Serenity’s heart pounded in her chest as she uneasily gazed at the bag. “What is it?”
“Letters. Its letters Tristan wrote for you during the first year he was away. There are more.” He reached inside his pants pocket and produced a small key. “The rest are in a safe deposit box in a bank downtown. He said he wrote you every day for the last seven years and he kept all the letters. Just before he left the church, he told me about them and made me promise to give them to you. When I was leaving the reception, Nyle spotted me and asked me about the bag. I told him what was in it and he took it away. He didn’t think you needed to know about it. He was worried about it setting you back in some kind of way. Against my better judgment and good conscience, I allowed him to take them. He thought I left but I didn’t. I saw him going outside with the bag and I followed him. I watched as he tossed them in a dumpster; then I went and retrieved them after he left.
“I’ve been struggling with the secret of these letters all this time. I wasn’t going to say anything; I swear I wasn’t. I wanted to respect Nyle’s feelings but at the same time I felt horrible for Tristan because he really wanted you to have them. He called me after he and Nyle had a meeting a few months ago and just broke down. He told me that Nyle told him he had tossed the letters. I knew I should’ve told him I had them, but I didn’t. You and Nyle seemed so happy and I honestly didn’t want to create trouble between you two. The past couple of weeks with Tristan being down about how things transpired when he came here to see you have been very hard to say the least. I feel so bad for him Serenity. I know he hurt you badly, but I feel sorry for him, I really do. He’s my best friend, and my heart aches for him. You’re my friend as well, and I know you haven’t been doing all that hot either, so… So, I… I want you to have these.”
Serenity stood staring at the bag with tears slowly falling from her eyes.
Concern flickered in Ricky’s blue eyes as he watched her. “Serenity, say something please. Say something.”
Serenity released the shaky breath she’d been holding since Ricky had produced the bag. “The past couple of weeks all I could think about was if he was telling me the truth about these and how much I hoped he was. Then all I could think about was how angry I was at Nyle for not allowing me the option of seeing them for myself and making my own decision. Now that you have them… Now that they’re here…”
She walked to the island and fingered the black bag. She tearfully looked over at Ricky and rubbed his shoulder. “Thanks Ricky.”
Ricky’s frowned face loosened with relief. “You’re not pissed off at me?”
“I might be later. But not now. Right now, I’m just thankful. Utterly thankful.”
She pulled him in her arms and heartedly embraced him, and he tightly hugged her back. Their moment of gratitude was interrupted by the telephone.
“Excuse me for a moment,” she sniffled. She grabbed a napkin off the table and blew her nose as she walked to the phone. She picked it up off the wall and answered. “Hello?”
Serenity’s lips lifted in a wide grin when she heard Katherine’s voice on the other end. “Hi Katherine…. Wait a minute, wait a minute… Slow down… What… What’s the matter? Tristan? What?”
The smile on Ricky’s face quickly faded when he saw the look of concern on Serenity’s. He rushed over to her and stood by her side.
“Katherine, wait a minute, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” Serenity said with heightened panic. “What about Tristan? What happened to him?”
Ricky immediately grabbed Serenity’s hand and firmly held it, waiting.
Serenity attentively listened for a few more moments before weakly collapsing against Ricky. Her broken heart stormed in her chest and her face twisted with brutal anguish. She closed her eyes, dropped the phone, and screamed.
SERENITY
The place was crawling with police. Everywhere she looked, all she saw were police cars. Sirens were going off. The blue and white vehicles were pulling up and screeching to a halt; cops were getting out and running; others were on their radios; a few were standing by talking intimately, while still a few others were barricaded against several journalists and news crews, trying to ward them off. How the hell had the news gotten out to the public?
It was hard for the car Serenity was in to get through; it was hard to hear coherently, hard to focus on one thing. So much activity was going on. The moderate-sized vacant lot was literally swamped with at least thirty-forty vehicles, each jockeying for position to get ahead of one another. Horns were blaring; first responders were yelling out of windows, cops were screaming at people; a few of them were even directing the bystanders, attempting in vain to move them out of the compacted space.
Serenity was frozen in terror. Her eyes were wide with grief and fear; her body corded tight with stress and uncertainty as Nyle cautiously made his way through the mass of police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances.
Ambulances?
Serenity weakly leaned forward in her seat, struggling to see through the sea of people and inconvenient traffic to where the SUV sat snuggled beneath the bridge.
She peered through the tinted windshield of Nyle’s Aston Martin and cringed at the vision of shattered glass on the windshield of Tristan’s Mercedes SUV.
She closed her eyes tight at the visual and fervently began praying to herself.
Please God. Please God. Please. Let him be okay. Please. Please.
Haltingly, she opened her eyes and struggled to focus on the scene in front of her. She was looking for someone, anyone to alert her to what was going on; what had happened. Katherine. A police officer. Tristan himself. Anyone. She hated they couldn’t get through quickly enough. From the look of things, it had to be pretty bad. She couldn’t reconcile in her mind that there would be so many emergency responders if it wasn’t.
She was afraid to breathe, afraid to think, afraid to talk… She had difficulty swallowing. She was breathing and dry-heaving so hard, almost to the point of hyperventilating. The lasagna she’d tasted before Ricky had shown up was swirling wildly in her body, threatening to project itself from her body. Trembles racked her body as she obsessively rocked back and forth in her seat, tightly squeezing her own arms; then gripping the arm rests of her seat so hard pain was shooting through her fingers.
Her mind kept going back to two weeks before. When she’d seen him on her doorstep. When he’d touched her. When she’d touched him. When they’d kissed, embraced, and practically made love to one another. The empty explanations that she refused to hear. All the horrible things she’d said to him. Her tears. His tears. Him begging for her forgiveness. The love she saw in his eyes. The desperation, the fear, the agony, the lust, the self-hatred for himself… And she’d just added to it. She’d been so cold. So heartless. She’d never forgive herself if he was dead. Never.
She swallowed a cry of hysteria as she eyed the crime scene tape strewn across one side of the bridge to the next, in front of his SUV. She gagged aloud and swallowed hard, refusing to get sick. She didn’t want to think about if he was dead. She refused to think he was dead. He couldn’t be dead. They had to get to him in time. Katherine had said she’d called the cops as soon as she’d found the note. Maybe they’d gotten to him before he’d…
But then she saw the stretcher… The first responders were taking it out of one of the ambulances and pushing it through the crowd, moving fast.
Was he dead? Were they too late? Where was he?
“Nyle,” she weakly croaked as she shakily reached out and grabbed his arm, gripping it tight.
She didn’t want to freak out in front of Nyle. She couldn’t freak out in front of Nyle. She had to think of Nyle and his feelings, while trying to suppress her own feelings, while trying to hide her feelings for Tristan. She was worried to death, but she had to think about Nyle. This couldn’t be easy on him either.
But she kept looking at the stretcher… Tears flooded her eyes and fell in droves as they wheeled through the crowd
, inching closer to his SUV under the bridge.
A feral noise from deep within stumbled past her lips, an unhuman sound between a cry and a groan. She keeled over in the car, her mouth dropping open as she struggled to breathe. “Nyle.”
Nyle furtively glanced over at her from his place in the driver’s seat and worried his lip, his eyes nervously taking in the harried scene around them. “It’s okay baby,” he said as he took one hand off the steering wheel to grasp her hand. “It’s okay. Everything will be okay. Just calm down.”
“Where is he?” she tearfully said. “I can’t see him. I need to see him. I need to know if he’s…”
Her voice trailed off, refusing to verbalize the last words. Nyle gave her a sidelong glance and looked back out the window, staying silent. He too was worried and concerned. The muscles in his neck were so tight she could see the veins jumping; his full were lips pinched together, his were eyes blinking rapidly, fraught with worry. Relief briefly swept through her body as she eyed him. He wasn’t thinking about her. He wasn’t worried about her or her apparent grief over the state of Tristan. He was honestly racked with fear and remorse as well.
If the circumstances were different, Serenity might be touched by Nyle worrying about the fate of his former best friend and current rival. She would be surprised to know he still cared. But even she knew from all her drama with Kara, when you were friends with someone; when you truly loved someone… that love didn’t go away, no matter what. Or who.
“Mother-fuck-,” Nyle yelled when a car abruptly jumped in front of him, bringing the already slow-moving mob of cars to a stop. He slammed on the brakes, missing the car by mere inches.
He glanced over at Serenity before briefly glancing in the backseat. He looked forward again and slapped the steering wheel, swearing as he racked his fingers through his hair. His fingers nervously rapped the wheel as he looked around for another opening to break through the traffic.
Serenity glanced in the backseat of the car at Ricky. His face was stoic and as pale as a ghost. He was so still Serenity would think he had zoned out if she hadn’t seen him blink. When she’d gotten the news from Katherine, Ricky had tried to keep her calm and sooth her through her screams, even while keeping his own sorrow and tears at bay. He stood by her side and held her as she called Nyle, screaming what Katherine had told her into the phone, crying so hard and so hysterically it was hard for Nyle to make out what she was saying. Ricky had to grab the phone and talk to Nyle himself. He hadn’t even finished saying the words ‘killed himself’ before Nyle hung up the phone. He was at the home he shared with Serenity in less than twenty minutes and the studio was over half an hour away.
He had barged through the front door, his eyes wild with disbelief; his hair all over his head. Only two words were spoken as he vacantly stared at them from the foyer: “Let’s go.”
Nothing else was said as they all ran to the car, almost forgetting to lock the door on the way. The bridge where Katherine said Jordan had gone was over an hour from their home and it was the longest hour of their lives. They didn’t talk all the way there, each of them paralyzed with their own twisted, shattered thoughts. Now, here they were. They didn’t know if Tristan was dead or alive.
Serenity hastily wiped her eyes and sat up as a police-officer rushed over to them. He stopped at Nyle’s side and abruptly rapped on the window. Nyle rolled the window down.
“You guys are going to have to get out of here,” he flatly replied. “This is a crime scene.”
“We’re friends of the victim-“ Nyle began.
“Crime?” Serenity hysterically screeched. “Crime? Are we too late? Is he dead? Is Tristan dead?”
“You guys are going to have to- “
“Sir, we’re his family,” Ricky quietly whispered.
“Can you tell us what happened please?” Serenity pleaded.
“I’m afraid not. Now, if you just back up and turn around… Ma’am!”
Before he’d even finished his sentence, Serenity had yanked open her door, undid her seatbelt, and took off towards the bridge at warp speed.
“Ma’am come back here! Come back here!”
“Serenity!” Nyle called.
“Ren!” Ricky shouted through the backseat window. “Come back! Don’t go over there!”
The cop had started off towards her, waving at people and shoving them out of his way. “Someone stop her!”
All their voices sounded decades away. Serenity made a mad dash to the bridge, her heart pounding in her chest, her breath choppy and wild. She struggled to run, to stay upright, and fight past her weak limbs. She vaguely heard fans screaming her name and journalists throwing questions at her, but she ignored them all. She had to get to Tristan. She had to find him. Several cops tried to stop her, but she zoomed past them all like a gold medal track star. Heaviness and tightness squeezed her chest and her legs threatened to collapse beneath her; she struggled to see through her tears…Her heart was breaking, literally breaking, falling and shattering apart with each step that she took. She had to get to him. She had to get to Tristan!
She yelped and cried out as a tall, solid police officer grabbed her and lifted her off her feet.
“Let me go! Let me go!”
“Get back! You have to get back!”
“Please, please let me go! You have to let me go! You don’t understand, he’s my-“
The cop tossed her to her feet and hovered over her, glaring menacingly. “I’m not going to tell you again, you have to get back.”
Serenity tried to push past him, elbowing him in the chest and shoving herself hard against his massive frame to no avail. “Let me see him! Let me see him, please!”
Fighting to keep his cool, the officer put his hands to his face and closed his eyes. “Ma’am, please don’t force me to restrain you. I don’t want to, but I will.”
Feeling helpless, Serenity put her hands to her head and distractedly looked around. Catching sight of Katherine, she screamed over to her.
“Katherine! Katherine!”
Katherine was standing a few feet from the front of the bridge, her eyes red and nearly swollen shut with tears. She turned in the direction of Serenity’s cries and almost collapsed from the impact of seeing her. A first responder that was standing next to her held her up and looked over her with concern.
“Let her go,” Katherine gravelly pleaded to the policeman holding Serenity at bay. “Let her come over here, please.”
Not waiting for permission, Serenity ran over to her and the two of them immediately embraced, sobbing uncontrollably.
Serenity pulled back and pleadingly searched Katherine’s eyes. “Where is he? Where is he Katherine? I need to see him.”
Katherine struggled to speak as she cried. “He-He- “
“Katherine please! Where’s the body! Where- “
“Serenity.”
Serenity’s body went stock still and her blood turned cold as she stared vacantly at nothing.
That voice. It was grave. It was weak. It was beseeching. It was… his.
It had to be a mirage. It had to be. She was hallucinating. Willing it into an existence that didn’t exist. She hadn't heard what she'd heard. It couldn’t have been him. But then, she heard that unmistakable timbre again. Her name. The voice that made all her senses come alive at once and the world around her seem brighter. More energized and meaningful.
She looked up to see Tristan standing beside his truck. He was weakly leaned against it as he struggled to stand upright. Blood was running down the side of his head and he was holding a compress to it. He was surrounded by officers, firefighters, and the medic team that she had seen running with the stretcher.
Serenity expelled a sharp, loud gasp of surprise and blinked rapidly. Where had he come from? He hadn’t just been standing there less than a minute ago.
She couldn’t move. She wasn’t sure if she was seeing if she was seeing. It was like seeing a ghost. For a moment she thought she’d had a heart attack
on the spot and died and Tristan was waiting for her at the gates of heaven. She didn’t know if it was safe or smart to run. She didn’t care. She needed to run.
Suddenly, she broke away from Katherine and sprinted over to him.
The officers standing by him moved to go to her and Tristan called to them.
“It’s okay,” he weakly said. “Let her through please.”
The officers paused, hesitantly looking back and forth between her and Tristan. They let her through.
Serenity ran over to Tristan and stood in front of him, railing back and forth on her feet. She widely looked at him, breathing hard and loud. She swayed and his hand weakly reached out to grab her. She dazedly looked down at his cold hand on her bare arm and coiled at the blood she saw on it. Looking at him again, she exhaled sharply and grabbed his face in her hands, squeezing and pressing hard, the blood from his hand and the compress seeping into hers and through her fingers. She didn’t notice. She had to look into his eyes. Makes sure he was there. Make sure he was alive. Make sure…
Mine All Mine : Book One Page 12
