Chapter 23

Fox

Standing in the yard outside the cabin, I thrashed an axe through a log, watching as it split on either side. Sweat poured down my face and chest. I wore only a pair of worn out jeans and boots, and I could feel my hair almost grazing my shoulders, a reminder that I was falling further and further back into my “bad boy” rock star look. It was like a poison. I couldn’t escape it, no matter how far away from that reality I tried to escape.

It was in my blood. Forever.

The anger was gradually subsiding. But god, how I’d wanted to tear Andrew’s throat apart. How I’d wanted to rip his hair from his skull and shove him into the yard, fighting him like a wild animal. Get the fuck away from Lily-Rose! I imagined myself shouting at him. Talia doesn’t need you! She has me!

But I knew this wasn’t true. It was clear, just from the fear in Talia’s eyes, that I was a monster. I had become the very man I’d attempted to escape. And it was clear that this persona – this horrible bad boy – wasn’t right for them. I couldn’t help Talia keep Lily-Rose, no more than I could try to love her, try to protect her. I hadn’t been able to protect Marissa, had I? She’d been slaughtered on the floor of a club, her body bleeding out. All because I’d gotten mixed up with the wrong people. “A drug deal gone wrong,” the papers called it. But Marissa had never taken a line of cocaine in her life.

All she’d ever wanted was to love me. Just like Talia. And just like Lily-Rose.

“I’M FUCKING POISON!” I cried out, tearing the ax through another layer of log. The wood shattered, clunking on either side of my axe into the grass. It was clear that Evelyn could use me as a “reason” to try and take Lily-Rose from Talia. It was clear the town could pinpoint me as the “reason” Talia wasn’t fit to be a part of them.

I had to separate myself from them. I had to be alone.

The car pulled into my gravel drive, toward me. I stopped my chopping, staring at Talia’s form behind the steering wheel. Her hair swept back from her shoulders, and her eyes were wild, bright, even from a distance. I flung the axe into the wood and strode forward, my biceps feeling tight after so much chopping. My adrenaline was still high, pulsing in my ears.

As Talia drove up, she blinked up at me, appearing increasingly innocent, particularly in contrast to my gruffness. I placed my hands on either side of her window as she rolled it down.

“You can’t be here, Talia,” I told her matter-of-factly. “It’s just going to make things worse. And you know that.”

Talia stuttered slightly, hunting for words. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Reaching upward, she drew one of her hands along my beard. “Fox, it’s just… I know we’re all each other has. And why don’t we use it? Why don’t we actually take care of each other? I know you care for me. And I know you love Lily-Rose.”

I jumped back from the window, anger stirring within me. I knew, on some primal level, that Talia was telling the truth. But I refuted it, seeing red. I reminded myself, over and over again, that it was my fault that Marissa had died. My boots kicked at the gravel beneath me.

Talia opened the door and came up out of the driver’s seat, reaching for me. Her pink dress swirled around her. I could see Lily-Rose asleep in the back seat, her mouth slightly open. I felt a wave of paternal love, nothing I could fully understand. And immediately, I wanted to refute it too. To fight it.

“I just can’t be what you want me to be. Don’t you understand?” I said, my voice echoing through the trees. We were miles away from anyone, or anything. It was only us out there. And yet, I couldn’t be anything but this gruff, horrible man.

“But… but I’m—“ Talia said, her voice almost a whimper.

“What? Tell me a single thing that would change my mind, Talia!” I continued, sounding wild. Challenging her.

“I’m falling in love with you! You’re my strength! You give me enough reason to get up in the morning,” she cried.

I stepped back. I felt a wash of memories: Talia telling me that she loved me when I was sixteen years old, and that she always would; my ratty flannel shirt across my thin shoulders and my jeans black, thin; a freshly drawn tattoo trickled across my arm. And I’d returned the love, unable to resist it. Love was the reason. It was what got me up in the morning and drove me forward. It is what inspired me to create music, and even to dive into the grunge scene. In some ways, I’d wanted to be enough for Talia.

Until Talia, and Bilkington, hadn’t been enough anymore. And I’d had to escape my father, my brother—my life.

“You need to get out of here, Talia,” I said, my voice low. “Before I lose it again, okay? I don’t want to lose it in front of Lily-Rose.”

“You won’t!” Talia said. “I know you, Fox. I know your heart. You’re not this monster. You’re a man who cares deeply for Lily-Rose. I know you don’t want to get hurt again. And neither do I! But I think, in this life, we have to try. Don’t we?”

She demanded it of me. She spoke with an eager smile, so hopeful. I felt it slice me in two. I could already visualize the ways I would continue to tear her apart down the line. I could imagine how Lily-Rose would resent me, as I’d resented my own father. My fingers tingled, wanting to rip at my cheeks. I stuttered, whispering it once more: “You need to get the fuck out of here, Talia. Please. Before everything falls apart.”

But she wouldn’t. She said it again, her voice ringing true, clear. “I love you, Fox. I have been in love with you since I was fucking sixteen years old. Just let me love you. Let me take care of you—“

But with these last words, I strutted toward my car, unable to look her in the eye. I gripped my keys in my pocket, and yanked them out. Feeling Talia’s eyes burning into my back, I jumped into the car and cranked the engine. Within seconds, I was racing through the forest, my foot heavy on the gas pedal. I wasn’t going to look back.

As I got out onto the highway, I found my car facing west—toward what I’d once envisioned as the promised land. As I drove, I picked up speed, remembering how it had been to abandon Talia all those years before. “I don’t need her,” I’d scoffed to my friends, so sure of myself. “I don’t need anyone.”

And I hadn’t. Not for a while. I’d fucked my way through my early twenties, through gritty Los Angeles. I’d strutted from one rock concert to the next, my cock nearly bursting from my jeans and my hands only a few minutes from the next pussy, the next tit. The girls threw themselves at me—early and mid-twenty-somethings, with perky tits and hard, pert nipples. I remember thrusting myself over them, feeling the way their body gave into mine. I was wholly dominant. I was able to forget, for a while, that I hadn’t abandoned Talia. That she didn’t matter.

I yanked my phone from my back pocket, dialing Rhett, out west. We hadn’t spoken since that day Marissa had been shot. He’d appeared at the hospital, his face ashen and his eyes almost black, peering at me. “What happened, mate?” he’d asked, in that often offensive British way of his. “Did he… did he really shoot her, then?”

“Yeah, he fucking shot her,” I’d said, my voice cracking. “You fucking asshole! We shouldn’t have had the drug deal at the club my fucking pregnant wife was! We shouldn’t have had it at all.”

But now, with months between that time and now, I felt a strange pull back to Rhett. I yearned for our conversation, or even the strange lost days that had ebbed between us, as we’d snorted line after line and gazed out the Los Angeles mansion window. He was the same brand of trash as I was, and I knew it. I knew he wouldn’t have been able to hack a place like Bilkington, or a lovely girl like Talia. We were washed out, drugged out, fucked. And we only had one another.

“Rhett? Hey. It’s me,” I said into the phone, gripping the steering wheel hard with my free hand.

“Well, fuck! Tis’ Fox, ain’t it?” the British man gushed into the phone, sounding outrageous, almost too happy to hear from me. “Fox, Fox, Fox, my boy! I can’t fucking believe it’s you. Everyone thought you disappeared.”

“I did, I guess. Got myself a cabin out in Indiana, if you can believe it,” I returned. “But fuck it. I’m coming back. Marissa’s been dead long enough. I can handle the ghosts.”

Rhett didn’t speak for a moment. I heard the roar of the car’s engine pushing me further west. My stomach began to twist with guilt as I faced my reality: I wouldn’t see Talia or Lily-Rose ever again. The past six weeks was absolute nothingness. She’d loved me, but I hadn’t been able to return it. It simply wasn’t in me.

“So you’re coming back to us, aye mate?” Rhett asked.

I could tell he was smoking a cigarette, and it made my fingers itch for my pack. I drew it from my pocket, slipping a smoke between my lips. “That’s right, Rhett. It’ll be just like the old days. Fucking women. Doing whatever we fucking want, you know?”

“So you’re embracing your nature, Fox? You really gonna commit to this? Because after all that shit went down, I remember how much… how fucked up you got. I mean, all the drugs, the booze—that was one thing. But the murder…”

“We won’t get close enough to anyone to have that affect us again, Rhett,” I scoffed into the phone. “That was our first mistake. And our last one. Remember that. Remember it for good.”

I was headed west without a care in the world. I was abandoning all thoughts of Talia—of her family problems, of her attempts to keep Lily-Rose close. Familial ties? Love? They were nothing. Everything always fell apart in the end.