Chapter 10 Hazel
Hazel
Twelve: The number of red roses in the vase beside my bed.
Ten: The number of days I’ve been here, resting and recovering.
Seven: The number of stitches on my scalp.
Infinity: The number of times Vincent has held my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles gently. A wordless apology with a look in his eyes that is so sorrowful that I can’t help but weaken for him, letting go of my anger little by little no matter how hard I try to hold onto it.
Because I have reasons to be angry. Good reasons. The lies, the secrecy. The stitches on my head wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for him. If I’d never met him, or maybe if he’d simply told me the truth from the beginning.
The doctor finishes examining me, returning his tools to his bag.
“So?” Vincent asks impatiently.
“Healing well,” the doctor says to him. “She’s clear for most activities, but she still needs rest. Lots of sleep, water, and nutrient rich food.”
“I’ll make sure that happens,” Vincent says, looking past the doctor and at me. “Thank you.”
The doctor gives me a warm smile and a friendly wave, then leaves.
Vincent comes to me, a bottle of water in one hand and a pill in the other.
“I don’t need that anymore,” I say, pushing his hand away. “You heard him. I’m all good now.”
“That’s not what he said,” Vincent replies. “There’s no need to deprive yourself of pain relief.”
“I’m fine,” I snap. “Unless you plan to shove that pill down my throat, forget it.”
He freezes, and for a second I think he’s actually considering doing just that. But then he puts the pill and water down on the bedside table and takes a seat on the edge of the bed.
“You’ll stay here for another few days,” he says firmly.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” I say. “I stayed here because I couldn’t fly yet, and because I can’t afford a hotel room for two weeks in this damn city. Now that I’m well enough, I’m flying home.”
I begin to sit up and get out of bed when Vincent’s hand reaches to me, pushing me back into the bed.
I hate the way my body responds to him. The hand holding.
The gentle kisses on my forehead when he thinks I’m sleeping.
But now his touch is more forceful, more reminiscent of the rough sex we used to enjoy before it all went down the drain.
My heart jumps from his firm hold on my shoulder, my nipples hardening as my breath hitches in my throat.
“You’ll stay here,” Vincent repeats in a low voice. “Where I can take care of you.”
“Take care of me. Because you’re really good at that, right?”
Boom. A blow, right where it hurts him.
His hand releases me, and his eyes stare at the wall behind me.
A couple of weeks ago I would have killed for the opportunity to land a blow like that, to wound Vincent and give him a taste of the emotional pain he’d caused me.
But today it doesn’t feel good. Not satisfying, the way I’d fantasized when I was in the depths of the heartbreak.
Because the truth is, even after all of this fucked up crap that he put me through, I still love him. Which might be the most fucked up thing of all.
So hurting Vincent doesn’t feel good. It feels like hurting someone that I love, like hurting myself.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologize,” he replies. “Be angry for as long as you need to be. I can take it. I earned it.”
This statement only makes me feel guiltier, though. Guilty, for being angry at a man who endangered my life and has done nothing but lie to me since the day that we met.
Why the hell do I feel guilty about that?
“I have to leave,” I say to him.
This time, he doesn’t try to stop me from getting out of bed.
I cross the room in my thin pajama set, my hair in a loose braid.
My uniform for the last ten days as I laid in bed taking medicine, drinking tea, and eating the meals Vincent brought me while surfing Netflix.
It was oddly domestic, the most consecutive time we’ve ever spent together, and the most time we’ve ever spent doing mundane tasks like binge watching reality shows while eating leftover pad thai.
If only. If only he’d been willing to do this a year ago, when the future still felt bright. Hell, when the future even felt possible.
Now it’s bittersweet. Knowing that I’ll go home to join Kristen in San Jose, that nothing will ever be the same between us, that no matter what happens, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust Vincent again.
And at the same time, knowing that I’ll probably never love a man like I love him again.
I fucking hate him for that.
Packing my things in my suitcase - one of Vincent’s “men” retrieved it from my hotel room after they discharged me from the hospital - I zip it closed and stand it up on its wheels.
“Brooklyn.”
I turn to Vincent.
“What?” I ask.
“That’s where I grew up,” he says, looking at me with hollow eyes. “A long time ago, you asked me where I grew up. I told you Denver, because I didn’t want to talk about anything to do with home. But…I grew up in Brooklyn. About twenty minutes from here.”
I nod, taking this tidbit of information in. It’s just another lie revealed.
“Um,” I say. “Thanks. Thank you for telling me that.”
“My dad was a salesman,” he continues, his voice flat.
“But not a very good one. He got his commission checks on the first of every month. So by the end of every month, we were usually out of money. My father couldn’t provide for us, but he was too proud to admit it.
He was an angry, insecure man. He felt small in the world, so he made up for it by being big at home.
Took out his anger on my mom, on me and my siblings. Mostly me, since I was the eldest boy.”
I exhale slowly, resisting the urge to grab his hand. Vincent’s backstory, the story I’d asked him about countless times, is more heartbreaking than I previously imagined.
“My mom applied for food stamps behind his back, which helped a little,” he goes on. “Sometimes we’d eat spaghetti with ketchup because we couldn’t afford real sauce. Now, as an adult, spaghetti with ketchup is still one of my favorite comfort meals. As gross as it might seem to most people.”
I continue to stand there. Just receiving the information. Little shards of Vincent, fragments of him.
“My parents were old school Catholic,” he says. “We went to mass every week without fail. I fought against it; I hated mass. Didn’t want to go. My parents finally gave up on forcing me when I got caught smoking weed behind the sanctuary.”
This makes me smile. A detail about Vincent that sounds like the version of him that I knew, something I can easily imagine him doing as a kid.
“I was the black sheep of the family,” he continues, looking down. “That’s probably why I rebelled so much. I figured everyone was expecting me to fuck up anyway. Might as well go all in. Eventually, I met Derek and Damien when their parents moved to our neighborhood.”
Leaving the suitcase by the door, I come closer, sitting beside Vincent on the edge of the bed but still careful to leave plenty of distance between us.
“They were already dealing,” he says. “That’s how we met. I was looking to buy off them. But we started hanging out and eventually I started selling, too.”
“Just…” I clear my throat. “Just weed?”
He shakes his head.
“Cocaine,” he says. “If you can believe that. A fifteen year old kid dealing cocaine. I didn’t think about it like that at the time.
But now I look back and realize how fucking young we were.
We were kids. But I was big for my age. All of us were.
And we had a reputation for being violent.
I think people left us alone because of that. ”
“And you had a reputation for being violent because…?” I ask, unsure if I even want to know the answer.
“Because we were,” he says simply.
I bite my lip.
“I’ve killed people, Hazel,” he says flatly, looking down. “I’m not proud of it. But I’m not not proud of it, either. Early on, it was usually self defense. Kill or be killed, that kind of situation.”
“And later on?” I ask.
“Later on, the violence became more strategic,” he says, his eyes darkening. “Leverage. Revenge. Blackmail. Silencing. We did what we had to do, but no more than that.”
I’m silent, watching him, waiting for him to offer more information.
“We grew up. Went from low-level street dealing to smuggling and distribution. Some gambling here and there. Occasional hits.”
“Hits?”
“Hired jobs,” he says. “Hits.”
I swallow hard, the weight of his words settling over me.
“About ten years ago we began talking about pulling back,” he continues.
“We’d made more money than we knew what to do with, and had some legitimate forms of income too.
We figured we’d let the hit jobs and the gambling go, and put some distance between us and the smuggling down south. A more…managerial role, so to speak.”
He smiles ruefully.
“Turns out, that’s easier said than done. We were tangled up with a gang down south and I’d had enough. I wanted out, fuck the financial losses. Just wanted out. Derek and Damien disagreed. They thought we could overpower the gang, scare the shit out of them and get them back under control.”
He lets out a big huff of air, running his fingers through his hair.
“Truthfully, maybe we could have. But it would have been a war, a bloodbath. I was tired of seeing lives ended from this work. I didn’t want to be responsible for that anymore,” he continues.
“So I said fine. I’ll give up my portion and go.
You two stay in if that’s what you want.
Half of my portion was to go to the gang, half to Derek and Damien.
I insisted on that compromise. It was the only way to ensure a peaceful transition.
And like I said, I didn’t want any more blood on my hands. ”
The way he finishes that statement gives me a bad feeling.
“Let me guess,” I say quietly. “In the end, you did have blood on your hands.”
“Derek got greedy,” he says, his voice a low rumble. “God knows why. We had plenty. There was no need. But he decided to steal the half meant for the gang. Worse, he blamed the theft on a rival gang. Framed them and got out clean. The rival group wasn’t so lucky.”
I recognize Vincent’s tone of voice. The quiet, deadly anger that comes from deep within his chest, up his throat, bubbling over like lava over the walls of a volcano.
“I had to put my business - my legal business - on pause to go down there and try to fix it. Derek had started a war down there and it…it looked like a war zone,” he says.
“It meant coming back into the drug business. Damien was more than happy to welcome me back. Derek, not so much. I put things right, and after that I was too afraid to get out again. Too afraid of the shit that might happen if I tried to leave again. I was always the more cool-headed of the group. Derek was the loose canon. And Damien is somewhere in between. Leaving was like upsetting the balance of this carefully positioned system.”
“Did you ever leave?” I ask. “Or are you…do you still do this stuff?”
He nods and my heart sinks.
“Smaller scale now,” he replies. “Stream-lined and clean. Violence is rare. Everyone knows their role.”
“You kicked Derek out,” I recall. “And Damien?”
“Damien left right after Derek,” he says.
I frown.
“What did you mean when you said you taught Derek a lesson?” I ask.
“Fighting,” he replies. “Physical fights were always how we settled things as boys. And it’s how we settled things then, too.
Derek had begun using off and on. The cocaine kept him up for days at a time.
He wasn’t eating, and he’d lost a lot of weight.
He was weak. Kicking his ass was almost too easy.
It felt wrong, like beating up a woman or a child or something.
But I couldn’t help it; I was so fucking angry about the war he’d caused. ”
“But you didn’t kill him,” I say, and he shakes his head.
“Hell no,” he says. “I wanted to, but I held back. All this time, Damien hunting me down, and me hunting him down…all because he thought Derek was dead. Well, it’s fitting isn’t it? Derek caused a war between gangs, and then a war between friends. He’s talented like that.”
“Do you know where Derek is?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“Somewhere in Central America, maybe South America right now, I don’t know,” he says. “I have a couple of guys who look into him now and then. He’s an addict living in poverty. He’s not a threat to me the way that Damien is.”
He’s quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is soft, almost wounded.
“I thought Damien knew,” he says. “He knew what his brother was battling with, the way he was getting more impulsive, more paranoid. Derek fleeing and disappearing isn’t out of line with how he was acting ten years ago. He’s just broke now. Broke and friendless.”
“If Damien thinks you killed his brother, no wonder he hated you,” I say.
He nods.
We sit in silence for what feels like minutes. My mind is feeling with the revelation that the man I’ve loved for so long has a past and a present that terrify me.
“I’m ending my involvement in it all,” Vincent says. “It was going to be next year, but after everything that happened, I’m ending it this month. Handing things off to someone new and stepping back forever.”
He watches me as he says it and I know what he’s thinking. Shaking my head, I stand from the bed.
“Thank you for your honesty now,” I say. “But it’s too late. You lied to me. For months and months. An afternoon of confessions doesn’t change everything that’s happened.”