Let him in—that was the lynchpin. How could he still care about me after knowing what I did? There was no way that anyone could love a monster like me. I knew what my mother was doing. If I’d only listened to my gut earlier, maybe I could have saved my father, but now he was dead and the blame rested securely on my shoulders. I’d failed him as a daughter. I wouldn’t fail my own daughter as a mother.
I sighed. “What if you don’t care about me anymore after I tell you everything? What happens when you see just how damaged I really am?”
Aaron took my hand and sat next to me on the bed. “Nothing like that could ever happen, Julia. My feelings are the same as the day I met you.”
“How can that be true when I left you and our daughter? I abandoned you.”
“Julia,” he pressed uncomfortably. “When you left, there had to be a reason. Something happened that pushed you away. You never gave me any details, so I got angry and lashed out. Its why I went through with the divorce. I was trying to get your attention but it didn’t work. You never came back to fight for me or Amy,” he said. “Now, I’m starting to wonder if you left for another reason.”
I was trying to find the words but it was so hard. Each time I tried to speak, the dam inside me threatened to break and sweep me away with the tide of emotions. I shook my head, looking at my hands folded in my lap as they started to gloss over from the tears. Aaron shifted on the bed before sliding off and kneeling in front of me, forcing me to look at him. His strong hands took my face and he kissed me gently on the cheeks. I knew he could see the tears and taste their salty truth. I couldn’t hide in the past any longer.
“It wasn’t safe for Amy to come visit me. I knew that as soon as my mother saw how much she looked like me and my father, the cycle would start again.”
“What cycle?”
“She was always so controlling, so manipulative,” I whispered. “I didn’t tell you before, but when she reached out to me when my father got sick, I told her I wouldn’t come. She got so angry. She said that my father was going to die because of my stubbornness.”
“You had nothing to do with his death, Julia,” he whispered. “It was a fluke, okay? Nature sometimes just pulls the wrong person’s card early. You did everything you could for him and your mother. He turned you down at every opportunity. He pushed you away.”
“I know that he did,” I said bitterly. “He never wanted anything to do with me, and when I left with you, the only contact I had with him was when he found out I was pregnant.”
“I never knew that.”
“No.” I snorted. “Why would you? I never told anyone. Do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘don’t bring that girl around here.’”
“Yeah, well, it was his loss,” Aaron said through gritted teeth. “He didn’t want to be a part of our lives, and your mother didn’t want to stay out of them. I guess that’s love for you.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. The truth would set me free. I knew it would. It had to. “My father wasn’t trying to push me away. Rather, he was, but not because he didn’t care about me. He pushed me away because of my mother.”
“Controlling, manipulative, and borderline insane? Why not just divorce her? He had to know that you cared about him.”
“He knew, but I didn’t until he was already gone. It was the only way to keep me safe, but when he died, my mother started trying to control me all over again.”
“Julia, I hate to say it, but it worked. You left us behind and went to her. I was mad at first, but even after that, when I tried to repair our marriage, you wouldn’t even see me.”
“What would I have done?” I asked him. “Fix things and let Amy come over where she could watch me get rushed to the hospital when I had an episode? Or worse, I could leave her with mom and she would end up right there beside me?”
“You talked about her being in a hospital,” he said carefully. “It’s a mental hospital, isn’t it?”
I nodded and let the tears finally flow. “I didn’t have any choice. She was poisoning me to keep me with her.”
“My God,” Aaron said. “You should have come to me.”
“I didn’t know that you would want to see me again. I thought that you had moved on, and it wasn’t until I knew she wouldn’t be getting out that I felt safe calling you. I always wanted to be a family, but with her hovering over my shoulder, my options were limited.”
“It’s okay,” he whispered as he pulled me to my feet. “None of that matters anymore. She is never going to get out, and we’ll make sure that our daughter is safe for the rest of her life, okay? We’ll get through this.”
His lips found mine again, and I gave myself over to him entirely for a brief second. When footsteps passed by outside, I pulled away, but only long enough to close the curtains and lock the door.
“No interruptions this time,” I said softly.
“I like the sound of that,” he whispered to me as he pulled me closer to him. “I just have one more question for you, if that’s okay?”
“Yes,” I said carefully. I had already opened the gates of honesty and I didn’t want to close them again. I’d felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders with each new piece of information that I gave Aaron about my life when we weren’t together. It was good to share things with him.
“I understand that you think she poisoned you, and I see now why you never let Amy go back there, but something is missing. There is a part of this story that you’re leaving out. What finally got her locked away?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“No medical doctor would have a patient’s rights taken away unless some compelling argument or evidence came to light to push them beyond the shadow of a doubt.”
“Well, she’s locked up for now, but I don’t know if that will last forever. I have a theory but I don’t know if I can prove it.”
“What?”
“Aaron, I think she killed my father.”
Chapter 8
Aaron
I swallowed hard as I froze and looked Julia in the eyes. “That’s a pretty serious allegation. Why do you think that?”
“There are half a dozen reasons, but mostly just the way she talked, like she had done something terrible to him.”
I shifted uneasily. “Can you tell me more?”
The last thing I wanted to do was talk. My cock throbbed to feel her flesh against it, but this was so much more important than sex. If she was finally ready to open up, then I wasn’t going to stop her. I’d been waiting so long for answers, and now I finally had a chance of getting them. Now that she was ready, the rest of the night could wait.
She sighed. “I don’t know where to start. When I first got there, everything seemed so normal. It was almost eerie how much everything still seemed the same as when I had left. It had been four years, but to her, barely a day had passed.” She shuddered but didn’t stop talking. “It’s like a strange dream. She sat down at the table with me and slid me a smoothie.”
“A smoothie? That’s strange,” I muttered.
“No. Not really. She used to give them to me all the time as a kid. She told me they would help to make me strong, but something was wrong. Of course, I didn’t know that until after I drank the first one and my guts started to churn.”
“You think she put something in them?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. I got sick whenever she gave them to me before, but she said it was my body trying to heal. I’m not a child anymore. I know the difference in what my body is telling me.”
“What did you do?”
“After the first smoothie and subsequent hospital visit, I stopped drinking them. That was when it started to go downhill rather quickly. I’d notice a bitter taste in my coffee at first, then I would switch brands but it would still be there. Then it started to seep over to my food.”
“She was poisoning everything?”
“I think so. It got so bad at the end that I wouldn’t even e
at takeout that I’d left on the table. She would tell me I was being crazy but I didn’t trust her anymore. I put a lock on my bedroom door, and the next day, I came home to it unlocked. When I would call Amy, she would get so sweet it was almost sickening.”
“Margarete sweet?” I snorted. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Yeah, you’re telling me. I wanted to call her more—both of you. I wanted to stay in touch and bring her to me for summer visits, but all it took was one conversation with my mother to know that could never happen.”
“How so?”
“She pressed me,” she said with another shudder. “She wanted to know what Amy was like, and at first, I thought she was just being friendly, but it got strange. She would press for Amy to come and visit, pretend to be a doting grandmother and loving mother. It wasn’t until she asked about Amy’s health that I stopped calling home in front of her.”
“My God,” I whispered.
“It was a losing battle no matter what I did. If I didn’t speak to you and Amy, I was isolated and easier for her to play, but if I did get ahold of Amy, she would try to get me to bring her there. The guilt that I had to live with every day was almost overwhelming. She reminded me of my father’s death at least daily.”
“What a monster,” I hissed. “You should have told me. I would have come and gotten you. We could have dealt with her together.”
“That may be believable now, but at that point, I didn’t think that you wanted anything to do with me. The only thing I knew was that the longer I stayed away, the safer our daughter was.”
“You made a huge sacrifice for us,” I said. “That took a lot of courage.”
She snorted. “I wish I could say it was courage, but even now, I look over my shoulder and jump when my phone rings. She is so manipulative. I didn’t even want to call you until after I heard that the doctor had locked her away. I don’t know how far her reach goes, but the way she was before” —a shudder rocked her shoulders— “I wouldn’t put anything past her at this point.”
“It’s over now, okay?”
“Yeah,” she muttered.
The word didn’t sound sincere but I was worried about digging any deeper. Our relationship was going to have to be a two-way street if it was going to work. Taking a deep breath, I turned back to her and smiled.
“Thank you for sharing with me. I promise that I won’t let her come near you or Amy ever again.”
“I don’t think that’s a promise you can make.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She shook her head again, her dark locks trembling. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Can we please move on to something else? Like why are you so willing to work things out when you hated me a few years ago?”
“I never hated you, Julia. You should know that,” I said quickly.
“That may be the case, but I had some pretty nasty emails, calls, and messages from you saved on my phone for years until my mother found them. I ended all contact with you then.”
“Julia, I was a different man. When you left, my life was going down in a rapidly moving tailspin. I lashed out at you, but I know now that it wasn’t your fault.”
“It was my fault, though, Aaron. It doesn’t matter what happened to me after I left. It doesn’t change the fact that I was still the one to walk out that door. How can you be so willing to forgive me for that?”
“Because you had good reason to leave!” I said a little louder than intended. “Julia, I pushed you away. After the accusations and the way you looked at me when you found out that Jenny had been in our home, I panicked and tried to take control of you like you were just a possession. I’m the reason you left.”
She shook her head and took my face in her hands as she stood above me. I was still on the bed. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pressed my head against her stomach as she spoke.
“Aaron, we both made a lot of bad choices and wrong decisions over the years, but we can’t change that now. All we can do is move forward.”
“That’s all I want, for us to move forward again as a family. I want us to be whole again. You don’t know how happy I was to see you the other day. It’s been too long.” Her body stiffened a little and I looked up. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m happy that we can talk too. I do want to start rebuilding the relationships from my past, starting with you and Amy. But you need to know that I’m not going to come to Arizona and stay with you.”
“Well,” I muttered. “I guess I hadn’t really thought that far ahead. I was just enjoying the ride.”
“Me too!” she exclaimed. “I’m so happy to hear you say that. What we have going on right now, reconnecting and bringing our family together again, is so wonderful, but that doesn’t mean I’m sure that I want to dive right back into being the other half of your whole.”
“What?” I asked.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d put my heart on the line, waiting for her to come to me and share. I thought that in doing so, I would have gained some of her trust, but it was going to be harder than I’d assumed. She still wasn’t ready to be in a relationship with me. It was a blow that hurt. I shrank away from her and looked away as she sat down on the bed next to me.
“Aaron, I don’t want you to close me out again, okay? This has nothing to do with you. I know that I want to move back to Arizona, but I can’t tell you that I’m ready for us to be together again when I’m not. I didn’t want you to think I was being dishonest.”
“No, its fine. Thank you for being honest. Can I ask what’s holding you back?”
She shook her head. “I just have some issues that I still need to sort out with my mother. I don’t think I can commit to a relationship when I’m still so damaged.”
“Julia!” I shot back. “You’re not damaged in any way! Your mother is the one who is sick, not you.”
“I still feel like she’s waiting for me back at the house. I have nightmares that she’s giving Amy a smoothie. Her doctor, you, everyone is just standing around and watching as Amy falls onto the ground, and then Margarete points her bony finger at me and they all agree with her that I’m the killer.”
I grabbed ahold of her, using more force than intended to pull her to her feet, and I shook her gently. “Look at me,” I demanded. “You’re not a killer. Your mother is a murderer, and we’ll make sure that she never sees the light of day again, but you have to trust me. I can’t take your leaving us again.”
Her soft, broken and sorrowful eyes lit up a tiny bit. “Aaron, I can’t offer you a future. I don’t even know what next week holds for us.”
“I know, but I don’t need you to be certain because I am. I know that somehow, we’ll get through this in the end. It doesn’t matter if it’s as friends, lovers, or a married couple.”
The sob racked through her body as she threw her arms around me. “Thank you so much, Aaron. I don’t know what I would do without you. I’ve been so alone.”
“I know,” I cooed over and over again as I stroked her hair.
It was heartbreaking for me to see her in so much pain but I had to sympathize. She’d endured years of emotional abuse to protect her daughter. Part of me wanted to rage and demand to know why she didn’t reach out, to try and understand her reasoning for dealing with everything alone. Yet another part of me, the side that I chose to listen to, told me to just hold her, that all she needed was a familiar shoulder to cry on. She just needed me to be her safety net, and I wasn’t going to let her down, not again.
“Aaron, I know what I want,” she whispered softly to me as her fingers trailed up my back.
I shuddered with the familiar desire she always stirred inside me. “Julia. You’ve had a rough time. Maybe this isn’t the best idea.”
Her warm laughter was disarming. “I don’t care anymore about what’s right and what’s wrong. For years, I denied myself the most basic and wonderful pleasure by leaving you. Even if it’s just for tonight, won’t you help me
to relive those glory days?”
“Are you sure?” I asked in a hoarse voice, my cock already standing at attention.
Her hands ran down my body and a groan slipped past my lips. Her skilled fingers trailed the outline of my shaft through the thin shorts that I was wearing.
“I’m positive,” she whispered.
Chapter 9
Julia
The world around me slipped away. For the first time in what felt like centuries, I was relaxed and I felt safe. Aaron always made me feel that way, warm and comforted, but once the fire was lit, as it was now, I felt a burning need for him. We stopped being co-parents, ex-spouses, and strangers brought together by fate in that moment. I was no longer a mother and daughter or drowning with guilt. The only thoughts I had were of Aaron and the way he now dragged his fingers down my arms, tugging the thin strap of my dress down with them.
I was on vacation. Putting on a bra hadn’t even crossed my mind, and now I was grateful for that. Aaron’s eyes grew large when he pulled the dress down over them. I groaned when he ran his large hands up my abdomen and thumbed my tender, erect nipples. I sucked in a sharp breath as the familiar sensation of pleasure washed through my body. He pressed my nipples down into the soft flesh below before pinching them between his fingers and tugging on them again.
I knew what he wanted. It was a game we’d played before and one that I had dearly missed. He led me forward by my nipples until his legs brushed against the bed, careful not to tug on his grip. I reached between his legs and grabbed ahold of his shaft through his swim trunks. He shuddered, his eyes rolling back in his head for a moment. I took advantage of the temporary distraction as I quickly worked my free hand into his pants. His cock felt burning hot in my hand, and I knew that I wouldn’t last long.
I wanted to taste his skin. I shoved him back against the bed, and he lost his grip on my nipples. Before he could reach for them again, I grabbed his cock with both hands and dropped down to my knees. He always seemed to bring out the freak inside me. In a split second, I had my slippery mouth wrapped around his throbbing cock. The salty precum on my lips continued to push me closer to the edge as my body pulsed and begged to be filled with him.
One More Kiss: A Second Chance Romance (One More Series Book 1) Page 5
