Chapter Seven
Romeo was exhausted. Talking his mother down from her latest episode had been worse than any business negotiation he had dealt with.
Sometimes he wondered if this was his life.
Forever. Always flying across the world to where she was when she told him that she didn’t want to live anymore.
But what else could he do? She was his last remaining parent.
His father had done terrible damage to her, and she had never recovered.
She was always seeking to re-create that relationship with new men, new lovers, and it was never good. It was always toxic. And it was just…
On top of that he was still dealing with Heather. Still dividing up all of these assets to liquidate, working on the legal aspect of buying her out of his father’s company. Her lawyers were being nitpicky with details, and he was about to…
He thought of her. Every night. And those thoughts left him hard and aching, and he couldn’t even bring himself to go out and find another lover because she had haunted his libido in such a way that he couldn’t exorcize the specter of her.
Every time he looked at another woman he saw her.
He had gone through bouts of this for a good portion of the last decade. But never this strong. Now he knew what it was like. To taste her. To be inside of her.
He wanted to get drunk.
That was his singular goal as soon as he walked into his father’s old home. Everything was boxed up, ready to sell. Except for what had been his father’s office, and the bedroom that Romeo used. Also, that damned dining table was still sitting there. The scene of the crime.
He was filled with hate.
Right when he walked through the front door, he was confronted by his own personal ghost.
There she was, her hands clasped in front of her, her face white.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s both of ours,” she said.
“I’m well aware. But I thought that there was an implied agreement that I would handle all of this and you would simply take the money.”
“There may have been that agreement. But things have changed.”
“Why? Or did you decide you wanted more?”
Something sharp flashed in her eyes. “And what if I have? What if I decided that I want what’s rightfully mine? To be part of this family, because I am. I am part of it. And you can resent me all you want, but your father saw me as a daughter. You’ve been trying to supplant me—”
“Don’t do this. Not now. You never wanted to see me again, and yet here you are.”
“Because things are complicated now,” she said.
He saw tears in her eyes, the sloped set of her shoulders, the pale color in her face, and that was the first time he felt truly disquieted.
Because there was one thing that Heather had never shown him, and that was weakness. She was weak now—he could see it—but what he didn’t know was why.
“What is it?”
“I’ve got to tell you something.”
She sounded grave. Grave enough that he wondered if she was telling him that she had poisoned his father. Or something similar.
“What is it?”
“I…”
“Dear God, Heather, you have never had trouble telling me anything difficult. Hard truths are in fact your favorite thing to speak to me, so just go ahead and say it.”
“I’m pregnant. With your baby, obviously.”
It was like the world was crumbling and falling away. Pregnant? With his child? How could that be? How was it possible?
You know perfectly well how it’s possible.
He had taken her like a rutting animal; he had taken no precautions whatsoever.
He had assumed that she had taken some. Well, that was a lie.
He hadn’t assumed anything. He hadn’t thought about it.
Never in his life had he ever taken a woman without protection, and now not only had he done it, but he hadn’t even been aware of it.
He had been aware of nothing at the time other than his need to take her.
Nothing other than the triumph of finally having her.
“It’s impossible.”
“I thought the same thing, but tests don’t lie.”
“You will be getting another test, one that I can see.”
“Why would I lie about this? You would find out. I’m not an idiot. You’re a very rich man, I know how paternity tests work. There’s no way and no point to be lying about this, Romeo, none at all. I wanted to be free of you. This is the last thing that I want.”
“Then why are you here at all? If you want to be free of me.”
Panic was tearing through him, and he felt wounded; he felt the urge to wound her back, as he had always done. And in the back of his mind was the realization that this was going to send his mother to an extremely dark place. A child with the daughter of the woman who had caused her so much pain?
This was untenable.
It was unimaginable.
“I can raise the child by myself. But if I do that, you can’t be involved at all. You can’t claim them. You can’t… There is no middle ground when it comes to this baby, Romeo. There can’t be.”
He stared at her, and he couldn’t even begin to describe the feeling that was flooding him. The intense possessiveness, the anger. “I would never deny my own child.”
His own distance from his father echoed inside of him now. The sense of rejection. He would never, ever consign a child to such a feeling. What a horrendous thought. What an evil thing to suggest.
“You know how we are,” she said. Her teeth were chattering now, and she looked sick. “We spent years living to hurt each other. When we are left to our own devices the choices we make are poor. There have to be…protections. Rules. If you want to be in this child’s life, we have to get married.”
“You dare come in here and make demands of me? Prove correct the thing I thought about you all those years ago? You were trying to get me to impregnate you then, weren’t you? I always suspected it.”
“No,” she said, vehemently. “And I don’t need you to.
I was left just as much as you. This has nothing to do with trying to get anything, but it has everything to do with being the child that was always on the outside.
Think about it. This child would never truly belong if we didn’t get married.
I would marry someone else, give the child some siblings, and they would only be half of that family.
You would do the same. Who would that child belong to?
And what would happen to them? I know what it’s like.
I loved your father so much, Romeo, and you never accepted me.
You made me feel like I was an outsider all of my life, and I will not allow it. ”
“Why do you think you’re in a position to allow anything? One way or the other. Why do you think—”
“If you don’t agree, then I will fight you with all of my resources, and I will paint a picture of you that isn’t flattering at all.”
“And what will that do to our child?”
“You have choices, Romeo, you just don’t like them.”
“What will a marriage look like between the two of us? We can’t even be in the same room without wanting to kill each other.”
“I know. It’s terrible. An awful situation and a terrible idea. But from where I’m sitting we don’t have another choice. We need to do what we must for this child.”
“So for eighteen years you expect us to live in a prison cell with one another?”
The truth was, he would’ve demanded marriage.
He would have. Because he would not allow any child of his to be born and stigmatized the way that she was.
He had been part of that stigma. He knew it.
He couldn’t deny it. And he had seen how cruel the other children could be.
Even when she had been the stepdaughter, they had whispered behind her back. She had friends, plenty of them.
But…
The trouble was, she was scratching the surface of the deep truth.
A child who was the product of a union between stepsiblings who had a reputation for long hating each other was going to face extreme ostracization.
And it would be only their fault. They would’ve created the situation.
And so it was up to them to mitigate the damage.
He had already lived thirteen years of hell where Heather was concerned. What were eighteen more years of it?
It nearly made him laugh. They both thought that they were going to be free.
And yet, when had he ever been free? He had been thinking about her constantly since that moment. He had been obsessed with her.
For so much longer even than the last month and a half.
“We will have to construct a narrative,” he said. “One of romance.”
“Why?”
“You’re thinking about our child, and that I find admirable.
In some ways. But what you’re forgetting is the fact that you and I have a reputation for hating each other.
It is well known. Particularly in the circles that I’m in.
Not unknown in yours. If you want to nip gossip in the bud, then it must…
There must be a story. It can’t be that we hate-fucked on the dining room table. ”
Her face turned red, and he felt his own body go warm in response to mentioning what had happened between them.
“I guess. I guess you’re right. And what will our marriage look like?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and nothing pained him more than admitting that he didn’t have an instant, immediate plan. It was infuriating, in fact, but there was no roadmap for this. He was a man who was accustomed to control, but with her, he was always out of it.
With her, everything was always near destruction.
“We will have to draw up paperwork. Very clearly defined paperwork.”
“It’s almost as if you don’t trust me.”
“I don’t. You spent years making my life miserable, Romeo.
You deliberately hurt me from the moment that I first came into your life, and you can blame the fact that our parents had an affair.
That hurt your mother, but you were mean to me from the moment that we met.
Nothing more than a snob. The thing that you now realize you have to protect your child from is you. ”
Her words lanced him through the heart.