All or Nothing: The Black Lilith Series #2

by Hazel Jacobs

  The woman pulls out of the kiss when she hears the door open. She turns to look, and Sersha doesn’t understand how she didn’t recognize her right away.

  Danielle.

  Danielle with her perfect breasts and long, luscious hair is straddling Tommy and kissing him. And he’s letting her. When Danielle sees Sersha in the doorway, her lips curl into a cruel smile.

  Sersha closes the door quickly. She might accidentally slam it, but she needs to close that door. Anything to get the sight of that smile out of her mind.

  She hears Tommy’s voice come through the door. “Was that the door?” He sounds amused. Like it’s funny that they got caught.

  Shit.

  Sersha turns and speed-walks away from the door, heading for the exit, hoping against hope that no one tries to talk to her or even look at her because she’s going to crack at any moment.

  He’s—Tommy is—she can’t even think it.

  She doesn’t need to think it.

  She saw it.

  Tommy kissing his ex, laughing at the thought of getting caught. Just this morning he made tea for her. He’d kissed her shoulder and called her temptress. She was getting ready to call her mam when she got home and tell her about how well things are going with her bass-playing, lyricist boyfriend. Sersha had been planning to ask her mam how to know if you’re in love. Whether it’s too soon to be thinking the word. How would Sersha know? She’s never felt this way before.

  She’s still holding his phone. There’s a picture of Emily as the screensaver. She remembers thinking how adorable that is when she first saw it.

  There’s a lump in her throat. Sersha can’t look at the screensaver without thinking about Tommy writhing lazily with Danielle on his lap, his eyes covered with the sleep mask, enjoying every second. Sersha picks up the pace and runs straight into Dash’s chest.

  “Sorry!” Dash says quickly, reaching out to steady her. He’s wearing a Captain America shirt with the Winter Soldier’s logo on it. Dash had confided in her that he thinks that Captain America and the Winter Soldier are totally dating. “Hey… Sersha. Shit! What’s wrong?”

  Because she’s crying by now. She knew as soon as she felt the lump rising in her throat. She’s an ugly crier, her cheeks and eyes go red and her nose dribbles. It’s not a great picture and she hates that Dash is seeing her like this. He’s looking at her like he’s seeing something awful, and it won’t be until many days later that she realizes that he’s horrified that she’s upset, not because of how she looks.

  She realizes that she’s in the front foyer. The security guard is giving Sersha a weird look and she avoids his eyes.

  “What happened?” Dash asks, his face a picture of concern. And a hint of anger as well. “Did someone say something to you? Where are they?”

  “I… can you give this to Tommy?” she asks, pressing the phone into Dash’s hand. His fingers close reflexively over it. “But don’t… don’t go into the studio now. He’s b-busy.” Her voice breaks on the last word.

  “Sure…”

  She pushes past him.

  “Sersha. Hey, Sersha! Wait!”

  She heads for the door, ignoring the way that Dash calls her name, running out into the snow. The bus stop is right there, but if she pauses now then there’s a chance that Dash will catch up to her—she can hear his footsteps—so she just starts running. Running on the slippery pavement. She’s always been a fast runner.

  Pumping her arms, the pain in her throat builds as her breath becomes short. She doesn’t pause until she’s several blocks away.

  She turns around. Dash isn’t behind her. In fact, she’s nowhere near the studio or anywhere she recognizes. She rests against the cold concrete of the building next to her, breathing hard, the pain in her chest only partly the result of her run. She slides down the concrete until she’s sitting on the ground, in a puddle, and she wraps her arms around her knees. People walk past her, but no one stops. Some children pause on their way past with their mittened hands clasped in their parent’s gloved ones, but their parents usher them along. No one wants anything to do with the crying girl with the wild, windblown blonde hair.

  She tries to push away the pain in her throat and behind her eyes, but she can’t. She’s not strong enough. There are no bubbles in the world to save her from this. She buries her face in her arms and lets it take her over.

  Sersha goes back to the Airbnb place to grab her passport. It’s all she needs. Then she takes a cab to the airport. Her phone has been ringing non-stop in her pocket, but she won’t look at it. She doesn’t want to have to explain to Dash why she’d been crying. She doesn’t even want to think about it.

  In the cab, she wipes her face, mascara comes off on the tissue and she needs to lean forward to use the rear-view mirror so that she can wipe the rest away. The cabbie doesn’t seem to mind. She pulls her laptop out of her bag, desperate for something to do with her hands, but once she’s pulled up a word document she realizes that the words have finally failed her. There are no words for what she’s feeling. Maybe sometime in the future she’ll be able to write this story down in lyrics, but at the moment she’s so raw that she can’t do anything but stare at the blank white page until finally, with a huff of annoyance, she closes the laptop and stuffs it back into her bag.

  He cheated on her.

  That mother fucker cheated on her.

  Sersha doesn’t know what’s worse. The fact that she’d been stupid enough to think that he’d been over his ex, or the fact that she’d been starting to plan her life around him. That she’d considered moving to New York permanently. That she’d been wondering if this is what love feels like.

  “You’re an idiot,” she tells herself harshly, drawing a worried look from the cabbie. “Not you!” she tells the man quickly. “Sorry… I’m just talking to myself back here.”

  “You do you, honey,” the cabbie replies.

  Sersha gets to the airport and buys the first ticket back to Dublin. It costs an arm and a leg and she’ll have six hours to stew in what she saw. Six hours to reflect on what she felt for Tommy and how humiliated she feels.

  She buys some sleeping pills from the pharmacy before heading to her gate.

  Finally, after over two hours of ignoring it, Sersha looks at her phone. She’d planned to call her mam to let her know that she’ll be coming home. She hadn’t expected sixty-five missed calls.

  “Sweet Jesus,” she mutters.

  They’re from the band. Dash called first, repeatedly. Then Tommy. Then Mikayla. Slate and Logan started calling too. There are thirty voice messages—all from Tommy. Is he pretending to be concerned about her? Or did Dash tell him that he’d been caught, and now he’s calling to make excuses. Sersha stares at his name on the screen for a moment before she deletes them all.

  No excuses will make her forget the easy smile he’d worn while he’d kissed Danielle, or the laughter in his voice when he realized that they’d been seen.

  There are texts as well. Mostly from Tommy, though many are from Mikayla. Sersha feels bad about bringing the rest of the band into her drama. She deletes the texts and sends one to Mikayla.

  Calm down, don’t worry about me.

  Mikayla calls immediately, but Sersha isn’t in the mood to talk. She rejects the call and selects her mam’s contact instead.

  “It’s ten thirty at night!” her mam says when she picks up. Just hearing her voice is enough to make the lump rise in Sersha’s throat again. “What’s wrong?”

  “He cheated on me, Mam,” Sersha says. She thanks every deity she can think of that the gate is empty.

  There’s a pause. “Shit… love… I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “That’s a bit dramatic.”

  “I just…” Sersha tries to swallow the lump and finds that she can’t, “…I just need a little distance. The band’s going crazy.” Even as she says it a ping in her ear tells her that she’s gotten another message. “Can you pick me up from the
airport?”

  “You know I will.”

  Sersha smiles weakly. Even if her mam might call her ‘dramatic,’ she’ll still drop everything for her. That’s the kind of relationship that they have.

  “When are you getting in?”

  Sersha tells her the time that her flight is expected to arrive. Then she says her goodbyes. Getting teary-eyed in an airport is only cute when you’re under fifteen, after that it’s just a public hazard. Sersha hangs up from her mam and sees four missed calls: two from Mikayla and two from Tommy. They both left messages.

  Mikayla: call me.

  Sersha deletes all of the messages and replies to Mikayla’s text.

  Sersha: later.

  Then she turns her phone off. She’ll call Mikayla when there’s an ocean between them. When she’s had some time to think and let everything sink in.

  Sersha’s mam picked her up at the airport. She was still groggy from the sleeping pills she’d taken, and when she got home she went straight back to sleep, ignoring her mam’s dire warnings about jet lag and time differences. There was nothing in the world that Sersha wanted less than to be conscious. It wasn’t until the next evening that she’d remembered to call Mikayla, and by then she’d decided that she wasn’t going to. She hadn’t even turned on her phone when she got off the plane.

  “You look lovely, dear,” her mam says when Sersha comes downstairs for dinner—breakfast, from her perspective.

  Sersha knows she looks a mess, but she’s grateful to her mam for pretending that she doesn’t. She sits down at the dining room table and stares around the house, trying to let the familiarity of the place calm her down.

  When Sersha’s dad left, her mam had been hit with a massive debt and no way to pay it off. She’d sold the house to pay for half of it, and then she and Sersha had moved to a tiny little place near the Docks. Sersha hadn’t minded at the time. They were near the River Corrib, which smelled horrible after rain but still had seemed magical to her youthful self. It hadn’t been until many years later that she’d realized how much her mam had struggled. How many nights there’d been hardly any food for the pair of them, and how the little homely touches—the doilies on the window-sill, the line of collectors plates on the wall, the pink roof painted by the pair of them one weekend—had been all they’d had to call the place a home. Since then, her mam’s business had taken off. She’d gotten new clients, built a name for herself, and is now one of the most successful independent music producers in the country. But she still lives in that poky, tight little house near the Docks.

  She says she doesn’t want to forget how bad it got. She says that she doesn’t want Sersha to forget how bad it can get.

  But the walls are lined with records and awards now. There’s a dishwasher under the ancient sink. The dining room table is made of heavy dark wood that’s polished to a shine. Sersha eats her dinner—porridge with berries—from a bowl that her mam brought back from a business trip to Taiwan.

  “How are you feeling?” her mam asks half-way through the meal.

  “Better now that I’m home,” Sersha replies.

  Her mam sighs. “You sure? Because you look like a limp rag.”

  “I’m so glad that we have the kind of relationship where you can tell me that and I don’t start thinking about which homes I could put you in.”

  Sersha knows that her bubbles are all gone and she hates it. She wishes that her mam would say something to make it all better, but she knows that it’s not going to happen. Nothing is going to make this better.

  But being home helps. Being home eases the lump in her throat and reminds her that the world is bigger than the Airbnb apartment where she’d spent so many nights wrapped around Tommy. There are more people in the world than the four men who’d made up Black Lilith, and the manager who’d embraced Sersha as a friend from the moment they’d met. Sersha feels bad about not reaching out to Mikayla sooner. She makes a promise to herself that she’ll call Mikayla the next morning—not to talk about why she left, but to reassure Mikayla that she’s all right. Maybe to ask Mikayla to tell Black Lilith to stop calling her.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Sersha’s mam says, pulling her back to the present.

  Sersha sighs, swallows a mouthful of porridge, and fiddles with her spoon before answering, I already told you, “He cheated on me, Mam.”

  Her mam nods slowly. “And that’s got to sting, to be sure.”

  “I thought…” the lump is rising again and Sersha curses herself, “…I thought that he cared. I’m so stupid.”

  “Don’t you dare take the blame for this,” her mam says fiercely. Sersha looks at her to see the fire burning behind her green eyes. It’s the kind of fire that could bring whole cities down in its wake. “It’s not your fault the man was too weak to stick with you. Don’t you dare think for a moment that it is.”

  Sersha takes a long, deep breath, but it doesn’t make the lump go away. “I know. I know I shouldn’t, but it just—”

  “It hurts,” her mam finishes for her. The fire is still behind her eyes, but it’s a warm fire and not a destructive one. The kind that burns in a grate and keeps a family warm. “I know, lovely, I know.”

  Sersha leans her elbows on the table and covers her eyes with her hand, desperate to hide the tears from her mam. Her mam who’d worked so hard to give them a life when her dad left. Her mam who never asked for anything from her daughter except that she stay bubbly. Sersha’s failing her. Even though she knows exactly how much it hurts her mam to see her so badly broken, even though she knows that this is everything her mam has feared ever since Sersha was old enough to start dating, she can’t hide this. She can’t hide her hurt and she can’t rationalize it away.

  Her mam pushes her dinner plate to the side and scooches her chair close to Sersha, gathering her daughter in her arms and holding her close.

  “I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry.”

  She just keeps repeating how sorry she is as Sersha lets herself break down.

  Minutes later, or maybe hours, because time has no meaning in moments like this, Sersha calms down enough to take the hanky her mam offers her. She wipes her tear-stained cheeks. She looks up at the photograph on the mantelpiece of their family—her mam, her dad, and her. It’s the only photo of her dad in the house. He’s a stocky man with wavy red hair and a corny smile. They looked so happy in that picture. Her mam had no idea what was coming. The love of her life walking out and never coming back. Her daughter moving to New York to have her heart broken. But there was also triumph in that future. Her mam’s business took off. She became a success. And the only reason Sersha got the job in New York was because she was damn good at her job as well. Good enough to win Tommy over when he’d been determined to see her fail. Good enough to bounce back from the falling out that will inevitably occur when Black Lilith sides with him and Bass Note sends her packing.

  Her mam survived heartbreak. Sersha will survive it as well.

  “Okay,” she says, speaking both to her mam and to herself as she blows her nose on the hanky. “Okay. I’m okay. I’ll be okay.”

  “Yes, you will be,” her mam replies with assurance.

  There’s a thin film of water in her mam’s eyes but she doesn’t shed a tear. Not in front of Sersha anyway, though Sersha knows that later tonight her mam will weep for her daughter the way any loving mother would. Sersha wonders if Tommy’s mother will be upset about their falling out. Her heart breaks a little when she realizes that she’ll never see Emily and Geoffrey again.

  Sersha offers her mam a weak smile, then settles back down to finish her porridge.

  Her mam always called it An Póirse Caoch. It wasn’t until Sersha was in her early teens that she’d learned to call it the Spanish Arch. Lingering at the edge of the River Corrib, the gray-stoned arch draws a healthy number of tourists in the summer months who come to visit the museum behind it. Now, on the cusp of March, Sersha is the only one willing to brave the sea winds to sit n
ear the arch. The familiar smell of fish and mold and impending rain fills her nostrils. She lets her feet dangle over the edge of the docks as she stares out at the water, watching boats drift past with their heavy loads. She can see the Claddagh across the way.

  This is her favorite spot—has been since she was a kid. She used to bring her laptop down to tap away while she watched the world go by, but as she grew she’d begun to leave the laptop at home. The arch became a place where she could unplug and think about everything that was bothering her.

  Sersha’s hair is up in a bun. She only lets it fly wild when she’s overseas. In Ireland, the wind is so strong that it can sometimes knock her right off her feet. When she was young, she would return home every day after school with hair so badly knotted that she would need to take hours to untangle it. Once, her mam had to cut a knot out. Above her, dark clouds promise rain, but Sersha’s not going to move from this spot until she has to.

  She’s got her phone in her pocket. It’s past 11:00 a.m. She’d promised herself that she would call Mikayla today, and she will. Just as soon as the breeze washes away the last of her anxiety and she can look at her phone without wanting to cry. If the rain happens to come before then, well… so be it.

  “Your mom said I’d find you here.”

  Sersha spins around so fast that she almost loses her balance and falls into the water.

  Tommy is here.

  Tommy is in Galway.

  He’s got a heavy-looking jacket on and his floppy hair hidden under a beanie. A green scarf is wrapped securely around his neck, and his blue eyes are cautious as he looks down at her from the footpath a few feet away from the edge of the water.