The Way Home (Lights of Peril)

by Unknown

  I see her walk to him with purpose and finally non-moving Hem catches sight of her, but it’s too late. One swift hit to the back of his head sends Sylvie flying.

  Sylvie regains her composure then matches stares with Mace as Mace gets into Hem’s ass. “Hem, what the fuck are you doing? Do you let garbage hang on you now? You never did before.” Hem has no reaction, but he’s looking directly at me. I can’t move, I’m just waiting for something else to happen, hoping someone comes out of the closet with a video camera and the crowd shouts ;Gotcha!’”

  “Hem, do you fuckin’ hear me?” Hem breaks his stare and looks to Mace, then Sylvie.

  I need to go to Mace. She needs backup with this scary-ass bitch. Shame is nowhere to be found and everyone else is so wrapped up in party play, they aren’t paying attention to what is happening in the middle of the room.

  “Yes, I hear you, Mace. Fuckin’ India can hear you. Lower your voice. Jesus, the shrill of your voice cuts my ears.”

  Mace says nothing but gives another look to Sylvie who finally sees me arrive and stand next to Mace.

  “Look Hem, it’s your ex.” She’s sneering at me.

  It dawns on me too late that she and Hem could have been an item while he was gone.

  “Did you know Hem and I lived together while he was vacationing from you, the boring little girl? He used to talk to me about you. How fragile you are and things you did as a kid to get his attention. He always spoke of your immaturity.”

  My chest hurts. Hem has given me shit my whole life about always being overly sensitive. Surely he didn’t talk of me like that to her. She’s not done hurting me, though. I can see it on her face. I send a quick look to Mace who has now disappeared. I feel alone in this now, with only Hem, who to me, is guilty and I want no part of him.

  Hem gets up from his chair and blocks our view of each other. His face is just inches from mine and he can see how harsh she is to me, but he’s so calm. “Sugar, go upstairs and let me handle this, okay?”

  She interrupts him as he’s attempting to calm me. “He used to touch me, too… my face and hair. He would ask me to hold him sometimes, so he could sleep. My favorite mornings were when he would walk around without his shirt. Those pecs are hard to the touch, but easy to admire across the breakfast table. Don’t you find it ironic that I held Hem’s body all these months while you held Ace’s heart? Makes us even… you agree?”

  Now she’s pissed him off. Telling someone’s secrets will piss anyone off. “Shut up, Sylvie. You’re a whore. Find your husband and get gone.” He towers over her and she smirks at him. Damn, she is fearless.

  It doesn’t matter if I agree with all she said or not. My chest hurts. I haven’t said a word to her, I have nothing to say. I can hear small chaos erupting behind me and when I turn to look, I see Mace and Shame coming my way and Shame has his hand wrapped around Ace’s neck from the back. Ace is red faced and fuming, but not struggling with Shame’s grasp.

  “Get rid of your fuckin’ cunt.” I have never heard that word from Shame’s mouth, not even in jest or in reference, to that part of a woman’s anatomy. The fact he’s actually calling Ace’s wife that makes it obvious to those standing around that Shame is one massive pissed off brother.

  “Sylvie, enough. Let’s go. I told you not to start your shit here, damn it. Let’s go.”

  Sylvie looks at Hem, who is looking at me, and then her eyes follow his. I’ve got tears coming down my face. Hem hasn’t denied any of this. What if it’s all true?

  “It isn’t, Sadey. It’s not true.”

  I’m so out of sorts…I must have said some of my thoughts out loud. Shame is looking at me with his gentleness, still towering over Ace and Sylvie. “Sadey, you know better. Get a grip. Apparently, part of everyone getting their shit together is taking out the fuckin’ trash. Ace get her out of here. She’s not welcome. She comes within three hundred feet of Sadey again and I promise you, I will handle her and it won’t be easy.”

  “Sylvie, let’s go.” I have felt sorry for Ace before because of this person, but pity doesn’t begin cover how I feel for him now. No one deserves that wretch.

  With that, they are gone. With that, my heart is broken.

  No one says anything to me for a few seconds. I’m being given an opportunity to regain myself. Taking note of who is here, I see no one is missing. They have all come to my side to fight that vicious dragon. There stands Hem though. He looks broken, lost, and further, he looks guilty. It’s the latter that I’m most concerned with. Shame doesn’t leave me to rattle in my fear long before spouting at me.

  “Sadey, go with him upstairs and take his ass to bed. He’s done acting like a fuckin’ idiot for tonight. Celebration is over. Fuck, Hem.” Shame is disgusted with Hem. It’s a rare emotion that Shame feels towards Hem, but it’s evident and not something Shame is going to attempt to hide.

  “What? Why do I have be any part of this? You want someone who gives a shit about him, you should have asked that tramp to stay.” I say this to Shame, while keeping my eyes locked to an empty and emotionless Hem.

  “Why the fuck do I need anyone’s help? She’s a whore and her words mean nothing. Why are we still talking about her?” Hem’s voice bellows off the walls, but no one pays attention to him, rather they watch Shame and I go toe to toe. It’s a sure bet I will lose, but it’s worth going through the motions to get rid of my anger.

  Shame disregards Hem’s comment, his anger pointed now at me. “I’m not asking. Did you hear me ask you to do this, Sadey? No? ’cause I didn’t. Get him up to his room…make sure he doesn’t fuckin’ come back down here. I suspect we have not heard the last of that bitch tonight so you are to stay up the fuckin’ stairs. Don’t care if you choose to sleep in my room tonight or with your man, but you are to stay put.”

  After his final word, he turns away taking Mace’s hand in his and leaves the room. Mace never looks back at me, but I’m standing around waiting for anyone else to help.

  No one dares to challenge Shame’s instructions, so I’m alone.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You know I don't love anyone but you. You shouldn't mind because someone else loved me.”

  -Ernest Hemingway

  My defiant attitude doesn’t sway the entire time I’m sitting in Hem’s room waiting for him to talk about what the hell just happened. He takes his clothes off, then rolls himself under the covers. I can’t help cracking a small smile regarding that Hem and I didn’t hesitate to get comfortable in Crickets bed just a handful of hours earlier.

  “Sadey girl, she was lying. I never fucked her. I didn’t. I never did. I swear and you have to believe me.” I don’t speak in hopes he’ll just stop talking. “You listening to me?” Nope. I stay still, not giving anything away. “Of course you’re not. You don’t want me anymore.” His words are not only full of contempt for me, but they are heart breaking.

  “Hem, how about you shut the fuck up and just go to sleep.” He reaches for me in frustration at my phrasing, but I back away and he removes his jeans the rest of the way, leaving him in his boxers.

  What he says next is so true and emotional I have no choice but to go with him down memory lane. With our lives having always been so entwined, it’s an easy and safe road to walk down together.

  “Do you remember when you were a kid, you must have been about eight or so, and I was already part of Peril, living with Doc and the boys. Your bus would drop you off a ways down the street from where our houses were.

  “All the other kids were so excited to get home after a long school day. Once everyone got home to change clothes and had a snack, they knew it was playtime in the neighborhood.”

  He pauses for a second, remembering how things were before Mace and I grew up and made his life more difficult. “Not my baby, though. Every day I would walk to that bus stop at the same time to see you sitting on that tree stump waiting by the Jensen’s mailbox wanting for me to walk you home. You said you were scared that the neighborho
od three-legged homeless cat was going to bite you if you were all alone, remember? It was that big, black fucker that used to catch mice in the sewers and carry them around the neighborhood. You remember him?”

  My throat is closed. I do remember that time in our lives…vividly. I was still growing up, but already I loved him with all I had in me. I didn’t know how to handle those feelings, so instead of trying to figure out what to do with them, I tried to surround myself in Hem and his safety and gentleness.

  “Yes Hem, I remember that goddamn cat. He would have eaten me. You don’t know that he wouldn’t have.”

  I hear him exhale a small chuckle. “Sadey, you talked so damn much on those walks home, you liked to have never shut up. If I had the weight of the world sitting on my chest, I was able to let it go for twenty minutes each school day because you would take me from my world of dark and share your light with me. God, you and Mace thought of me like I was a fuckin’ hero. I never wanted to fail you, sugar. It was only a matter of time that I did though and here I am failing you now. Your hero is losing the battle for your heart. I’m fuckin’ miserable.”

  “Hem stop. You always took care of things for me. You loved me. You, Mace, and Shame never held back your love. I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t love you all my life.”

  He corrects himself on the bed, now he’s sitting up with his back against the headboard, his arms open. Without words he’s asking me to come to him, but I’m sitting on the floor giving us enough space to talk openly to each other in this dark room. It’s best if we aren’t looking at each other right now, for me anyway.

  He drops his arms in defeat, accepting my need for space.

  “Sadey, I need to say a few things and it is important to me that you listen. I’m not talking about just hearing what I’m saying, but please listen with your heart. Can you give me that?”

  “Yes.”

  When Hem speaks from his heart, it isn’t something I would ever not want to miss. Moments like these are when that big heart inside of him carries his soul into mine and I fasten it to memory.

  “I left you. I’m so fuckin’ sorry I left you. I would do it again, though. I know that hurts you, but I wouldn’t hesitate. I didn’t want to just go away, Sadey…wasn’t my plan. My plan was to die, keeping you and my family safe. I knew Warren wasn’t lying when he told me that if he died that night, he would finish my life in another way. Taking you and my son away from me, that would have finished my life. I was going to be dead one way or another, so I chose for you and Patrick to live free of my darkness, surviving in your light.”

  “Hem…”

  God, his words are hurting me. He’s telling in spoken verse that he wanted to die for me. If I’m honest with myself, I would have made the same decision. If given the choice to die and allow my son and his father to live free, I would have done the same for them.

  “No baby, please. You have angrily told me again and again how you felt about me being gone and just ‘leaving’ you. Honey, did you ever think about what it was like for me?

  “You had a grave marker to go to. When you felt sad, happy, or just missed me, you could visit and then leave ‘me’ there dead and buried. To you I wasn’t moving on.

  “While I was with Ace in Cali, I used to wake up each morning to that one question that plagued my heart and haunted my mind. The question I would ask, out loud, to God every day, ‘was this the day?’

  “’Was this the day’ my best friend and love of my life found someone else to take my place? Would this man love my son, the way I need him to love my son, if I can’t make it back to them soon?

  “Some mornings, if my thoughts weren’t clouded in hangover, I would think positive. I would ask myself ‘is today the day that Hood finds that fuckin’ hire and I get to walk into my girl’s house again and tell her how I’ve missed her and how I can’t breathe or sleep without her near me.’ Sadey, it was fuckin’ torture not knowing what you were doing or where you were every day. You got to visit a grave, baby. All I got to do was pray on chance that you remembered me, how much I loved you, and you still felt me with you.”

  He hears me let out a loud cry. My arms are around my knees, pulled up to my chest, and my face is buried in them. His words have struck me. I finally get it. He’s right.

  In my world, Hem was in the ground, never moving forward with anyone else. He had to sit and wonder if someone here was taking his place. I survived his death. I’m not sure I could have survived his living and moving on without me. That’s my answer. I can’t live without him. I don’t want that to even be a choice. The problem with my certain love for him is that there is also a new doubt that lingers.

  “Hem?” I move my head up to look at him the best I can in the dark. I want to gauge his reaction; to be sure he understands what I’m asking.

  “Yeah, girl, I’m here.” From what I can see through the darkness, his head is bent and he’s looking at his hands, clutched in front of him on his lap.

  “If I were to kiss you goodbye right now, and never come back, but you didn’t know I wasn’t coming back, how would you move on the next day?”

  He’s on his feet and rounding the bed, coming right at me as I sit motionless on the floor. Once reaching me, he’s on his knees, grabbing my shoulders, and we are eye to eye. “Don’t say that to me. Don’t tell me goodbye. Sadey, I am going to give you everything I have. I am enough for you. I will be your enough. Do not leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you right now, but how will I ever know you won’t leave me again?”

  There’s not an answer he could give me right now that I could believe, but it’s all I can ask him, so he can gain a sense of how raw things are for me.

  “Sadey, how can I ask your forgiveness for doing what I did, when I did it to you, then turn around and ask your permission, knowing I would do it again?”

  He’s getting annoyed. His tone is changing and he’s starting to talk to me like he did when I was seven, to get me to shut my shit down and stop whining.

  “I’m confused, Hem. That’s all. I’m confused.”

  He stands from me and walks to his window, keeping his back to me still sitting on the floor. He’s angry as he looks out into the night. His hands are on his hips, but his stance is strong. He’s preparing to battle. He’s going to use his hurt as a shield.

  In a voiced laced with ire he lets out his frustration, “Confused about what? What the hell is there to be confused about? Fuck, be confused about the weather then. Be confused about the fact that Mace can say one hundred words in less than a fuckin’ minute, but still have said nothing. Don’t be fuckin’ confused about you and I spending our lives together, in peace, giving each other everything we need. Fuck, giving ourselves everything we need.”

  “I don’t know how to process…” His anger continues as I try to speak, so I’m cutoff again.

  “God damn, you’ve known me for-fucking-ever. In that time, whatever gave you the impression that my life is filled with rainbows and horseshoes? If that’s what you believe, then it isn’t the real me you know. You’re still that scared kid inside, looking for love outside the walls of your teenage bedroom. You’ve grown into nothing more than that girl that wrote me a love letter when she was just a kid.”

  Now it’s on.

  I move to stand up, wiping my face and walk to him. I hit his chest with both heals of my palms and he moves back with my force. “’Kid?’ Hem, this ‘kid’ buried you. This ‘kid’ took a child to full term, carried and protected him through the trauma of losing you. This ‘kid’ delivered and loved him, knowing she was alone in doing so. Worst of all, I went to your ‘grave’ and told you goodbye in attempts to get my shit together and be a better mom and a friend. So, fuck you, Hem.”

  We are standing in front of the window, eye to eye in challenge. He lets a heavy exhale and nods in defeat. “Sadey, you can’t keep bringing this shit up as if I don’t know it happened. Fuck, we can’t get past this, can we?”

  Now I
look to him in defeat. He’s said the words my heart has been fearing to release since he came home. We aren’t the same people anymore. I have forgiveness for him in me somewhere, but he may never forgive me for doubting his decision.

  I’ve been battling this out with Hem for as long as I can. My mind is racing with ‘what if’ scenarios and it’s driving me mad. I head downstairs to get that drink that Shame so angrily had prohibited. Hem doesn’t follow me, thank fuck for that. He can surely see I have had enough for one night.

  Most likely I’m about to put a nice dent in Shame’s tequila stock. Come at me Shame, ‘cause this is gonna happen and I don’t care if I have to drink it in the damn bathroom. I’m going downstairs to get it.

  Looking at the clock I see it’s already two-thirty in the morning. I had no idea it was so late or early. Whatever…where’s the Jose Quervo?

  I’m assuming I’m alone down here as I pillage through the cabinets around the bar. I have assumed wrong, of course. I hear Hood’s voice behind me and know I’m busted, but again, I need the drink.

  “Can I get one of whatever you’re having?”

  “Sure thing, Hoodie.” I smile at myself, calling him Hoodie. I’m sure he won’t appreciate that, but when I turn around and see his smile, I’m glad he’s here.

  “Nice, Sadey. Like I’ve never been called that before?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. It suits you. What are you doin’ down here anyway? Can’t sleep? Hem’s upstairs right now, not sleeping as well. Rather, he’s trying to find words to keep me the emotional basket case that I am.”

  “I hate the night. Always something waiting in the shadow. That’s my experience, anyway. Know what I mean?”

  “I don’t, but let me trust you on that.”

  “Don’t be so hard on your man. He’s been through a lot.”

  “We all have been through a lot.” I mutter as I pour the tequila in the shot glasses that I’ve set on the bar in front of him.