Miss Independent, Volumes 1 - 4

by Kiki Leach

  Vanessa might have smiled at the memory, but it wasn’t one she was so eager or quick to recall for herself.

  “Why do you think about that night so much?” she asked, genuinely curious.

  “Because I’m starting to wonder if it might have been the beginning of the end for us, not just as friends, but as everything.”

  She turned away and slightly rolled her eyes. “You’re starting to sound like a babbling drunk--”

  “We had sex for the first time that night,” he said. “Remember? Before I took you back home, I brought you back to my house first because I wanted to show you the remodeling of my bedroom. But I could tell from the look on your face that you had figured out why we really took that detour. After you sat down on my bed, I sat down beside you. And I slid my hand beneath that dress, all the way up between your legs, and told you that my parents wouldn’t be back from Pittsburg for another week, and that I wanted you to stay the night. You said you couldn’t because Alexis would kill us both, and so you didn’t.” He eyed her up and down and gulped. “But you kept my hand there, so I pushed it further. And when I hit that spot, you told me that you could stay long enough for us to be together. Do you remember it now?”

  “Yeah, sure.” She swallowed back the pain of that memory, and tried to shake the warmth that she felt in his hand being there for the first time, from her mind entirely. “It’s all coming back to me now in a tortuous flood – what the hell does any of this have to do with the stunt you pulled in the Hamptons?”

  “Everything, V,” he said, his voice softer. “It’s got everything to do with it and you don’t even know.”

  “No, I don’t know! Because you keep dancing around what you should actually be telling me. Reminiscing about another night that I don’t even want to remember isn’t exactly my idea of a poppin’ Wednesday night, Nathan -- !”

  “Look, you told me that I was the first person you had ever been with,” he interjected. “That I was the only person you ever wanted to be with. You told me all of this while I was still inside of you and that made me feel…” He paused and exhaled sharply. “It made me feel like a man, Vanessa. You made me feel like a man for the first time in my life that night.”

  “Good grief,” she murmured.

  “I didn’t ever want you to be with anyone else in the same way after that, not in the same way you were with me.”

  She turned her eyes up and sighed. “That was an unrealistic expectation,” she said.

  “I get that now,” he retorted. “But that night mattered a hell of a lot to me, V. It’s been one I have carried around with me for years and I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that it was special to you too and that maybe… maybe you felt the same way about it to the point where you--”

  “Carried it around with me too?” She bobbed her head back and forth and sighed. “I mean it was special to me at the time, for a long time actually. But truth be told, if I had known that it would’ve turned into a complete mess not long after that, I would’ve kept my legs closed and waited until I was thirty or at least for somebody I was sure I’d never see again.”

  “Why for someone you would never see again?”

  She threw her arm out to the side and tilted her head. “To avoid shit just like this, Nathan.”

  He nodded in response, his face now somber.

  “Right.”

  “Now can we move this along because I still have shit that I need to do and all I’m starting to feel aside from annoyance with this entire conversation, is that you’re just here to waste my damn time--”

  “Alright,” he disrupted. “Alright.” Placing one hand in the palm of the other, he took a deep breath and continued. “Vanessa that night we were together, is the night that I thought you’d be mine for good. And that everything you had, belonged to me in some way.”

  “Did you still feel that way after being with Sheila?”

  “About you?” He was quick to nod. “Yeah, I did.”

  “So basically what you’re telling me is that it was okay for you to screw around, but not me. Gotcha--”

  “When I saw you with Maurice at the opening for Angelino’s, even before we talked, it fucked something up inside of me. And then when you told me that you weren’t afraid of exploring something beyond your friendship with him, I wasn’t prepared for it; not as much as I probably should’ve been. Sheila had been trying to push up the wedding date and up until that night, I had been hoping to keep it as far away as possible, if only to completely cancel it at some point in the hopes that we’d…” He pointed between himself and Vanessa, then stopped turned his head.

  Vanesa became uncomfortable and began to squirm in her own skin.

  “But after that night, I agreed to move up the date just like she wanted. I considered that being miserable with her was better than being alone, or without you. But then something happened,” he said. “I saw you with Maurice again. And I heard how you called out his name in a way that you had never called for mine before. You two were so wrapped up in each other that you didn’t even realize I was here.”

  “What?” A mixture of anger and revulsion began to encapsulate her from the inside out as she slowly came to realize exactly what he meant. “‘Here’ as inside my house?” He remained silent. “What the hell were you doing inside my house – ?!”

  “I came by to see you, to talk about Adrian. After talking to Joan earlier in the day, I felt like I needed to know how it all started with him and why. If it was because of me and what I did to you--”

  “If it was because of you? Arrogant, selfish, piece of shi--”

  “I’m not finished--”

  “Well get to it!” she yelled out. She rested a hand on her head, so nervous to hear what he had to say, she began shaking. They both noticed and when she saw him reaching out for her hand, she immediately dropped it and stepped back.

  He exhaled and spoke as calmly as he could. “I came out here that night, after having dinner with Sheila, because I couldn’t get to you earlier in the day, knowing that you were working. And I didn’t want to disrupt you at the office again.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  He shook his head. “And so I waited when I thought that you were home. I wanted to get you alone, but I knew that wasn’t likely, so I tried calling instead, but no one answered.”

  “So you thought showing up here would be a much better idea?”

  “I thought there was a chance you could slam the door in my face, but it was a chance I was willing to take to get the answers I needed.”

  “What answers?! So far it seems that the only reason you even wanted to know about my relationship with Adrian was to boost your own damn ego.”

  “That’s not true, V.”

  “Oh yeah, it is. Otherwise, you would’ve left it alone because my relationship with him had absolutely nothing to do with you, which is something you would’ve realized had you been able to pull your oversized head out of your own damn ass long enough to understand that my love life doesn’t revolve around you and ‘what we had’. If anything, my relationship with Adrian was in reaction to the relationship that had originally fizzled out between me and Maurice. I didn’t start seeing Adrian until THAT blew up in my face when I was in college, long after you and Sheila flew New York’s coop.”

  Nathan dropped back down to the edge of the couch. His heart sank down deep to the fiery pool of acid in his stomach. He ran his hand down his face again, then stopped to cover his mouth and turned his hazel eyes back up to Vanessa. She still looked like an angel to him, one who now possessed the sweet tongue of the devil.

  “You were with Adrian…” He took in a breath. “Because you couldn’t make things work with Maurice?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “It sounded like that’s what you meant.”

  “What the hell difference does it make now, Nathan?!” she asked him. “I want to know what the hell you saw between me and Maurice when you came here on the night you’re talking
about.”

  “I saw you together,” he said, jumping back up. “Too wrapped up in each other to realize I was even here, just like I said.”

  Vanessa leaned away from the wall and dropped back on her heels. While staring into the rage filling Nathan’s eyes, she covered her mouth and sank her shoulders.

  “Oh my God.” She placed a hand on her chest to keep from hyperventilating. It was no use as the breaths came quicker and harder. She bent forward to try and reduce how many she took in.

  Under any other circumstance, she might have told him it served him right to see her making love to a man who actually seemed to give a damn about how he made her feel and not the other way around. But after everything that happened, and finally understanding that it was the trigger of seeing them together which had sent Nathan over the edge, she couldn’t help but be both mortified and livid that he had stolen such an intimate moment between them and used it to his own advantage to screw them out of eventual happiness.

  “Do you even realize what the hell you’ve done?” she asked him. She covered her face and bent forward again.

  Seeing the woman he loved struggling to breathe because of his own actions was like a direct punch to the gut with a steel iron. Nathan wanted her to feel the pain he felt that night and then some, but he didn’t expect it to be so harrowing for himself as well. He moved up behind and slid his arms around her shoulders and down her arms, trying to calm her. He pulled her back against him and pressed his face into her hair.

  “Vanessa, I--”

  “GET OFF OF ME!” She scrambled out of his arms like a wayward child and turned to look him in the face. Her eyes were as wild as her hair, her fingers were clawed as if she had been ready to dig hard and deep into his skin had he gotten any closer.

  Nathan backed away. “V,” he said again.

  “What you did…” she told him, seething; her chest rose slowly and lowered as her breathing increased. “…what you did in watching us together was incomprehensible. I don’t want to hear any more of this trash – I want you to get the hell out of my house.”

  “You still don’t have the entire story.”

  “I don’t need it. I can pretty much guess what’s coming next, GET OUT!”

  “No,” he stated in a firm tone. “Not until you hear the rest of what I need to tell you.”

  Anger fueled her emotions and she slammed her hands into his chest, shoving him back into the wall so hard, the pictures around him crashed to the wooden floor.

  “You are downright evil.”

  “V--”

  “You don’t wanna leave?” She clinched her teeth and shoved her way into his personal space even further, her eyes roaming every part of his face, a sneer arching up her lip. “I will fucking force you out.”

  Reacting the only way she knew how, she raced to the kitchen and rounded the counter. Nathan followed after and watched with wide eyes and a gaping mouth as she picked up a plate and tossed it at his head. She hoped to crack it right between his eyes and straight through to his thick skull. Unfortunately for her, he had ducked just in time, as the chinaware smashed into the wall directly behind him.

  “You’re everything that’s still wrong with the world, you EVIL, STUPID, SICK son of a BITCH!” She smashed another plate, this time, nearly missing the side of his face. Had he not dodged to the right the moment he saw the second plate flying at him, there was a chance he would have been in need of a glass eye. “PIECE OF SHIT!”

  “V!” he yelled.

  But she wasn’t trying to hear a single thing he had to say.

  “I don’t know what the hell I ever saw in your sorry ass! I must have been blind as FUCK from the moment my mother gave birth! Ever since we were kids, all you’ve ever done is fuck up my life and nine times out of ten, it’s been for your own damn selfish reasons.”

  “And the one time it wasn’t?” he asked.

  “It was for Sheila’s.” She grabbed another plate and held it tight, breathing so hard she could feel her heart slamming against her ribs. “Almost twenty years is too gotdamn long to be in any kind of relationship with you, good, bad, five miles away or thousands!” She lifted her hand high above her head, preparing for another toss.

  “I only reacted how you wanted me to in seeing you together, alright?!”

  Vanessa paused and took her time to lower the plate in front of her before dropping it on the counter and wiping blown strands of hair from her face. She pulled her brows together and rattled her head, certain Nathan had finally lost the last shred of his damn mind.

  “What the hell are you even talking about?! Do you think that what we were doing up there in the privacy of my own damn bedroom was putting on a show for you, you freak?!”

  His anger rising by the second, he closed his eyes and tried to breathe in through his mouth and out through his nose. But deep, heavy breaths evaded him. He was now a lit fuse just waiting to explode from every end.

  “You asked me once before, remember?” he said. “What I would have done or said if I had seen you with someone the same way you saw me with Sheila in that shower. You specifically said, if I had seen you with Maurice.”

  She gripped the edge of the counter if only to keep her hands from wrapping around his throat. “It was a metaphor, you moron, an ‘if/chance’! I didn’t think something like that would actually come to pass, considering I never thought you would actually go skulking around inside my house like a damn cat burglar instead of using the doorbell like everybody else with even half a brain!”

  His skin lit up like a firecracker; he could actually feel the flames building inside his neck and exploding out both sides of his face. The man was red hot and though he hadn’t ever planned to show Vanessa of all people just how angry she in particular could make him, especially when it came to discussing her feelings for another man, she had finally pushed a button in him that he could no longer diffuse before shit not only hit the fan, but shot it straight through the ceiling and roof like a rocket.

  Nathan rushed forward in the manner of a professional linebacker waiting to kick and brought his fist down hard on the edge of the counter, rumbling the plates and cups left behind. When she didn’t react to his anger, he brought his fist down again and glass went flying from one side of the room to the other. Vanessa defiantly folded her arms and he stepped around the counter, the glass popping beneath his heels like fireworks as he moved. He stood just a few inches from her face and stared down into her eyes with a mixture of lust and rage that continued to burn up from the inside of his core.

  “I used the doorbell,” he said in a relaxed, but frightening tone. The words shook as he spoke, spittle flew out from either side of his mouth. And by now, Vanessa knew that she was in for a rude awakening about a man she once thought could have been her everything.

  “You should’ve – !”

  “I USED THE MUTHAFUCKIN’ DOORBELL!” He roared so loud and hard that it made her ears ring. For a few seconds, she thought she might have gone deaf. He moved even closer and she shrank down almost like a child in fear of receiving physical punishment. “But you were too damn busy in there fuckin’ Maurice’s brains out of his head that you couldn’t hear it! When I knocked, the damn door opened on its own. I didn’t know where the fuck you were, and so I called out to you. And when you didn’t answer, and I saw your keys scattered across the floor, I got worried. And so I went up, and that’s when I saw you. That shit wasn’t something I went looking for, Vanessa – seeing you on top of him like that, calling out HIS name in a way you have never called out mine when we were together. Woman, if I could dig my own damn eyes out with a spoon to keep from ever looking at the two of you again and only seeing you wrapped up in him like that? I would.”

  As Nathan continued to scream out about other things she couldn’t half understand, Vanessa’s eyes traveled down to the blood pouring down from his hand. She took another step back, bumping her head against the cabinet, and frowned. It was the first time in all her years of kno
wing Nathan that she had ever seen him become so violently angry. Sure, he would scream and yell, maybe even throw things on the floor from time to time when he felt she wasn’t listening to or refusing to hear him. But this was something on a completely different level, to the point where she actually feared he could not only put his fist through a wall, but put her as well.

  Knowing that it was all because of Maurice, how she felt about him and what Nathan thought they still had together, didn’t move or thrill her, not like it would have maybe years or even a few months ago. Now, it only made her feel sad for him, sad that he was still clinging onto something that she forced herself to give up the moment she realized he had yet to change his ways for the better. It also made her angry as hell that he had the nerve to think that she would or should still be pining for him in the same way after all of the shit he had managed to pull since being back in town.

  When he raised his hand to make another point about something she had no interest in listening to any further, more blood dripped down the side of his arm and soaked into the cuffs and sleeves of his shirt. She pointed a finger toward him and glared.

  “I don’t know if you even realize this, but you’re bleeding. A lot. And all over my damn floor, which I just so happened to mop up this morning.”

  “The same floor now covered in the glass you threw at my head?” he shot back.

  Vanessa sneered.

  Nathan looked down and turned his hand over, palm side up. Getting a good look at the blood and deep cuts from the shattered glass, he wasn’t startled or even in pain. More than anything, he wanted Vanessa to know how seeing her with someone else made him feel. He thought about continuing on, confronting her about the baby she shared with Adrian, but in looking at her face again, at the shock and outright disgust she displayed in her eyes, he decided against it.

  “Do you want me to tend to that for you or do you just plan to stand there and bleed to death inside my kitchen?”

  He made a fist and tightened his jaw while watching the blood seep out from the cuts and onto the tips of his shoes.