Chapter Five
~Mahogany~
I can’t imagine what it took for him to admit that’s what he thought of himself. There was no question why he couldn’t tell me about his childhood illness now. Reliving it while he spoke would’ve been horrible. Now, I understood why he didn’t tell me about anything that was so painful for him and his understanding of medical terms, but Majestic had needed him to speak up. I needed him to, and he didn’t do it in time for me therefore not for her. She’d went through so much, needlessly, for months and I wasn’t forgiving him for that.
“I wouldn’t have pitied you or been disappointed in you, Chance. I would’ve been in awe of a man who survived cancer as a child, only God knows what else, and still grew up to be who you are. We all pass on good and bad things to our kids: diseases and syndromes, afflictions and addictions, but good parents hope that the bad doesn’t outweigh the good. But it happens, and then we step up to save our children in any way we can, like you’ve done. There is no guarantee that Majestic wouldn’t have had a different father with a more common blood type and still not be going through what she is right now. So I better never hear you call yourself a killer again because you’re not the only one with defects in their genes, or we’re all killers. That said, nothing in life is ever nipped in the bud because we can’t plan for every mishap, freak accident, and coincidence that aligns up perfectly with our worlds.”
“Mahogany”
I shushed him. “You don’t get to talk now but you can damn well listen. I couldn’t have planned for the flu that called for antibiotics that weakened my birth control, which I didn’t even know was possible. You couldn’t have planned to be in such a hurry to make love with me after I got better that you rushed to the questionable pharmacy on the corner that sold you four-year-old condoms, which leaked. I checked them out thoroughly after I went to the doctor because I felt like the flu was still hanging around two months later and had missed my period. Would’ve told you about that our last night together too, but you were so distant, which hurt me. We were supposed to have been better than that. Oh, and if you slept with other women while wearing those condoms, you better call them up because they’ve probably had your baby too.”
“I haven’t slept with anyone, but I dated some,” he forced through gritted teeth, seeming rather unhappy about having dated, which was weird. “What about you?”
Should I be thrilled about his abstinence? Probably not, but I was.
“Okay, fine. Majestic doesn’t have a half sister or brother anywhere. I have no other lovers beside my first and you. That doesn’t change your outlook on having children and your refusal to open up to me about it so I could make an informed decision about having your babies. Despite all that, you’re a good man, never a killer besides in business. You gave to charities anonymously and had work ethics I can only hope to have when I finish school. Hell, you didn’t want to kill me when I wasted hot coffee on you. Every day except for that last one when we were together, you showed me you loved me… and I loved you for that with everything in me because I didn’t have that growing up. But when you wouldn’t speak up about your past, you didn’t do the one thing I needed you to do the most: be more honest with me than you ever had in your life. Because of that, I thought my man wasn’t a man at all and my child, a precious life that I wasn’t snuffing out, would’ve had a father who couldn’t show her that he loved her.”
“You didn’t want her going through a repeat of your childhood, so you left me.”
“So I left you,” I repeated, then swiped at my face with both hands before washing them on my jeans. “I thought I was doing us both a favor.”
“Breaking my heart and keeping my first-born a secret was a favor, huh? Risking Majestic’s childhood becoming a repeat of mine is not a favor, and I guess you’ll never know if I could’ve shown her that I loved her from birth because…” he shrugged and crooked his mouth up in one corner. “… you left me before telling me that you were pregnant.”
How many times was he going to throw that in my face?
“Chance, I never meant to hurt you, or thought you were so damn thickheaded that you couldn’t read between the lines. Why else would I have demanded we stay at home that night when I tried to tell you outright that I was pregnant? I’d never been that insistent about staying home before, or pressured you to let me in on everything that made you tick. Our last night together, I knew I hadn’t gotten past the surface with you and I chickened out on telling you the truth when you were so cold to me. I knew I never would get more than your surface thoughts unless I cracked your skull open with a hammer and saw your deepest thoughts for myself. Yes, you had a traumatic childhood at some point, but that didn’t give you a right to leave me on the outside because you didn’t want to be pitied for your trials in life that you surpassed by the way, in case you hadn’t noticed. All I knew was you didn’t want anything to do with a pregnancy, so I didn’t tell you about mine. I left you to your childless existence in the lap of luxury and other women and I had my child alone. Majestic being born doesn’t have to change anything for you. You can go back to your life now. My daughter and I are fine thanks to you because you’re still a good man… and I’ll always love you for what you’ve done for us and promise not to call on you again.”
His lips morphed into a predator’s grin that shook me to my toes. Right then, I knew that I was public enemy number one to him, and he perhaps had something planned for me that wasn’t going to be nice.
“Oh, but you can’t promise that, Mahogany.”
“I c-can,” I vowed, with my voice shaking too.
“You can’t. You may have gotten me here in time this time for our daughter, but there’s no guarantee her cancer won’t come back. If it does like it did with me, it’ll be even more aggressive, and it may take an Indian relative of mine giving her their bone marrow before the leukemia can be stopped again. The subtle differences in our genetics seem to make a big difference with this disease that develops immunity to things like any other disease that wants to live. I didn’t battle cancer once but twice, Mahogany. My great grandfather saved me the first time at three, my great grandmother the second time at eight. Even if the cancer doesn’t come back for Majestic, you don’t get to push me out of our daughter’s life again. I know she’s here now, and she has a father, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The whole nine yards. People who will love her, take care of her, and spoil her so rotten they’ll make you repent the day you added to our bloodline because my people will enforce Majestic’s thinking that she really has the right to have chocolate if she wants it and tear up shit if she wants to.”
Despite my first instinct to run and hide my little girl from his family, at least the ones that took an instant disliking to me, I can’t in good conscious deny Majestic the love she’d receive from them. There were more people for her to depend on in a life that sometimes gave none, which meant that Chance will be in both of our lives now. Oh God, I got a front row seat to everyone and everything in his life, too.
I didn’t know how good I had it when ignorant of who was in and out of his bed. Although he claimed there hadn’t been anyone, I don’t ever want to know if that changes, and if I don’t want to know after all this time apart from him, my heart hasn’t moved on from him at all.
Life suck balls right now even when I couldn’t be happier. I had convinced myself that Chance and I were meant to be together for just a season, long enough to create Majestic, and it was okay that his heart had moved on from me. Stupid me was deceiving myself. But for Majestic, I swore to deal with the heart-gauging I’d experience every time a new someone entered his world now.
Or an old someone… but I can handle it.
I took a deep breath, storing up more defenses around my heart this time. “If you want a part in your daughter’s life, it’s yours. I just hope your family don’t mind that it’ll be their shit she’s tearing up and that I’m not coming to Utah to stop her. They hate me and always thought I was too young for you, remember?”
He smirked. “Yeah, well, you were. Still are. And they don’t hate you. My sister actually liked you. The rest just didn’t want to invest their time in getting to know and love a girl they thought I was moving too fast with and wouldn’t be with come tomorrow, let alone marry. My mother’s words, not mine. I knew she knew what she was talking about from her past predictions of my relationships. That didn’t stop my heart from wanting you though.”
“Didn’t stop you from following your heart either,” I sneered, but he wasn’t completely to blame for our past relationship that had a seven-year gap in it.
One month after we met, I moved in with him. A year later, we were connected forever by a positive pregnancy test. At first sight, I wanted him just as much after we bumped into each other in a small café on campus where I spilled my coffee on him, burning him through his suit and ruining his jacket. He took one look at my clumsy ass trying to wipe the macchiato off his forearm with napkins that just pebbled up, then he asked for my number, claiming I owed him a date for the burn. Anyone else would’ve cursed me out and threaten to sue. Nope, not Chance. He smiled, and I took the full brunt of how gorgeous he was while he stared at me as if I was equally gorgeous. Nothing could’ve stopped me from being with him afterwards, except Majestic’s birth.
If life was fair, she would be the reason I was still with him. Well, my world seemed to have run on a backwards course since I was about four days old. No one’s really sure how old I am exactly. My correct age and birthday has been a guesstimation since the firemen found me with my umbilical cord still attached. Since not a thing can be done about any of that, including how I was adopted into a loveless household, I never dwelled on any of it. Neither was I going to let my beginnings stop me from living life to the fullest… well, stop me from enjoying as much as I could with a baby born right when I should’ve been at the highest peak of enjoying life with only had a few hundred dollars in the bank to speak of before Majestic and afterwards.
Damn, I’ve been struggling a long time, long overdue for a vacation. Personally, I’d like to go to the Caribbean, but a good book and a room at the nearest ski lodge would work just fine. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon, and that’s okay. My child would live, I was alive to raise her. Two things that I would sacrifice the whole world for was mine and to be thankful for. Compared to that, a good book and a stay at a lodge was trivial. Besides, I could just pretend I was somewhere different in my bedroom for free, while Chance was with someone else in his. As long as that was happening somewhere other than in Arrow, I’d be fine. I hoped.
“You were my heart the minute I saw you, Mahogany. I’ll have some movers bring boxes over in a few days so you can start packing,” he mentioned out of the blue.
Took a few seconds for me to absorb his declaration. “Wait. What? I’m not moving!”
“Oh, you are. See, you’ve made the decisions for Majestic for two years and now it’s my turn. That includes getting you both out of here as soon as possible.”
“This isn’t a tug of war, Chance. You don’t get to push and pull us wherever you want us to go because I had your baby behind your back, then had to asked you for something for her and you’re unsatisfied with our living arrangements. We don’t owe you anything.”
“Oh but you do, sweetheart. You owe me the right to take care of my daughter. That means taking care of you too in my book. Can you honestly say you’d have moved here if you hadn’t left me? Can you honestly say that you gave me a real chance to prove what kind of father I would’ve been from the start?”
“I gave you the chance, Chance, and you shot me down. I didn’t ask you to feel how you do about children, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around while you ordered me to get an abortion every day until I did it or you left me.”
“We both know you wouldn’t have gotten an abortion if you hadn’t wanted to. We both know you can be right feisty and stubborn with the best of them, too. What we don’t know is if I would have actually demanded you get an abortion. And as I remember the last conversation we had, you gave me a hypothetical situation and I responded in the only way my emotions would let me back then. It was hurtful for me to even think about how I couldn’t give you everything you wanted in life. Talking about it just made it hurt more and you never said you were actually pregnant. Things might have turned out differently if you had.”
“Might have, Chance? You don’t even know how it would’ve turned out, and I wish I could make you feel better about all the things I’ve put you through but I can’t. It’s all written in stone somewhere and fact. Done and over with now.”
He crossed his arms. “Some of that is true, and you can make me feel better about some of the things you put me through.”
“H-how?” I didn’t really want to know though. His answer would require a pound of flesh that I couldn’t afford to give, but he’d take it anyway, and I might as well know exactly what he had in mind for retribution.
“Date me again.”
Blindsided and knocked for a loop, check.
“What?” I shrieked like a terrified little girl who would’ve screamed ‘Mama!’ then ran to her, if I had a mother who cared. How I wished I did.
There was another storm named Chance brewing on my horizon after I just survived one called Cancer. I was going to have to face him head on too, alone, and there was no forcing him back once he’s headed in your direction.
He tilted his head to the side. “You wanted to make me feel better. I’m telling you how: date me again.”
“D-date you?” I could barely say it, which was supposed to have been out the realm of possibilities.
“Yep. Didn’t you say you’d do anything in your voicemail? I have an app that sends a text of my voicemails. I could show it to you in writing if you don’t remember.”
His expression was smug and calculating. I vaguely recalled saying something on one of the voicemails to the effect of ‘I’ll do anything if you help my... Ohhhh shit, I said it. Now, I had to own it.
“Okay, Chance, I did say that, which had nothing to do with dating you again, but you know that already and don’t care, so moving on. Are you telling me that you gave Majestic blood so you could date me? To get back at me for leaving you?”
Every word his voicemail recorded, he’d taken and twisted to his own advantage in typical business tycoon fashion, but this was worst: this was personal for him.
“Still thinking the worst of me, huh, Mahogany? FYI, I was already on my way here when you left the second message, but I’m damn sure taking you up on the promise you made on my voicemail. You still keep your word, well, most of the time, don’t you?”
Ohshitohshitohshit! What have you done, Mahogany? There was a two-part answer to that: I’d let my mouth write a check that Chance fully intended for my behind to cash along with made a bigger mess of things between us than I thought. He was currently pitching every one of my screw ups into an industrial-sized fan that was about to blow every gooey, stinky mistake back on me. Should’ve got that raincoat last night anyway.
“What do you really want from me, Chance?”
“You doing whatever I want until I no longer want you.”
I’d have felt better if he had said ‘until he no longer loved me’. ‘Want’ usually has no tender feelings attached it—tender feelings that would soften whatever he’d demand of me. A big part of me believed that dating Chance again wasn’t going to work in my favor, and that part of me was freaking the hell out, but he appealed to another part of me at the same time: my stupid heart that had no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. However, an honest woman would hold up her end of a vow, even those made by voicemail when her emotions were running high. I knew I didn’t have to agree to this but would because, honestly, I owed him a chance to have a decent future with someone else after I’d damaged his present beyond repair. Plus, I didn’t want to want him any longer either. Working him out of my system sounded like the only course to take to achieve breaking ties to him, but Chance’s demands…
Lord have mercy, I grew hot just thinking about what they might involve. For starters, a bed with me in it screaming his name. Luckily, I switched to the IUD for birth control that’s impossible to be tampered with by medication. One baby out of wedlock was enough.
“For how long, Chance?”
“However long it takes.”
His evasiveness worried the hell out of me. He couldn’t stay in Colorado forever though, a week at the most. A week to coddle myself in what I yearned for in the dead of night: being touched by him, only him, when all was quiet and the space beside mine in the bed was too cold to stand. There were places within that only he could reach.
“I’ll do this on one condition: I’m not moving back to Utah. I’ve thrown my life in enough upheaval to last a lifetime. Not doing that again for anyone, so I’m on a different birth control now that lasts for twelve years and is way better than the pill and a condom. It practically ties my tubes itself.”
“I don’t want you to move back to Utah either. You will be moving out of this place though, and it’s good you’ve taken better precautions with birth control because you’ve just shook the hell out of my confidence in corner store pharmacies. I didn’t see any big chains around here either.”
I stopped listening after ‘you will be moving out of this place.’ “I told you I’m not moving. I can’t afford anywhere else but here.”
“When has your money ever counted with me?” Never.
“Chance, thank you but no thank you very much to being stuck with a place I can’t afford after you’ve had enough of me.”
“I’m not surprised that you expect me to leave you high and dry suddenly like you did me, but I don’t operate like that, Mahogany. Just you.”
Asshole!
“Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t know what else to do after you shut me out.”
“And I thought I was doing you a favor by letting you go. But you’re not sorry that you left me broken, worrying about what had happened to you, were you okay, and thinking I knew the real reason why you’d left. No, you wouldn’t be sorry about any of that, would you?”
If he thought he was broken, I, who was intimately acquainted with ‘broken’ and wanting to be in one functioning piece again, was in trouble. He was going to take me down to get the repairs he so desperately needed. Regrets, for damn near every decision I made relating to us, started hounding me. Each decision had brought us to this point of no return. Once he was done with me, he would be done. But would I be done with him? I didn’t know. Reservations, of taking part in this mockery he would make out of dating, skyrocketed to harrowing levels. What if it took him months to get over me? What if I fell harder for him during that time? That could leave me broken. Neither Majestic or I could afford that; we were all each other had.
“Chance,” I whispered, “I am sorry you felt broken, but I thought you would be okay since you always planned to let me go anyway. And you had more family and friends to lean on than I could ever hope for to get you through anything.” How was I to know that our breakup would affect him that much?
“Yet, no amount of money I made or people who wanted to support me after I lost you could ever replace you in my life when you left before I could prepare to let you go.”
This is what most of his pain boiled down to: his heart wasn’t ready for me to walk away for the reason I really had. Now, he knew the real reason too, and he was oh-so-unforgiving. Though, I had already hurt him more than I thought. No wonder he wanted payback.
“I didn’t know you’d felt that much for me.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Didn’t you?”
“No, I thought if you could so easily say you’d let me go to have a baby with another man, I couldn’t mean that much to you. I guess I was wrong and I’m sorry for that too, Chance. If I—”
“It doesn’t matter what you wished you’d have known or did differently,” the rude asshole cut me off, “only what you did do and did know, and how you acted afterwards, Mahogany.”
I had cut him off too with no warning years ago, had given up on him too soon, and destroyed him. The latter, he would never disclose to me though, but I knew. Been there. Done that to me when I did it to him. Had to help him get over it, somehow… and me too. He didn’t have a Majestic to take his mind off his loneliness or his heartache. And I wanted to go to him, soothe him, make it up to him, but he already had plans to let me go again. What I should be concentrating on was upping my chances for surviving him. I don’t think he had plans for me to do that though, so I should be turning him away from the avenue he was about to drag us both down.
“Look, I’m begging for your forgiveness. I promise to never hurt you like that again.”
His face was a blank mask as his eyes roved down my body then back up. “God forgives, Mahogany. I don’t, and don’t worry, you won’t ever hurt me like that again. So, are you in or are you out?”
I gulped oxygen like I’d been trapped underground for far too long, sick and tired of saying ‘I’m sorry’ to him. “Okay, I’m in, Chance.”
We both needed closure, and this would be my penance for putting us both into this situation with my secrets and taking off without an explanation.
He checked his watch then set his sights right back on me who shrunk to small prey in the crosshairs of a big animal sharping its claws. “Good. We start dating by taking a shower together at the resort I’m booked at. We’ll have about ten minutes to do whatever I want to do in it, if you grab a change of clothes and come on now.”
This was going to be one hell of a shower. I assumed we’d work our way up to sex. My defenses weren’t strong enough to keep out the warm and fuzzy feelings he always stirred up within me after making love. A thorough lovemaker he was. I have no reason to think that had changed about him, so ‘making love’ better not take place.