Not The One (London Lovers #4)

by Amy Daws

  As they retreat through the double doors back to wherever they have Hayden, I feel myself imploding with panic. Panic and self-loathing. Self-hate. Self-destruction. I wasn’t the blade that sliced through Hayden’s wrists, but I certainly was one of the catalysts. And now he doesn’t even want to see me. Daphney pins me with a worried gaze.

  Clearing my throat, I say, “Daphney, I think I’m going to go.” I’m doing everything I can to choke back a fresh wave of tears.

  “No, Rey. We might get to see Hayden before they admit him. You should stay.”

  I shake my head pathetically. If he wanted to see me, he would have asked for me—not Leslie. “No. No, it’s alright. It sounds like he’s going to be okay. Just…um…keep me updated, please?”

  She nods nervously and I turn to leave the hospital where my best friend chose to talk to someone he barely knows over me. If alone was what I was shooting for, I hit a bullseye tonight.

  The following day at Club Taint was painful. It was nearly two in the morning before I got home from the hospital. Daphney has been texting me updates today and said that Hayden apparently checked himself in to a thirty-day facility. I asked her what facility so I could send him a letter or something and she wouldn’t tell me. When I finally drug it out of her, she informed me that Hayden made her promise not to tell me.

  My pushing skills are even impressing myself at this point.

  So here I sit—rotting away at Club Taint—unloading glasses from the dishwasher before we open, and trying desperately to stave off the aching melancholy of my own best friend wanting nothing to do with me. The sadness shooting through my veins is potent.

  Suddenly, a familiar figure comes shuffling in. “Mom?” I ask, my jaw dropping in shock. Dr. Elizabeth Miller inside Club Taint. And I thought I’d seen it all.

  “Miracle! I just got back from my medical conference. I stopped at your flat and you weren’t there. I had to come see you right away. I’ve just spoken to Alistair.” She sounds scared and out of breath, but she smiles as she slides onto the nearest barstool. I assess that her sneakers are still firmly in place beneath her long black skirt. Always prepared.

  “Mom, you didn’t have to come here.” Alistair the narc, I think to myself. He must have told her about the fight that he had to break up between Liam and Hayden.

  “Well, you’re not answering my calls.” She half smiles but her eyes are squinting at me.

  I huff, “Ever think there might be a reason for that? I’m too busy hating every single part of myself. The last thing I want to do is hear you tell me otherwise.”

  Ignoring my snide remark, her blue eyes train on me in an assessing doctor way that aggravates me. “Have you been eating?”

  “I’m fine, Mom. Just stop.” I’m so not in the mood for her fake bullshit.

  “Miracle, I really think you should move back in with me. We tried this apartment living thing and it’s just not going well. You don’t look well. You don’t look like you’re eating or sleeping enough. Let me take care of you. I’ll go ahead and cancel the lease on the flat. Come back home.” Her face is beaming a huge, glorious, fake smile as she drops this atomic bomb on me.

  “What the fuck, Mom?” I sneer.

  “You’ll be more protected with me. We can be close,” she adds cheerily.

  “I don’t need you to be so close to me all the damn time. I’m nearly thirty! I don’t need to be protected! I’m literally nothing to anybody, so stop acting like I’m some damn prize!” That thought has never felt truer since last night.

  “Of course you’re special. You’re my miracle.” She tucks her short dark hair behind her ears, doing her best to ignore my tantrum.

  “Why do you keep calling me that? I’m certain that one of my sisters would have fared a far more miraculous life on this earth than I am right now.”

  Her smiling eyes tighten at my comment pertaining to my sisters who didn’t have a chance. “Let’s not discuss this. Let’s just keep you happy and get you—”

  “You tell me I’m a miracle all the time, but I’m not. And I’m tired of being forced into thinking I am!” My outburst is unexpected, but not surprising considering all the self-loathing I’ve been rocking the past couple weeks.

  Her eyes blink in shock for a moment, before she smiles brightly. “You’re upset. I’ll leave. We can discuss this later.” She stands and turns to make her way back out the front door.

  Feeling angered at yet another Dr. Miller brush off, I push the bar partition up and jog out after her. I blast through the entrance just behind her and we stand face to face beneath the gray London sky.

  “Why can’t we talk about them, Mom?” I snap, my voice rising in a challenge. “I’ve seen pictures of all of them. Sure we were all hooked up to breathing tubes and wrapped in UV blankets, but I was with them. They were a part of me. I was a part of them. They were a part of you!”

  “Reyna, please stop.” Her voice is shaky as her eyes continue looking down the street.

  “Why can’t we talk about them, Mom? Tell me! I have to know. Do you realize how extraordinary quad pregnancies are?”

  “Of course I do, Reyna,” my mother snaps, her smiling demeanor dropping momentarily as she gives up her search for a cab. She shakes her head and schools her features to be cheerful again. “I’m who hospitals call with their impossible cases just like my own!” Her voice is shrill and tight as she smiles through her words. “High order multiples are my daily life. I also know all that can go wrong in a quad pregnancy. I knew before I even gave birth to you that the odds of me carrying any of you to term were nonexistent! It just can’t happen! But I clung to hope with all my might. Then, all four of you came even earlier than any of us ever expected. Before I knew it, I was trapped in a NICU that I couldn’t control. They wouldn’t let me consult on your care. They said I wasn’t in the right state of mind. So one by one I watched my babies die, and now I live with the guilt and the shame of wondering if I could have saved them! Do you know what it’s been like for me to have the career I’ve dedicated my entire life to be rendered completely useless when it came to my own babies?”

  Her words send shivers all the way down my spine. A strange prickling settles over me. “Mom—” I start, but am interrupted.

  “You are damn right that I remained close to you my whole life,” she says with a fire to her eyes that reminds me of the passion I witnessed in my NICU dream not too long ago. “You are also right that I treated you like a miracle. Because you are! You should be dead right now! But you’re not. You’re standing here…yelling at me. The pink of your cheeks, the rise and the fall of your chest,” her voice cracks with a sob.

  I step toward her feeling completely overwhelmed at seeing this emotional side of her. It’s nothing I’ve ever bore witness to and something I’ve always yearned for. I don’t even know how to process it. “I’m nothing, Mom. Calling me Miracle just feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy that I can never live up to.”

  She pins me back in place with a pinched smile. “What else do you call your existence, Reyna Miracle? You aren’t the result of modern medicine.”

  “Then what the hell am I?” I screech in frustration just as a cab pulls up. “Because I feel like floundering nothingness!”

  She holds up one finger to the cabbie and moves up to the sidewalk. Then she cups my face in her hands. Her blue eyes are wide and watery, probing and hopeful. The tenderness of her touch literally hurts my skin because I don’t want it. I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve the look in her eyes.

  “You, my child, are the result of divine intervention and I can only find it all miraculous. And the worst of all of this is that I feel so entrenched in my own fear that I could lose you at any second…and all you want to do is get lost.” She turns and strides over to the cab, gracefully sliding in. Her face is serious and sad. The first time I’ve ever seen her this way. “Please, go back to work. Be happy. We can talk later.”

  She disappears down the street and takes
with it a woman I know nothing about. Whoever my mother was just now was not even a glimmer of the person I’ve grown to know. How can I even begin to make sense of it all?

  “Oxford, how the bloody hell are ye?” Frank’s voice croons from behind me.

  I turn to find him strolling around the corner in some type of an orange jump suit. Steeling myself with a heavy sigh, I reply, “Not great.”

  His fair, freckled face turns serious. The mirror S’s popping up instantly between his brows. “Who was in the cab?”

  “My mother.”

  “Ghastly! Mother’s are like butt holes. We’ve all got one, but damn do they stink and are a bitch to wipe clean. That’s why I have a bidet.”

  I turn to frown at him. “That’s not even funny, Frank.”

  He crosses his arms in challenge. “I’d like to hear you do better!”

  “Why are you dressed like you just got out of prison?”

  “That’s not a mama joke.” His hands drop to his hips to rest on the pumpkin-colored swish pants. I point to his clothes. “Oh,” he titters softly. “It’s a new workout outfit. Lariza gets back today, so I’m heading to the gym after this!”

  I roll my eyes and then inspiration strikes. “Frank, I need to ask you something kind of serious.” He frowns at me but remains silent. “I think I need to talk to someone.”

  He leans close to me and whispers, “What the fuck do you think we’re doing right now?”

  Despite my gloomy mood, I giggle half heartedly. “No, I mean…like…a therapist. I have so many questions that I need someone to tell me the answers to.”

  “Oh fuck me, I’ve got ten therapists on speed dial, Oxford. I thought this was something serious.” He throws his narrow arm around my back and leads me back inside the club.

  A few days later, I’m sitting on a cushy loveseat, staring at what looks like a teenager. Frank vouched for this doctor, but upon meeting him, I’m not so sure. He looks like Doogie Howser and Mario Lopez had a love child and that love child was entering his junior year in high school.

  I’m extra grouchy because ever since the fight with my mom outside Club Taint, I’ve been reaching out to Liam. Shockingly, he was the first one I wanted to talk to. Aside from my parents, he’s the only other person I’ve been able to open up to about being a quad and the feelings that I have pertaining to my sisters. Sisters that I don’t even know. I’ve internalized and dealt with my emotions by myself for so long that to reach out to someone was huge for me. So, for my texts and calls to go completely unanswered feels devastating.

  “You do realize you’ve been here for ten minutes and still haven’t said a word, right?” Doogie says with a Spanish lilt to his voice. He told me to call him Miguel, but Doogie suits him.

  I eye him speculatively. Frank said this therapist helped him after his parents moved out of the Brixton house. He told me that being gay in high society London wasn’t the happiest of news to his parents and he turned into a bit of a wild child for several years after their less than kind reaction. I could tell that Frank was minimizing something huge and made a mental note to ask him more about it in the future. Frank and I have become really close since my shower re-boot, but I don’t want to push my nose where it doesn’t belong. I only hope that I’m able to return the tremendous favor he’s given me someday. Even obnoxious gingers have demons to fight.

  “You have to tell me how old you are,” I say flatly.

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “When I asked Frank for a referral, I was expecting a white haired Santa-looking type.” Two dimples form in his cheeks as he fails to conceal a smile. His grin reveals a much needed flaw: One of his front teeth is longer than the other. Thank God. Otherwise he’s just too damn hot to be a shrink.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he says in response.

  I sigh petulantly and cross my arms over my chest. I glance around at the stark white painted walls. It would feel rather clinical in here had it not been for the lush, earth tone furniture and accents peppered throughout the office. The room has a sandalwood scent that you know is completely manufactured because where the hell do you ever actually smell sandalwood anyway? I’m sitting in a cream loveseat and he’s situated straight across from me in a brown leather arm chair.

  “You know, Reyna…This will go a lot faster if you start by telling me why you are here.”

  Very well, then. Might as well dive right in. “My best friend, Hayden, tried to kill himself last week. He’s in a treatment facility and hasn’t called or texted or even asked about me. He’s even made a point of telling his sister not to tell me anything about his progress in there or where he’s having treatment.”

  “Well, most facilities don’t allow outside calls. If he has seen his sister or spoken to her, it is likely the family is involved in group therapy sessions.”

  “Why couldn’t I be involved in a group session?”

  “Why do you think you should be?”

  I pull my lip into my mouth and chew away the red matte coloring that I applied this morning. “I think I’m the reason he’s in there.”

  Miguel’s eyebrows rise in encouragement rather than wonder. “Why is that?”

  Rolling my eyes, I lean forward and pin him with a serious scowl. “Look, I’m not a special person, alright? I’m not trying to turn this into something about me. That’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to get answers about my friend. But you need to know how he got to this point and I think that had something to do with me. I have an uncanny way of shoving people away who only want to love me. I’m blunt and to the point. I’m just a loner. I feel better alone. When I let people get close, that’s when things get fucked up.”

  “How so?”

  I tell him the entire conversation Hayden and I had before he left my flat for the gala and then what Leslie walked in on. “What made him do that? I mean, I know things were bad between us and he was upset…but like, mentally, what made him do what he did the way he did it?” I swallow a painful knot that forms in my throat every time I think of Hayden’s method of choice.

  “Those are questions that he will work out in his own therapy. I’m more interested in why you think you are to blame. Why do you think things get ‘fucked up,’ as you say, when you let people get close to you?”

  I sigh heavily. “Look, I’m a somewhat educated person. I’ve done some Googling on what might be going on with me.”

  He half smiles, creating a dimple on just the one side. “And what do you believe is going on with you?”

  “Don’t give me that look, they were legit websites. I guess it all started with my mother, because none of the emotions I ever received from her felt real. They always felt like she was giving me what she should have given my sisters. Like, she bottled up all the love she had for the four of us and shoved it down my throat. It was too much.”

  “And, how old are your sisters?”

  “Dead,” I reply coldly, and then quickly stop myself to swallow down my bitchiness. I need to rein in my emotions. I don’t need to push this doctor away, too. “They died in the NICU a few months after we were born. My mother was barely twenty-four weeks pregnant, so we were crazy premature. It was bad. I was the lucky one of us four that survived. ‘The Miracle,’” I gesture with lame finger quotes.

  “So, you were a quadruplet? How does that make you feel?” he asks, frowning and scribbling into his notebook.

  I huff at that question. It’s so therapist and cliché, but it’s also so raw and vulnerable. How does me being a quad make me feel? “Well, I must feel something because these three roses represent my sisters,” I finally reply, gesturing to my collarbone exposed by my spaghetti strap tank top.

  “Would you say you feel a special connection to your sisters?”

  I purse my lips as soon as the NICU dream flashes in my mind’s eye. “As crazy as this sounds, I dream of them. Frequently.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Until recently, it’s sort of just these dark
orby feelings. Almost like we’re back in the womb and just sensing each other’s connection. I feel drawn to them in my dreams. Safe. Comforted. Like I know them implicitly.”

  He cocks his head to the side and replies, “You said ‘until recently.’ What happened recently?”

  Choosing to avoid eye contact, I look down and pick at the open frayed holes in my black jeans. “I’ve always had crazy vivid dreams, and I remember a lot of them, too. But most recently, I dreamt of when we were all in the NICU. My sisters and me. I could hear my mother arguing with the doctor, trying to save us. She’s a high-risk neonatal surgeon. She’s a genius in her profession so she had a lot to say about our care. Meanwhile, I could feel my sisters beside me in their own incubators. In my dream, I felt nervous and protective…but yet powerless because I was just a baby and I could feel them slipping away.”

  Miguel holds up a finger for me to pause as he writes something down in his notepad. “Your mother is a doctor you say?” he asks, his brow furrows as his writing turns frenzied.

  “Yes. Do I get to know what you’re writing?” I ask, my tone dripping with annoyance. I’ve seen doctors take notes on TV, but if there’s information about me in there, I want it.

  He glances up and offers me a kind smile. “Not always, but you can know this.” Clearing his throat, he moves to the edge of his seat, resting his muscular forearms on his knees. “I get the impression that you are hungry for information, Reyna, so I would like to digress for a moment and tell you about the philosophy of ‘ghosts.’”

  “Ghosts?” I balk, unable to hold back my incredulous stare. Fucking Frank set me up with a quack.

  “Try to bear with me. There are some psychologists who do not believe in the presence of ‘ghosts.’ However, ghosts do not only pertain to spirits. Rather, ghosts can refer to our past dictating our future. This kind of thinking has an origin with Freud and psychoanalysis. But, I have seen numerous powerful examples in my career that I am a full believer. Knowing our own behaviors and where they come from or why we act the way we do is not an exact science. We are all just guessing based on decades of the research and experience. Going back to your friend, Hayden, or anyone who has experienced a horrible tragedy—there could be several reasons for him attempting to take his own life. It could be a genetic pre-disposition he has or the result of a tragic experience that could have led him there. This is an example of the past dictating our future and actions. Coming back to you and the way you say you can feel your sisters…have you considered the possibility of residual memories?”