by Deanna Roy
Blitz still stands by my open door. His face is lowered, but I can see him thinking. “Is this the guy?” he asks me. “The one who got you pregnant?”
My head snaps around to look at Denham.
His eyes get wide. “What?” Denham asks. “What is he saying?”
Blitz realizes the situation and tries to close the door.
But Denham steps forward and grabs it. “Livia? Did you get pregnant?”
I want the car to collapse around me, crush me into a cube to be tossed into a pit. This moment must end. It’s all come together. Blitz. Denham. Gabriella. My brother who isn’t my brother after all.
“Let me get this straight,” Blitz says. “You,” he says, pointing at Denham, “were her brother but now you’re not.”
“Half-brother,” Denham says. He’s still trying to get past Blitz to me. “And she didn’t know. I moved in when I was sixteen.”
Blitz’s voice is low and menacing. “She knew at some point, or you wouldn’t be telling her the truth now.”
Denham looks at Blitz. “Her dad made me keep the secret or I couldn’t move in. If I told, then Livia’s mother would know he had been unfaithful.”
Blitz lets out a rush of air. “So Livia, MY Livia, was seduced by you, when you were living there as her brother.”
Denham tries to look around Blitz again. “When I thought I was. But I’m not. Livia, tell me about the baby.”
Blitz won’t let it go. “And you didn’t think to tell her that little detail? When you were sleeping with her?” He looks like he might punch Denham after all.
Denham gets increasingly agitated. “I loved her. I just wanted to protect her from what people would think.”
Blitz grips the door frame so hard his knuckles are white.
“I think,” Blitz says, then pauses. “No, I know, that you seduced a very young girl living in your house, by all accounts your half-sister. And you didn’t even prevent her from getting pregnant.”
“That is past,” Denham says. He’s done with Blitz. I can hear it in his voice. He tries to shoulder Blitz out of the way.
“Where is our baby, Livia?” Denham asks. “You’re Catholic, so I know you had it.” He leans down to get closer to my face. “WHERE IS OUR BABY?”
And that’s when Blitz slams his elbow against the back of Denham’s neck.
Denham crumples to the ground.
Chapter 4
“Blitz!” I cry. But I don’t try to get out of the car or help Denham. I can’t do that. My allegiance is with Blitz. It has to be.
My mind is a whirl. Denham isn’t my brother. My father was lied to. We all were.
It’s too much. I take great gulps of air while Blitz nudges Denham with his foot, waiting for him to come around. He’s out cold on the pavement by the door. Thankfully no one’s in the parking lot of the academy right now to see.
“How did you know where to hit him?” I ask Blitz.
Blitz barks out a sardonic laugh. “That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”
I look down at Denham. The space over his eye is swelling a little where he hit the door of the car on the way down.
“The rest is too much for me right now,” I say. I’m barely holding it together. I have to get past this moment with Denham on the ground, and Blitz in an angry posture over him. I have to get away so I can sort all this out.
“I was supposed to be on some action TV show,” Blitz says. “Artists and Outlaws. We were dancers who fought crime. Dumbest premise on the face of the earth. We shot a pilot but nobody took it. I had to train in combat for it.”
This random conversation helps my mind settle. “I’m sorry the show didn’t happen.”
“I’m not,” Blitz says. “Probably would have destroyed my career.”
Denham shifts his arm and groans.
“Lover boy is back,” Blitz says. “What do you want me to do with him?”
“Move him out of the way so we can leave?” I say, more of a question than a suggestion.
“All right,” Blitz says. He bends down to drag Denham away from the car, but Denham shakes his head and rolls over.
He presses his hand to his forehead. “Damn, dance boy,” he says. “I didn’t figure on you being a heavy.”
“I figured on you being an asshole,” Blitz says. “I should have done it sooner.”
Denham struggles to his feet, his hand on the back of his neck. He takes a step toward me, but Blitz moves in again.
Denham holds up his hands. “All right, all right. Simmer down.” He tilts his head so he can see me around Blitz’s body. “This isn’t over, Livia. I’m going to find that baby.”
He glances up at the giant letters of Dreamcatcher Dance Academy. “And I know where to find y’all.”
Denham turns and stumbles off. He opens the door to a beat-up dark green pickup truck and sits down.
Blitz closes my door and walks around. We wait a moment until Denham starts his truck and screeches off down the street.
“You okay?” Blitz asks. He reaches for my hand and lifts my fingers to his lips.
I manage to nod. I’m so scared he will be freaked out by what he’s learned about me. Nobody’s ever known who Gabriella’s father is, except my parents. They wouldn’t even tell the doctor, and I knew from eighth-grade science that a baby from related people could have problems.
But we weren’t related. It had all been a lie.
I shake my head. So much to sort out. I want to talk to my parents, but they aren’t speaking to me right now.
And…as for parents, I am supposed to meet Blitz’s in a few hours.
Is that still on?
Is he still on?
His warm lips against my fingers seem to indicate we are fine. I glance over at him. He watches me with concern. “You want to talk about it now?” he asks.
I don’t, but I know I have to.
“Denham showed up one summer, a couple months before my fifteenth birthday,” I say. “His aunt brought him. Didi. She was old and pretty sick. And Denham was wild. His mother had not been very involved in his life and had overdosed on something. Her heart stopped, I think.”
My grip on Blitz’s hand is like a lifeline. “The aunt met with Dad privately, and then left Denham with us.”
“Your mother let that happen?” Blitz asks.
“She wasn’t happy about it, but Dad said he was homeless, that he was a distant cousin’s kid. We only had to have him two years, until he graduated.”
“Was he an all-right kid?”
Remembering Denham the way he was then softens me. I can breathe again. “He was larger than life. Wild, for sure. He came in with his big black boots and silver chains and a tattoo even though he was underage. But he was a charmer, you know?” I realize I’m gushing a little and add, “Even though he’d been kicked out of two schools.”
“So obviously something happened between the two of you.”
My body goes cold. I can’t talk about that with Blitz. They are my most private memories.
I decide to keep it simple. “Yes. It went on for a couple months and then one day Denham just couldn’t take it anymore. He told me my dad was his father too.”
“God,” Blitz says. “I can’t even imagine what that felt like.”
“I ran straight to them. Dad exploded and kicked Denham out. He drove him back to the aunt’s. I didn’t see him again.”
“So you didn’t know you were pregnant then?”
“Not for another several weeks. I was upset, not eating, pretty distraught. Anything that would have been a pregnancy symptom was just mixed up in my distress.”
“And then you moved.”
“Dad brought us here so no one would know about the baby. He was so shamed. So angry. No one would talk to me. I was hidden from everyone.”
Blitz leans over the center console and takes me in his arms. “That must have been incredibly lonely.”
I shake my head against his shoulder. “But it wasn’t.
I wasn’t alone, you know? I had the baby with me. I could feel her moving. It was like a miracle. I would talk to her and sing.”
“Then you gave her up.”
I pull away just enough to look into Blitz’s face. “I did not want to. But I had no choice. My parents just did it. I had no way to take care of her. I didn’t know anything. If I could do it all over again, I would have refused. Run away. Found a shelter. At least tried. But I didn’t then. I was too scared.”
“I told you, I can call my lawyer. You were underage. Coerced.”
“No,” I say. “I could never do that to Gwen. She already lost her husband. I couldn’t take Gabriella from her.”
He holds on to me again and we sit listening to the wind howl outside the car. I can still hear Denham’s shout, “WHERE IS OUR BABY?”
And fear slices through me.
“Do you think he can find Gabriella?” I ask. “He didn’t sign anything giving her up.”
“Who did you list as the father?” Blitz asks. “On the birth certificate.”
“My father wrote down a name. I think he made it up. It wasn’t Denham.”
“Then we’re okay for now,” Blitz says, but he looks behind us, out the back window to the front of Dreamcatcher Dance Academy.
I know what he’s thinking.
All he has to do is see Gabriella, and he’ll know. We’ve led him right to her.
Chapter 5
When we get to the hotel, I stand in the shower spray for a long, long time. I have to get ready for this dinner with Blitz’s parents, but I’m totally knotted up over Denham.
I remember the day he arrived. Mom and Dad obviously knew about it ahead of time, as they weren’t caught off guard when the car pulled up in front of our house in Houston.
It was the summer before I would start high school, and life was still pretty normal for us. My friends from middle school were like me, giggly and obsessed with boys and fingernail polish and whether or not our mothers would ever let us wear makeup.
I knew all the singers on the new show The Voice and had a super-serious crush on Adam Levine. If he was behind a singer, so was I.
Then came that knock at the door. I remember sitting in Dad’s ratty navy blue recliner, pretending to read the book on my summer list for freshman English class.
The woman came in first. They introduced her as Aunt Didi, but I had certainly never met her and she wasn’t a sister of either Mom or Dad. She looked to be in a lot of pain, walking with a cane and taking small mincing steps in her creased old-lady shoes. Her white hair was thin and lay flat against her head.
My little brother Andy was only three and seemed scared of her, hiding behind Mom’s leg. Mom seemed to be taking a lot of deep breaths as the woman came in, and had on her biggest, fakest smile.
Then came Denham.
He looked like a young rock god. His jeans were ripped, and he had on a black jacket over a charcoal shirt, even though it was ninety degrees.
He had his hair gelled so it shot off to one side, like he’d just flipped it. He saw me and lifted his eyebrows, then shook his head and looked away, like I was something he shouldn’t gawk at.
We were introduced and Aunt Didi stayed around for dinner. Then she left, leaving a beat-up suitcase and a couple duffel bags on the porch. I was shocked but Dad just said Denham had no place to live and would be crashing with us for a while.
Dad didn’t seem to know quite what to do with this rebellious-looking teen. He slept in Andy’s room on a mattress on the floor. Andy was instantly starstruck and could be found most mornings curled up next to the mattress. The two bonded pretty fast, and it’s probably the way Denham treated Andy that made me like him.
Because otherwise, he was kind of a jerk.
Our first conversation came on his second day. Dad was at work. Mom was inside with Andy. She had me outside pulling weeds around the rosebushes. Denham stepped out the back door and lit up a cigarette.
“You can’t do that,” I told him. “Dad will kill you.”
Denham shrugged and blew smoke my direction. “He ain’t exactly here. You gonna narc on me?”
He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, right down to the charcoal shirt. I’d never met anybody like him.
“How did you end up here?” I asked. “Who are you really?”
“Nobody important,” he said. “And I’ll probably just run off.”
My eyes got wide at that. “Where would you go?”
“I got friends on the East Side,” he said. He looked up at the canopy of trees that shaded our backyard and kicked at an old plastic teeter-totter. “Somebody will hook me up with a place to crash.”
“Dad won’t like that,” I said.
He took a step closer to me then, and when his sky blue eyes penetrated mine, I felt a little quivery inside. “You sure worry a lot about what your father thinks.”
“Don’t you have a dad somewhere? Don’t you care what he thinks?”
Denham drew in a long pull on the cigarette, his blue eyes fixed on me. “Been me and my mom all my life,” he said. “She died two months ago.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, shoving a hand in his jeans pocket. “She wasn’t around all that much. I don’t really need nobody.”
He blew smoke in the air, and I knew I’d rather not be around when he got caught. But I decided something that day. Denham was going to be part of a family once and for all. And I was going to make it happen.
At the hotel, I turn off the shower, instantly shivering even though the bathroom is warm with steam. How could he be back now? When I’d impulsively gone onstage for the finale of Dance Blitz, it hadn’t even occurred to me that he would see me. Mom and Dad, maybe, if Mindy saw it and her parents caught her and they called mine. I was fine with that. They can’t do anything to me. I’m nineteen.
But Denham? He hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I wrap myself in a towel and sit on the cushioned stool in front of the long marble counter. The top of the mirror is fogged, but the bottom is clear. I look at myself, remembering the younger version of me. I had confidence then. But the years in between were laden with self-doubt and shame.
Shame I hadn’t needed to feel.
He wasn’t my brother at all.
Denham had kept the ruse, calling Dad “Mr. Mason” although Mom had him call her Dot, a shortened form of Dorothy that felt more like a nickname for him to use.
Mom liked Denham, quietly bringing him into the family, keeping the smoking away from her home and encouraging him to come along on outings to movies and dinners, even though he tried to stay behind.
That summer had a record-breaking heat wave, and Mom set up a sprinkler in the backyard for Andy.
One day, my friend Paula and I went to the backyard to get some sun and watch Andy for Mom, who had gone to the store.
I wasn’t allowed bikinis, even back then, but I wore a tankini where the top was long enough to meet the bottom. Paula’s mom was less strict, so she had a ruffled bikini, but it was still pretty tame.
After fifteen minutes of Andy splashing around, and Paula and me chatting about high school starting in a few weeks, Denham came out on the back porch.
He had wisely shucked the leather jacket, since it was pushing one hundred degrees, and had on a tight white T-shirt and jeans. His eyes roamed over me and Paula as he lit a cigarette.
Paula nudged me and asked, “Who is THAT?”
I wasn’t sure what to call him. He wasn’t related, not a cousin or anything. “That’s Denham,” I said. “He’s living with us.” I leaned in to whisper. “His mom died.”
“Oh,” Paula said. She flicked her long blond hair behind her shoulder and squeezed her arms together to make it look like she had more cleavage than she did.
Denham noticed, his eyebrow quirking as he blew smoke out over the yard. Then his gaze rested on me lightly, like a caress.
“He’s into you,” Paula whispered. “
It must be pretty crazy, having a hot guy like that living in your own house.”
My gaze snapped back to Denham. He wasn’t trying to hide his interest. My skin tingled where he looked, along my legs, up my belly, and across my chest.
“Have you kissed him yet?” Paula asked.
I nudged her hard. “No way!” I said.
But as Denham kept staring, his gaze constantly dropping to my thighs, I started feeling like maybe I wanted to.
A tap at the bathroom door startles me.
“You okay in there?” Blitz asks.
I stand up quickly, pushing my wet hair back, and open the door.
Blitz waits outside, holding up two shirts.
“Which says, ‘I’ve brought the crazy hottie who disrupted my TV show home to Mama’?”
This makes me laugh. “Go with the blue,” I say, tapping the chambray one. “Purple makes it seem like you’ve been tamed by a woman already.”
“Ah, but I have!” Blitz says, leaning forward to press a light kiss on my mouth. “How are you doing?”
I open my mouth to say, “Fine,” but the words freeze. I’m not fine. I’m terrified.
Blitz sees it. He hangs the two shirts on a hook over the door and leads me by the elbow into the bedroom. He picks up a white robe on the way and wraps it around my shoulders.
“Come here,” he says, settling on a bench at the end of the bed. He pulls me down close to him, his arms around me. “Tell Dr. Blitz all about it.”
I laugh again. Blitz is good for serious situations. Of course he is. He entertained millions of viewers every week for two seasons.
My head rests on his shoulder. “I didn’t think I’d ever see him again,” I say. “Do you think he’ll go after Gabriella?”
“He might,” Blitz says. “But judging by his broken-down truck, my lawyers probably charge more than his lawyers.”
I sigh. “But what’s the right thing to do?”
He squeezes me. “I guess it goes back to what happened back then. You want to talk about it?”
I close my eyes to the beautiful hotel room, the luxury around me, and the sight of Blitz, who has been completely understanding of every step of my withdrawal of my family.
