Chapter 58
Chapter Fifty-Eight
She was meeting me here.
I’d only just arrived at my apartment from Sanaa’s five minutes earlier, peeling off the shirt I’d been wearing all day so I could get a quick shower in.
Lauren had sent me a text message saying she was on her way.
Her folks lived in Coconut Grove, so her drive up to my Downtown apartment was going to allow me at least twenty minutes alone.
Just before I got in the shower, my phone vibrated with a phone call. Thinking it would be Lauren, I stopped to check the screen, only to forward the call and set the phone back down.
It was Vance.
For days, ever since leaving my visit with Silas, I’d been avoiding my uncle’s attempts at contacting me. What Silas had told me last Sunday hadn’t exactly sent me on a quest for revenge, but it did leave me feeling like I’d been living some sort of lie.
I used to say that when I was kid, before Vance went to prison, he acted like the mother I never asked for.
I would go on to get older and assume that came from a place of strong family values, and he was just looking out.
But if what Silas had told me was to be believed, then Vance was replacing the mother he allegedly took from me.
After Silas had dropped the ball, it hadn’t been my knee jerk reaction to ask any more questions.
I didn’t actually want an explanation at the time.
One shock was enough for one day. So I kept my distance, leaving Sanaa’s house just before her Christmas dinner started because I knew Vance would be there.
My uncle likely hadn’t noticed my evasiveness until today.
You can write off a few missed calls here and there during the week, but once Christmas Day comes and there’s still no contact, most people begin to catch on that they’re being ignored.
That was probably why Vance had called me three times today.
Each call had gone unanswered. When I stepped out of the shower, I estimated that I had about three minutes to get dressed before she arrived.
I hadn’t spoken to her much this week. There were a few questions here and there—text messages where she would ask me about a dream she had about something I said, and I would confirm if this was something I told her while she was in a coma last summer.
It was bittersweet that she unconsciously remembered so much.
So many things had been shared with her that summer, and to think that she held onto most of it, that was beautiful.
However, not everything said in that hospital room needed to be remembered.
Somewhere in her memories was an unconscious scene of her father leveraging her life to get me to testify against my father. I felt guilty that I couldn’t protect her from that. And I felt guilty that she was coming here tonight to get the rest of the truth.
This past year and a half, I let Lauren go because I felt like no matter how much I loved her, I knew she loved her parents more.
It was clear now that they couldn’t be the support system she needed.
The girl I found at my door that night at Seven was a testament to that fact.
Her parents undoubtedly weren’t doing enough for her.
So I would.
Tonight would be the night I confirmed if I was enough.
***
In the time since I’d been over his place last, Kain had apparently moved from his father’s beach home in Pinecrest.
His new place of residence was a shorter drive from my parents’ house, a fortieth floor luxury penthouse in a Downtown Miami building called The Pegasus. The place was absolutely unreal.
Kain had come down to meet me in the building’s lobby, catching me staring in awe of the coal grey interiors of the first floor reception area.
The building was decorated for the holidays, of course, a faux black Christmas tree standing at least ten feet tall with real crystal ornaments, placed as a centerpiece of the entry.
It was so damn beautiful.
If I for one second forgot the level of wealth my ex-boyfriend was living in, this served well to remind me.
And here I thought Rashad’s condo in Overtown was nice.
The lobby of The Pegasus building alone made Rashad’s living situation look like poverty.
If this was what the common area looked like, I could only imagine how grand the top-floor penthouse was.
“You okay?” Kain asked as soon as he saw me. I wasn’t used to being around people who were so in tune with my facial expressions. As far as Kain was concerned, the argument I’d had with my parents before I arrived here was written all over my face.
“I’m fine.” At least, I was trying to be. I pulled a bag out from behind my back. “This is for you by the way.”
“I didn’t know we were exchangin’ gifts.” His eyebrows climbed. I’d caught him by surprise. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“Don’t be too excited,” I was quick to warn. “I did all my Christmas shopping last minute. Could you wait until I leave before you open it?” My gift certainly was not a Cartier Love Bracelet, and I didn’t want to witness it if he was unimpressed.
It was a little after eight o’clock in the evening, and I couldn’t be sure what time it would be when I left, but right now the night was young.
Even still, as we stepped on to an elevator, I wondered if we would have enough time.
When we were together, we hadn’t just been lovers.
We were friends. There was a lot of catching up to do.
I used to be so uncomfortable with silence. It was with Kain that I learned that sometimes silence could be comfortable. Sometimes you could stand in the presence of a person you cared for, and the fact that neither of you spoke could be intimate.
In that elevator, he checked me out, and I checked him out, too, neither of us seeming uneasy under the attentive gaze of the other.
Was he observing the changes in my appearance?
The way I’d grown to like my hair pulled back.
The way my waist had narrowed and my once chubby, dimpled cheeks sunk.
The way the winter weather made my dark brown skin a few shades different.
Kain had never known me in the winter. He’d met me in the spring and we parted ways before the fall.
He knew the Lauren who loved to be outside, where the sun was.
I wasn’t that Lauren anymore.
His eyes brushed over me openly, seemingly getting a thorough look at this New Lauren for the first time. Nothing in his features gave away what he might be thinking. I returned the gesture, trying to keep a steady expression as my eyes traveled up and down the details of his… everything.
His old brush cut fade made the not so dramatic switch to a typical brush cut, his black sideburns kept clean as they transitioned seamlessly into a wonderfully full beard that he kept short.
Facial hair had a way of aging Kain in a good way, giving him an outward air of maturity that had always been present in his personality.
Kain had somehow managed to upgrade what was already perfect.
I felt inadequate.
His changes were for the better, while my changes seemed to only emphasize that I had certainly been through some shit. I wondered if he missed the old version of me, looking at me now.
“You don’t talk when you’re nervous anymore,” he noted. We were on the twentieth floor, with twenty more floors to go.
“Who says I’m nervous?”
“I say you’re nervous,” he chuckled, as if to say, ‘I know you like the back of my hand.’
And in this regard, I guess he did.
I was nervous as hell. “Well then… Yeah, I don’t talk when I’m nervous anymore.”
He cracked a faint half smile, shaking his head at my admission. The elevator came to a stop, dinging twice before opening to another door. From his back pocket, Kain pulled out a set of keys, nodding me in to the full-floor apartment.
I cautiously stepped inside, doing all I could do to keep my jaw from hitting the floor.
The large space, although probably obscenely expensive, was not ostentatious.
It was actually kind of minimal. The modern and sleek furnishings against steel grays and white backsplashes gave the penthouse a luxuriously understated theme.
Very Kain, I found myself thinking about the place.
We stepped further inside, and Kain set his keys and my gift on a white granite kitchen counter, shaking his jacket off before looking over his shoulder at me and catching my wonder-filled eyes.
I took in the beauty of the space, awe-stricken.
Situated at the fortieth floor, the main living space was mostly walled with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a priceless view of Downtown Miami, drawing in the shining lights of the Miami skyline and city traffic thirty-nine stories below us.
Even though we were in the heart of the city, it was so quiet up here.
“You like it,” he guessed, to which I only nodded, unable to find the words to describe my first impression.
“It’s so big,” I marveled when I finally did speak, estimating that this apartment was likely three times the size of my parents’ house.
“I needed the entire floor,” Kain informed, ambling over to a stainless steel, doubled-doored refrigerator. After pulling out two bottles of water he explained, “Privacy has been really hard to come by for the last year and a half.”
Of course. The Montgomery vs. The State of Florida case from last year totally went viral.
While it made my father the laughing stock of the law community all over the country, it turned Kain into an overnight celebrity.
The handsome pre-law student who took on a Florida state attorney, and not only held his own, but ruined his career.
Like Kain, Dad was also having trouble getting privacy, but Dad welcomed the fame, because any kind of publicity was good publicity for the new sector he was trying to dive into—running for governor. In elections, name recognition is half the battle, and because of Kain, Dad now had lots of it.