Prime: A Bad Boy Romance

by Stephanie Brother

  Ruby shakes her head. “Then I can’t promise I’m going to be here to support you.”

  “Ruby”, I say, shortening the distance between us.

  “Don’t”, Ruby says, holding up her hand to stop me advancing.

  I stand about a meter away from her, my hands on my hips wondering how the hell I’m going to proceed.

  “You don’t get it”, Ruby says. “You only get one chance.”

  “I’m not going to die”, I say. “It’s just not going to happen.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You’re making a bigger issue out of this than you need to.”

  “I’ve had enough, Jaxon”, Ruby says. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “You’re being selfish”, I say, growing tired of her childish threats. “And you’re being unfair to me.”

  “No”, Ruby says defiantly, shaking her head. “I’m telling you how it makes me feel and what I need.”

  “You’re giving me an ultimatum”, I point out.

  “I’m giving you a choice”, Ruby says.

  I stare at her for a handful of seconds more, in utter disbelief at what she’s saying, but as much as she’s threatening it, I know she won’t ever leave. She’s way too into me for that.

  “I’m going to bed”, I say. “I’ve got to get some sleep before tomorrow. We can talk about this when I get back.”

  Ruby stays for a while by the door before she comes back over to the bed, her tears all but dried.

  “I love you, Jaxon”, she says, when we’re lying alongside each other in bed. “Please don’t ever forget that.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Present Day

  Ruby

  I hold Jessica for so long it begins to scare her. Finally I let her push herself away from me, but not so far away she’s out of reach.

  “What happened to your face, Mommy? Did you hurt yourself?” Jessica says innocently.

  “It’s nothing darling”, I reassure her, aware Rosa is looking at me with barely concealed concern. “Mommy just had an accident, that’s all.”

  Jessica makes a little noise in her throat that tells me she doesn’t know if she should believe me or not, but her doubt isn’t quite enough to challenge me. “I missed you”, she says instead. “I don’t like it when you go away.”

  “I promise I won’t go away again”, I say, gathering her into my arms. “Did you behave yourself for aunty Rosa?”

  Jessica nods, but she’s distracted by something and points to it. “Who’s that man?” she says.

  I turn to see Jaxon standing in the doorway - filling it completely so he has to bend his neck would be a better description. Daddy doesn’t seem quite appropriate right now.

  “Come in”, I tell Jaxon. “Bolt the door behind you.”

  “Who is this beautiful girl”, Jaxon says, moving towards us. I take a step back from habit and then realize I’m overreacting. Jaxon pauses to look at me before moving towards us again. He holds out his hand for Jessica to shake. “I’m Jaxon”, Jaxon says.

  Jessica buries her head into my chest overcome by shyness and the movement sends a twist of pain up through my body.

  “This is Jessica”, I say. “She’s not usually this shy.”

  “She looks like you”, Jaxon comments. “Same eyes.”

  I put Jessica down and watch her tilt her neck up towards Jaxon. “Are you staying for lunch?” she asks him.

  ***

  Rosa clears the plates away from the table and serves coffee, while Jessica sits on the bust up sofa, watching American cartoons on a box TV set from the 1970s.

  The initial shock of seeing her mother storm in like a lunatic, face battered and body broken, babbling like a maniac and checking no-one has crept into the house in her absence has finally passed. I watch her from the dining table lost in her own world and wonder what she must be thinking. I’ve been away for almost three days, but now that I’m back and I’ve promised I’m not going away again, she’s already settled back into normal routine as though nothing ever happened in the first place. Children have an incredible sense of distortion when it comes to the passing of time, and I can only think it’s the brain’s way of protecting them.

  “You look like shit”, Emilio says, his voice laden with disappointment.

  “I feel like shit”, I counter. “Thank you for taking care of Jessica.”

  Emilio shrugs. “I think we had the easier part of the deal.”

  Emilio and Rosa are the best friends I have in this city, the closest I could liken to a family. It was here, in this very house that I stayed when I first came to Mexico, working as a reporter for Emilio’s online, underground, counter government news service. It’s been a long time since he was forced to give that up, but we’ve always remained close, and they’ve always been there for me and Jessica.

  “They said they knew about her”, I say. “I don’t know how, but they knew her name.”

  Emilio sighs and pours himself more coffee. “I told you, this country isn’t safe anymore. You can’t trust anyone. Think about Jessica, what would have happened if they’d have got to her?”

  “Yeah, well thankfully they didn’t”, I say.

  “Thankfully someone got to you”, Emilio says, directing his look towards Jaxon. “Thank you, amigo.”

  Jaxon holds his hands up humbly. “Always wanted to come to Mexico city”, he says jokingly.

  “What will you do?” Rosa asks.

  The question surprises me a little bit. “There’s nothing to do, Rosa”, I say. “Publish the information, carry on as normal.”

  Emilio shakes his head. “You nearly got killed.”

  “Jaxon took care of that”, I point out.

  “Until when?” Emilio asks, his hand searching for mine across the table. “You saw what they did to me, and now they’ve nearly killed you and threatened your daughter. You’ve got to ask yourself, Ruby, what is more important to you? Your work, or the people that you love?”

  “I absolutely agree”, Jaxon says. “These people don’t stop. You publish what you need to publish, whatever that is, and the people you hurt will come back and hurt you. They’ll kill you if they can and where does that leave Jessica?”

  Emilio and Rosa are nodding. “Come on”, I say. “This isn’t an action film, this is real life.”

  “Exactly”, Jaxon says. “And the people that win in real life are not the good guys. It’s the bad guys with money, it’s the corrupt police forces and governments, it’s the people that have whole armies on their payroll. It’s just you and your daughter and your writing, and someone can’t always be here to protect you.”

  “You mean you?” I say spitefully.

  “I mean anyone”, Jaxon retorts. “Look at you, Ruby. They took you for three days and the only reason they didn’t kill you is because you had something they needed. When that gets published and it makes an impact and then everything dies down because it always does and no-one gets what they deserve, they’ll not only come for you again, they’ll come for the people you love. That means Emilio and Rosa and it means Jessica. I’ve seen what these people do, they don’t mess around. Do you seriously want that for what you can achieve here? You’re fighting against a whole ocean of corruption, you’re not going to win.”

  “Nobody’s going to win unless they try”, I say. “At least I’m fighting.”

  “Until it kills you”, Rosa says. “And you’re just another dead journalist in a city already stacked to the roof tops with them, and Jessica’s left without a mother.”

  I sip cold coffee and sink into my seat, too tired to continue arguing. “Nobody came?” I ask after a while, keen to change the subject. “No phone calls, no house calls, nothing?”

  Rosa shakes her head. “They didn’t get to her”, she says. “No one knows she’s here. She’s safe.”

  “For now”, Emilio adds. He takes my hand again. “You need to rest. Why don’t you sleep for a while, we can look after Jessica. She’s got her own
personal bodyguard it seems.”

  I sigh deeply, the gravity of the last three days sinking into me. Now that I know Jessica is safe, I feel like I could sleep for a thousand years. That might be just about enough to wash away this excruciating pain as well.

  “Okay”, I say, finally giving in to it. “But down here, I want to be with Jessica.”

  Emilio shrugs. “The sofa is the perfect place for a siesta”, he says, before turning to Jaxon. “The bed is yours if you need to rest.”

  “Thank you”, Jaxon says, “But I’d prefer to be down here with everyone else, at least until we know what we’re doing.”

  “I’m not going with you”, I’m quick to say, but already I’m beginning to doubt myself. A month or two back home until this dies down, let Jessica get to know her own culture, keep her safe, rebuild the relationship I’ve let fall apart with Dad, be normal.

  “Get some rest”, Jaxon says. “We can talk about it when you’ve got a clear head.”

  I don’t even deign that idiotic comment with the scowl it deserves. I’m way too tired to interact and all I want to do is catch up the time I’ve missed with Jessica. There are things I need to tell Jaxon before this mini-reunion ends, and I will when the right moment presents itself, but now is not that time. I take to the sofa while conversation continues at the dinner table, and snuggle into Jessica, rolling my hands through her hair and hugging her tightly against me, even though she wriggles away every so often.

  I can see so much of Jaxon in her, and I wonder if it’s obvious to everyone or just me because I know.

  I can feel sleep dragging me down like an anchor, forcing my eyelids closed, pushing my body into the deep recesses of this well used sofa.

  On TV, cartoon characters subject each other to extreme acts of violence, and I have to concentrate hard to work out if what I’m seeing is actually there, or whether I’m just imagining it. I float between micro sleep and alertness, my legs jerking me back to reality every so often until I caught fight it anymore, and sleep eventually tugs me under.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jaxon

  “You need to take her back home”, Emilio tells me. “This place isn’t safe for her anymore.”

  “I wish it were as easy as that”, I admit, feeling pretty helpless in my ability to change Ruby’s mind. “You know Ruby, she doesn’t like to be told what to do.”

  “She’s her own worst enemy”, Rosa says. “She thinks she’s invincible but I know the truth. She’s just as vulnerable as everyone else, just as sad inside.”

  It’s on add choice of word, but I can’t help thinking I agree with her. Of what I’ve seen, and it might not be a fair representation, she looks anything but happy. I wonder if the stubbornness to complete her work, to prove to everyone - her father, me, anyone else who might have told her she wasn’t good enough - that she can be independent and succeed at it. When I knew her five years ago, she was exactly the same. She had something to prove and would never admit it. Nothing was ever good enough for her, despite the fact she was constantly told otherwise.

  The fact that she’s still here, against a crushing force of oppression, is just a continued extension of that. Ruby’s independence has always been something I’ve admired, it was what made me want to stay with her in the first place, but there’s a moment when that stubbornness becomes dangerous, and Ruby has long since crossed that line. The difficult thing is going to be making her realize it, before she fucks up one too many times and ends up getting herself killed in the process.

  My job here was to rescue Ruby and now I know how deep she’s into this shit, and how dangerous this place is, I won’t consider that job complete until I get her and Jessica out of this country and back home, and even then, until I get what I’ve wanted for the last five years, I’ll still consider it falling short.

  The memory of coming back home after Afghanistan to find the apartment empty of her belongings and a note to say she’s had enough will forever be embedded in my memory.

  “Why are they after her?” I ask.

  Emilio has swapped the pot of coffee for a bottle of tequila and pours a large shot into my glass.

  “Ruby has a tendency to poke her nose into people’s business and then rub everyone up the wrong way. What she has exactly, only Ruby knows, but they don’t send a team of professionals after you for having an opinion. Ruby’s dug something up, she’s got proof of it, and it’s made whoever it threatens very scared indeed.”

  The tequila warms my throat, exploding like fire in the pit of my stomach. “Will they come back?” I ask.

  “They always come back”, Emilio says. “You can’t be a journalist in this country and get out of it alive. This isn’t America, there is no free press, no fair system, no do overs. And a lot of people are going to die before that ever changes.”

  Emilio throws his tequila into his throat and fills his glass again. “Rosa and I learned that the hard way.”

  “She has a choice”, Rosa says. “We’re old people, poor people, our lives are here. Ruby has a choice. She has to think of Jessica.”

  “She’s like a daughter to us”, Emilio says. “And we love her dearly. We can cope with her moving away, what we can’t cope with is losing another child.”

  We take to the living room, our glasses refreshed with tequila, the bottle on hand just in case we need it. While Ruby sleeps deeply, my head is filled with a handful of memories of her doing the same in my apartment, after we’d made love or when first light broke through the windows in the morning, and I thought life would never get better.

  She’s curled into a foetal position in the sofa, Jessica tucked into the curve of her body, the pair of them asleep.

  I sink into one of the armchairs, exhausted by the mission and desperately in need of sleep myself. Cartoons continue to stream in silence on the TV in front of us, while the room defines itself by the rhythmic breathing of its occupants, strangers brought together in the most unfortunate of circumstances.

  I let my heavy eyes fall upon Jessica, trying to work out where she came from and what she might mean to the development of a relationship between Ruby and I. She’s brown eyed like her mother, with skin darkened by the Mexican heat, and a smile that could make entire icebergs melt.

  She’s got my nose, though, my high cheekbones and my curly hair. My heart leaped when I saw her stood there staring at me, a miniature imprint of the both of us, and I knew right away she was mine. Either Ruby knew when she left or she found out after it was already too late to swallow her pride and turn back around. Maybe that’s why she wanted me to quit in the first place, only coming here and putting both of them in danger makes that argument completely hypocritical.

  I just wonder when Ruby plans to tell me she’s mine, because I’m not going anywhere without getting to know her and making sure she really is safe.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ruby

  I’m woken sharply, gagging for air, a hand across my mouth to stop me from screaming. My skin is already soaking wet with sweat without the need for this additional shock to my system, and while I transition from fever dreams of love making with Jaxon on satin white sheets in abandoned buildings on the cusp of Mexico City to the here and now, my only concern is the location of my daughter.

  My heart skips a beat as the owner of the hand pressed against my mouth comes into focus. It’s Jaxon, the index finger of his other hand pressed tightly against his lips, my daughter - our daughter - clinging around his neck, her legs wrapped as far around his chest as she can stretch them. Something is wrong.

  Behind Jaxon, lined up in against the far wall, where shadows make it almost impossible to see them, I can just about make out Emilio and Rosa, armed, scared, ready for what is about to come for them.

  “They’re here”, Jaxon says, before he lowers his hand away from my mouth. “They’ve found us.”

  I sit up quickly, careful not to make a sound. “How many?”

  “Two cars, maybe three”, Jaxon whi
spers. “This time they’re not fucking around. They must have followed us, or just waited instead to make sure they got us all.”

  “Give me her”, I say, my hands outstretched.

  There is a look in Jaxon eye’s I don’t like. He pauses for a moment, crouches down and let’s Jessica peel herself off him. “You should have told me”, Jaxon says, and immediately I know he’s already guessed.

  Jessica wraps herself into my arms. “Would it have mattered?” I say.

  Jaxon takes two guns out of the holster around his hips and passes them to me. “Go upstairs”, he says. “Into the bathroom. Make sure you lock it. Emilio, Rosa, you too.”

  “No fucking way”, Emilio says.

  I look at Jessica, I look at my gun and then I look at Jaxon. A moment later the kitchen window explodes under a hail of bullets. Instinct pushes me off the couch to the floor, Jessica curled into a ball underneath me. “Upstairs”, Jaxon cries, his sub machine gun cocked, ready to take down anyone that happens to feel confident enough to come all the way inside.

  “Give her to me”, Rosa implores, her hands outstretched.

  I shake my head, worried that if I hand her over I’ll never get to see her again. A second round of bullets chew up the furniture, scattering plates from the dresser and biting into the wall. Jaxon is right, this time they’re not fucking around.

  “Now”, Jaxon says over the hum of an automatic rifle, “All of us, upstairs. Go!” he screams at me.

  Rosa is the closest to the stairs and the first to go. Emilio reluctantly follows her, before Jaxon provides a human shield for me and Jessica, backing us all up the stairwell, while he keeps his guns trained on the entrance through to the front door.

  “This is what you call safe?” Jaxon says.

  “This isn’t the time”, I snap back.

  Jaxon backs us into the bathroom, and while he quickly checks the other rooms, I lay Jessica flat in the bath.

  “It would have mattered”, Jaxon says. “You should have told me.”