I reach out to take her arm, but she jerks away from me, and there’s a ripping sensation in my chest. “Sheila, don’t. Just don’t. We need to . . .”
“Nope. Nothing to talk about.” She disappears down the hallway.
When I turn back to Adele, I know she can see the fury on my face. “You’ve got some explaining to do. How dare you show up here like this! You get your sorry ass off my property and . . .”
“Steffen Cothran! Is that any way to talk in front of your son?”
Her words stop me dead in my tracks. For the first time, I notice that there’s a little boy with her. He can’t be more than six or seven, and there’s something in his face that looks familiar to me, but I can’t put a finger on it. He smiles up at me, his angelic little cheeks glowing.
“Adele, what kind of trick is . . .”
“No trick. I was pregnant with him when I left. Now do your fatherly duty and say hello to your son.” She’s grinning malevolently and then thrusts the boy toward me.
“You’re my daddy?” he asks in innocence.
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Mommy says you are. Right, Mommy?” He looks up at Adele.
She gives him a sickening smile. “Yes, Morris, he is. Right, Daddy?”
Now I’m getting really pissed but, before I can say anything else, Sheila breezes past us. “Sheila! Baby, wait! Stop!” She throws a hand up and keeps walking. “I’ll take you home!”
“Not necessary,” she calls back.
“But baby! Wait! Please!” She just ignores me, and I watch my whole future stalk off down the street, all the while punching numbers into her smartphone. Unable to hold it anymore, I turn my rage on Adele.
“What do you want? I’ve been looking for you for seven years. All I wanted was for you to sign the papers and get this over with, and you’ve been hiding out. Then you pick now, of all times, to show up?”
“Of course! I’ve been watching you. I knew you were almost happy. Almost. Nice try, Cothran. Are you going to let me and your son in, or are we going to have to stand out here all day?”
I open the door wider and let them pass into the house. Before I can stop her, she plants Morris on the sofa and heads down the hallway herself. She disappears into the bedroom, then sticks her head out and smirks. “Well, I see your kink hasn’t changed at all. Good submissive?”
“Fuck off, Adele.”
“Kid, Cothran.”
I look at Morris. “Sorry. Bad words. Do you need a drink?” I hear Adele flushing the toilet in my bathroom and my stomach turns. I’ll have to go and buy a new toilet seat, because I’ll never be able to sit on that one again.
“Do you have soda?”
“Yes, I have lemon-lime and regular. What would you like?”
“Lemon-lime, please.” To be Adele’s kid, he’s surprisingly polite. Wonder who taught him that? You can bet your bottom dollar it wasn’t her.
“That little bit of business has been dismissed. Now we need to have a little chat.” She marches back into the room and sits down, then looks at Morris and pulls something out of her bag. “Little man, why don’t you take this and go right out there? That’s the den. There’s a TV out there and you can sit back there and play video games.” Aha. It’s one of those portable video game things. I have no idea what they’re called. So she babysits him with video games. Wow.
“Okay! Thanks, Mommy!” He snatches the unit out of her hands and heads for the den.
She smiles as he walks away. “He’s a lovely child, don’t you think?”
The anger boiling inside me refuses to stay to a low, gentle roll and comes bubbling out all over. “I’m tired of this bullshit. What the hell do you want? Why are you here?”
“I think we should start over.”
I stare at her as I feel my eyebrows disappearing into my hairline. “Start over? I’m not starting a damn thing with you!” I cross the living room to my little desk there and pull out an envelope. Thrusting it toward her, I rasp out, “Sign these papers and it’ll be over.”
“I don’t want it to be over.” She pretends to be sad, but I see right through her act.
Teeth gritted tight, I snarl out, “Sign the damn papers, bitch. That kid’s not mine and you know it.”
“Are you sure about that? I know you recognized him as soon as you saw him.” There’s a wicked glint in her eyes, and I’m not sure what that’s about. “I’m not signing anything until I get what I want.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“You. On a silver platter. Back child support. A place to live. A car to drive. Childcare. Whatever it takes to raise your kid.”
“My attorney’s name is Michael Riley. Call him. He’ll tell you exactly which corner of hell to visit for all of that. Now sign the damn papers.” I throw them at her. For a fleeting second, I see something that actually looks like remorse on her face, but it’s quickly replaced by sheer meanness. “We’ve been looking for you for years, so you’re getting nothing.”
“We’ll see about that.” She stands and looks around. “You know, I’d forgotten how much I love this house. I’ll enjoy living in it again. Morris, come along! We’re going to get a kid’s meal and go to the park.” He stomps back into the living room and hands her the video game.
Squatting down to his level, I try to get a good look into the little boy’s eyes. “So, Morris, where do you go to school?” For a split second, I could swear I see panic in Adele’s eyes.
Fear and abandonment register on his face. “I don’t go to school. Mommy says I don’t have to. I’m too smart.”
Oh my god. She’s not even sending him to school. All of a sudden, I’m not scared anymore. If she’s not even sending him to school, what else is she not doing as a parent? “Well, that’s a shame. School can be fun. Okay, run along and I’ll see you again soon, okay? Have fun at the park.”
Adele composes herself quickly and says, “I’ll be in touch.”
“Oh, so will I, bitch, so will I.” As soon as she clears the door, I start to slam it shut, but Morris turns around and watches me in sadness as she drags him down the steps and out the walk. In that brief glimpse, I recognize the eyes, and I know who his father is.
It’s Clint Winstead.
My hand is shaking as I take my cell out and dial Sheila’s number. No answer, so I leave a message. “Baby, please call me. There’s so much you don’t understand, that I don’t even understand, but please let me explain. Please? Please call me.” I hit END and sit down on the sofa.
My whole world has just dissolved, but all I’m really concerned about right at this moment is how confused and hurt Sheila must be. I’ve got to talk to her, and I’m not sure how I’m going to get her to let me, but I’ve got to try. Then I decide I’d better make another call.
“Steffen, what the fuck is going on?”
Uh-oh. “So you heard?”
He sounds really, really pissed. “Hell, yeah, I heard. I’m still hearing. I’ll be hearing for the next couple of years if this doesn’t get straightened out. Trish is furious with you, and I can’t even begin to gauge how Sheila is feeling. You still hadn’t told her about Adele?”
Something slaps me in the face with those words. “Yeah, I told her about Adele like you told Trish about Christi.”
“Oh, that’s really, really low, Steffen. Really low. I can’t believe you’d go there . . .”
“Look, you can be mad at me later, but right now, you and I have a bigger problem.”
His laughter is sarcastic, and it’s not wasted on me. “Oh, yeah? I don’t have a problem right now except you.”
“That’s not true. I need to talk to you, and I need to talk to you alone. When I tell you what I have to tell you, you’ll be glad Trish isn’t with you.”
There’s a deep pause on the other end before he responds, “Steffen, Trish and I don’t have any secrets. If there’s something you need to tell me, then she needs to know too.”
“I think that’
s a huge mistake.”
“You let me be the judge of that. How soon do I need to know about this?”
“Right now. Give me fifteen to shower and then head over here. And whatever you do, don’t bring the girls. Hear me? Please?” I’m getting desperate now. If Adele shows up over there before I get a chance to tell Clint, it’ll ruin his relationship with Trish, and I can’t bear the thought of that happening. “Hurry. It’s really important.”
He doesn’t sound quite so angry when he says, “Okay then. We’ll be there as fast as we can get there. But this had better be important, Steffen.”
“Oh, it is. Trust me. It’s very, very important.”
“See you in, oh, probably thirty?”
“See you then.” I hit END again, then dial Sheila once more. “Baby, please, I really, really need to talk to you. It’s important that you understand what’s going on here. It’s not at all like you think. Not at all. Please, please, call me.” Once I end the call, I wait and stare at my phone, but she doesn’t call back. After five minutes, I dash off to the shower.
On my trip through the bedroom, I look at the bed. The restraints are still lying there, the bed sheets all rumpled, and I pick up a pillow and sniff. Sheila. I can smell her perfume on it where she slept last night, and I hug it to me and bury my face in it. When I finally look up, I glance over at the dresser and there, on its dark surface, is the bracelet, dropped and abandoned. That’s all I can take, and I do something I haven’t done in over twenty years.
I cry.
“God, Cothran, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Clint stares at me when I open the door, and when Trish turns and looks at me, she mirrors his expression.
“I have. And you’re about to too.” I move out of the doorway to let them in. “Have a seat. This won’t take long unless we need the paramedics.”
“What the fuck?” Clint sits down and pulls Trish down next to him. “Okay, so what’s this big emergency?”
“You know that Adele showed up.”
“Yeah. I got that part. You never got that taken care of?”
“How could I? We couldn’t find her. But I got my attorney to set the final dissolution into motion a while back and I was just waiting to hear from him. I wanted to finalize it. I really thought I could get it done without Sheila ever having to know.”
Trish shakes her head. “You weren’t planning to ever tell her? Because, I’ve gotta tell ya, I don’t like that one bit.”
“Oh, I was planning to eventually tell her, just not yet.”
Clint eyes me. “Didn’t she ask you if you’d been married before?”
I shake my head. “No. Honest to god, it never came up. She did ask me if I’d ever been divorced, and I said no.”
Clint rolls his eyes and sighs deeply. “Semantics. You as good as lied to her, Steffen. What the fuck were you thinking?”
“That the situation would be very difficult to explain, and I needed her to trust me totally before I even tried that. Adele is hard to explain. Actually, that one time she asked was the only time we even got close to a situation where I could talk about it, and that was just a short time ago, not early on. I haven’t considered myself married in a very long time. You know that.”
“Yeah, but legally . . .”
I interrupt him. “We’ve got much, much bigger fish to fry, my friend.” I look at Trish. “I hope you love him, because I’m about to tell you something that’s going to be pretty hard to take.”
“I do.” Trish reaches for the hand of a very confused Clint. “Do your worst.”
“Okay.” I turn all my attention to Clint, and now I have his. “When Trish got that call from Sheila and you guys started talking about this, did you think to tell her about all the times you scened with me and Adele?”
Now his face is turning a deep crimson. “No. Didn’t cross my mind. That was a long time ago.” I see Trish’s mouth drop open out of my peripheral vision. “Maybe I should now.”
I nod. “I think now would be a good time.”
He nods back slowly, then turns to Trish. “Baby, Steffen and Adele were still married when Christi . . . well, you know.” Trish nods. “Steffen thought it would be good for me to get back out into circulation. I didn’t really want to, but I figured it would be safe enough with the two of them.”
“When was this?” I can see Trish trying to digest the information.
“Let’s see . . . When Christi left us, McKenna was about six months old. She came back about six months later, so McKenna would’ve been about a year old. She waited about a month until she . . . So McKenna just turned ten. Christi’s been gone nine years. And that was about, what, Steffen, two years after?”
I nod. “Something like that.”
“Steffen and Adele would scene at the club several times a week.” He glances at me. “Hell, did you even have sex at home?”
I snort. “Not really. She liked an audience.”
Clint purses his lips. “Yeah. She really did. Anyway, babe, he asked if I wanted to scene with them a few times.”
Trish interrupts with, “What’s ‘a few?’”
Clint looks at me, and I respond with, “Oh, maybe a dozen?”
“And what did this ‘scening’ consist of?” Now we’ve got Trish’s attention.
Clint forges ahead. “Three-ways. Sometimes we’d fuck her all night. She couldn’t get enough. She was always like that.” Then he stops. “There’s something you don’t know, Steffen, something I never told you.”
I can feel my eyes widening and I’m pretty sure everything is about to make sense, if I know Adele. “Oh? What’s that?”
“She called me once while you were on one of those bankers’ trips you always took, said she was lonely and needed to be fucked. Asked me over, told me she’d cleared it with you. So I went to your place. It made sense; hell, we fucked each other all the time, but with you present, of course. Still, I didn’t think much about it. I showed up, brought a pizza, we ate and laughed, and then she turned on the charm. Actually, she was all over me. I’d had a couple of beers and I was younger than I am now, and I was really, really hard and turned on. It didn’t take much for her to get me into bed, and we did some pretty kinky shit that night. Damn kinky shit.”
“Clint,” I start, “I need to know something.” He nods. “Did you by any chance fuck her without a condom?”
He’s really scarlet now. “Yeah. I didn’t realize it until later.”
“How many times that night without a condom?”
With a shrug, he says, “I don’t know. Maybe five? Six? Eight? I lost count. It was almost like she put something in my drink . . .” He stops. “Oh, god, she didn’t put something in my drink, did she?”
The big breath I just sucked in comes out as a huge sigh. “Oh, yeah, she probably did. And buddy, I’ve got some bad news for you.”
Every bit of redness drains from his face and he and Trish both go stark white. He manages to groan out, “Oh, god, please don’t tell me she has AIDS.”
“No, no. Nothing like that.” I watch both of them relax, but only a little. “No. Much harder to treat than that.”
“Wha????”
“Clint, she showed up here with a kid. And he’s yours. I knew his eyes looked familiar, and I finally figured it out. You got her pregnant. She’s trying to convince me that he’s mine, but I knew something had gone on there. He looks too much like you.”
I hear Clint make a little sound, almost like he’s choking, and his eyes go glassy. “Hey, buddy, stay with me!” I grab his shoulders and hold him upright, and I bark at Trish, “Go get him some water! Now!” She scurries off to the kitchen and I slap him hard enough to rock his head. “Wake up, Clint. Get it together, man, it’s gonna be okay. We’ll get through this.” Trish reappears with a glass in her shaking hands and I put it to his lips. That seems to reanimate him, and he takes the glass and swallows a couple of huge gulps. “Better?”
“Oh my god,” is all he manages to squeeze out o
f his throat. “Oh my god. How the hell? Oh my god.” He turns and stares at Trish. “Baby, I swear, I didn’t . . .”
And my faith in true love is completely restored by her next words as she takes his chin in her hand and looks straight into his dark eyes. “That was before me. It has nothing to do with us. I love you, Clint, and I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. We’ll face this together and do whatever we have to do.” She turns to me. “What now?”
“Well, they let something important slip. I asked him – by the way, his name is Morris – if he likes school. He told me he doesn’t go to school, that his mom says he’s too smart for school.”
“Oh my god.” Clint stares at me. “She’s not sending him to school?”
“Nope. And I’m wondering what else she’s letting slip by in her insanity. The woman’s crazy, you know that.”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely. If he’s not even going to school, he needs to be taken away from her and put in a home where that happens.” Then I see a look pass over his face as he understands. “Oh shit. That would be our home. Oh, god, Trish.” He props his elbows on his knees and drops his face into his hands, and she rubs his back between his shoulder blades.
“Yep. I’ve got to find out where they’re holed up, and then get social services involved. And you’ll need to do a DNA test right away so it’s on file.”
“Okay. I’ll do that tomorrow.” Clint raises his head and looks at me. “Steffen, I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry for you guys. I’m sorry you got dragged into this whole thing.”
Then Trish turns and puts a hand on my knee. “Now, about you and Sheila. Steffen, what can we do? I want this fixed. You were so happy together. Sheila loves you.”
I feel my eyes welling up. “I feel the same way about her. We talked about that last night and this morning, before . . . I can’t live without her, Trish.” And I can’t hold it in anymore – I start to cry like a little kid, and Trish moves in beside me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Damn Adele. She’s kept me under a cloud for years. I finally thought that was all behind me, and . . .”
Unforgettable You (Me, You, and Us Book 2) Page 14
