Wounded Love (G Street Chronicles Presents From Love to Loathe Series)

by Rayne, Phoenix

  “Cricket, it’s only me. Open your eyes and look at me, sweetie,” I heard Chelle say.

  I opened my eyes, and there she was. She smiled at me and pushed the hair out of my face.

  “Someone get me some water and a cold towel,” she said. Someone handed her a glass of water, and she gave it to me. Someone then handed her the cold towel, and she lightly rubbed my face with it.

  “I’m sorry,” I hiccupped out.

  “Shh.”

  I drank all the water and handed her the glass.

  “Are you ready to eat?” she asked. I nodded, and she helped me up.

  We walked through the bedroom and Jyme was sitting on the bed with his hands covering his face. Chelle pulled me past him and we headed downstairs. The first floor looked exactly the same as it did before. Nothing had been put out of place or bothered. We walked into the kitchen, and Mrs. JJ, Ayashe, and Patty sat at the table. Ayashe ran over to me and hugged me hard. I hugged her right back, and the tears started swelling in my eyes. Patty hugged me, and when she really saw my face she began to cry as she turned away. Mrs. JJ hugged me for a long moment.

  “Thank you for saving my son and sending him back to me, but he’s been lost since you’ve been gone, and I’ve taken care of him for you. Now he’s ready to take care of you.”

  I nodded at her, and she kissed me on my forehead and patted my back. We all sat there in silence for a long moment. Then, they all silently watched me eat.

  “I’m a regional now, and I bought a four-bedroom house in Fife,” Chelle told me. I put my hand on hers while I swallowed another bite.

  “I’m engaged,” Patty whispered.

  “Congratulations,” I said in surprise. We smiled at each other.

  “Well, Sheen and his woman broke up and we started dating for real. But we’ve been on and off for months now and we finally broke it off for good; we’re done forever this time,” Ayashe said.

  Chelle laughed and told us that they had broken up last night. She looked at her watch and said it had not even been twenty-four hours yet. We all laughed, and it felt so good to laugh with them. Mrs. JJ kissed my forehead again as she picked up my plate and fork. The sun was setting beautifully against the water.

  “Let’s light a fire and have some cocoa,” I said.

  “That’s an excellent idea,” Mrs. JJ said. She made the cocoa on the stove, and Chelle lit the gas fireplace. We sat in the living room; the furniture still looked brand new.

  “Cricket, the house is beautiful. You have such good taste,” Patty said.

  “I just looked on the better Homes and Gardens website.”

  They all burst out laughing and I joined in. “So when did Jyme finally let you guys start coming over?”

  They all looked at one another and then Chelle whispered, “Cricket, Jyme has been all over the country looking for you. We haven’t seen him until today. He would call when he thought he had a lead, and then we didn’t hear a thing. I told him about every single place we used to go to, and he went to each and every one of them.”

  “I only saw him because I travelled to him while he was in Tennessee and California,” Mrs. JJ added, “he lived in California for three months looking for you. I swear he walked every single street in Los Angeles twice.”

  “He hired two detectives to help him, Cricket,” Ayashe said.

  “He never gave up on finding you,” Chelle said.

  We all sat there sipping on our cocoa and not saying a word. It was dark outside now, and Chelle said they should go; everyone stood and hugged me. We agreed to get together tomorrow. Patty and Mrs. JJ left first, and I walked Chelle and Ayashe out to their cars.

  “Y’all didn’t tell him about the casino?” I asked.

  “I knew they’d kill him; and then I knew you’d kill me. He had to stay busy, so I sent him on a wild goose chase,” Chelle told me.

  “We weren’t really sure if you were there though,” Ayashe said.

  “He did go there a couple of months ago, and you were nowhere in sight. I got scared then because I didn’t know where you were.”

  She started to cry. I hugged her, and they left. I went back into the house and picked up our cocoa mugs from the living room. Then I washed the mugs and wiped down the table and counters. I swept and mopped the kitchen floor. I re-straightened the pillows in the living room, turned the fireplace off, and rechecked all the doors and locks. Then I shut off all the lights. Slowly, I walked back upstairs and opened the bedroom door. Jyme had showered and was on the bed asleep. I tiptoed to the closet and changed into one of my nightgowns. I stood at the window and watched the water rolling in the moonlight.

  “Cricket?” Jyme whispered.

  “I’m here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come to bed.”

  I climbed into the bed and he pulled me close to him. I lay there not saying a word.

  “Do you want me to go and sleep in another room?” he asked.

  “NO!”

  “Alright,” he said, pulling back from me.

  “No, Jyme…hold me.” He pulled me back closer to him. “Tell me everything,” I said.

  Jyme started at the beginning. He reminisced about the night I gave my life for his.

  “I knew you were there, something deep down inside of me told me that, Cricket,” Jyme’s eyes were far away now. “I could smell you, I smelt your perfume; it was everywhere.”

  Jyme could smell me because I had searched that whole entire house looking for him that night. My perfumed lingered in the air, and his sense of smell was on full blast.

  “You ran into me, I felt that too.”

  I was silent; I wanted Jyme to find his way through all of this. He needed to work this out in his head on his own.

  “Your shoes, I heard your heels, Cricket.” I watched him and his face was contorted. “You couldn’t give me some sort of sign? I needed you.”

  I placed my hands on top of his. He turned his hands over so we could intertwine them. He rubbed imaginary circles with fingers into my palm. “When I got back to the reservation, I looked for you everywhere. You were gone and I knew it the moment I climbed in the back of that truck. You would have been there with Chelle and Ayashe. No one would look at me in my eyes; everyone kept their distance from me. My Mom…she had this look of torment and I didn’t understand it then, but I know now…she knew you would break me.”

  I pulled away from him, but he pulled me back.

  “No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  He slid his fingers back through mine. “I meant that she knew all along that you would be the one that could. She knows how much I love you; she always has.”

  He got quiet for a moment and then he started back up again.

  “I left the reservation and came straight to the house. I was hoping…no, I was praying that you would be here waiting for me somehow. But you were gone; then I found the letter. I didn’t want to believe what you wrote in the letter. You said you were never coming back and that made no sense to me. You loved me, and you had paid the ultimate price—you had given your life for mine. That couldn’t have been the last of our love story; we weren’t finished. Chelle told me that’s your way of coping; you run. She told me that I made you feel and you did not like to feel.”

  A few tears fell from my eyes and he wiped them away with his hands. He leaned in to me and kissed me so sweetly on the lips.

  “I went back to California the next day and stayed there for about three months looking for you. I called Chelle. We talked on the phone for hours, and we got a strategy together. I decided to go to all of the places you used to work and hang out. Chelle told me that you backtracked a lot. I went to New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Michigan, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois, California, Ohio, New Hampshire and Tennessee. I had never been to those states before, and the drive was beautiful. I went to all the shelters I could find; and then I worked my way through to the Catholic Churches
. I have thirty seven Rosaries now, mostly given to me by nuns but also from a few priests. Chelle told me you had a special connection with Catholic Churches. I had a few leads, and then they all ended at a dead end. People on the streets remembered Chyna more than you.”

  He pulled in closer to me then, wrapping his legs around my waist. “Chelle told me Chyna tried to keep you under wraps, so she stayed in the spot light more than you did.”

  “Where did you go last?” I asked.

  “I just got back from Tennessee again two days ago.”

  “Again?”

  “I got like ten leads there and…” he broke off and didn’t say anything else.

  “What?”

  He slid away from me.

  “No, Jyme…hold on.”

  “I’ll be right back. I need to show you something.”

  He went downstairs for a moment. When he came back, he had a large file box in his hands. He sat on the bed across from me. He pulled out a brown folder and stuck it behind his back. He wasn’t hiding it from me; he was waiting for something. The first file had pictures of houses and people with addresses written on them. Each state he had visited had its own file. We went through it for at least two hours. I remembered a lot of those places and people, and I told him some - but not all - of the stories from those times. If I didn’t remember, he told me the stories. When he closed what I thought was the last file, I looked at him.

  “Where’s Tennessee?” I asked.

  He handed me another file and I hesitated before I opened it. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to learn where I truly came from. He opened the file for me and said, “I went to The Holy Rosary Academy; do you remember going there?”

  “I’m not sure.” I answered in a whisper.

  “They told me you were especially close to a Sister Mary Aquinas.”

  With that name leaving from his lips, so many memories rose deep inside me.

  “She used to braid my hair and it didn’t hurt; most of the Sisters pulled to tight, but her touch felt as soft as a butterfly landing on your head.” I closed my eyes and I could see her warm heart-shaped face now. “She used to give us peppermints, not the hard ones, but the chewy ones. They were my favorite; usually you could only get them around Christmas. But Sister Aquinas had them all year round.” When he closed the folder, I looked at him. “Where’s the rest?” I asked.

  He pulled another folder out and I asked him if it was the last one. “Before this one,” he held up the brown folder that he kept back from me.

  I opened the folder and went through a stack of photos. Jyme had taken pictures of the places he went to, in order to jog my memory. Some of the places I recognized, some I didn’t; the places I didn’t remember, Jyme told me what he found out while there.

  “I don’t recognize this place,” I told him. It was a picture of an arcade and he had taken a picture of the street sign. It was on 5th Avenue and I didn’t have a clue what it meant.

  “The owner’s name was T’Bear; he said your sister, Chyna, would have different people from there watch you every night until they closed. He said you were there almost every day and that he used to make you grill cheese sandwiches in different shapes. Then something came to mind.

  I interrupted Jyme. “He was a tall man with a big stomach. He wore a dirty apron and a cigar always hung out of his mouth. He laughed a lot and his belly use to jiggle like Santa Claus. I remember he had a few teeth missing, and he used to pick me up and sit me on the tall stool. I used to spin around on that stool and he used to catch me before I fell off.”

  I smiled and then nodded at Jyme. He touched the side of my face and I melted into his hand.

  “I think she used to leave you there when she would go to…make her money.”

  I just nodded because I remembered how Chyna used to give me pockets full of quarters before she left. I remembered I always had quarters to play the video games with. I smiled a small smile and then I felt the tears coming. I fought them back and tried to focus my mind on something else. Jyme put everything back into the file folder, then he turned and faced me.

  “Babe, I found out some information about your family.” I stared at him; his face was torn. “I found a lot of unpleasant stuff, babe.”

  I nodded at him and prepared for the worst. He pulled the brown folder from behind him, and handed me a piece of paper. The first piece of paper had the State of Tennessee seal on it. It had “Cristina Makael Winters, born March 18, 1979, in Nashville, Tennessee to the parents of Michael Christopher Winters and Lauren Michelle Winters at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry.” I stared at the paper, confused.

  Jyme put his hand on top of mine. “That’s you, Cricket,” he said softly.

  I looked down at the paper again and dropped it.

  “How do you know that?”

  I hired a couple of detectives, and we were able to get a couple of good fingerprints here and at the condo. We ran them through system and this is what we found. He handed me another sheet of paper that looked identical to the one before. It said, “Chyna Michelle Winters born September 26, 1974, in Nashville, Tennessee to the parents of Michael Christopher Winters and Lauren Michelle Winters at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry.”

  “Chyna,” I cried.

  Jyme handed me five different pictures of two little girls playing in the snow, on a set of monkey bars, and then on a merry-go-round.

  “That’s you and Chyna,” he whispered.

  Then, he handed me a pictures of a women who looked just like me, and a man who looked just like Chyna.

  “These were your parents; Michael and Lauren.”

  I looked at the picture of them for a very long time.

  “You look just like your mother.”

  “Chyna looks just like him,” I said.

  He handed me two more pieces of paper; death certificates—one for Michael Christopher Winters and one of Lauren Michelle Winters. They both had the same death date; December 24, 1983. Jyme then handed me a newspaper article. It read,

  Brutal Deaths for Goodlettsville Parents; the parents of two were found murdered inside their home in Goodlettsville on Christmas Eve, officials said on Christmas Day. Goodlettsville’s Commissioner said dispatch received a 911 call about a possible shooting at 1876 Windover Drive at approximately 2:46 a.m. Upon arrival at the scene, the Commissioner said the two parents were found deceased in their residence. They have been identified as Michael Christopher Winters (29) and Lauren Michelle Winters (24). Tennessee State Police Crime Scene Investigators were on the scene throughout the morning to process evidence and conduct interviews. The bodies have since been removed from the house and transported to Nashville for autopsies. The cause of death wasn’t immediately known, but is thought to be gunshot wounds. Local media has reported that the two children in the residence were found alive and have been placed in child protective custody.

  I dropped the paper and walked to the window. I wrapped my arms around myself, and Jyme came up behind me and held me.

  “Cricket?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Babe, I’m here for you. You still have me.”

  Jyme was so good at reading me. I did feel alone. I felt like I had no one; but I did have someone. I turned to Jyme and touched both sides of his face.

  “What?” he asked. He knew I wanted to say something to him, but I thought about it, and this wasn’t the right time.

  “I love you.”

  “Cricket?”

  I kissed his neck and his chest. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth wide. His breathing was so fast now, and he was holding back. He was being reserved with me. He was scared I would reject him or maybe even freak out.

  “Cricket, can I touch you?” he asked, panting.

  “Yes.” I looked around the too bright room and took a deep breath.

  Jyme knew my thoughts. He placed both hands on my shoulders and pressed down for me to stay there. He went over to the bed and put all the papers and photos back into the fold
er and set it on the nightstand. He turned off the light.

  Then, he came back to me and kissed my forehead, my right cheek, and then my left.

  “What’s your best moment?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your best moment with me?”

  He pondered my question for a minute and then he smiled wide. He pulled me into him, and I wrapped my arms around him. He pulled one of my nightgown straps down with his teeth because he was using his hands to remove my panties. I laughed aloud, and he chuckled. The deepness of his chuckle made my toes tingle for the first time in months. I realized they had not tingled since the last time I was with him.

  “Our first night,” he whispered.

  My panties hit the floor; then Jyme pulled my left breast out and started sucking it. He was so loud with it, that it sounded like he was drinking something. He pulled the other one out and started on it with the same fierceness that he had done with the other. I was really feeling it now; and I touched him and patted my hands down toward his Anaconda. And there he was at full length. I was so happy to be reunited with his big fellah that I wanted to bend down and talk to him; but I didn’t want to ruin the mood. I stroked him up and down, and Jyme was going crazy.

  “And you?” he asked.

  He pulled me over to the bed; I pulled my nightgown over my head in the darkness. He untied his pajama pants, and then there he was in all his fabulous glory.

  “The string quartet…in the park that night,” he smiled wide and I leaned over to him and put him in my mouth. He pulled it out and told me no. I frowned and then he told me to lay back. He bent down and licked the lips surrounding Juicy. I sat straight up.

  “No, don’t…” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Jyme, I get tested every two months, and everything has been fine, but I…” I couldn’t even finish what I needed to say.

  “The guy that hit you?”

  I nodded at him and took a deep breath.

  “Jyme, I am a whore; always have been. I am safe, but Trey and Troy they…” I broke off. “Stop it!”