I wanted to ask God for help, but I had been so far on the left hand of God that I knew my prayers would be heard, because he heard all prayers from his children, but he didn’t have to answer me.
Not a man who lived and strived in a family that ruled and destroyed so many lives for their own personal gain and for enjoyment.
So I wouldn’t be angry at God for being silent to me.
I strolled through the doors to the indoor pool, my eyes landing on Dominique as she stepped out of the warm waters. The sparkling droplets of pool water cascaded down her firm body and the newly formed roundness of her stomach.
I knew she felt my presence. Her back was to me as she grabbed a towel off the chair and tended to dry her hair off with it.
I waited. Not sure what I would say if and when she turned to give me indication that, yes, she knew I was here, and, yes, she knew that I wanted to talk.
Talking would’ve been polite to what I actually wanted to do. Sure, I wanted to talk but the conversation that I had in my head would end with my hands around her throat.
What did I feel?
The word betrayed wasn’t even a big enough term.
I had always known that my family was sharks but this was too much, too much evil, and too little respect for what was humanity.
My father would marry the woman I loved.
The woman I loved had tricked me into fathering her child.
The woman I loved and my father were going to raise my child as their own.
And the woman I loved who was hours away from being recognized as the Rogue’s next leader, and had done all those things to me – lied to me, made me believe enough to give her my seed – looked at me like I was a piece of hair caught in her glass.
And the world stopped its turning and started tilting. I was at the edge of it, my toes gripping for support – my body trying to save itself, but my mind knew the truth: it was over.
“What can I do for you, Tristan?” Dominique asked as she wrapped the towel she had used to dry her hair off around her waist.
And I closed my eyes tightly. My hand pinched roughly at the bridge of my nose. I was trying to wipe away the vision I had seen. Dominique had sounded like Lulina, and looked so much like her when her eyes met mine.
“My father told me that I was about to be a daddy,” I croaked out, wincing at my words.
Dominique huffed then chuckle. “Your father is about to be a daddy again, Tristan.”
She turned her back to me then.
I grasped on to the back of a chair to keep from falling off the world’s edge, and, more importantly, to hold something solid to keep me grounded because I could see in my head hurling myself at her. I swallowed, grabbing the tie around my neck and loosening it, hoping for some air to cool down my neck.
“So that’s it?” I asked.
“Yes, pretty much.”
“You said you loved me and I believed you. I believed you because I knew you weren’t lying and you weren’t.”
“Love is beautiful, Tristan,” She whispered.
I watched as she licked her lips – choosing her words carefully, just like her mother did. Dominique wanted the best words that would get her message across, had the most effect and she wanted the words that would hurt, and crush you if that what they were intended for.
She repeated, “Love is beautiful and sometimes it is everything.” Dominique panned the cool, crystal waters of the pool then looked back at me. “And then sometimes love has nothing to with anything.”
She walked up to me, the towel falling away from her body and onto the floor. Her eyes, the same ones that had showed love now had an edge with rage, hate and disgust, she shoved my chest and I stumbled back. She went after my stumbling body and followed up with a slap.
My hand touched at the warm skin on my face. I bit my bottom lip, my teeth baring, I wanted to fight back. The same rage that had blacked out my mind and gave so much power to my body was hovering over me. I was seeing red and my teeth ground together. I heard the plastic of the back of the chair I was holding crack under the pressure of my hand clenching it.
Dominique saw the change in my face.
She didn’t run.
No, she didn’t run, she stepped into my face and looked me in the eyes. “When you said you weren’t fucking my mother, I believed you.”
And the rage was gone.
I lifted my arms and let them drop at my sides. “There is much bigger shit between you and me then just me screwing your mother.”
She slapped me again and I laughed around the pain this time around.
I asked after rubbing my cheek. “Are you done?”
She hauled off and slapped me again, my bottom lip tore and I tasted blood. I laughed harder, my head tilted up as I guwhaff into the air.
It was all funny, all of it.
You either laugh or you lose it.
I had failed at losing it and now I was laughing instead.
She went for another hit, this time her fist was curled. I caught her arm, my fingers squeezing on her wrist until I felt bone. She didn’t wince but I knew I was hurting and I knew there would be a bruise.
I stared long and hard at her. “You think your mother is innocent? She’s not. I started fucking her when I was nineteen, but she had started fucking me when I was nine.”
She yanked her arm away. “You’re a man, Tristan. Get over it.”
I laughed at this, my mouth widening inhumanly as it aloud the smile. Then the smile was gone and the rage was back, raw, hot and everlasting.
“That’s what everyone keeps telling me!” I scream and my voice was echoing off the walls. “You excuse your perverted mother but I’m the one you hang for it?”
“I asked you to tell me the truth.”
“And obviously it wouldn’t have meant a fucking thing!” My lips were quivering as the waves of rage hit one after another. “You and my family had this collassol plan to use me to knock you up, so the fuck difference did it make that I was fucking your mother or not?”
Dominique grabbed the towel of the floor. Her hands touched at her hair as her eyes looked for the exit. It was as if she was considering to even give me the good graces to have the conversation we were having.
“I’m going to be your father’s wife, Tristan. And your son will be your father’s son and theres nothing you can do about that, but you’re right. I did feel something when we met on that balcony, and what I felt for you may have grown into something.”
“Something like what?” I asked.
“Something along the lines that when your old daddy croaks that I may have decided to take you as my husband and give you a chance to run the family that should’ve been yours but mine instead.”
The blood was draining now. “And now?”
Dominique licked her lips and closed the distance between us. Her mouth was on mine, her tongue parting my lips and licking around my mouth. And I was lost to her, grabbing the towel from her hands as it was the barrier between hers and mine.
I loved this woman.
So, when she kissed me, the world ended. Yes, I was kissing the enemy, the very woman who had destroyed the parts that I didn’t destroy myself.
Then she yanked her mouth away from mine and the world situated itself back to the shit it had been before her lips touched mine. “Maybe, if you’re lucky, you may be one of the men I choose to fuck when my husband doesn’t satisfy me.”
I shoved her away from me.
“Yes,” she said, “show me the rage that caused you to rape my mother.”
I opened my mouth to retort, but nothing came out - not even a scream, which is what I felt in the pit of my stomach and felt it growing fast up to my throat. I crashed within myself, my head going back to that night and hearing Lulina’s screams all over again, and seeing her blood smeared all over my floor.
“That was between your mother and me,” I said, unsure even if I was talking.
“So you say she deserved it?” She sna
pped.
“I say she was playing with the monster she created a little too roughly.”
Dominique laughed, her voice something I loved so much and even as I heard her laughing in my expense, I yearned to continue to hear her voice. “I don’t care, Tristan. But-“and she was walking away as she said this,”-I wonder what I will get for playing so rough with the new monster I creating in you.”
I dropped my head as I listened to the soft thuds of her bare feet hitting the ground.
I called after her. “You don’t want me as an enemy, Dominique.”
She whirled around, cocking her hip out which she perched her hand on. “Please, Tristan, don’t let me take that as a threat.”
The battle lines were itched in the ground.
“I go back to my first statement: you don’t want me as an enemy, Dominique. It’s a weird transformation when you push a man against a wall. He does something wonderful. He starts fighting back.”
“Come on, Tristan, show me that man that your family missed when they chose me to run the family,” Dominique beckoned.
“Trust me you don’t want to see the man your mother saw.”
“I don’t give a fuck about my mother,” she hollered across the pool. “I don’t give a fuck about my mother in general, but you know that. I’m a very dangerous person when pushed and you keep pushing me you may see that danger for yourself. No one owns me, no one gets the pleasure to hold something over my head. I’m every bit as powerful as you are weak, and you were just the unlucky one that I didn’t choose to hold my purse, Tristan.”
I shook my head as I smiled. “Then if I’m at such a disavanagted, why don’t your first order as boss is my death?”
And she answered back with, “You aren’t an enemy I would have to fear for long. Your mistakes are catching up with you, Tristan, and I’m patient enough to let them kill you.”
***
I was watching the pillow of smoke moving from my mouth as I was leaning against the railing inside the gazebo.
I remembered Dominique’s kisses on my neck.
I remembered her kisses on my lips.
It seemed like forever ago.
Then I watch the smoke moving from my mouth, thinking how envious I was of it. The smoke could disappaite into the air and become nothing and not even be missed.
I wanted to do the same.
Lulina breathed my name from behind, “Tristan.”
I half laughed, half cried as I balled the cigarette in my hand, feeling the hot embers burning my palm but still barely felt it.
“Here to grind salt in the gaping wounds, Lu?”
I turned to her, feeling the cold banister sinking through my coat. Lulina crossed her arms over her chest, a wrinkle forming in the middle of her eyebrows. “You’ve had a rough day, dear?” She almost sounded like she cared that I had.
And a part of me wanted to walk into her arms and lay my head on her shoulder. A part of me wanted her hands to rub through my hair and touch my face as I cried, and a big part of me wanted her to tell me that it was okay. That eventhough the kids were mean that I was better than them, and the only reason they were picking me was because of that.
I placed another cigarette in my mouth and lit up. “You told Dominique a secret, didn’t you?”
“Nothing should be kept a secrect between mother and daughter, Tristan. You see how secrects and betrayel and destroy.”
I chuckled around the smoke. “Suck my dick, Lu.”
“Suck your dick? Oh, I’ve done that.”
“Yea,” I said, “And your daughter was better.”
Lulina started to hit where it hurt. “You know she did love you?”
“I saw in her eyes when I was fucking her,” I responded.
“Telling her that you raped me did something for that, now didn’t it.” Lulina motioned to her face, around the lips, indicating my busted lip that had stopped bleeding all of five minutes ago. “I gave her a wake up call.”
“Silly bitch,” I sang, “Tricks are for hoes.”
She closed her eyes and nodded, extremely pleased by my retort. “Reember that secret, Tristan?”
“Is it time already, Lu?”
Lulina tightened her arms across her chest. “Our child would have been beautiful, Tristan. He or she would have been the one running this family.”
I laughed harder, walking past her and into the middle of the gazebo. I brought my hands up and motioned her to keep going, beckoning her to keep tossing daggers.
“Let’s have it, Lu,” I goad her on, “Let’s talk about this imaginary kid you wished you had of mine. We all know you can’t have kids. We all remember you miscarried a ways back.”
I laugh at this because I know I’m hurting her, but instead all I had done was set the stage for her.
Lulina walked into me and I felt her hot lips on my cheek. “That’s the thing, Tristan. Our child wasn’t imaginary, but very much real.”
She kissed my cheek again, longer this time.
I was frozen as her lips were on me.
She leaned in and her lips touched my ear. “When will you realize that I’m the most important woman in your life, Tristan? Katie was fucking happy that she was going to be the first to make you a father, but she didn’t know what I knew.”
“And what didn’t she know,” I mumbled, my insides clenching and twisting together.
“That I could’ve made Tristan Rogue a father when he was nine years old.”
I felt her smile against my cheek.
“That’s right,” she said, “our very first time made you a father. I protected you eventhough Johnny wanted children. It could’ve been his, but I was eighty percent sure that it wasn’t so I got rid of it.”
I put the cigarette to my lips and inhaled long and hard. I choked on the smoke. The truth she was scratching in the sand was too ugly to really want to see.
My mouth twitched as Lulina leaned in and kissed my cheek again, longer still this time and closer to my mouth. She touched my chin and pulled my mouth to hers.
I was too frozen to pull away and gag.
She pulled away and rubbed my face with the back of her hand. “See, Tristan? I was right; it tastes so much better when you let secrets have time.”
She patted my cheek, used her thumb to wipe her lipstick off my mouth and walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Running into walls as fast as I can…
Eddie had looked like he aged so many years since the months I hadn’t seen him. His face had thinned out and the dwindling hair he had was now gone and he wore his head bald.
He nervously palmed his shaven head, “The fed thing.”
I looked up and met his eyes. “We took care of it.”
He nodded, his face not showing the relief that I thought it should. I thought maybe he feared that my father would send him away again if the Feds were still sniffing around, or kill him because of the same reason.
I was smoking out in the cold next to the outdoor pool. I had a glass with ice and a bottle of acholo that I couldn’t seem to get to the bottom of, and I was dangerously too sober.
I lowered my head and put my cigarette back to my lips. I heard the music, laughing and talking from inside the compound and the happiness of crime life was making me break out in a sweat.
The ceremony had been completed and Dominique was working the crowd with her soon to be husband and they were being congradulated on their soon to be child, and Lulina was hanging on Dominique arm, smiling ear to ear.
Even I had to admit that Dominique had been the perfect for the job my father and Papa handed to her. She knew how to smile and conjole and swapped the banter wisely to leave the men in the Rogue pockets still in the Rogue pockets.
My father kept her on his arm, walking her around the room, greeting the men who had made the Rogue family what it was. It was these men who did the dirty work, the grunt work, the nasty work behind the scenes while the rest of us called shots and cleaned up messes. Dominiq
ue smiled as she greeted them. She wore a stunning red dress that was open in the back, allowing her creamy tan skin to gleam. More than one stare was lingered on her after she had left a conversation and my father led her to another. Besides the curve of her ass the men gawked, I knew what was next on their mind: What would the Rogue family expect by allowing the daughter of a Lougotti taking the reigns?
The party had been dangerously close to the party two years ago when I seduced Katie, and there was times when I was in the crowd that I looked for her, waiting for her to awe the men and make the women hate her for the way she pulled you in with her eyes and smile.
Katie had never showed.
Still, my demons were just as thick as ever.
Eddie took a seat in front of me. “Let me get one of those, Tristan.”
I handed him a cigarette and waited until he had lit up and puffed his first few puffs before I spoke. “You know, unc Eddie, Zander isn’t doing too well.”
Eddie fanned me away along with the smoke hovering around his face. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper that was yellow with age. He took care with opening it, his eyes glistening with tears as he turned the paper so I could see it.
“You know what this is, Tristan?”
I glanced at the paper then looked away. “My IQ scores.”
He nodded as tears dripped down his cheeks. “You were thirteen and you were said to be a genious.”
He pushed the paper back in his pocket. Eddie pointed to my bottle and I nudged it toward him. He put the rim of the bottle to his lips and took a long hard gulp.
“You’re every bit the man your father raised and more,” he said, wiping his face and still crying as he did it. “You may have fucked up, but those mistakes are forgivable. The mistake that’s not is the one where you stopped knowing how smart you are.”
Tears of my own dripped from my eyes. I covered up by dropping my head and smoked hard on my cigarette. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes that aren’t forgivable, Uncle Eddie.”
He touched the top of my head and I cried harder. “Tell me,” he whispered.
Rogue (In the life of the Rogue Book 1) Page 25
