Chapter 16
Two weeks had passed since the fight and Kyla still wasn’t answering any of my calls.
I had called everyday those two weeks. Left voicemails. Sent invitations to two press conferences and a sponsor dinner that she never showed up to. The last text I sent her she left on read for four days and then nothing.
I understood why she was hurt. I did. Standing outside that arena watching me close a car door and signal the driver to pull off while she was inside it — that was cold and she hadn’t deserved it.
I had cared about her genuinely and I still did and I wanted her to know that even if I couldn’t be what she needed me to be.
I just wanted to know she was okay.
Instead I had silence and it sat on me in a way I couldn’t fully shake.
Brielle had been at my place since the night of her father’s arrest. We hadn’t talked about what we were doing yet. Hadn’t put anything into words. We had just been existing in the same space and letting that be enough for now.
She cooked sometimes. I trained. We watched movies and fell asleep on the couch and neither one of us pushed for more than that.
It was the most peace I had felt in years.
But underneath the peace something was still unresolved and we both knew it.
—
I was in my workout room when she called me into the bedroom.
I found her sitting on the bed with her legs pulled up and her hands in her lap. Her eyes were red in a way that told me she was dealing with something heavy for a while before she called me in.
I sat down across from her and waited.
“I need to say some things to you,” she said. “And I need you to just let me say them before you respond.”
“Go ahead.”
She looked at me and took a breath and started talking.
She told me she was sorry. Not the kind of faking that people did when they knew they’d done wrong, it seemed sincere.
She told me I had always been good enough.
That it was never about me not being worthy of her.
It was about her being too scared of losing her family to choose what she actually wanted.
She said that she had let that fear cost her years with me and she knew she couldn’t take any of that back but she needed me to know it was never about me.
She told me she never stopped loving me. Not through Marcus, not through any of the years in between, not through any of the nights she had laid next to somebody else pretending that comfortable was enough for her.
By the time she finished her face was wet and her voice was barely holding together and she was looking at me like everything depended on what came out of my mouth next.
I looked at her for a while.
“I started something with somebody else,” I said.
“Somebody who kept it real from jump. Somebody who showed up for me in ways I wasn’t used to being shown up for.
” I leaned forward. “And now you’re sitting in front of me telling me everything I needed to hear for thirteen years.
And I don’t know what to do with that Bri. ”
“I know. But you don’t love her the way you love me. Yeah it looks good to the public but you know that I have your heart! She don’t deserve you!”
“You never chose me. Every time it came down to it you walked away. Why would this time be different?”
She got up from the bed.
She crossed the room and stood in front of me and put both of her hands on my face, then she kissed me. I felt everything behind it that I had been trying to talk myself out of feeling for years.
When she pulled back she looked at me straight.
“Because I’m your soulmate,” she said. “And you know it. Nobody is going to make you feel what I make you feel. Nobody ever has and nobody ever will and you know that’s true.”
I hated that she was right.
I hated how well she knew me and how little defense I had against it when she was standing this close saying the right things in the right voice.
“If I give up everything for you,” I said. “There’s no second chance after this. You understand that? This is it. I’m not doing another decade of almost.”
“I know. I gave up my father to be with you. I chose you and I’ll always choose you from now on Xavier.”
“Say it like you mean it Brielle. I’m about to drop everything and need to know you all the way in.”
“I mean it Xavier. You before everybody. Every time. From right now until I don’t have any more time left. I promise you that.”
I looked at her.
And I believed her.
Not because she said it perfectly. Because I could see it costing her something to say it. She’s been proving herself to me this go round.
I pulled her in and held her tight. She held back and we stayed like that for a long time in the quiet of that room.
What happened after was the best sex we’d ever had. Years of everything we had been holding back finally coming to surface. She rode me like she had something to prove, and I let her prove it. I knew, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. Finally, I knew she was fully mine.
—
She was asleep, cuddle underneath me when my phone lit up on the nightstand.
Kyla was calling me.
I looked at the screen for a second. Two weeks of nothing and now a call at eleven thirty at night. I slid out of bed without waking Brielle and went into the hallway and answered.
“Kyla?”
She was crying before she said a word. This cry was heavy as hell. The kind that had been building for a long time and had finally gotten too heavy to hold.
“I need you to come over,” she said. “Please. I know I don’t have the right to ask you for anything right now but please just come.”
I looked back at the bedroom door.
“Are you okay. Are you safe.”
“I’m safe. Just please come.”
I grabbed my keys.
—
Her front door was unlocked when I got there. I walked in and found her at the dining room table in a robe with her hair down. She looked sad, her eyes swollen from crying. She was staring at something on the table in front of her and when I got closer I saw what it was.
Two pregnancy tests.
Both positive.
I picked them up one at a time and looked at them, then set them back down and pulled out the chair across from her.
I sat because my legs weren’t fully cooperating.
How did this happen? I mean I remember her taking the plan B the first time, but even after that we were reckless but I didn’t feel the need to check behind her.
I thought she automatically knew to get the pill and to take it.
She was watching my face.
“Say something,” she said.
“Give me a second.”
I sat there and let it land. All of it. The timing, the implications, what this meant for her campaign, her plans and everything she had mapped out for her life.
And underneath all of that something else that I hadn’t expected. This news that felt nothing like panic.
“This isn’t the end of the world,” I said.
She looked at me like I had said something in a language she didn’t speak.
“Kyla. You can still be city councilwoman. You can still do everything you planned. This doesn’t take any of that away.”
“You don’t understand what this does to my image. The election is two months away. I am not married. The father is — “ She stopped. “This is not part of the plan.”
“Sometimes life doesn’t care about the plan.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t give me a bumper sticker right now.”
“I’m serious.” I leaned forward. “I’m not going anywhere. Whatever you decide I’m in it with you. You’re not doing this alone.”
She looked at me and something in her face shifted. Not softer exactly. More tired.
“What are we Xavier?” Her voice was quiet. “Tell me the truth. Right now. What are we doing for real? A baby is a lot. And if this is something we’re going to do, I would prefer us to at least be in a relationship.”
I looked at her and I owed her honesty more than I owed her comfort.
“I care about you,” I said. “Genuinely. What we had was real to me and I don’t want you to think it wasn’t.” I held her eyes. “But my heart is somewhere else. It’s always been somewhere else and leading you further into something when that’s the truth, it wouldn’t be fair to you.”
She looked at her hands on the table.
“Get out,” she said.
“Wait. Just hear me out.”
“I said get out! Get the fuck out of my house!” Her voice broke on the second word and she pressed her mouth closed and looked away.
I stood up.
“We’re going to figure this out,” I said. “I meant what I said. You’re not doing this alone. Whenever you’re ready to talk I’ll be there.”
She didn’t look at me.
I left.
—
The drive back was thirty minutes and I spent all of it inside my own head trying to figure out how to say what I needed to say when I got home.
There was no way to explain this and come out clean. There was no way to tell Brielle that the woman I had been seeing recently was pregnant with my child. It was going to hurt and it was going to be a lot and she had every right to walk out the same door she had walked in.
But we had just made each other a promise about doing this the right way.
The right way started with the truth.
Brielle was in the kitchen when I came in. She sipped a glass of water. Still half asleep, squinting at me in the kitchen light.
“Where did you go,” she said.
“Sit down,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”
She looked at my face and whatever she saw there woke her up the rest of the way. She sat down at the island.
I sat across from her and told her everything. Kyla calling. The pregnancy tests. What I had said to Kyla and what she had said back. All of it straight with nothing softened.
When I finished Brielle was quiet.
“If this is a dealbreaker,” I said. “I understand. I’m not going to ask you to stay for something you can’t accept. But I need you to know that whatever happens I’m going to be there for that baby. That’s not negotiable.”
She looked at me for a long time.
Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and looked back at me.
“I’m not leaving,” she said.
“Bri. You don’t have to give me no answer right now without fully processing this.”
“I’m not leaving Xavier.” She said it steady.
“I can’t be mad at you for something that happened when I was with somebody else.
That’s not fair and I know it’s not fair.
” She reached across the island and put her hand on mine.
“You’re going to be a good father. And I’m going to be by your side.
I said I was going to have your back through whatever.
That’s what I promised you and I meant it. ”
I looked at her sitting there saying exactly what she had promised she would say and meaning every word of it.
I came around the island and pulled her in and held her and she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed her face into my chest and we stood there in my kitchen at midnight with everything that was complicated and everything that was simple all at the same time.
This was real.
After everything. After all of these years, all the wrong timing and all the doors she never walked through.
This was finally real.
—
Two weeks later I was at a public speaking event Kyla had downtown.
She hadn’t returned a single call since the night I left her house. I had texted. I had reached out through channels. Nothing. I waited outside after the speech and caught her coming off the stage.
She saw me and kept walking.
“Kyla.” I stepped beside her. “Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.”
She stopped but didn’t look at me.
“We need to talk about the baby,” I said. “I meant what I said. I’m not walking away from this. We need to figure out a plan that works for both of us. I wanna be at appointments, parenting classes and whatever else you need from me. I’m all in.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then she reached into her bag and pulled out her phone, pulled up something and turned the screen toward me.
Medical documentation. A abortion clinic in Kansas. A date from eight days ago.
I looked at the screen.
Then I looked at her.
“I handled it,” she said. Her voice was flat. “It’s done. You can go be with whoever you’re in love with and leave me alone. Don’t call me. Don’t show up at my events. Don’t send invitations to shit of yours! We are done.”
She walked away.
I stood there in that corridor and didn’t move for a long time.
I hadn’t been ready for a baby. I knew that. But somewhere in the two weeks since she told me I had gotten used to the idea. I had told my family. Had started to make room for it in the way I was thinking about my future. Had started to feel something about it that surprised me.
And now it was gone.
This shit hurt me bad. I felt like something had been taken from me, and I couldn’t do shit about it. The admiration that I had for Kyla was starting to turn into something else.
And I was standing in a hallway understanding for the first time what Kyla had meant about having to have everything her way. About not being able to handle things not going according to her plan.
This was the version of her she had warned me about when I asked her flaws.
I just hadn’t known what it would look like when it arrived.
I walked out of that building and got in my car and sat there.
Then I drove home.
Brielle was on the couch when I came in, she looked at my face and put the remote down and didn’t say anything. She just motioned for me to come over to her.
I sat down beside her and she pulled me in. I let her and we stayed like that in the quiet of my living room.
I had won the heavyweight title.
My father finally had his justice.
My family was safe.
And the woman I had loved since I was fourteen years old was sitting in my living room with her arms around me. She was finally choosing me the way that I had always needed her to choose me.
Life was going to keep being complicated.
It always was.
But for the first time in as long as I could remember I wasn’t carrying any of it alone.