Chapter 69
JAYDEN
Eli’s in the bedroom getting ready to meet with Coach and Gerry, and Finley’s at work. He demanded we carry on with our day as normal. Which meant training in the morning for us and a day in the office for her.
Our home is eerily quiet.
After the chaos Lex brought with him earlier, everything is too still. Too calm. Too controlled. Nothing like the storm raging inside me.
When Eli spoke to Lex, I thought he would help us get a handle on the situation.
However, there’s a turbulent undercurrent beneath the placid surface of our lives right now.
We’re all desperately trying to keep outwardly cool ahead of Eli’s meeting while being one wrong breath away from freaking out. Aloud.
The anxiety amped up all around the second Coach called Eli into his office after practice. Then Dad showed up here.
Surprise!
At first, I was mad that Lex would invite him here to help without discussing it with me. That he would out Eli like that for the sake of figuring out the PR approach and everything that goes into Eli as a brand and sports personality.
Until Eli told me it was him who called. Right after he called Taylor yesterday. Before he went to Lex.
I know it’s a positive thing that Eli feels secure enough in the family to reach out to Dad. Still, the fact he didn’t talk to me about it stings.
“You’ve been staring at that page for a while,” Dad says, sitting beside me on the couch.
He’s quiet for a moment, giving me the opportunity to talk to him. Except, I don’t know what to say. Since he walked in the door earlier, I’ve had this crippling fear that I’ve let him down. That me not doing more or pushing Eli to say something sooner has disappointed him.
“I’m sorry,” I say, quickly following it up with a groan, “No, I’m not. I couldn’t tell you, and I couldn’t force Eli to—”
“Do you guys have ice cream? I have the worst hankering for a sundae.” Dad shifts to the edge of the couch, taking my much-loved copy of Pride and Prejudice from my hands. “How many times have you read it now?”
“I stopped keeping track a while back,” I reply, pushing to my feet and ushering him toward the kitchen.
“Austen never called to me. I always preferred the darker gothic offerings from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker. Even then, Rebecca was my favorite classic. The perfect mix of mystery, crime, and romance. None of the frivolous drama Austen constantly harped on about.”
“Are you kidding me? Austen is the quintessential feminist.” I turn to glare at him as he flicks through the novel in his hand and puts it down on the kitchen counter with a pained grimace.
“Come on, JJ, the Bronte sisters were the real feminists. In comparison, Austen was a romantic with big dreams for a changing world.”
Ugh! Why is he goading me right now? I’m already riled up as it is.
“Are you going to stand there thinking about the ice cream, or are we going to eat some? Are you going to be the Austen dreaming about it or the Bronte eating it?”
“Your analogy sucks,” I mutter, turning back to the refrigerator when he grins at me.
Once I’ve got the different tubs of gelato—Fin’s favorite from the parlor at the mall—I source the chocolate fudge sauce along with the salted caramel and sit at the breakfast bar while he makes us each a sundae.
I can’t even go back to reading because he’s shat on that escape with his annoying anti-romanticism snark. Now I have nothing to focus on but the war in my head.
“You did the right thing, Jayden,” is all he says as he drizzles a generous amount of chocolate sauce into our bowls.
In my heart, I know that. In my head… there’s an endless stream of doubt. From what I did, to what I didn’t do, to what I could’ve done.
After adding a scoop of each gelato to our bowls, Dad slathers on more sauce and adds a maraschino cherry on top like it’s the magic trick to making it a healthy snack—just like he used to do when I was a kid. Then he drizzles on some of the cherry syrup because… “It would be rude not to.”
“Obviously,” I chuckle back, taking the bowl he holds out to me and licking some of the sauce trickling down the sides.
I don’t know how he eats the ice cream so fast, or how he made so much mess making the sundaes. It fills me with dread for the day he and Eli are in the kitchen together, because that would be an apocalyptic disaster.
“Do not tell The Sire about this. He’s been a sucky dictator about the whole no-sugar resolution.” Like the chocolate-and-caramel fiend he is, he spoons more sauce into his bowl before he smooshes it around what’s left of his ice cream.
From previous experience, it’s obvious he’s trying to disarm me. Neutralize my hot mess of a brain. It’s why he was goading me about my reading preferences, too—giving me something other than the voice in my head to focus on.
“Do you remember those boatload sundaes we used to get at the Bear Valley piste?”
“Yup.” It was one of the main reasons that the skiing tournament was my favorite to watch Kailey at.
“The warm cookie boat packed with the brownie ice cream…”
“And marshmallow fluff.”
“Don’t forget the homemade salted caramel.”
“And the almond butter…”
“My God, my mouth is watering right now.” He makes for the sauces again, and I snatch the jars away. “What are you doing?”
“Looking out for your cholesterol,” I say, even though I push my untouched sundae his way.
Dad doesn’t touch it, either. The bowl sits between us, melting into a sad puddle of cold custard swirled with more chocolate sauce than any reasonable person should eat.
“What are you going to do now?” I ask tentatively, knowing that unless Eli gave him the A-okay to talk to me, there’s nothing Dad can tell me.
“JJ…” Dad gives me an apologetic smile. “The situation isn’t straightforward. It’s been a long time since the assault. There’s no physical proof, and our only witness is hostile. Any judge will throw this out as hearsay.”
“There has to be something you can do.”
“Of course, and I will do everything in my power for Eli. I’ve already contacted the DA here in L.A., and Natasha is one of the best prosecutors in the country.”
“But?”
“The burden of proof is substantial and, like I told Eli, cases like this—especially when a victim asserts their right to withhold their name from public record—can get… messy,” Dad says between gritted teeth.
“Under the California penal code, there are at least eleven charges we can make for sexual assault. Then there are hate-crime charges, which we can prove, given that the linesman from the game overheard what Tomes called you both. Not to mention statements we can get from other players and the fact that the Comets’ GM already filed a complaint about his behavior months ago. ”
“What does that mean?” It sounds like he has a lot to prosecute Presley with, so why the trepid expression?
“Something will stick, Jayden. It might just not be the charge we want.”
“So what you’re saying is that Presley gets away with what he did to Eli?” Bile burns up my throat with the raging lurch of my stomach when he gives me an apologetic wince. “No. There has to be more we can do. More… just more.”
“JJ…”
“Stop,” my bark echoes around the living area as I push to my feet with the sudden sucker punch of reality to my chest. “Stop it. You’re better than this. You’re… you’re the best…”
How is he standing there so calm and collected when every part of me is spinning out? My head. My heart…
“What’s the point in any of this?” The sob escapes my cloyed chest when Dad ambles to me and pulls me into a tight hug.
Even though I’m several inches taller and a lot broader than him, he still manages to rock me like he used to when I didn’t dwarf him—a there-there, there-there swaying motion that acts as a metronome to my errant emotions.
When I finally stand tall again, he hands me the bright-colored silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
“The point is that no crime should go unpunished. If you use your head instead of your heart to think about this, you’ll see that any charge that sticks is a win. It’s a small justice that Eli deserves. That you and Finley deserve.”
“Small is insignificant, Dad.”
I’m twisting the silk square into a tight rope around my fingers while I try to force myself to see the situation from his perspective—to think like him. It’s impossible, though.
Eli is one-half of my heart that is breaking and aching. It’s excruciating, and all I want to do is fix it. Fix the hurt he’s suffering.
“A small charge that sticks is enough to tarnish Tomes’s name, to ruin his career. By the time we’re done with him, he will never step foot on the ice again.”
“It’s not enough. I don’t care about his career.
” I suck in a deep, cutting breath, rubbing my neck to dispel some of the tension knotting my muscles.
“It’s his life. I want to destroy it completely.
So that he has no reason to live. And if you can’t do that, then neither you nor your colleague is the right attorney for Eli. ”
The scrunch of his face hardens. “I’m the best and Nata—”
“Then fucking fight like it,” is my snap remark before I snatch up my book and head for the bedroom, where Eli is getting ready to leave for his meeting.
It’s been made abundantly clear that I can’t go into the boardroom with him. Nevertheless, I’m going to drive him to the arena, and I’ll wait as close to him as I can—on the other side of the door, down the hallway, in the cafeteria, or in the fucking car.
There’s no way I’m letting him go through hell on his own.
Not when I’m the reason he opened the gates in the first place.