Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Settling in her apartment, I poured us each a glass of wine and some water as I grappled with how to approach her about her dad. Distracted, I turned on the fireplace, plopping down on the couch. “Hey,” I said to her back, “let's chill for a minute.”
She twirled toward me, a wide smile consuming her face as she pranced past me like she was on stage performing. “You could use a bit of wine. It’ll help you calm down.” She fucking winked at me with that comment. What would help me calm down would be my hand heating up that ass of yours. So proud I was able to keep that in my thought bubble.
Taking a long sip, I said, “Yep, wine is exactly what I need.”
She dimmed the recessed lights. “I think I have something else that will help with your tension. Give me a second to change. I'll be right back,” she chided like a preschool teacher to a naughty boy.
Help my tension? Wow, what a brazen thing to say. My tension! “Yeah, okay,” I said, taking a slow breath in through my nose, letting it ease from my mouth, still unsure of my tactic to guide her into this conversation.
My dad’s words waved in my mind like letters drawn in the air by a plane: “One choice: empathy.” Sipping my wine, I thought about his message, his tone, his body language. God, I sucked at this. I just wanted to be direct and make sure she understood that she should have already told me something so central to her life. Memories of my dad holding my mom when she was upset, the way he’d been able to deliver a hard message to me or my sisters even when he’d been angry. We all knew love directed him, so our hearts and minds were open to his words. I needed to be like my father right now.
I laid my head back on the couch, blankly staring at the ceiling, popping up when I heard her throat clearing. Then, with a sultry murmur, she cooed, “Hey, birthday boy.” She sounded all Mae West-like, raking her eye tooth over her bottom lip in that way I loved, her eyes focused as she watched me sit forward, swallowing a gulp of wine. My eyes snagged on the black leather and lace one-piece teddy draped by an open black, short silk robe, and—to send my crotch into pure mania—she wore black stiletto heels, her lips doused with red lipstick, which she typically didn’t wear. It was all a ploy to distract me. I recognized it, but damn if I didn’t wanna just abandon my plan to delve into her past, connect with her…blah, blah, blah.
“Damn, just damn, damn it,” I growled half into my wine. “Sweets…fuck, what are you doing?”
“Um, well, if you need me to explain, I will.” A haughtiness oozed from her as she continued. “This…” She threw her hands in the air, and I half expected her to yell, tah-dah ! “This is the first half of your birthday present. The other half can wait till tomorrow,” she taunted, sauntering toward me, straddling my legs, then lowering her pelvis onto my lap. “Promise, I’ll let you come before me this time,” she added, her voice husky as she leaned forward, nipping at my earlobe.
“Yeah, now…you…” I grunted, my hands cradling her ribs, pushing lightly to move her back from my ear. “You can’t do that right now.”
“Uh?” Her bottom lip protruded as she searched my somber face for a crack, something to indicate that her little sexy-as-hell charade to derail me was working. I mustered every last bit of the adult shit in me not to give in to her. “Rakell, I just…God, this is hard.”
She palmed my crotch, my pelvis flinching as she purred, “I know. I can feel it, and I can’t wait to get it in my mouth,”
“God, you’re so bad, I swear…you! I want to spend some time talking. I want to ask about your dad. I feel like we shouldn’t do this before we talk. We need to…”
Shaking her head, she said, “Really, really?” She rolled her eyes as she pushed herself off my chest, moving her legs back to standing. “I come out in this …after being gone for three weeks, and you…” She stared down at me, practically vibrating with anger. “And you want to fucking talk.” Stepping back, then to the side, she continued, “I wasn’t aware that we were entering a new phase, the platonic phase of our relationship. Because talking is the last thing I wanted to do,” she hissed, grabbing her wine from the coffee table. “I want to fuck, and you want to engage in a chit-chat session. Great, I…”
“Stop with the bullshit,” I yelled, jumping up. “This is hardly a platonic relationship, and, of course, I want to fuck you all the time. It’s pretty much all I think about.” Then I added, trying to lighten the air, “Ninety percent of the time I’m awake, I think about that.” I gestured to her, waving my hand up and down. “Ten percent of the time, I’m thinking about Tex-Mex and BBQ.”
She sighed heavily, her eyes rolling back. “Sure...”
“Okay, not exactly. Ninety percent of the time, I think about doing bad things to your amazing body, and the other ten percent, food, family, and football…but that is a pretty accurate breakdown,” I said, grinning, hoping she’d laugh.
Her features were locked, intent on her anger smokescreen. “Guess not,” she snarled, gesturing to her black get-up before swigging her wine.
I see through your bullshit, sweetheart . “Rakell…Jesus, talking is part of any boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, sharing things that may be difficult.” I realized the hypocrisy as the words spilled from my mouth. Until then, I was never willing to engage in this level of intimacy with a woman who wasn’t in my family or Delilah. Now I was demanding that she go deep with me. I saw the cords in her neck flex, her features stiffening as if masking the sheen of sadness in her eyes. She was battling an internal war, using her fierce reactions as a defense so she didn’t have to face genuine feelings.
“Thanks for the relationship lesson. Another Jake Skyler teachable moment,” she muttered, deadpan, then added with a bite, “Why don’t you write a goddamn book?”
I smirked, a quick chuckle escaping, taking a step toward her. “Come on now, I’m trying to do the right thing, so no pouting.”
“Got it, Mr. Noble. I’ll go change into a platonic outfit,” she huffed forcibly, rotating her pelvis in an exaggerated way as if to make sure I knew exactly what I was saying no to…before stomping down the hallway as slowly as possible, giving me ample time to abort my quest to understand her and just fuck her. Damn, it was tempting.
“Wow, good job not pouting,” I teased, watching her middle finger dart above her head, leaving it as a trail as she walked away. I chuckled, thinking , I love that about her. Followed quickly by, what the hell is wrong with me?
“Don’t use a teacher's voice on me,” she shouted, striding toward her room.
“Yeah, okay.” I shook my head, wondering how I was going to proceed with this “talk.” I had to remind myself that she was twenty-five, hadn’t ever had a real boyfriend, hadn’t even been in a true relationship. I hadn’t pursued the emotional aspect of a relationship with any of the women before Rakell. In a sense, we were making this shit up together as we went along. But I was at an advantage. I’d been watching my parents over the years, and I knew how a man who loved a woman acted; how he would put her before himself. I’d seen my dad doing just that, over and over and over.
“Hope you’re happy, mate, spoiling such a raunchy, sex-filled night,” she sneered, punctuating the word raunchy as she marched into the living room scowling, reminding me of Cassie when she was five and was forced to put her PJs on before bed. The red lipstick had been wiped away, and she was now wearing a baggy sweatshirt and leggings.
I smirked, loving how much this girl was loaded with sass. “Still look hot.”
“Guess not hot enough,” she groaned sarcastically under her breath.
I motioned for her to sit beside me on the couch, but she shook her head and dropped into the chair facing me from an angle.
“ Rae -kale…well, I’m sorry”—I began, reining in my emotions—“I’m sorry about your dad. I was a little shocked, mainly ‘cause I had no idea. I didn’t know, well…” Scouring my experiential library of past relationships to find the right way to assure her I was a safe person, but I came up short, so I sought once again to channel my father.
She stood, moving slowly, almost catatonically, toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. “We rode horses together, and he let me help work cattle with the crew. My mom didn’t like that. She didn’t think it was good for a teenage girl. Horses were his thing, not hers, but I think she liked having alone time when we went on our long trail rides. They would last for hours.”
Staring at her back, I said, “I’m sure you must miss him.”
As if it were just her in the room, she started uttering memories about her dad, like she was watching a slide show playing on the glass. “We used to watch the Iowa Tornadoes play, eating this gross, cheesy corn dip he liked to make. My mom refused to eat it because, as she said, it was ‘like dog food.’ Dad would just say, ‘It’s American football food,’ and Mom would reply, ‘That’s the same thing.’” Twisting her torso to look at me, a choked laugh left her mouth.
I’d moved to the edge of the couch, resting my elbows on my knees, ready to spring up any minute to enfold her in my arms. “It was truly nasty. I mean, only Americans could shove so much processed shit together and call it food.” I saw the sheen in her eyes opposing the stiff smile she forced to her lips. “You know that Velveeta stuff you like? It was that, plus cans of drained corn, beans from a can, peppers from a can—nothing was fresh.” She adjusted her feet as though her legs were shaky or weak.
I stood, wanting to go to her, but forced myself to halt. Nothing in her watery voice or her body language invited me to approach her. Beyond her, I could see the blurry baubles of light from the cityscape. A pre-summer haze had settled into the air, muting the man-made bulbs of light that usually accentuated the Austin skyline. “Sounds like my kinda food.”
“Oh God, my mom would say you’re an unsophisticated bloke if she heard that. I guess, unlike my dad, my mom, well, she ate healthy all the time.”
It struck me that she talked about her mom in the past, as if she was gone, too.
“Anyway, she was kind of a snob. She’d been a model in London before I was born. My dad came from a family without money but he did okay after LSE.”
“LSE?” I inquired, slowly sitting back down.
“London School of Economics. He met my mom when he was going to school in London, and then I came along,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Anyway”—she turned back toward the windows—“I was closer to him than to her, and I think that bothered her. I mean, I didn’t try to love him more. He was just easy and funny, and Mom was always pushing me and she was critical…but Dad, well, to him, I was enough.”
“Enough?” tripped from my mouth . Even when I disappointed my parents, I always instinctively knew I was enough. That’s how they made me feel. Isn’t that the job of parents?
“He just didn’t want me to limit myself by staying there on the ranch. I always knew I would go away to college, but once he was gone, I had to, I had to get out…” With that declaration, she applied the brakes, as if she had to let the memories cross the road.
I heard her mumble to herself, something about nothing left. But what about her mom? “ Rae -kale,” I drawled softly, siphoning any emotion from my voice. “What happened to your dad?”
Turning toward me, her jaw hard in defiance, at odds with the tears brimming in her eyes waiting to spill, she replied, “He died, okay, Jake, he died.”
“ Rae -kale, come sit, or…” I muttered, shifting forward to stand.
“No, stay, I’ll sit.” She slid into the chair, squeezing her eyes shut, forcing the tears back. She opened them quickly, narrowing her gaze on me. “Okay, Jake, I’m just going to tell you what happened, but I don’t want to get all emotional about this, and it’s not anything that affects me today. That’s what you Americans do…”
“Huh, what do we do?” I uttered, not able to conceal my confusion. Her comment was seemingly out of place in this conversation.
“You use your childhood experiences to explain maladaptive adult behavior, then take years to figure all that shit out in counseling. Then when it’s finally figured out, you go on Instagram and talk about your self-discovery journey, inviting the world to see how strong you are because you’ve healed yourself from a fucked-up childhood, but not ‘til your adult life has been riddled with mistakes. No one says they made a mistake, or that they did it because at the time it made sense to them.”
“Wow, that pretty much sums it up for all of us Americans,” I replied, a twinge of humor surfacing in my tone. “Not sure what my excuse is then, for my less than mature adult behavior.” I let out a sigh, laughing lightly. “My parents were pretty great.” Shit, I wished I hadn’t said that.
“You’re lucky,” shot out of her mouth.
I nodded, acknowledging her comment but not addressing her biting tone, as if I didn’t deserve my family somehow. Who deserves or does not deserve their parents? Family is so important, but you get no say on who is in charge of your body, your brain, or your heart at the beginning of your life, and it impacts you so much. “I think you may have a point, but some people may refer to it as self-reflection, so you could position this positively and say Americans are self-reflective.”
“Really? But then you people write books and start podcasts as though you have the roadmap for becoming psychologically whole. This country is so bizarre. I’ve never seen so many people so fixated on their journey and then, with no education, think they’re equipped to help other people heal…like everyone in America is a psychologist. Life coaches , right? That’s what you call them. How about a friend? Just be a friend.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, trying not to chuckle at that statement—it was so her, her dry way of seeing people—some would call it black and white, but I liked the matter-of-fact way she summed up the shit people could spend hours dwelling on and discussing. “So, your dad?” My voice was soft yet unwilling to let go of this thread.
“In an instant, the life we were living was gone. It was as if all the years spent being a family evaporated all at once, almost as if I’d never had the past. The memories I have are all part of the same bucket that includes my dad dying, so it’s a chunk of my life I don’t like to revisit.” She gulped her wine, peering at me over the glass. Her face was blank—she was clearly resolved not to let this moment become anything more than facts, unwilling to share the emotional turmoil contained in that bucket.
“Okay…” I coaxed.
“Well, there was a bad fire, sort of like the fires you see in California.”
“Yep, we’ve seen our share of smoke-filled skies around Sacramento, for sure.”
“Firefighters were working for days trying to stop it, which led to weeks. The fire had been far from us, so we weren’t worried, but then the wind shifted.” Halting, she drew in a breath as if processing how to proceed.
Her eyes flitted from me to her wine, the fireplace, and then the windows, like she was trying to remember what came next. Her voice and expression were void of feeling, almost like she was retelling something she had seen on the news. It struck me as oddly detached.
“The fire,” I prompted, willing myself not to react to the conditions around me, to only focus on extracting the story from her, somewhat like the feeling when I’d played football in the pouring rain and could only move the ball so much. The players had to focus with patience while inching down the field, ignoring everything else.
“It went from something far away that we weren’t worried about at all until it started to creep up on the ranches around us, so my dad insisted my mom and I leave, get out, but he wouldn’t come with us. He wanted to try to save the ranch, well, the livestock. He’d stayed…” I flinched when she choked down a sob. “He had assured us he would be right behind us. I remember my mom jumping in the car, yelling for me to get in, but I didn’t want to leave. He squeezed me, reassuring me it would be okay, then guided me into the car. ‘Kells, just go, it will be fine. I will meet you and Mom in town,’ but I could see the black and red sky behind us. It was something out of one of those movies, when you know , you just know that within minutes, everything will be gone.”
Listening to her, my chest cramped, constraining my breath. It was like I could see flames approaching my parents’ ranch; I imagined the panic that must have ensued. Her dad had called her Kells—I remembered Matt and Jonathon chanting that at the karaoke bar.
“My mom didn’t talk the whole drive. Even when I’d asked her, ‘Is Dad going to be okay?’ she was silent.” Rakell pulled her bottom lip into her mouth, her jaw twitching like she was mustering all her power to stave off the wave of grief that would come with the next line. “I could see how angry her face was when I’d asked that question. Like I had no business asking. I knew then that nothing would ever be the same. Somehow, I knew that she was gone, too.”
The weight of her words hit my sternum, my brain rewinding. Didn’t she say her mom had called her? Didn’t she say…wait, what?
“Dad didn’t make it out. He died trying to save…” Robotically, she bent her head as if she were studying the color of the yellow liquid in her glass.
“ Rae -kale…” I scooted on the couch, closer to her chair, my hand reaching toward her. She glanced at my open palm stretching toward her but didn’t take it. I watched her throat convulse.
“Sweets…” My outstretched hand was motionless, hanging in the air, waiting. Her pain was so tangible I was sure it would manifest as a black cloud, one I prayed I could wash away with my love for her.
My eyes followed a silent tear as it slipped over the apple of her cheek, plopping into her wine as her mouth opened to talk.
“When I hugged him goodbye, I begged him to save my horse, Snowbird. I, I…” Another tear dripped into the yellow liquid, then another. “I begged him like some little kid and…he promised me and…he died trying. He burned to death because I begged him, ‘Please, Daddy, please save Snowbird, please,’ knowing he’d do anything for me, anything.” Her jaw trembled as the tears spilled down her face. “Such a fucking selfish teenager. I wish I hadn’t…”
I stood, taking her wine glass from her hand, then setting it on the table before bending to pull her to me. I enveloped her in my arms wishing I could absorb some of the agony emanating from her, fighting back my own tears as her self-loathing became evident, so well buried under a defiant fa?ade. Her prickly, defensive exterior decomposed before me. Her fragility glared as she spoke. Her words were lost to sobs as I gently tugged her toward the couch, bringing her onto my lap, turning her face into my chest as she wailed uncontrollably…words, encapsulated in gulps of tears…
“If only…”
“I killed him…”
“My mother hates me.”
“She will never forgive me.”
“He was my world. My everything.” A teary hiccup left her mouth.
“He died because I was a daddy’s girl.”
“He’d do anything for me.”
“I took him from my mom.”
“I lost both of them that day.”
“Our ranch, my parents, every…everything…”
“I loved my horse but not more than my…” Another wail lunged from her throat, guttural agony writhing its way to the surface.
Stroking her back as I gulped down the chord of ache constricting my own throat, it felt like a belt was tightening around my esophagus. Yet, I hadn’t lived it. She had. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imagine the gutting loss and how that would have changed the trajectory of my life. “Sweets, you do know that it wasn’t your fault.”
“Nooo, I’d begged…” she shrieked into my chest. “You don’t understand. I made him promise that Snowbird would live, but it never struck me that it would cost his life. I loved him more than anything.” Her voice grew thinner when she said, “It’s no wonder she hates me.”
Nurture took over as I moved my hands up and down her back. “You did what any young girl would do. How old were you?”
Snorting in tears and snot, laying her cheek against my wet shirt, she said, “Almost seventeen. I didn’t even think about the chance that he could die. He passed with his hands around Snowbird’s neck, trying to lead her to safety. God, I just…” Fresh tears sprung to her eyes. I was sure there was an endless well that she’d been pushing down for years. Then, a past conversation with Matt scurried into my head. Had she told him? It was the discussion I’d had with him the first time I put her on a plane to L.A., and I needed some guidance. Oddly, I’d turned to him, knowing he knew her best.
“Give it time, Jake. I think you guys can figure things out, but in every situation, it takes time. I know she’s guarded but with good reason. Trauma doesn’t just magically go away—especially when it sends a person on a different path.”
“I suppose being an escort,” I’d replied, fishing for more.
“I’m sure that contributed to her being closed off, but I also know there’s a lot of depth to her, and her capacity for love is huge. It’s just wrapped up a little tighter than most people.”
“Shhh, Sweets…” My fingers sifted through her hair as my brain desperately fished for the right words. What are the right words to say to someone when they share something that literally shattered their psyche and forever altered the course of their lives? And her mother…what kind of person reacts like that, takes it out on their own child—someone you're supposed to love, to protect? I couldn’t grapple with that. Her detached relationship with her mom was starting to make sense. That had led to her decision to be an escort. I was sure of it.
Craning her head back, her eyes encircled with black mascara, she examined my shirt, her nose scrunching. “I’ve made a mess of you,” she sniffed. “Sorry.”
I cupped her cheeks in my hands. “That’s the last thing I care about right now, Sweets. Let’s get you to bed.” I stood, bringing her with me. As I carried her, she buried her head in the juncture of my neck and shoulders. I laid her on the bed, pulling the covers over her, then returned with a warm washcloth, gently cleaning the black from her swollen green eyes before undressing and slipping into bed next to her. When I wrapped my arms around her, she laid her cheek to my chest, murmuring something about podcasts.
“Sweets, what?” I whispered, stroking her back.
She arched her neck, her red eyes catching on mine in the dimly lit room. “I’m not going to do a podcast.”
“Huh?”
“Seems like everyone starts podcasts when they go through something traumatic and feel like they’ve healed,” she sniffed, and I could see fresh tears brimming in her eyes.
I yanked her in. “No pressure on that. Stick to acting and modeling,” I murmured softly as I drifted into my thoughts—A: went through something traumatic…check. B: healed…a work in progress. She was still so far from healing that I wasn’t sure if a lifetime would be enough time to reconcile what had happened. It hit me then that sometimes, merely surviving is enough.