Lovable Lawyer

by Karen Deen

“Ugh, I’m never going to hear the end of that, am I?”

  “It’s pretty funny.”

  “For you. But I’ll be honest, I do need the bathroom before the kids wake and Jack jumps on me. And, if you breathe one word to the boys of what I’m about to do, you will pay for it with all my man movies on repeat.”

  Lifting himself up and over the top of me to stand, he leaves me feeling so relaxed on the couch.

  “Oh Lex, I’m …” I don’t even get to finish.

  “Don’t you even say the word sorry. You have nothing to be sorry for. What we just shared was amazing, and it will just keep getting better. I promise. Now don’t move, this won’t take long, I can assure you. As soon as I close my eyes and replay what just happened, I’ll be back here snuggling with you in the afterglow. Looking like you do right now.” With that he is off towards the bathroom. I feel bad, but part of me is cheering that I got him so turned on that he needs to go and jerk off to relieve the ache, and that he is so kind that he never even contemplated asking me to do it.

  Lex is more than a gentleman; he is an extraordinary man. One I hope I can keep.

  “Mia, we really need to think about leaving,” I hear Lex’s gentle voice behind me.

  Sitting on the bed holding Kayla asleep in my arms, I’m trying to hold it together before I face Jack. I can’t let them see me crying. I need to give them the confidence to be here without me. I feel Lex’s hand on my shoulder trying to give me the support I need.

  I tell myself I can do this.

  For them I can do this.

  Standing up above her playpen, I kiss her on the cheek and place her down with her teddy that Lex gave her. Tucking her in snugly, she looks so peaceful. Turning into his arms, he hugs me, but I know I need to get out of here before I lose it. I can do that in the car.

  Walking into the living room, I find Jack coloring with Paige on some pictures she found on the internet.

  “Look, Mommy, Auntie Paige got me all these cars and trucks and planes and animals.” He is so excited, and I don’t want to change that. That’s how I want to remember his face while I’m gone.

  “I hope you said thank you. That’s very special.”

  “I did. I promise. If I keep in the lines, she said we can get the delivery man to go to McDonald’s and get a kids’ meal. She said they come with a toy. Like on the television.” His little voice is killing me. My love for him is like no other.

  “That sounds awesome, bud. Now come here and give me a quick hug before I go.” Jumping up, he is in my arms and hugging me tight. He has no idea how long it is until tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll be back before he even has time to think it’s been a long time.

  “Now you be the best big boy for Auntie Paige and Uncle Mason. Help them with Kayla, won’t you?”

  “I will. I’m the besterest big brother ever,” he proudly tells me.

  “Yes, you are, my beautiful boy, you certainly are.”

  Standing quickly, I’m ready to leave swiftly as Lex leans down and also gives Jack a hug then a high five. Whispering something in his ears that has Jack giggling and running back to keep coloring. Then taking my hand in his, we head to the elevator with Paige following.

  Turning to say goodbye to her, she grabs me and squishes me tightly.

  “I’m so proud of you, Mia. I promise I will take good care of them. I’ll protect them with my life.”

  “I know you will, otherwise I wouldn’t be walking out of here right now,” I say, trying to hold back my tears.

  “You stay safe and do what you need to for this part to be over with. Be strong and let Lex take care of you.” Now it’s Paige that’s teary too.

  “Don’t do that. You’ll start me off and I won’t stop,” I mumble as we give each other the last big squeeze.

  “Lex, we need to go.” My voice is weak, and he takes control. Feeling his arm around my waist, he guides me into the elevator.

  Watching those doors close is like knives stabbing into my chest. I fall against Lex as my legs feel weak. He does what he has been doing since the day I met him.

  He catches me.

  “I’ve got you, Mia, you can do this. Stay strong.” His voice washes over me with a calmness like it always does.

  Taking me to his car, we start on our journey. Not saying another word between us for around thirty minutes. He is so perceptive that he knows I just need space. To firstly settle my nerves and then to help clear my head of some of the fear.

  After a while I start to come out of the fog a little, then it dawns on me.

  “Where’s Ashton?” I want to take it back as soon as I say it. That shouldn’t have been the first words that came out my mouth.

  “He has been following us in his car ever since we left.” Lex just smiles at me and doesn’t seem mad at how rude I’ve been.

  My head swivels to look back and I see his big black SUV with the really dark tinted windows.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet. I’m so rude,” I say, looking back to the front.

  “Don’t be silly. You just need time to get over a pretty big thing you just did. We still have at least two hours in the car to torture each other with my dad jokes and you laughing hysterically at them.” He looks sideways at me with that warming smile.

  “Who said I’ll be laughing?”

  “And there she is, my sassy girl who hides from me at times. Welcome back.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.” I wonder what he thinks about my mood swings at the moment.

  “It is. Because behind that sass is a pure heart. So, I know no matter how sassy you get with me, it’s never in a nasty way, but in such a fun affectionate way.”

  “Not like her, the lawyer?” I question.

  “Yeah, I suppose you’re right there.” It’s like a bit of a lightbulb moment happened for him answering my question.

  “Before we get to the dad jokes, which I honestly can’t wait for, we have plenty of time. Do you want to tell me about Jacinta and your mom? I’m okay if you don’t. I never want to pry. I, of all people, know what it’s like to keep things deep inside.” I reach out with my hand to touch him on the arm and give him a reassuring squeeze to know I’m here for support.

  He goes quiet for a moment and then looks towards me again quickly and lets out a deep breath.

  “Plus, you telling me your problems takes my mind off mine.” Which is true, but I’m hoping it will help him to find the courage to tell me.

  “Yeah, you know what? This is probably the perfect time. I’m not good at sharing feelings. Actually, to be honest, I’ve never really done it. Not even with the boys. So here, in the car, you have me trapped. I can’t run from it when it gets hard. I don’t want to hide anything from you, so some of this will be hard to say to you. Embarrassing. But I just want you to know, the guy I’m about to tell you about is not the guy I am when I’m with you. You have shown me the man I want to be. The man I didn’t know was even possible in my world. Yet the person I’m becoming right now is someone I want to know more about and want you to get to know him too.” As he turns to look at me, I see for the first time since I’ve met Lex, an emotion that actually makes me fall for him even more.

  Vulnerability.

  LEX

  I’m not sure if I was ever going to find the right time do this, so Mia pushing me is taking that indecision away from me. The irony of it is that’s what I’ve been doing to her since I met her. Asking her to trust me with her deepest darkest secrets and to let me behind her walls. She is far braver at this shit than I am.

  “I already know that last man you’re talking about. He’s my Lex. The others don’t matter to me if they don’t matter to you anymore. I like to think of it like the spring. Where nature has shed its old skin and the new life is coming. I have to believe that there is a new life for all of us coming. Otherwise it’s too hard to get up and move forward every day if we aren’t moving towards something better. Let me help you shed that skin, Lex. You’ve pushed me to
finally let go of some of mine.”

  What have I done in life to deserve such a caring soul to be sitting here beside me? No one has ever asked me what I’m hiding. Yet she sees the real me when I don’t even know who he is?

  “For someone who has been through so much, you are so strong and know all the right things to say. You have such resilience, which I admire.” One of the things I want to help Mia work on is accepting that she is worthy of compliments. From what she’s told me, she has been told most of her life how hopeless she is that she finds it hard to believe any of the good stuff. That needs to change.

  “You know talking about me is avoiding the hard conversation, don’t you?” Mia starts to giggle a little at me.

  “See, you are way smarter than you give yourself credit for as well.”

  “Lex, start talking. We’ve been through this every time you try to talk emotional crap. Suck it up and get on with it.”

  “Wow, we can add bossy to that list too.” Laughing at her, she just smiles and waves her hand in circles to indicate I need to get on with it.

  “Okay, okay, little miss bossy pants. I get the hint.”

  “Good, now start talking. I’m all ears.”

  I drop my closest hand to hers because I want to hold on to it. To have it ground me. “I’ve told you some basic outlines of my life growing up, but not what it was really like. The relationship I have with my mother and father is not normal. Well, maybe in their world it is, but when I took my first steps out of the world of high society and old money, it became very clear how far from normal it was.” I know compared to what Mia has lived this is trivial, and I don’t want her to feel that I don’t know that. How the hell do I tell her that, though?

  “I know what I’m about to tell you won’t sound bad, and your childhood was so much harder than mine…” I don’t get to say anymore before she’s cutting me off.

  “Don’t do that! Your emotions are no less important than mine. Don’t put me up on some pedestal I don’t deserve. Please, Lex, I need an equal in my life. I’ve lived too long with an unequal level of self-worth. I won’t make that mistake again. It’s equality in everything or not at all. Do you understand!” Her voice is more forceful than I’ve seen her. She is fighting for what she wants in her new life, and I’m so fucking happy to hear it.

  “That’s a fair comment. You know you would make an excellent lawyer with your counter arguments.” I laugh at her screwing her nose up.

  “And I can see why you are good at your job because you are the king of changing the direction of a line of questioning.”

  “Touché, baby, touché!” I’m actually laughing hard, at a time where I thought this would be difficult.

  “We should have brought popcorn for this. By the time we’re finished we will have analyzed and debated the whole fucked-up life of Alexander Jefferson the third.” Trying to keep things light always helps.

  “Not if you don’t start talking, we won’t. Man, when you were a child at school, did they have trouble getting you to focus?” Mia is laughing at me now.

  “Yes, but that was more the friends who were sitting with me.” I smile and try to look all innocent which she sees right through.

  “Oh yeah, it’s always the friends fault.” She shifts herself in the seat until she is a little more side-on, so she has the perfect view to pin me with her glare.

  Releasing her hand and taking a drink of water from my bottle sitting between us, I know I need to stop joking and get on with it, but maybe not with such a serious undertone.

  “Alright, let’s do this.” Looking into those soft eyes, I know I can share anything with this woman and there is no judgment.

  “My parents apparently had trouble getting pregnant, so by the time I came along, I should have been a treasured little baby. Instead I just became the perfect pawn in my mother’s society ladder climbing. She needed to appear the perfect wife and mother, and our family a pillar of society. But behind the big wooden door of our home, that was so far from the truth.” Pausing to take a moment to organize my head, I know I’m treating this like an argument in court. But I can’t help it because that’s all I know how to do. I don’t know how to have a conversation about these sorts of hard emotions.

  “Once we would arrive home from wherever we had been, Mother would walk inside, leaving my father or the hired help to get me out of the car and settled. We never ate a meal together without other people in the house, and then I wasn’t allowed to speak unless directly asked a question. It was my Nanny Sue that I would run through the back door of the house to tell about my day at school, to show her the pictures I had drawn, or tell her about my marks on a test. All my mother cared about was the report she received from the school to tell her how I was performing and if my marks were still at the top of the class.”

  “I’m sad for that little boy, and I wish she understood what she was missing out on,” Mia says with the utmost compassion for my younger self.

  “Me too, but it was what I learned to expect. That and the other thing that I had drummed into my head from as young as my memory will go were the words: ‘You will live the life I tell you, that’s what good sons do. Your life will be as a lawyer and then move onto being the Chief Justice which will be the perfect point to move into politics.’ I look back now and realize she was brainwashing me. I grew up knowing no different. That’s what my life was to be, so I just accepted it and aimed to fulfill it. It wasn’t much different for most of my friends in middle school. I use the word friends loosely. They were the kids of the people my parents socialized with, who were also trying to keep their rank in the society ladder, by having their kids at the best school money could buy. So, we all had been pretty much told similar things of who we were expected to be when we grew up.

  “I accepted it was just what happened, until high school where I met the boys. That’s when my whole world opened up and it was the start of the friction between my mother and me.” Laughing a little, I can still see the look on her face the first time she met them. Which was in the principal’s office when we all got called in for being too disruptive in class. My mother was outraged, and I remember Gray’s mom and dad trying not to laugh and pretend to act serious. That was the first day I wished my parents were different.

  “Oh, dear I can imagine how that went down. Was Tate as cocky then as he is now?” Mia’s laughing with me at the thought of it.

  “He hasn’t changed one bit since the day I met him, and I love that about him. Which of course really pissed my mother off every time she would see us together. Not that they came to my house very often. Mother made sure they knew they weren’t welcome, and I was told bluntly how she hated my friends and that they weren’t the right friends for my image. I mean, who the fuck tells that to a thirteen-year-old boy. Friendship isn’t about your image, it’s so much more than anything so superficial.

  “Anyway, needless to say I ignored her, and we just always went to one of the other’s houses after school. Gray’s mom, Maxine, used to make such a big fuss at school in front of my mom about what a wonderful boy I was so that all the other mothers who loved Maxine – which was most of the school population to be honest—knew that we were friends and she approved. She was easy to love, especially compared to my mother. Then she sadly died unexpectedly, and the school community made a big fuss on how lovely it was that us boys were such a support for Gray. So Mother was stuck then and couldn’t say a word in public and had to give up on banning me from seeing them. I then spent so much time at his house that I started to learn what a good father should be. Even in all his grief, not one day went past that Gray and Bella didn’t know how much they were loved.”

  As much as I started trying to make this light with my humor, now I’m feeling the weight on my chest getting heavier.

  “I’m sure your mother loved you then and still loves you now in her own way,” Mia softly says.

  “To this very day my mother has never told me she loves me, and I’m starting to
believe that maybe she doesn’t. Perhaps she is incapable of love, I don’t know. But it’s unexplainable to me now after seeing you with Jack and Kayla how a mother can’t love her own child. Hell, I love your kids and they aren’t even mine.” Running my hand through my hair, I find myself at a complete loss, and the fact I just told her how much I’ve fallen for her kids too.

  “So why wasn’t I ever good enough for her to love, Mia? What is so wrong with me, that I’m not worthy of a mother’s love?”

  I sigh loudly. “I just wish I fucking knew, because I’m sure it would explain a lot of my life.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Lex. It’s not that you feel unworthy of your mother’s love. You are now at the point you believe you don’t deserve anyone’s love. Isn’t that the real statement you tell yourself every day?”

  I almost swerve the car off the side of the road. How the hell can she know that? I want to lie and deny it, but I vowed I’d never lie to her.

  “Every. Single. Fucking. Day,” I tell her the words from the bottom of my soul.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LEX

  “How do you know what’s in my soul before I do?” It’s like Mia’s reading my mind.

  “Because I live with that belief every day of my life too. And now I’ll never be able to change that with my mother gone. You have time, Lex, and hopefully one day you’ll get the answers you need too.” Taking in what she’s understanding, I finally see that though we’ve come from different backgrounds, we are the same. We both have craved our whole life for the love and acceptance of our mother.

  “I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I’ve been proven wrong before.” We drive for a few minutes without talking, Mia giving me the time to work out the next part of my conversation.

  “Perhaps that’s why I’ve lived my life the way I have. Not wanting to look for love because I don’t think I’m worthy of it. I don’t know, I’m just a guy. We’re not supposed to know this crap.”