Cruise

I didn’t know what I was walking into earlier tonight. I thought my family was fucked up.

Maybe I should have seen this coming . . .

I want to take away her pain, absorb it into mine, but this is too big me for me to fix. Vaughn’s words ring in my ears: “He wants his mother.” Her confession not what I expected to hear: “Toby is my baby.”

I ask, “You’re his mother?”

“I am, but not.”

“What do you mean, not, Clara?” Clara. I find my hand tapping and my foot bouncing. Clara. “Vaughn called you Clarissa. Is that your name? Clarissa Johnson?”

“Yes,” she answers, but it’s not satisfying.

My guilt is too heavy to hold things against her when I fear I’ll lose her when she finds out my role in her father’s murder. Jumping between the two topics, I table one for later and pursue the other. I need to know more even with the sickening feelings eating at the insides of my stomach. “You’re Toby’s mother, his birth mother, but you gave him to your mother to raise?”

“No.”

Frustration gets a stronghold on me. I stand and start to pace. “I need you to tell me, Clara . . . Clarissa. What am I supposed to call you?”

With her back to me, she whispers, “Dove.”

My anger evaporates. How can I be mad at her, my little dove? I stop and move around her. Taking the front of her chair, I shift her until she’s facing the couch, and then sit so we’re eye to eye. “Talk to me, Dove. Please.”

“I’m so ashamed. Not of him. Never of him. He’s amazing. So smart. But his life is tainted, like mine. I didn’t fight hard enough.”

“Fight? Fight hard enough for what?”

“Not what. Who.”

Who? Fucking hell. “Fight against who?”

“Him,” is all she says. “And then Toby came and I couldn’t bear to look at him at the beginning of his life.”

As she speaks through her broken heart, I see her devastation, the pain she still carries day in and day out. I understand what she’s saying even though she struggles to say it. I need to hear her use her words. “Don’t be quiet. Not to me, Dove. You can say anything to me and I’ll stay. Right here with you.” I know the abuse she endured at the hand of that man. In my research on Connor Johnson, there were no babies listed. “There was no record of him.”

“Record?”

Shit.

He hid her away to hide his sins. If anyone would have known, he would have been arrested, so he tortured her to save himself. “He raped you and made you carry his baby to term.”

The tears have stopped falling and the streaks are drying on her skin. Her body is empty of willpower or fight as she stares out into nothing. “No. Toby is not my father’s, but I don’t know the man’s name. I do know that my father was paid five hundred dollars. I started at a thousand and was negotiated down to five hundred.” She blinks a few times, her eyelashes wet from the tears. “I remember his eyes were light blue. Haunting in the dim room because all I could see were his dark pupils.”

Holy. Fucking. Shit. Her father was even more of a monster than anyone knew.

I reach for her hands. Normal. When we met, she used to say all she wanted was normal. I never knew what this normal was she was so desperate to find, but I do now. Normal is not being sold to a stranger. Normal is having the choice to make love because you want to. Normal is waking up in the arms of the person you’ve chosen to give yourself to. Although I consider our love extraordinary, she only needs normal. She only wanted normal.

Her hands are cold. Icy. She recalls. “I had Toby in the tub of our bathroom without pain medicine, without a doctor, without anyone knowing.”

“Look at me. Look in my eyes.” When her gaze finally finds mine, I say, “You are a survivor. You. You survived him. He’s not here. He’s not even alive. Don’t let this drag you to some dark place. You’ve come out on the other side.” I think of my mom and the pain she must have felt while giving birth to me—both physically, and the emotional pain from the death and loss of Tucker. I can walk out, push this outside the darkness I have inside me. But that’s not the man I want to be. I want to be like my birth father—strong and kind. To be remembered that way would be worth the pain to achieve it. “Stay here with me. I’m here for you, Dove. I’m not going anywhere.”

Her eyes glisten with the revelation of her secret, hope still found in the green. “You mean that?”

I nod and take her hand. Our hands mirror each other and our fingers fold together. “You’re my yellow.”

That seems to be the breaking point. Her shoulders shake, her tears come heavy like little waterfalls over the most beautiful landscape, and she sobs. Getting up, I kneel before her and wrap my arms around her shivering body, letting her cry, wanting her to pass her pain onto me to bear.

When she looks up, her cries seem to calm. She brushes her hand over my shirt, the wetness bothering her more than me. Her eyes tend toward green when she cries. I love the brightness, but hate what they’re a side effect of. “I don’t deserve you, Cruise.”

“Sure you do. Just like I deserve you.”

The laughter is light, but I’m happy to hear it. “You make this too easy.”

“That’s because it was hard for you to carry this secret for so long. But I’m not here to judge you.”

“I should have told you.” No, she shouldn’t have. Not until she knows I love her.

Because I do. But now is not the time, either.

She is so, so brave.

“You didn’t owe it to me. I know now, so tell me how I can help you.”

She stands and stretches, her hands reaching above her head. “You’re too good.”

“And here I thought I was always the bad Cristley, the black sheep in the family.”

“I have a feeling you’re the good one.”

“No, Paige is the good one.” Standing up, I take her by the waist. “I want to introduce you to her.”

Arms full of her love come around me and hold me tight. She feels so good that I hate to ruin this moment. “Clara?”

“Yeah,” she answers, resting her chin on my chest and looking up. My heart is racing. Her smile falters. Under her hand, each rapid beat gives what I have to admit more weight than it already has.

“I killed your father.”

Squeezing my eyes closed, I wait for our world to fall apart, for my confession to decimate what we just saved.

It doesn’t.

I open my eyes to find hers narrowed on mine. When she doesn’t speak, I do. “Say something.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Her arms remain around me but they go limp. Taking a step, her hands slip away until she’s not touching me at all. I watch her walk to the window, biting her lip.

“Please say something, Dove.”

She glances back. “I’m not upset.”

You should be. I just admitted to murder, or at least an accessory to murder. “Okay.”

“I’m numb.”

“Okay.”

She turns to face me, her hands helping to find the windowsill to rest against. The sun is setting, the sky on fire behind her. An orange halo highlights the lighter strands of her hair.

Goddess.

Mine. All mine. Please stay mine.

“I’ve never used donut with you. You now know my innermost secrets. The secrets that could destroy my family. And you’ve given me one of yours.” Standing in the middle of the room, hope stretched between us, unraveling like the threads of an old rope. I wait with bated breath for my punishment. I’ll take it. Whatever she’ll dole out, I’ll take ten times worse if she’ll take me knowing how I’ve sinned against her.

Pushing off the sill, she walks around the room caught up in her thoughts. It’s tough to be patient, the wait is torture, but I have to in this situation. Clara goes to the kitchen and gets a glass of water. I watch as she finishes the entire glass before she returns to stand in front of me. Resting her hands on my chest, it’s a gift I cherish because it’s one she always gave me when love existed between us. Does it still? It does for me. I love her. I love you, Clara.

The seconds are stripped between us, the low tick of my watch the only sound I hear. I remain, still a criminal begging for her mercy, needing her forgiveness.

“I’ll protect your secret like you protect mine.” When she speaks, the death I was slowly dying is stayed. She lifts up on her toes and her hands embrace my face.

“You don’t hate me? He was a fucker who deserved to die, but what have I done to your family?”

“You freed us. That’s what you’ve done, babe.” She bounces on her toes. “You freed me from that life. You’re not a killer. You’re my hero.”

A hero?

Connor Johnson was a despicable scum fuck of the earth, like his partner Nastas O’Hare and everyone he ever did business with.

I have never regretted either of their deaths. What they did to my friends, to people I consider family can never be undone. But our vengeance and their blood is on my hands, whether I pulled the triggers or not. I worried she would blame me for hurting her family more than they had been. Knowing she doesn’t, that she breathes before me because of what my crew did, I look at her, and know there’s no life without her in it. And I don’t want there to be.

Standing before me, I see a future I never thought I’d have. I see it in her, with her, and I grab hold of it happily.

We can hold on to secrets to save our lives, but this time we’ll hold on to each other’s to give us a life.

* * *

I thought we’d gotten through the toughest topics earlier, and maybe they were, but there were things still lingering that had to be dealt with. I picked up dinner and brought it back. We ate at the table, sitting across from each other. It’s been a hard day. She’s cried more tears than she should in a lifetime.

I worried I would lose her, but my sins turned out to be blessings in disguise. Before I left for food, I told her more about that night. That I didn’t pull the trigger. That I’m not some crazy assassin, nor do I work for one. Despite her initial calm about what I told her, I knew she needed that clarified. I didn’t use names or many details. But I did tell her we tried to right a wrong to stop him from every touching anyone again, and how inadvertently, now, I am even more thankful we did. She means everything to me, and I hope she sees that in my confession. More than anything else.

Conversation has been light since the heavy drained out of us earlier. The one remaining concern is a subject I’m not afraid to broach, but I don’t want to upset her. Still, Vaughn needs to be dealt with. “I think something is very wrong with your brother.”

Clara chews the last of her fries and sits there, staring at the cheeseburger wrapper.

I clean up our trash and shove it in the bag, not leaving her any room to be distracted. Her brother, the fucker, is like their father, and I’m not sure any of them are safe in that house with him. I know exactly what he will become.

The last of her soda begins to slurp, and then she says, “He needs help. The physical abuse I endured was not the same as with him. He was beaten but more so, he was trained to see things a certain way.”

“To see you a certain way?”

“He would never rape me if that’s what you think.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

I can tell she wants to bolt from this table, to hide under the guise of looking out the window or cleaning up the kitchen. “I can see you don’t want to talk about this. I get it.”

“Do you? I grew up sacrificing myself to protect him. To find out it didn’t matter distorts the image I’ve always had in my head. It might take me a minute to flip the switch.”

“The image needs to be fucking distorted. He’s a psycho like your father.”

She says, “He’s a teen—”

“No. I’m not going to let you justify his behavior because he’s a teenager. I was a teenager once and I never fucking hit my sister across the face. I also never threatened her boyfri—fuck. I have threatened Paige’s boyfriend. He’s an asshole and she can do better, but he never hit her. He wouldn’t be alive if he had.”

“I think it’s something else . . . or someone else.”

Watching her, I can tell she’s keeping something from me. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes flash to mine. It’s only been a few seconds but it’s feeling like minutes. She’s not forthcoming at first, but the longer we stare at each other the more she eases, eventually laying down the rest of her secrets. “My mom said someone’s been coming around.”

“Who?”

“They don’t know his name or how to contact him. Nothing. He stopped by to get what he paid my father for.”

“What did he pay for?”

“We don’t know. Whatever it is, my father sold it to him for three hundred thousand dollars.”

Fuck. $300K to make something go away or to take control of something? What though? There’s no telling from what I know of her father. “What did your father have that was worth that amount of money that he was willing to sell?”

Shaking her head, she replies, “I don’t know, but we don’t have the money to return to this creep and we don’t know what he wants. We’re screwed.”

“How many times has he come around?”

“Twice.”

Standing up, I cross my arms over my chest. “I don’t want you going over there until this blows over.”

“Do you think it will? My father’s dead. He can’t collect, right?”

“Your father was a low life. We’d been dealing with him for months prior to his death. If there was something illegal or black market around, your dad had a hand in it.”

She comes around taking the trash with her to toss in the bin. On the other side of the island, she says, “Every day I wake up, I’m grateful he’s dead. You’ve seen my bedroom. I thank my lucky stars every night before bed.” And I thank my lucky stars that you still want to be with me, Dove. More than anything.