A Kiss of Color: The Complete 3 Book Collection (24 page)

When they were together, he reveled in making her forget where she had come from, and all she’d been told she couldn’t do – just as she believed that his parents were monumental idiots for not seeing his potential. Now that they were apart, he found himself struggling through routines that used to be mindless. It seemed like Helena’s scent, her clothes, her possessions were everywhere, and he couldn’t escape.

He wanted to box up some of her things – to purify the space – but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Even knowing that she had gotten rid of the child they’d created wasn’t enough to make him give her up.

Or, at least, the memory of her.

He clung to it like it was his lifeline, refusing to let go of the good times that had carried them through the last five years. While Xavier knew, in reality, that he should be letting it fade – along with the pain of their unborn child – he simply couldn’t pluck Helena from his mind like that.

She was far too deeply entrenched for that.

Instead, he tried to busy his time with distractions. Even when he was forced to be at home, he called into the office and asked to be let in on every detail about the current merger. He took apart and rebuilt his own home computer with modifications several times before he tired of seeing the same parts over and over. He spoke on the phone with Brandy until she was tired of hearing the sound of his voice and demanded that he go out and find something to do with himself.

He watched enough mindless reruns on TV to make him want to destroy the damned thing, and read until literature practically flowed from his ears.

And yet, nothing helped. No matter what he did, Xavier couldn’t get over the all-encompassing notion that he’d failed, horribly. He’d failed Helena, for not being able to carry her through how she felt about having her own family; and he’d failed himself, for lacking the wherewithal to realize that some things just couldn’t be fixed.

He was contemplating exactly how one came to terms with such weighty issues when he received an unexpected Skype summons from the desktop he knew far too intimately for his own good. Xavier immediately unfolded his long form from the sofa and stalked across the room to answer it.

He was pleasantly surprised to be confronted with his youngest sibling’s face in the window as she waved to him cheerily. The background behind her, he realized, must be her apartment in New York. It was obvious that their parents had spared no expense on it – but he had been in that particular situation himself.

It was a relief to know, at least, that the young woman genuinely loved what she did – and thusly wasn’t only in New York on their parents whim.

“Emily!” Xavier smiled for perhaps the first time in days, taking a seat in the chair in front of the desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The blonde smiled back at him. She was clad in a lovely black dress and wore the slightest bit of makeup, so he assumed that she’d done a show that day. Brandy had told him that the young woman had started on the series of performances that would carry her into the fall. ‘I’m just checking on you.”

As lovely as Emily’s welcoming smile had been, it quickly turned into a frown as she got a good look at him, her blue eyes roaming his visage critically. “I’m checking in on you, Xavier. Brandy said you haven’t been doing too well.”

At the statement, the programmer scowled deeply. He’d hoped that reforging his relationship with his youngest sibling would be done with only the more positive aspects of himself. It was just his luck that Emily would walk back into his life when it began to fall apart. “Brandy,” He asserted firmly, “Is a worry wart. I’m perfectly fine.”

“Well, you certainly don’t look fine.” He winced at the younger woman’s bluntness. Never would he have thought he would be reprimanded by a twenty three year old about his love life. “You look like crap. When was the last time you got a full night’s sleep? Or ate something that wasn’t Chinese takeout?”

Xavier growled lowly. How the hell could she have been apart from him so long and still know him so well? Brandy was probably feeding her tales of all is misadventures. “I’m…handling things.”

“Are you? Have you tried talking to Helena yet?”

That was a particularly sore subject. Brandy had, several times, tried to get him to call the dark-skinned woman in an attempt to talk about what had happened between them. Xavier wouldn’t deny that he’d been tempted, several times. When Brandy bought it up, it sounded like the most logical thing in the world. They’d simply had a small misunderstanding. They needed to speak to one another to straighten things out.

If only things were that simple.

“Emily, Helena doesn’t want to talk to me.” He shook his head slowly. “She made her decision…and I don’t know if I can come to terms with what she’s done. She knew…she knows how important family is to me. And for her to have made an arbitrary decision like that without even talking to me...that’s not something I expected from her. Not after all we’ve been through together.”

Emily merely sighed, running a hand through her blond waves. “So…communication is now just…not even an option.”

“I
might
like to point out,” Xavier returned with a slight edge to his voice, “That she hasn’t exactly tried to contact me either.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s pretty sure you hate her. You told her she was just like her mother.” That particular reminder was like a punch in his gut. Xavier groaned, drawing a hand down over his face at the memory.

That had been harsh of him. Perhaps a little too harsh. He recognized that he’d been angry – and in that anger, perhaps he’d said a few things he really didn’t mean. But how the hell was he supposed to take them back now? “Emily, not like I don’t appreciate your advice, but I don’t know if things between Helena and I are salvageable. Maybe we…we just weren’t meant to be together in the first place. We tried.”

Emily appeared on the cusp of saying something more. She opened her mouth briefly before closing it. When she next spoke, her topic had nothing to do with his and Helena’s relationship.

“Mom and Dad want to see you.”

For a moment, Xavier was too shocked to say anything. His parents had barely spoken a word to him since he’d graduated and Helena had lent him the money to start his company. He knew that they resented the fact that he hadn’t kept to the path they’d set for him –that they didn’t approve of Helena and didn’t really cater to anyone outside of their carefully constructed world. To be honest, he would have gone through the remainder of his life completely content to have never heard from them again.

Or, so he thought.

For some reason, the idea of facing his parents now made him inexplicably nervous. He’d tried to tell himself his entire life that he didn’t care what his parents thought of him. He’d made the ultimate decision to disregard them when he’d chosen to move from the Northeast to California to pursue his dreams – to speak to them now…when he was particularly vulnerable…

He didn’t know how open he was to that.

“Emily, right now isn’t the best time.”

“Isn’t it?” The young woman rebutted almost immediately. “I know you haven’t always had the best relationship with our parents, but wouldn’t right now be the best time to repair that? Or, at least, try?”

She sounded so desperately earnest that she actually gave him pause. Though Xavier knew that he and Brandy had their share of rather difficult experiences with their parents, Emily seemed to have an entirely different outlook. What did she know that they didn’t? Was it in any way possible that his parents had softened in their parenting methods with their last child?

“Emily, I understand what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it, but if Mom and Dad want me to admit I was wrong and come sniveling back, that’s not going to happen. I have a company to run.”

“Jesus, Xavier, that’s not what I’m asking.” The younger woman’s smile was exasperated and indulgent at the same time. “They just want to talk to you. You haven’t even seen them for years. And knowing you, nothing they have to say about their disapproval is going to turn you into a law-abiding mama’s boy.”

She spoke with a bluntness that was almost startling, really. Xavier had to remind himself that his little sister had grown up…that this was some new brand of tough love she’d taught herself. He sighed, shaking his head as he contemplated.

He was in the middle of a merger. There was no way he could return to the east coast right this moment. He had too much on his plate, and deep down, the idea of facing his parents in person at this juncture was more than a little but intimidating.

But the prospect of speaking to them on the level for perhaps the first time in his entire life? The idea that something might have changed in the years of silence between them? That was an interesting prospect.

If he could make any progress at all, it might help with the way he was currently feeling. That would be, as Brandy called it, “constructive”.

“Well, I can’t come back home now. I have too much on my plate at the moment.” He hesitated, his mind working furiously. Was he really going to do this? Let his parents back in during one of the most vulnerable periods in his life? “But if Mom and Dad want to talk…I wouldn’t be opposed to a phone call or a Skype session. Just let me know when the best time to set it up is.”

Emily’s smile was bright and immediate, beaming at him across three thousand miles of cyber space. “
Really
? You’d think about it?”

At her obvious happiness, he couldn’t help but share a wide grin of his own. “I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”

The blonde girl gave him the thumbs up, laughing softly. “Well, I guess you’re not as thick-headed as I imagined.”

He smirked at her assumption. “I’ve grown more level-headed over the years. Don’t let Brandy fill your head with tales of my shortcomings.” His sister rolled her eyes, shaking her head.

“You act like she has to
tell
me about them. We may not have seen each other for a few years, Xavier, but I still know you. I’ll always know my big brother.”

Her words softened his heart and for a brief moment, drove away the emptiness that had once been filled by the woman he loved. He could do this, Xavier realized. He could try and rebuilt his relationship with his family…and try to come to terms with what had driven Helena and he apart.

And if he was lucky, perhaps he could win her back.

***

“Well, there he is.”

Utterly transfixed, Helena stared at the image that popped up on the ultrasound screen before her. Encased in a little bubble of light, amidst the darkness that was her growing belly, was her five month old fetus. “He?” The words came out in a low, awe-filled tone. As many times as she’d told herself that she didn’t want this baby – that she wasn’t ready to be a mother and that she would ruin her children – her first sight of the life pulsing inside her brought tears to her eyes.

Helena had put off this first ultrasound until almost two months past the usual time. Throughout those eight weeks, she’d had regular checkups with Doctor Forge to declare her baby healthy and growing, but a large part of her had been scared. Scared that if she actually saw the child, she might fall in love with it on the spot.

And Helena didn’t know if she was ready for that.

Somehow, over the past few weeks, as hormones raced through her and her body started to change in alarming ways, she’d managed to keep herself together. Going back to work at Susan’s office had helped, as she once again had long work hours to occupy her days. Then, there were her classes, which she had four nights a week. Every Saturday morning, she had surgery trials as well, and she found that, as time went on, she became more and more engrossed in her work.

To see herself overcoming the squeamishness that had once threatened to keep her from her dreams made her feel elated – no small trick when she was reminded of the man she’d lost every time she looked down at her swelling belly. Helena was trying to associate her baby with new beginnings – with a way that she could start over again. Build a new concept of how she felt about family and herself

Those attempts, to say the least, didn’t bear much fruit.

At least, not until she laid eyes on the small, curled up little figure on the monitor before her.

In that particular moment, the fear, and anxiety-arousing love that she’d so obsessed about in the past months did indeed flood in. But, the emotional deluge did not, in fact, overwhelm Helena as she’d thought it would. Instead, the warmth that took up residence within her was almost enough to fill the void left behind by the lover she pined for almost every waking moment.

“Yes, he.” Dr. Forge smiled down at her. “It’s a boy.”

A boy.

She was going to have Xavier’s son.

Despite all that had happened between then, Helena had to try hard to repress tears of joy. After so much sadness, dejection, and uncertainty, she’d finally been given something beautiful.

“He’s gorgeous.” She breathed, unable to tear her eyes away from the image before her. With a congratulatory smile, Susan proceeded to show her the child’s head, hands, and feet.

He was so tiny…so unbelievably breathtaking…Helena felt all of her apprehension melting away. She knew that she hadn’t had the best childhood – and that she might not be the best mother, but for her son, she was willing to try.

Later on that afternoon, Helena was still riding the high from her ultrasound. Even a few misbehaved children couldn’t dampen her mood. She supposed that, in the grand scheme of things, she was doing as well as could be expected. She’d found her own apartment and gotten settled in, she was still well on her way to earning her MD, and she was just beginning to work up the courage to perhaps call a moving service to get some of her things from Xavier’s house.

According to Brandy, things were pretty much as she’d left them. Xavier hadn’t tossed all of her things into an incinerator or given them away. They were still sitting around the house. He was just too busy – or, the elder woman hinted, too heart-broken to get rid of them.