Chapter 13 Dominic Royal #2
The room got quieter after she said that because she had finally gotten closer to the truth of why any of this shit was happening at all. She set the wine glass down and turned more fully toward me with one arm draped along the backside of the couch behind my shoulders.
“I know how this sounds,” she said softly, “but I used to think if you ever saw me away from all the noise in Miami, away from Carmen, away from all that… maybe things would be different.”
I let that comment sit right there between us because silence always made people reveal more. “You still think that?” I asked after a second.
She looked down at her lap first, then back up at me, and the expression on her face would’ve made another nigga feel important. Hope always looked flattering on a beautiful woman but I didn’t give a fuck about it.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Sometimes I think you only stay because your life got complicated.”
That was the first time she said the baby without saying the baby. I rolled the glass slowly in my hand and looked at her. “Complicated how?”
She gave a little nervous laugh. “You know what I mean.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
Her eyes dropped, then rose again. “I think Carmen being pregnant changed everything.”
I didn’t lose my cool cause I was too calculated for that. “She’s my wife.”
“I know.” She replied quickly, like she wanted to get past that part before the truth of it could really settle in on her. “I’m not saying you don’t care about her. I’m saying maybe you feel stuck.”
That was was her ugly truth and the shit she convinced herself of.
It was just the quiet, ugly thing she had been feeding in her own mind this whole time.
The idea that Carmen only had what she had because she was carrying my child made her feel better.
That if it wasn’t for the baby, I would’ve drifted somewhere else.
, somewhere toward somebody like Victoria.
She really had built herself a whole little dream.
I looked at her long enough to make her shift and I slowly cocked my head to the side. “You think that?”
She tightened her fingers around the stem of the glass. “I think you keep calling me for a reason.”
That answer was honest… a little delusional, but honest. I leaned forward and set my drink down on the table in front of us. “Victoria, men call women for a lot of reasons.”
She looked at me like she was trying to decide if I was teasing her or warning her. “And what reason are you calling me for?”
That was the kind of question you had to be careful with. Too much truth too early and she might get cold and too much softness and she’d get worse with the fantasy. I needed her warm, and comfortable, not suspicious and guarded.
“I call because I know how your mind works,” I told her looking in her eyes. “And if I don’t, you get in your feelings and start doing stupid shit.”
It made her laugh, but there was pain in it too. “So, this is management?”
“Partly.”
She stared at me. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s honest though and you know I’m honest.”
She looked away, and for a second I thought maybe that would be enough to sober her up a little. Maybe enough to give her some pride back but then she reached for the bottle and poured more wine into her glass instead, with her hand steadier than I expected.
“You know what your problem is?” she asked.
“No.” I told her, still engaging.
“You say horrible things and then act like honesty excuses them.”
I watched her drink and not just for the drink itself. I watched the way her shoulders moved when she swallowed and the way her eyes kept coming back to mine even when she wanted to look away. She was already a little emotionally lit up. The wine was just helping her say it.
“My problem,” I said slowly, “is that nobody ever listens the first time.”
That made her look at me even harder and I let my eyes scan over the room once more while she sat there trying to figure out what that meant.
The terrace doors were still cracked open enough to let the night air in.
Upstairs stayed dark except for one little wall light over the landing.
The whole house was just too lit and too private.
She had really built me a gift and wrapped it in candles.
“You know what I used to hate most about Carmen?” she suddenly asked.
I looked back at her and waited. She smiled, but it wasn’t pretty now it was more of a bitter smile. “That she never even looked threatened. She always knew she had you.”
I stayed quiet and let her continue.
“She looked at me like I was some little problem that would pass.” She took another sip and sat the glass down a little too hard causing the bottom to click against the table.
“And maybe she was right, because here I am. Still talking about you and still wanting something that was never really mine.”
That was closer to the truth than she had been all night. I leaned back and watched her. She was crying without really crying now but she had that gloss in her eyes and that tightness in her mouth. It was that place where women still tried to hold onto their beauty even while they were breaking.
“You should’ve let this go a long time ago,” I said.
That hit her hard and her whole face changed, and she looked at me in a way that finally had some real understanding in it. “Is that why you came?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t answer right away and that was all the answer she needed.
I went into my hoodie and pulled out a bottle of Fentanyl pills sliding them across the glass coffee table with my eyes locked in on her the entire time.
Victoria’s eyes looked from the bottle to my eyes, and it wasn’t a disbelief behind them.
She knew exactly what this meant, she could take herself out of her misery on her own, or she could really suffer but either way, she wasn’t making it out of this alive.
Victoria’s hand hovered over the pill bottle for a second, but she didn’t grab it.
That was the first thing I noticed because for all the crying, all the liquor, and all the heartbreak spread across her face, she still wasn’t gone go out sad in front of me that easy.
Her fingers touched the bottle, rolled it a little across the table, then pulled back.
She looked up at me again, with her mascara smudged under her eyes now, and I could see it all over her face that she was still trying to figure out if there was some part of this she could fix.
That was Victoria’s problem, she always thought if she stayed in it long enough, if she looked pretty enough, cried soft enough, loved hard enough, she could pull something out of me that wasn’t there.
“You really came all the way here just for this?” she asked.
Her voice was rougher now and that seductive little tone she had earlier was gone. This was stripped-down Victoria feeling hurt, humiliated, and drunk enough to feel everything twice as harder, but not so drunk she couldn’t still see me clearly.
I stayed where I was, with one shoulder angled toward the counter, and my glass still in my hand even though I hadn’t touched it in a while.
The music was still playing low in the house, and that made the whole thing feel uglier and more dramatic than it had to be, like all this softness had been waiting here for a man who never planned on giving her what the fuck she wanted.
“I came because I had to know, for myself, I had to see in person.” I told her.
“Know what?”
“If you was ever gon’ stop.”
She let out another laugh that sounded more like a breakdown. “Stop loving you?”
“Nah, stop wanting more than what it was. You ain’t never loved me cause it wasn’t shit to love. I never gave you nothing to love… I did my job cause I had to and after that, I gave you a chance at freedom when I could’ve buried you.”
She took another swig of wine. “What was it, Dom?” she asked, finally looking back up at me. “Since you always so honest, tell me. What was I to you?”
The truth sat easy in my mouth. “I just told you… a responsibility.”
I saw it all over her face, it was the way her eyes got wide followed by her hand coming up slow to press against the center of her chest like maybe that would stop what she was feeling from getting worse.
She was so dramatic, I promise she was. If I had one wish, it would’ve been that El Blanca didn’t deprive her of the love she was looking for.
“A responsibility,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
She nodded like she understood, but the tears came harder after that. “Wow. I understand at first that what it was, but I just thought after that, the way you cared for me… I just…” she stopped herself.
I looked at her and didn’t move because that was part of it too.
She needed to sit in everything happening right now and accept it.
She need to sit in every lie she told herself.
Every little fantasy she built around a man who never belonged to her.
She needed to feel all of it before the end came, because that was the only way any of this would make sense once she was found.
Victoria had to look like a woman who had finally given up.
Not a woman caught off guard by violence, and not a woman who fought or was silenced.
I need this shit to look like a woman who broke.
She picked the glass back up and finished the rest of it in one swallow. Her throat worked overtime while she drank, and her hand shook more when she set it down than it had before. “You made me feel stupid,” she whispered.
“No,” I said. “You did that on your own.”
Her eyes shot to mine through the hot tears. “You don’t get to tell me how I feel.”
“I ain’t telling you how you feel. I’m telling you what happened.”