it at all, we need to get inside before we can have the honest chat we need. I could let it fester, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be tackled because ignorance is bliss, but we have to. We can’t just keep not talking about it. We need to move forwards.

“Yes, okay.” Cici nods slowly. “I think we should. It’s time to go inside.”

We walk slowly, almost as if we’re heading towards our doom, and we step into the elevator. Jordan seems fidgety, and I’m sure it’s because he can sense the emotions fizzing between us. I’m realizing that he’s very in tune with other people for a baby. It makes me worry about all the things that he’s been through before.

I grab my keys out and unlock the door to the apartment, glad that it’s tidy now. For Cici’s return, I wanted the place to be straighter than it’s ever been before, and that’s what I’ve achieved.

“Oh.” Cici scans her eyes about, noticing right away. “It looks good in here.”

“Yeah, I wanted it to be nice.” I shrug awkwardly. “I don’t want you to have to do anything.”

Cici nods and takes a seat on the couch. She watches me put Jordan into his crib with a light shining behind her eyes. If anything, at least she can see that I know how to take care of my son now. If she wants to break up, and I hope to God that she doesn’t, then she can see that I can handle things alone.

“There, I think he’s settled,” I say quietly. “He’s due a nap anyway. But you know that…”

“Yeah, I know. He’s in a pretty good routine, surprisingly considering everything.”

I step back from Jordan letting him rest, then I take a seat on the other seat to look at Cici. The atmosphere is thick surrounding us, we both know that it’s time to talk, and I don’t think either of us want to start. I don’t even know where to begin. I’m very aware of how I want it to end, but how do I get to that point?

“So, how are you?” Cici asks, blurting out a shocking question. “I know that you’ve told me all the practical stuff that you’re dealing with, but I don’t know how you’re doing. It can’t be easy with Landon…”

“No.” No one has really asked me that question yet. Jones has danced around it, but Cici is going right in. “It isn’t easy. I can’t sleep very well because I keep thinking about it, but I’ll be okay.”

“Don’t put up your walls.” She shakes her head. “Don’t do that with me. I know it hurts.”

“It does.” My voice has gone all raspy. “It does hurt a lot but I’m carrying on. You know how it is.”

“Oh, I know. You’re strong. But I’m here if you want to talk about it. I was there too. I know more than anyone else what it was like. I didn’t see the shot, but I know how scary it was.”

I gulp, trying to stop the emotion from overwhelming me. I don’t want to burst into tears right now. Cici shouldn’t have been there, but she saved my life. If she wasn’t in that business park, I would be dead for sure.

“I don’t want to talk about Landon right now,” I admit. “I want to talk about us.” I’m ripping off the band aid, getting started before I fall apart. “Things were bad before, and I know that it was my fault. I was a terrible person. I put work before you, I didn’t hear you out, I didn’t list to your point of view, and I regret that now. Massively.”

“Oh, wow.” Cici looks like she wasn’t expecting that. “Yeah, well it wasn’t just you… I wasn’t perfect.”

“None of this was your fault,” I growl, angry at Landon again. “I really don’t want you to blame yourself.”

Cici nods and slumps back in her chair, I can see that she’s trying her hardest to process that. “It wasn’t either of our faults, was it, really? It was a situation that was thrust upon us. None of us invited this in.”

“I know that. I get that, but I still didn’t handle it right. I should have been better. I didn’t handle it and I took a lot of things that I shouldn’t have. I said some things that I didn’t mean, because I really do love you.”

“I love you too,” Cici replies almost right away. “And I said some terrible things. Things I didn’t mean.”

We sit in silence for a couple of moments just looking at one another. My heart lifts, I hope this means what I want it to, but I’m very aware that she could say that love isn’t enough. That it won’t hold us together. My past behavior might have been so bad that she doesn’t ever want to speak to me again. Only as a father.

“So, where do we go from here?” I ask her with a one shouldered shrug. “What shall we do?”

“I don’t know.” Cici bites down on her bottom lip. “I mean, I want to give us another go, but I’m scared. Things got so screwy before and I don’t want to go back to that place again. I’m scared that we couldn’t get through the hard times without tearing one another apart, and that’s a sign we can’t do this.”

“But… we did make it,” I insist. “I know it wasn’t easy, but we’re still here. We sitting across from one other, talking despite the fact that everything in the universe is tearing us apart. We’ve already been through more than most people do in their entire lives, we’ve suffered ridiculous things during the time when we should have been getting to know each other. If we can still be here after that, then we should be able to cope with every day life.”

I need her to know that I mean this, I want her to understand that we can do this, but the choice is hers. I guess I will just have to be patient until she makes that choice.