Chapter 10 Remy
REMY
“Remy? What is it, baby?” My mom pulls me into a hug when she opens the front door, and I sob onto her shoulder.
I’ve been emotional for weeks now, but those tears fade in comparison to the tidal wave that crashes through me when I see my mom.
She holds me tightly without speaking and waits for it to subside. When she finally holds me at arm’s length, her eyes narrow. She is my mom. She knows me better than anyone else, and maybe that’s what I need right now. Someone to produce a Band-Aid for my heart and make it all better.
“Okay,” she says, “let’s go through to the kitchen and talk about it.”
She closes the front door and guides me across the foyer with an arm around my shoulders. I feel like a little girl again, upset because I fell off my bike and scraped my knees. Only this will take more than an antiseptic wipe to fix.
Pedro is sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop open.
He’s a writer. It’s pretty much all I know about him—my mom has become quite secretive about her new man as if she’s afraid to jinx the relationship by revealing too much—but I didn’t truly believe that he wrote books.
I thought it was a creative metaphor for between jobs.
Seems I’ve been wrong about a lot of stuff lately.
He stands up when he sees me, offers me a hand to shake, and then thinks better of it. His brown eyes search my mom’s for a clue as to what he should be doing right now.
“Remy, this is Pedro. Pedro, this is my daughter, Remy.”
“Hello.” I smile and sniff at the same time, and Mom pulls out a seat for me.
“I’ll make coffee.” She switches on the coffee machine and leans against the counter. “Or do you need something stronger?”
“No.” I cover my face with both hands and try to swallow the lump of humiliation in my throat.
I can’t drink anything stronger because I’m pregnant, my babies have two fathers, and neither of them wants to be in our lives because they’re too busy running casinos and adding more zeroes to their bank accounts.
“I’ll make coffee, you sit down, Annie.” Pedro’s gentle voice wriggles inside my bubble of self-pity.
I lower my hands to watch him hug my mom from behind and nuzzle her neck.
My mom kisses his cheek, and my chest swells with love for her.
She’s happy. I didn’t want my parents to get divorced, but seeing her like this, I understand that she deserves happiness after everything she went through with my sister, and she has found it with Pedro.
Mom pulls out a seat and sits in front of me, our knees touching. She takes my hand and peers right through to my soul in that way that only a mom can. With her other hand, she tucks my hair behind my ear.
“Who is he?” she asks.
I almost choke on a semi-hysterical giggle while Pedro discreetly watches the coffee machine bubbling away on the counter. “Is it that obvious?”
She squints one eye at me as if the sun has created a halo around my head. “There’s more, but we’ll start with the guy responsible.”
All this time, I thought my mom was too wrapped up in chains by her own circumstances to take any interest in my life, and here she is reading me like I’m an open book.
I suck in a deep shaky breath. “Guys, plural.”
Pedro doesn’t react.
My mom rubs my hand. “You have feelings for them both?”
How the fuck is she doing this, poking straight through to the raw heart of the problem like she’s the counselor?
My mom is a mobile hair stylist. I would never trust anyone else to cut my hair.
But years of listening to clients spilling the beans about their private lives while she snips off their split ends has obviously provided her with the kind of experience you don’t learn from a textbook.
“Yes.” It’s a strange, strangled sound thick with emotion.
Now that I’m here and slicing my chest open to examine the contents, I realize that I already knew Cash and Bash were two different people. I just needed someone to point out the obvious.
They’re identical twins. Easy mistake to make. But the signs were there; I was simply too besotted and blinkered to recognize them.
And now…?
Now, I don’t know what to think or how to feel or what to do about any of it.
Cash was excited to see me in the Rinse.
Bash less so. But they both handle situations differently; it doesn’t take rocket science to figure that out.
I believed Cash when he said that neither of them knew about the other, but how could I possibly choose between them?
If the choice was ever mine to begin with.
Pedro places two cups of coffee on the table, picks up his laptop, and leaves us alone.
I sip the steaming liquid before I realize that I should minimize my caffeine consumption because it isn’t good for the baby. Babies.
“You want to tell me about them?” Mom asks.
I swallow hard, my pulse racing. Here goes.
“They’re twins. Identical. I didn’t realize until… Until today.”
Frown lines appear between Mom’s eyebrows. I get the same lines whenever I’m concentrating, George once pointed out to me.
“You thought they were both the same person?” Mom asks. “This isn’t some kind of sick game they’re playing, is it? Because if it is, I’ll hunt them down and—”
“No, Mom. It was a misunderstanding.” I suck my top lip in to stop more sobs from escaping. “I’ve not been dating them.”
The frown lines deepen. “What then?”
“Long story.”
“I’ve got all day, Rem.”
She’s right. I came here for a reason; I can’t now give her half the story and leave.
“One of them was my boss at the casino. There was an accident, I got drinks spilled on me, and he took me up to his apartment to get me some fresh clothes. At least, I thought it was him.”
“But it was his twin.”
I nod and instinctively touch the teardrop around my neck. “I lost Dan’s pendant. When I went back to get it…”
“You met the other twin.” Mom rubs her temples. “And now you’re in too deep and you don’t know what to do about it.”
“In too deep?”
“Rem…” Mom smiles. “I recognize love when I see it. Here.” She stands up and pulls a small mirror from her purse on the kitchen counter. “What do you see?”
I peer at my reflection. My eyes are puffy, my lips are swollen, and my cheeks are blotchy.
“A mess?”
Mom chuckles. “Look deeper. You wouldn’t be a mess if you didn’t care, right?”
“I guess.” I turn the mirror over and put it down on the table. There’s no easy way to say this, so I just come straight out with it. “I’m pregnant. With twins.”
Mom sits back in her seat. She looks deflated for a whole second before she sits forward again. “And either twin could be the father.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And have you told them?”
“Uh-huh.” This time it ends on a down-note.
“Let me guess. They think you’re scamming them.” My mom can be brutal when she wants to be.
“It’s complicated.”
She smiles. “Oh, sweetie, it isn’t as complicated as you think it is. Tell them how you feel.”
I shake my head. That’s an emphatic no.
“What’s the alternative?” she asks.
“I do this on my own.”
“Is that what you really want, Rem? I’m not saying you can’t do it alone. You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. But trust me, denying your true feelings will catch up with you in the end.”
Now, she’s speaking from personal experience.
“I don’t know what my true feelings are though.”
“You will when you speak to them, Remy. Trust me.”
I think about the conversation I ran away from, and my stomach churns. Whatever my mom says, it isn’t that simple. Sure, I’m attracted to both twins, but how do I know if that’s something more than desire?
“What if…” I don’t fully understand what Bash was accusing me of, but I do know that he didn’t believe me. And Cash might’ve been on my side earlier, but his twin will convince him otherwise. “What if they don’t feel the same way?”
“Then it’s their loss, sweetie, and we’ll get through this without them.”
Walking back to the residence halls feels different. Maybe I’m different. Or maybe the goose bumps on my arms and shoulders have something to do with the fact that I know Bastien Murray has been having me followed.
I’ve always felt comfortable in New York City.
Sure, I’ve read the horror stories about women getting brutally attacked on the streets, but nothing has ever happened to make me feel unsafe.
It’s kinda twisted that I’m glancing over my shoulder now that I know I’m being followed by a member of the Murrays’ security team.
They wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me, right?
Or is this maternal instinct kicking in? I’m a lioness protecting her unborn cubs now.
Still, I call Ariel from my cell, for extra protection.
“Where have you been?” Her voice at the other end of the call makes me smile. “I was about to call nine-one-one and report that you’d been abducted by a hot casino owner.”
“Are you sitting down?”
There’s a pause, then, “I am now. I’m sitting on your bed because mine is covered in laundry that I don’t have the bandwidth to sort out yet.”
I smile. Ariel is the messiest person I know, and I love that she makes me feel like I could pass an inspection by our residence halls supervisor.
“Rem, the suspense is killing me. Did Bastien Murray go down on one knee and propose to you when he found out that you’re having his baby?”
“Babies.” It’s going to take a while to adapt to the plural version of the word. “And no, not exactly.”
“O-kay, so why exactly am I sitting down?”
“I’m not sure if Bash is the father.”
The silence is deafening. I glance left and right before crossing the street without checking for men in black.
Then, “Wait, you slept with someone else, and you’re only now telling me this?
Why? Did you think that I would get all judgmental on you and accuse you of being a floozy? Girl, have you met me?”
“Bash Murray has a twin. His name is Cash. They have the same tattoo, Ariel. They look the same, so I ignored the missing scar on his eyebrow, and the different hairstyle, and I had sex with them both and now…”
A woman walking by stares at me as though she heard every word despite the massive pink earphones covering her ears.
I lower my voice. “I don’t know which one is the father, and a paternity test isn’t going to be much help. Same DNA,” I add when Ariel still doesn’t speak. “Say something.”
Ariel’s chuckle filters through the handset. “You got two sex-gods for the price of one.”
I press my cell phone closer to my ear and hiss, “I’m pregnant, remember? With twins.”
“Because twins are genetic,” Ariel states the obvious. “Did you tell them?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And then I left. It was horrible, Ariel. They both looked at me as if I’d grown horns and a tail.”
“You left without hearing what they had to say about it?”
“Yes. I was confused. They—”
I stop when I hear footsteps coming up behind me. I turn around, and George is there. His left eye is turning black and is almost completely closed. His bottom lip is swollen and split, and bruising is creeping across his jawline.
“George?”
“George?” Ariel repeats from my bed in our dorm room. “Who the fuck is George? Please tell me this isn’t your ex, Remy? Don’t you have enough shit to—”
“Gotta go.” I end the call, cutting her off mid-sentence. “What happened to you?”
I glance around the street. I’m not far from the residence halls, and I have the vague recollection of Bash—or maybe it was Cash—telling me that George had been spotted hanging around near here.
Whatever our history, he’s clearly hurt, and I can’t turn my back on him because the Murray twins might get offended by us talking.
“Can we go somewhere?” He’s shaking.
“Okay.” It’s probably best to take this somewhere private, but not my dorm room. I don’t want him to know where I stay.
Instead, we find a small café on a side street, and George takes a seat near the back while I order him a coffee from the counter. I’ve had my caffeine quota for the day, and my budget won’t stretch to two unplanned coffees after the train fare to and from my mom’s.
“What happened?” I ask when I join him.
My first thought is that this has something to do with his fiancée. I don’t know why. Maybe some small irrational part of my brain wants him to get payback for the way he treated me, but guilt soon sets in when he presses a napkin to his lip and it comes away bloody.
“Your boyfriend did this.” He looks me straight in the eye when he says it, and I hate myself for looking away first.
“My boyfriend?” My heart is thudding, making me feel nauseous, just when I thought I was over the worst of the morning sickness. “I-I don’t know who you mean.”
“Cassius Murray. Or are you more interested in his brother, Bastien?”
“They’re not my… You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Seriously? You’re still going to lie to me, Remy, after what we meant to each other.”
I stand up, the chair legs scraping behind me. What does he know? Did he hear me talking to Ariel on my cell, or did he follow me to the clinic? This was a mistake.
“I’m sorry this happened to you, George, but it’s nothing to do with me. Go home to your fiancée. I’m sure she’ll give you the sympathy you’re looking for.”
“I know what’s going on, Remy,” he calls after me. “You’re making a huge mistake if you think they’ll look out for you.”
I don’t stop. I don’t look back at him. I don’t want to see his black eye or think about Cash hurting him.
Opening the door, I pause while two women step inside. If I hadn’t, I might not have noticed the man in black walking away on the opposite side of the street.