Chapter 23
Blaise
I stare Tilly down as hard as I can, willing her to just confess everything. She needs to admit that she’s my blackmailer. This is all too much, and I need just one thing clarified to make space for what to do about everything else.
It doesn’t even matter. If I ever thought I could get custody of Donovan and kick Tilly out of our lives, that’s impossible with this diagnosis. Same for her. If she cares even a sliver for Donovan, she knows she needs me just the same. We’re stuck together.
So she just needs to admit the truth. And also explain how Donovan has sickle cell because that’s practically impossible if she’s his mom.
I know I’m a carrier, I’ve got several family members with it, so I had them test me ages ago, since they do bloodwork for me regularly anyway, but I didn’t think white people got it.
If they can, it’s crazy rare. It never even crossed my mind, with Tilly being Donovan’s mom.
But she’s not budging. She quotes Mean Girls and leaves it there. Just stares at me. She even has the audacity to look irritated with me.
I give her an extra push by handing over the cellphone I’ve had in my pocket since yesterday. She takes it in both hands like it’s a gift, stares at it like she doesn’t understand how it got into my pocket.
“Dammit, Tilly!” I curse, hitting my breaking point. “I saw the nursing home yesterday.”
She opens her mouth only to close it again. She stares too hard at the phone before finally saying, “So you know,” in the saddest, most self-serving little whimper.
I fly up out of my chair so quickly it falls behind me as I stomp past it, needing to give myself space from her so I don’t do anything stupid.
“Yeah. I know that’s where the money went, while you’re raising our son in a fucking hovel,” I snap at her, pissed all over again.
This is not the fucking time for her to play the victim.
Her sad puppy eyes widen in shock. She breathes deep, like a dragon about to spit fire.
“How dare you?” she snarls, standing as well, but she’s so short that it doesn’t have a fraction of the impact she wants it to have.
“A hovel? He’s your son, too, and what the hell have you contributed, huh?
You’ve hidden behind a mask for a goddamn year and just waltzed in like the savior and reaped all the benefits of it, while hogging my bed and taking up the entire fridge, and why the fuck do you have so many doorstops? ”
“What the fuck are you talking about, doorstops?”
She gets right up in my, well, chest because it’s the closest she can get to my face. Her cheeks glow with anger, the heat seeming to clear the water that’s been pooled in the rims of her bloodshot eyes since last night.
I’ve never seen her like this before. There’s a fire, a toxin, a streak of fight within her, there has to be, but she’s never shown it to me.
She never challenges me. She rarely ever argues back, and when she does, she withers at the slightest push.
But she’s holding her ground now, and whether it’s deflection or not, if she’s truly pissed about literally non-existent things because why the fuck would I have doorstops, or if she’s just distracting me from all this shit coming out now, it’s hot. Really fucking hot.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. Fuck admitting to everything, just show me who you really are.
“The things! The black things!” She starts gesturing wildly. “Those things that you have like forty of on the table, so I can’t even prop my feet up while pumping!”
I stare at her blankly for three seconds before I figure it out. “Lin’s kicking tees?”
“Why the hell do you have Lin’s kicking tees?”
As she says it, she hits my chest with the heel of her palm.
It’s not a rough hit, even by her standards.
I know she can hit me way harder, and even that isn’t going to do anything to me except maybe make me wince because, yeah, usually a hit to the chest has a whole bunch of plastic protecting the thin but squishy layer of skin there.
But this is just a tap of frustration, a wake-up call.
I grab her by the thighs and haul her up to my height so I can slam my lips against hers as I pin her to the door that, now that I’m putting our collective weight on it, I realize is definitely not solid wood.
Tilly’s arms and legs go around me as she grinds against me.
My cock goes hard so fast it hurts, and I groan into our kiss, but I want more.
We’re both wearing pants, and we’re in this random pediatrician’s office right between a stack of coloring books and a pile of stuffed animals.
I’m not getting inside her now, but fuck, I could jizz right in my pants if she keeps moving like that.
Everything is falling the fuck apart. Our child, our sick child, our child who is sick with a disease I thought he was protected from despite knowing all along I was a carrier, is being watched by a doctor on the other side of this flimsy door, and there’s not a goddamn thing I can do in this moment to fix this.
And in this exact second, I just want to fuck Tilly’s brains out.
Is this us? Are we angry sex people? This is fucking hot, but I don’t want to be angry with her. I want to see this side of her. I want her to stand up for herself. But I want her to just be honest with me.
No, I’m not an angry sex person. I want to be kissing her because I enjoy kissing, and I’m hurting right now, and she’s not going to give me what I truly want, but that will make me feel just a little better.
I do my best to ease back, to soften myself for her even as she clings to me, demanding I smother her.
When I lower my lips down to her jaw, she whispers, “Blaise,” and there’s so much desperation and need in it that I have to stop.
I continue to hold Tilly, but I move my arms up to her waist, pinning her more to me than the wall, hugging her tight as I rest my cheek on her shoulder.
“How did this happen? How does Donovan have . . .” Fuck.
My sinuses are burning. I know it’s not a terrible disease for everyone who has it.
A lot of people can just take care of themselves, keep themselves healthy and take their medication and not suffer too many flare-ups, but my cousin’s daughter had it so bad that she was getting a bone marrow transplant before her first birthday. That poor baby suffered.
And now my baby is suffering, and I can’t stand it.
Tilly pushes at me gently to set her down, and I don’t want to let her go, but I do.
As soon as I set her down, she reaches right back up, takes my head in her hands, and runs her thumbs below my eyes.
“Ah, fuck,” I mutter. I’m supposed to be the big, strong man here, but her thumbs come away damp with tears.
“He’s going to be okay, right? This won’t kill him. He’s going to have a good, long life. My grandpa had it, and he lived to be—”
“But how is there sickle cell in your family?” I stare hard at her, and yeah, her complexion is a touch more vibrant, even darker, than when I first met her and her features have never seemed to fit her face, the pretty almond eyes and the broad, dusky lips and the delightfully heavy spray of mute freckles across her cheeks, but she’s just Tilly. She has Tilly features.
“You met my dad,” she says with an incredulous tone.
“I didn’t. I was there, but I didn’t meet him. I didn’t see him.” I wouldn’t have thought to look for him; according to Andy’s investigator, the man is living with her sister.
“Blaise, look at me. I’m—” She cuts herself off with a sigh.
There’s hurt in her voice. Resignation. Like she’s finally going to admit that she did blackmail, that she took all my money and funneled it to her father, her debt, whatever else, that she spent it all just to end up broke, but at least her father will live out the rest of his days comfortably, and .
. . and I don’t know how that’s going to explain how our baby ended up with this disease of all things, when it was the very last thing I thought I had to worry about, since Tilly’s his mom.
She lifts her hands up, curving her fingers around her ears to snag the ridge of her wig back behind where it’s been glued down and starts to peel it away.
I’ve never seen her remove it — she’s still never let me see her head uncovered before, always hiding in the bathroom to remove whatever she’s worn that day and reemerging with a sleep bonnet — but I know the process.
She should be using water or a remover to soften the glue, not just peeling it right off the skin.
“Ooh, ooh, don’t do that,” I rush out, not wanting her to hurt herself. I don’t know why this is the moment she thinks she needs to do this, but I feel an instant pang of guilt for whatever I said that made her think this was important.
“No,” she whispers, spinning away as though to warn me off. “Just let me do it this way. I need to.”
I clench my fists, unsure if I can actually hear the glue tearing at the delicate skin or if it’s my imagination, but I hate this so much. I hate that we can’t just have normal issues like our friends have.
Then again, Shaunessy and Allore both tricked their girls into getting pregnant, and apparently, Morales’s girl got kidnapped once. And Huang? Not that he’s my friend, but the shit he called his girl when their relationship got rocky? He’s lucky she didn’t castrate him.
Freak would probably like it, though.
She turns back to me once the lace has fully peeled off, leaving her forehead red and splotchy. She keeps her eyes closed, though, when she pulls the wig off her head.
The biggest surprise is that there’s hair actually covering her head. I always just assumed she was bald, and that’s why she’s so protective of her head. I know she’s been through chemo; I don’t know how long it takes for hair to grow back.