Page 22

twenty-two

Damien

When I awake in my bed, I find that Lucy is not there.

I take a while to leave still, the events from last night weighing heavily on me. Megan’s confession, my drunken anger, Lucy’s overwhelming fear. Lucy saying I love you. Lucy riding me.

Lucy saying I love you.

I’d be stupid if I said I was surprised, I’m not. And I’m not all that surprised that she confessed it either. Lucy Fairchild is many things, but she truly isn’t a liar. I should have seen that yesterday.

I understand why she didn’t tell me about Megan, no matter how much it pisses me off. She didn’t put herself in this fucked up situation, I did. All of this is on me, not her. And I’m shocked that I am actually admitting that.

I’m shocked by a lot of things actually.

Like why she still isn’t next to me in bed.

I get up and shower, dressing in sweats before I walk around the house shirtless and barefoot in search of her. Henry is in the kitchen and when I look to ask where she is, he gives me a guilty expression.

Fuck. What now.

“What happened?” I demand and he sighs, clearly exhausted from the ever-changing dynamics of this household. I wouldn’t blame him if he quit tomorrow.

“She ran into her room crying. Didn’t say a word to me,” he says as he continues to chop on the counter.

I look at the coffee cups from the cafe around the corner, suspicion filling me.

“What direction did she run from, Henry?” I say through gritted teeth.

He sighs as he points his knife to the front door, then down the hall where my office is, then finally, to her bedroom.

Fuck.

I speed down the hallway and jiggle the doorknob, and I can hear her shuffling around in her bedroom.

“Lucy, open the door,” I growl, and no response comes, just more shuffling.

I continue to jiggle the doorknob.

“You want to explain what’s happened in the last few hours?” I bark out and hear a small scoff.

A very depressing one at that.

“You want to explain what’s happened in the last seven years? Or rather, the last twenty-five years of my life?” she snarls, and I freeze then, her words chilling over me.

“Lucille,” I hiss, ramming my shoulder against the door. “Open the goddamn door, or I will break it down,” I growl.

“By all means, go ahead. Nothing is stopping you. Nothing ever does,” she sneers and I step back and give the door one solid, wood splintering kick.

I continue to ram my body until it breaks off its hinges. When I step inside, Lucy turns to face me, her face pale and eyes swollen from crying.

“Before you freak out and try to manipulate me some more,” she says before she flings a folder full of papers at my feet, “You want to tell me about this?”

Not just any papers, but her file. The one I dug up on Michael years ago. The one describing his hush money case with her actual birth mother.

Shit.

“Don’t go quiet now, Damien. Be a man. Face the consequences, remember?” She taunts me, however her words are much more sinister than last night.

She doesn’t just hate me right now.

She fucking despises me.

I’ve been lying to her for years, alongside the rest of her family, and now she knows.

“How long have you known?” she asks, and I decide right then to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time.

I tell the truth.

“Seven years.” She gasps.

“Jesus Christ, Damien. Are you serious?” she cries.

“I didn’t like the way your father treated you that night, the first night I met you. Especially your father. It reminded me too much of… my own life growing up,” I confess, but she doesn’t bend or melt at my words.

She doesn’t need to.

I’m a fucked-up bastard and she’s known this from the start.

“My dad used to hit my stepmom. A lot. And I watched it happen. When I started to get rebellious, he started to hit me too,” I explain, and she falls silent. She stares at me with her arms crossed across her chest and her eyes narrowed.

“It wasn’t until I discovered what he did to my actual mother. How he abused her and sent her away after I was born. It wasn’t until then that I decided to start hitting him back,” I explain.

“It didn’t last long. I was in and out of the house and he didn’t care to see me. When I joined basic training, I never saw him again. I didn’t care to. I only cared about finding her, my birth mom,” I say.

“And did you?” she asks quietly, her voice still icy, still cold.

“Yes. While I was deployed in Mexico on a mission,” I say, and she sniffles.

“And then what?” she asks, and I inhale hard and fast, ready to tell her all of my truth, ready to bare it all, because she’s been nothing but vulnerable for me since the day that I met her.

“Then I joined the cartel that she worked for. And when the second leader died, my good friend, I took over.” I explain, but she doesn’t seem shocked. Doesn’t seem fazed or surprised in the slightest.

In fact, she just looks sad. Defeated. Betrayed.

“And how is that supposed to help me, huh?” she sneers. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you, Damien? Supposed to relate to you?”

“No.”

“Good, because I fucking don’t. I don’t relate to you. Because I would never do something like this to you!” She cries, tears pooling in her bright blue eyes. She swipes at them angrily.

“You knew. You knew everything, this entire time and yet you did nothing,” she bites, and I nod.

“I know.” It’s all I can say.

“You watched them treat me like an outcast, abuse me day in and day out, and yet you did nothing.” She seethes and I nod again.

“I know.”

“You knew I didn’t belong there, you knew they were lying to me, that you were lying alongside them, and yet you did. Fucking. Nothing.” She enunciates, the words sharp like a knife as she launches them at me.

“And when you found me there, with my rapist on top of me, you beat him to death and you did nothing for me. You did nothing.” She cries and slowly, I nod.

“I know.”

“You killed him and instead of coming to check on me in the hospital, you hid his body in the Hudson river with my sister,” she says, and I look into her eyes then, long and hard, before I nod slowly, confirming her suspicion. Though, I’m not sure where it came from. I had no details about her attacker.

“So, Megan was right then,” she scoffs and I see red, wanting to know exactly what happened when she ran into Megan the other week.

“What did she say to you that day?” I glare and she gives me a humorless smirk.

“Nothing. That happened this morning, when she was walking around on the sidewalk in front of your penthouse. She confronted me when I went to grab coffee from the delivery driver. There’s every sordid detail for you, since you know, no more lies right?” she hisses, and I want to get on my knees and apologize to her right now, but I’m too concerned that Megan was outside of my apartment this morning.

“Tell me, did you fuck her once or twice yesterday? Before you came home and fucked me?” she growls, and my eyes widen in confusion at her, my head snapping from left to right in shock.

“What the hell are you-”

“Don’t play dumb with me. It’s too late for that now,” she growls, and I try to approach her, but she backs away instantly with a finger raised.

“Don’t. Don’t you come near me. You can’t lie your way out of this one. I see right through you. She told me you did and I smelled her perfume on your jacket this morning,” she hisses, and I want to shake sense into her, make her see that I really am telling the truth.

Then again, why would she believe a single word I say from here on out?

I’ve betrayed her too much, hurt her too badly.

“You’re not even sorry either. And why should I expect you to be? You don’t confront your demons, nonetheless your shitty, manipulative behavior. You won’t even talk to me about that night, because you’re a fucking liar. A god damn coward-”

“Enough!” I bark, wanting the insults to stop, no matter how much I deserve them. To be truthful, it’s not the insults I wish to block out. Once again, it’s mentioning that night.

That horrible, awful night that has haunted me for three(?) years.

“I don’t talk about that night because it killed me too, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? That I had fallen in love with my wife’s younger sister, a woman that was too young for me, a woman that I was forbidden to acknowledge? It haunts me still, Lucy. Your screams, your pleas, the sight of your pants around your waist, the blood dripping from your head,” I pause, choking on my words as the memory hits me like a Mac truck.

“That night haunts me and so does every moment of your fucking life that I’ve witnessed. The abuse, all of it. Not because it happened, but because I didn’t save you. Didn’t hold you. Didn’t help you. Didn’t heal you. It haunts me because you’re right, I fucking did nothing.”

She’s quiet except for her sharp intake of air and sniffles as tears pool in her beautiful blue eyes.

Eyes that have haunted me for nearly seven years.

There it is. My bitter truth,

My most sinister trait of all.

I am in love with Lucy Fairchild and I think I have been since the moment I first laid eyes on her.

“But it’s okay now?” she asks, breaking the long stretch of silence.

“What is?” I huff out.

“To touch me, to fuck me. To manipulate me now because I’m older. Because time has passed. It’s okay to use me now in any way that you see fit, Damien?” Her hands ball into fists at her sides and I swear I can hear her heart pound from across the room.

She’s angry.

And she has every single right to be.

“I fucking hate you, you know that?” she says, tears pouring from her eyes.

I want to go to her, to take her into my arms and hold her, but she is a wounded animal right now, all guarded and afraid.

“I know, I know baby.”

“Don’t fucking call me that! Stop fucking with my head!” she cries, and I shake my head as I approach her.

“No, I won’t. You can be as angry as you are, you can feel hurt, but you won’t tell me to hide my feelings now after you’ve spent years fucking pulling them from me,” I growl, “after you told me last night to face my consequences like a man. Well, here they are, sweetheart. Here is every feeling, every consequence from my actions,” I say as I stop right before her.

“I love you, no matter how fucked this all is, no matter how doomed it was from the start. I love you and I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for the fact that I abandoned you when you needed me the most, when you needed someone.” Her breath hitches on a sob and I move to touch her, but she rips away.

“You could have avoided all of this, if you had just, if you had…”

“Told the truth? I know. I could have.” I sigh. “But here is the rest of it now. Your father has tons of hush money cases that I know you’re aware of, but I’ve been blackmailing him with this one for years. As soon as we’re married, I’m releasing it to the public and I’m taking your entire fucking family down for all of the turmoil that they’ve caused you, Lucille. I swear it,” I vow and her head drops, tears now splashing onto the carpet.

“It doesn’t matter now, Damien,” she whispers, so broken sounding, so lost.

“None of it matters now. It’s too late. The damage has already been done and you have been dealing with it as much as they have for years.” She won’t even look me in the eye when she speaks, she just pushes against my bare chest with one of her fists to move me away from her.

“We’ll go through with this contract. I’ll hold up my end of the deal, finish out my degree, finish out this year, but that’s all this will ever be, a business transaction. Nothing more. I owe you nothing and now, you owe me nothing.”

“Wrong. I owe you the world, Lucy,” I rasp out, but she shakes her head at me before meeting my gaze, her blue eyes now cold and vacant.

It’s bone chilling. Heart breaking.

“As soon as the year is up I want out of this marriage. When I graduate, I’m fleeing the state, maybe even the country. I’m getting far away from my family and far away from you,” she says, and the words slice me open like a knife, but I deserve them.

I also don’t believe them. Because I have an entire year to prove to her that she should stay. That she will stay.

That she’s mine and always has been. Always will be.

She turns around then and starts folding laundry on her bed.

“Have Bruno give Jenni an invitation to both the rehearsal dinner and wedding next week, she and her husband are the only family that I have and even though none of this is real, she at least deserves to see me fake happy,” she explains and I want to touch her, to spin her around and shake some sense into her.

“I found a dress online and ordered it here yesterday morning, it should arrive by this weekend,” she says before turning and facing me.

“As for the rest, I’d like you to leave. I’ll sign the marriage contract as soon as Adrian brings it, I think your text said on Wednesday. And then we can be done with the theatrics by the end of this month,” she explains, her voice void of all emotion.

I fucking hate every moment of it.

“As for now, I want you to get the fuck out of my bedroom and leave me alone,” she barks, and I have no strength in me to argue.

I can only do as she wishes in hopes that she’ll see that I’ve listened to her and that she will forgive me one day.

I turn reluctantly, dying to steal another glance from her, even though it’s filled with sadness. I’m dying to steal another kiss, to claim her once more, btu I know it’s all useless.

Everything is fucked now.

When I close the door behind me, I hear her begin to vomit as soon as it clicks.