forty-four: in which she makes peace with some truths

"I can't sleep, but I can dream of us" –Eden, Gravity (Side note: he's perfection)

********************************

What I learned from being out of the house was that I didn't even have to play the sympathy card, because it was automatically being played for me.

I was being hailed as the town's hero for singlehandedly taking down James and Roisin McNally, doing something not even the local motorcycle club had been able to successfully do. More word on the street was that I was also responsible for putting David McNally in cement, so I'd wiped out an entire generation of gangsters who had terrorized Sallow County and neighboring towns for years.

The Florence-Nightingale Vigilante – that was an actual newspaper headline.

I couldn't make that crap up even if I tried. I was the registered nurse who led a double life as a murderous vigilante: Oliver Queen, but not anywhere near rich. Or masculine.

It was beyond ridiculous, and the small-town journalists who'd written those articles had definitely chosen the wrong career. They should have been fiction writers.

My sessions with psychotherapist and relationship therapist, Dr. Melissa DuBois, were every Tuesday and Friday. Tuesday was for my solo hourly session with her, and Friday was when I accompanied Jake to his. Well, ours. He wouldn't go without me, and I didn't mind, because aside from his issues, we had to work on ours. Together.

Melissa's office was located on a quiet street only a few blocks away from Jake's neighborhood, and her consultation room was decorated in neutral colors – chalk-whites, concrete-grays – that instantly made me comfortable. Jake, on the other hand, was his usual uncomfortable self, and I knew that his right knee would be bouncing up and down during the remaining minutes of our one-hour session as we sat beside each other on a leather cream sofa opposite Dr. DuBois.

She was a nice-looking woman, probably somewhere in her mid-thirties, and she always looked the same: Curly light-brown hair held back by an Alice band, bronze skin devoid of any makeup besides painted red lips and eyeliner rimming almond-shaped brown eyes, and sleeveless blouses paired with black pants.

"So, Mr. Ford —"

"Jacob," he corrected her automatically.

And like always, she gave him a small smile and amended, "Jacob, your task until we meet next week is to take five minutes out of your day and write down all the things that you're most grateful for. The things that make you happy."

I felt Jake stiffen beside me. "You want me to sit on my ass and write in a fuсking journal?"

"Jacob!" I hissed, putting a hand on his knee.

He huffed out an audible breath. "Sorry."

Dr. DuBois gave him another one of her smiles, looking unfazed. By now, she just had to be used to Jake's outbursts. We'd already had two sessions with her before this. "We've been easing our way into discussing how certain periods of your childhood have clearly affected your adulthood," she said to him, before directing her gaze to me, "and your relationships." She looked at Jake. "Your aversion to the written word can only get you so far. It will be a good experience to turn your feelings into the very thing you've detested all your life."

After muttering to himself for a little while, Jake finally agreed to do the task. It was only when we were outside in his truck that he started hyperventilating.

"This is exactly why I hate fuсking head doctors," he spat.

I rolled my eyes. "You hate fuсking head doctors? When have you ever fuсked one?"

He eyed me, lips twitching. "You know what I meant."

"It's not so bad, Jake," I told him. "Writing down the things you've been blessed with? It'll put everything into perspective."

He reached behind him, into the pocket of his jeans, coming back with a pen and a crinkled receipt. "What I'm grateful for, huh?" He pressed the paper down onto his left thigh, scrawling away.

He handed me the receipt.

You, it read, in a big scrawl. + peanut butter cups.

I smiled big. He took my free hand, kissing the back of my hand, before letting it go to start the car.

***

It was something I had been putting off, but it was something I had to.

Standing outside her bedroom door, eyeing the huge KEEP OUT sticker that felt like a personal warning to me, I danced with the idea of not knocking and simply quietly slinking out of the house instead.

The coward's way out.

I took a deep breath and gently rapped on the door.

The low music coming from inside stopped. A pause. I knocked again. The door was opened.

"Hello, Daisy."

She stepped aside, silent. I stepped into her bedroom and she closed the door behind me.

Gone was the heavily made-up pre-teen and in her place was a fresh-faced girl whose blue eyes were sad.

"May I sit?" I asked, and she immediately motioned at a chair in front of a white desk.

Grateful, I sat down. Daisy's room was still the same - brightly lit and overly girly, with a huge bed and a purple comforter, and white walls decorated with posters of boy bands.

She was still standing, right in front of the door.

"I should have called," I told her, looking her in the eye.

"Did he suffer?"

Blood... Blood... "No," I lied.

"At the funeral, his casket was closed." Her eyes drifted to the open window beside her bed. "He suffered."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said nothing.

"How are you doing?" she asked, playing with the hem of her red T-shirt.

"I...I'm...better." For once, it was the truth.

Her eyes were shining. "The last thing Keegan had said to me was to hide in the basement, and that he had to go look for you. He was so brave, wasn't he?"

"Yes," I agreed, getting up to approach her. "So, so brave, Daisy."

She let me draw her into a hug, and I let her put her arms around me, even though it hurt a little bit because she was hugging me so tightly.

"Is it weird that I still haven't cried, Maya?" she wanted to know, her voice barely audible.

"No," I replied.

"My therapist doesn't think so, either. But I want to cry. Just to be able to get over him." She let out a sigh, pulling back from me.

I watched her walk over to the large white chest of drawers beside the vanity. "I knitted these for you. For whenever I'd get to see you," she said, returning to me with two pairs of black-and-white striped socks. "One pair's for Jake. They're a feel-better gift."

"Thank you, Daisy." My fingers ran along the soft fabric. "They're lovely."

She smiled, and that smile lit her entire face. "You're welcome."

I stayed for a little while longer, talking about nothing and everything with her, but eventually, we talked about Sticks – Keegan – and Daisy described her crush on him as stupid puppy love. I believed that that was what it might have been, and imagined what it would feel like to lose my love. Imagining that scenario made my chest ache.

But I didn't have anything to worry about. Jake, who had explicitly refused to let me even think of driving myself over to the clubhouse, was upstairs safe and sound with the remaining Phantoms, his first outing here since his hospitalization.

He wasn't buried six feet under with his lacerated throat stitched up by a mortician.

It was this thought that remained with me on the short drive back home from the clubhouse.

"You're too quiet," Jake commented, sounding worried.

"Just thinking," I told him, gazing at the darkening sky through the window.

"Wanna share?"

I looked at him. "I could have lost you."

He gave me a fleeting look before turning his gaze back to the road. "Would've been my own stupid fault."

I leaned forward and turned the radio on, and Gotye's voice filled the car, singing about somebody that he used to know. By the time Jake pulled up into his driveway, I was pretty much halfway to making my brain agree to think of nothing.

Neither of us immediately got out of the pickup.

Jake turned the light on above us and went into his back pocket, taking out a carefully folded piece of A4 notebook paper and a pen.

"Things that make me happy," he said to himself, clicking his pen and starting to scribble something down. "Riding my bike. Riding Maya. Just riding, in general."

"Oh, God. Don't write that!" I put a hand over my face, laughing. "You're forgetting that Dr. DuBois is going to read it."

"There's that laugh of yours," Jake murmured, putting pen and paper away. "Fuсk, I missed it. I missed it so bad."

My laughter faded. Jake leaned toward me, and my eyes automatically drifted closed. I waited, waited for that moment when he would touch his lips to mine, and when it came, I kissed him back. He put a hand to my face, cupping my chin, his lips pressed to mine so hard, and when I let out a soft breath – just to breathe – his tongue slipped into my mouth.

He kissed me slowly but thoroughly, sucking on my tongue like a sweet, and I didn't know if the moan that left my lips belonged to him or to me.

He drew back suddenly, his breathing uneven. "We should go inside. You should rest," he said gently, already pushing his door open.

"Yes," I whispered, gathering my thoughts and storing them for later.

Jake walked around the car until he was at my side, pulling open the door for me. He took my hand, and I slid out for him to shut the door behind me. Hand in hand, we walked up the pathway that led to his front door.

"I wonder if Baron —" I started to say, but that was as far as I got before Jake pulled me to him so that he could bend down and put his mouth on mine.

"One day," he began, when he was done making my head spin, "when I've atoned for all the shit I've put you through, I'm gonna put a ring on your finger and a baby in your belly. Because you are every-fuсking-thing to me, and you can bet your sexy ass that I'm gonna work my ass off to be able to say for sure that I deserve you."

Frozen to the spot, I could only watch as he opened the door and went inside, leaving it as open as my mouth was.

*~*

"That man downstairs," said Aimee, folding a pink cashmere sweater and putting it into her suitcase, "is head-over-heels in love with you."

Sitting on the bed that she'd been sleeping in for the past two weeks now in one of Jake's guest rooms, I could only nod in agreement. My aunt – God, it still felt so surreal to call someone that – was leaving the next day, and she'd asked me to help her pack, leaving the Ford brothers downstairs talking numbers.

Aimee smiled. "I'm happy for you, Maya. Love like that is very, very hard to find." She looked away. "Your mother had that kind of love. I wish I had had the chance to tell her that I was happy for her, too."

Even at twenty-six years of age, I still got instantly teary-eyed whenever my late parents were mentioned. It didn't help that Aimee could have been my mother's doppelganger.

"My parents didn't need anyone to be happy for them," I said, my voice catching. "Their happiness is all that mattered."

"Chantelle never cared what anyone thought. She always did her own thing, even when we were much younger." Aimee sat down beside me. "I was seven and she was ten when she refused to go to church."

My brows went up. "She loved the church."

"Sunday school, she asked the teacher: Why are there only white people in our church? I remember how shocked the woman looked, and when she told Chantelle that it was because we went to a whites-only church, my sister asked if there was a white God and a black God, and if we all went to different Heavens.

I don't remember exactly what the teacher told her after that, but it was bad enough that my sister refused to go to a single service after that. She didn't understand segregation, didn't think it was fair that everyone was treated differently, and spoke out against it."

"And you didn't?"

Aimee didn't look uncomfortable, which was what I'd expected. "I knew it was wrong, but I didn't want to...to get into trouble. I was a coward. I even tried to tell my sister that she should leave Michael. An outspoken African-American activist? Coming to our suburbs to stir things up? Chantelle was asking to get herself killed, along with him."

"And yet, they died anyway."

A tragic accident, people had called it.

"Boating accident" was too tame a description for the yacht explosion that claimed the lives of my parents and all thirty-five of the other passengers who were onboard as part of a fundraising gala just off the Gold Coast.

Aimee and I were silent after my harsh declaration. But then, she said, "I would really like to be a part of your life, if you'll let me."

I looked at her. "I would like that."

"Thank you."

She continued packing, chattering away about the other, less precarious things her sister – my mother – used to get up to, while I imagined my hand heavy with a ring and my stomach full with a baby.

***

Author's Note

For those of you who still don't know yet, there are two books in the works after this book.

The second book is Branded, Ghost and Cat's story: