Chapter Eight
You Killed It. Dead.
Now…
We’d been informed we could go in and see him.
And we were right outside his hospital room door.
I was anxious to get in there.
I was anxious about a lot of things. How Liam was going to
react. Dorothea’s new knowledge, sixteen years late. If there was going to be
any lasting effects of Darius’s head trauma.
I mean, a tire iron?
Bile filled my mouth.
Liam’s fingers curled around my forearm.
I stopped and looked at him, saw the expression on his face
and twisted my arm so he’d let me go, but only so I could take his hand.
“I know this is going to be hard,” I started.
“Mom—”
“And we’ll have a lot of chats, on your time, on your
schedule at processing things.”
“Mom, listen—”
“But now we have to—”
“Mom…shit,” he hissed and looked away.
I got closer and held his hand tighter and decided, in the
current circumstances, not to give him guff about his language.
“Baby, I know this is hard and confusing and—”
He looked back at me. “Mom. Dad and I’ve been hanging since
I was seven years old.”
I stood solid and immobile for a moment.
Then my head exploded.
It was dark when he finally opened his eyes.
And as luck would have it (for me, not for Darius), I was
alone with him in his room.
He turned his head, winced, and my heart contracted, but I
stood strong.
No, I was sitting.
So I sat strong.
He looked at me and there was confusion, then softness.
“Baby,” he whispered, and there was a rasp in his voice.
I felt that rasp in the heart of me.
Ugh.
“Ally’s all right,” I told him.
“Good,” he murmured, still raspy.
“Do you need water?” I asked.
He was just awake after getting a tire iron to the head, two
gunshot wounds to his thighs, a stab wound to boot, but he’d lived a certain
life, so he shook off the stupor and was pretty damned alert as he studied me
and nodded.
I got up and used the little plastic pitcher to half fill a
little plastic cup with water then I put it to his mouth.
His hand came up, fingers curling around mine as he pushed
up a bit in bed, again wincing, and on his own steam took the cup from me and
sipped the water.
“The bed lifts up, it’s one of those buttons,” I told him.
“You gonna do that yourself too, or do you want me to do it?”
He was still studying me, guardedly, even as he took another
sip.
Then he nodded. “You.”
I nabbed the control, figured out which button and pressed
it.
“Tell me when,” I said to the control.
The bed whirred.
“When.”
I stopped pressing and dropped the control.
I returned my attention to him.
“Where’s Liam?” he asked.
“With Toni and Tony, seeing as today, I disowned my mother,
father and Lena.”
“Baby,” he whispered, but his mouth was twitching.
Fury boiled in my veins.
“Are you being serious right now?” I asked, my voice
dangerous, my eyes locked on his gorgeous, full lips.
“Maybe when I’m not in a hospital bed with a caved-in head I
can explain this to you,” he said.
My eyes darted to his.
“Explain what?” I asked. “How you, for the last nine years,
colluded with my sister, and then my mother and father, to be a part of our
son’s life, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Lena caught me watching him on the playground one day.”
“I know.”
“She got up in my shit.”
“You’ve been unconscious for a while, Darius, and cell phone
technology was invented before you took that hit for Ally. I’ve had a few
conversations since then.” I leaned slightly toward him. “Heated
ones.”
His lips twitched again.
Of all the—!
“This isn’t funny,” I snapped.
“Maybe you’ll get there one day,” he murmured.
A tire iron, two bullets and a knife didn’t kill him.
But I was going to.
“Taking us back, I know that too,” I declared. “About Lena
getting up in your shit. About you two striking a deal. About how she
eventually roped my parents in. Even about the fact that when Miss Dorothea saw
us in the waiting room of this very hospital and gasped, she didn’t gasp
because she didn’t know Liam existed. She gasped because you were in surgery
when it was all gonna come out that all of you all,” I whirled a finger in the
air, “were playing me behind my back.” My voice was rising when I
finished, “Even Miss Dorothea!”
“I know you wanted Liam to know his grandma.”
“Not behind my back!” I shouted.
“We had to be careful.”
I’d heard that refrain.
And I was sick to death of it.
So my eyes narrowed.
Darius got serious. “Liam didn’t want you to know. He
overheard me talking to your father about the precautions we needed to take,
and he was adamant. You couldn’t know. He thought, and he was right, that it
might put you in danger. You’d push for more. We had what we could have, and it
was Liam’s idea, and I backed him, that we had to do it how we could to keep
you safe.”
“And you give your son everything he wants.”
“Well…yeah.”
Oh my God!
Why was he so awesome and such a pain in my neck at the
same damned time?
Gah!
“Does he know you used to do what you did?” I asked.
“I think he suspected, with all the care we had to take with
me being with him, but I came clean to him last year, when he was old enough to
get it…and after I was out.”
“So it was only me you kept in the dark.”
“Sweetheart—”
“And when our son started to pull away from his Uncle Tony,
it wasn’t because he was settling into knowing it was him and me against the
world. It was because he had his dad. Did you play basketball with him?”
“We had to make arrangements so no one would see us,
but…yes.”
“You didn’t show to delete his Transformers and give him
Tupac because he needed a growing man’s room. You showed because he told you he
wanted one.”
“And he needed a growing man’s room,” Darius reiterated.
“Right,” I said crisply. “And when I sat him down and shared
about his father, the reason he told me a man has to do what a man has to do
isn’t because he didn’t want to hurt me by talking about his dad, a man I
confessed to him I still loved. It was because his father and him were lying to
me. He didn’t need me to seek you out and ask you to meet him. He’d been
hanging with you for years.”
“Malia—”
I turned stiltedly and grabbed my purse.
I turned back and said, “Fuck you, Darius Tucker.”
He flinched.
“It took you a long, damned time,” I shared. “But have to
hand it to you, in the end you killed it. What I felt for you. You killed it.
Dead.”
With that, ignoring the expression on his face, I marched
out.