Not Quite Juliet: A Club Imperial Novel (Silver Soul Book 1) (28 page)

I backed the car up to a turn around, then drove slowly down the road. He didn’t move or speak. He needed time to collect himself. Frankly, so did I. I aimed the car for the law school library, and drove us there slowly.

~*~*~

I
knocked. Even though he’d given me a key, I wasn’t sure he was ready for me to use it. And after the revelations of the day, I didn’t want to push. I waited to see if there was any movement in the house, but there was none.

There was a flash of headlights behind me, and I looked to see Nick pulling up. He was just getting home from the set, I guessed. He shut the car off and marched up to the porch. “Gave you a key for a reason, kitten.” His grin was blinding, but his eyes were tired.

“Yes, well,” I said. “I was waiting to see if you’d let me in.”

His grin slid off his face slowly, easily picking up on the double entendre. “I’ll be happy to let you in.” Nick slipped his key past me and pushed the door open. I stepped into the house and waited for him to close and lock the door.

“How was the show?” I touched his arm, mostly because I wanted to connect with him.

“It sucked.” He grabbed my hand. “I got through it, but it was one of the most lackluster performances I have ever done. Never again on this day.”

“I would’ve told you to cancel if I’d known sooner.” I put my hand on his shoulder, and brushed my fingers over the spot where I knew the tattoo was. “Talk to me? Tell me what happened?”

I could see him blinking in the darkness, the glow from the nightlight in the kitchen barely showing his eyes. He nodded. “Yes. Just, head upstairs. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Don’t be too long.” I trailed my hand down his arm and walked up the stairs.

It was easy to tell he was avoiding this whole conversation. Nick took a very long time in the kitchen, then the bathroom, but eventually he opened the door and walked out. He was wearing regular pajama bottoms, and even his hair looked nervous.

I threw the covers back and motioned him over. Nick walked around and climbed in. He settled against the headboard, and I settled again him. I let out a breath and looked at him. “I already know you have a secret identity. And I already know you have a serious ex behind you, named Casey. I’m okay with those things. You already know I was in the lifestyle for a while, and I have an ex-dom and a former sub. So unless one of us murdered someone, I don’t think there’s much that is going to drive me out of this bed tonight.”

“No slouch, Miss Kirkbride.” He ran a hand up and down my arm.

He was so nervous, I felt bad. It wasn’t that I wasn’t nervous, but apparently he really hadn’t had anyone else he’d had to tell these things to. “Nick, we can’t keep fucking our way through this relationship.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”

“Nicholas.”

“I’ve been shut up inside Nick D for three years, hiding from relationships,” he said. “Now I’ve got one I really like and I’ve got some explaining to do. And after you’ve been so brave, I want to tell you.” He paused and considered me. “This isn’t easy to talk about.”

He leaned forward and I could see the tattoo clearly. It wasn’t very big, and this was the first time I’d really been able to get a good look at it. It was a water drop, shaded just ever so lightly pink. There was the date encapsulated at the bottom of it, and there were wings on either side of the drop. The whole thing was no bigger than a credit card. I ran my finger over it, tracing the outline.

“The day my perfect world with Casey Lind was crushed into a billion pieces.”

Oh. Wow. I just trailed my fingers over the image he had stitched into his skin, waiting until he was ready to go on. He stayed where he was, but a moment later started speaking. “Casey and I met at an orientation at Rutgers. She was going into the music arts program with me. It was the best and easiest way for me to get in. I didn’t have great grades, but apparently everyone was enchanted with my piano. I wanted to learn chemistry. She was the only other person from Pittsburgh in my orientation group.

“We hit it off instantly and by the time we moved into the dorm, we were dating. She said by the time October came around, she knew I didn’t want to be in music and she encouraged and supported me as I rolled over into the sciences. I felt so much more at home in the chem department than I ever had in the stuffy classical department.

“I joined Despot Heroes, much to Casey’s chagrin. I still loved music, I just didn’t want to play classical for the rest of my life. And I could sing, and liked it. My voice coach didn’t want me in the band either. Tough shit. I wanted to sing in a rock band.

“Casey hated every minute of my being in that band. She hated the practices, she hated the shows. She hated the women who dripped all over me. I never had eyes for anyone but her, though. I don’t think she could ever fully believe me by the sound of the fights we had. I told her it was a lark for me, I didn’t want to make it big. I loved my chemistry, and I wanted to find a job doing chemically things.” He turned and looked at me. “I actually said that. Chemically things. I wanted a typical middle class life with all the wonderful trappings. Kids, house, mortgage. My parents made it look so awesome, and still do.” I could hear the love and pride in his parents, and it made me smile.

“I told you about the three nuts who broke in,” he continued. “And honestly, it wasn’t my safety that worried me. It was Casey’s. I worried about her getting hurt. So I made the decision after four years, to quit the band, move us into a secure building and just finish up what I needed to do at Rutgers. The day after graduation, we moved back to Pittsburgh.

“We stayed with my parents, while we both tried getting jobs. Casey got hers first- she had given up music and went into sales. She was booming with a pharma job almost immediately. And about two weeks later, I landed the job at Thrumon. We were perfect, and we decided to go right ahead and keep going with that perfection and buy a house.

“The day we closed on the house, I proposed to her on the front porch. She accepted, and then turned around and told me she was pregnant.”

A rush of air escaped him, as if he’d just run a marathon to get to that point. I lightly brushed my fingers over his neck, not saying anything, but thinking a million things. Nick had been engaged. His fiancée had been pregnant. Those were the pictures on the wall, the picture hidden on the mantle. His newborn babe.

He hesitated, then continued. “I was—we were deliriously happy we were going to have a baby. It was all we needed to make our perfection more real. I painted the nursery beige and pink when we found out it was a girl. We bought cute dresses and a crib and bows for her hair. A winter coat. Booties. There was a baby shower, where she got everything she needed to be a mother.”

“Then Ava came.” He gulped the air, and I realized he was trying not to let his tears fall. “And she was gone.” He swallowed hard, smacking at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Fucking hell. Three years—”

I knelt up and put my arm over his shoulder. He was trembling, and I didn’t have the words to make him stop. I simply held him. He sniffled and smashed his eyes a few more times. “You don’t have to go on.”

“I’m going to get this fucking story out of me.” His voice was nearly a growl. “Casey showing up was the end of me staying quiet about this.” He took a deep breath, and trembled again, then continued. “She was born with a severe heart defect. Her brain didn’t develop properly, she had no right lobe at all, and her medulla was severely underdeveloped. She had an enlarged liver that was too small. Get that one. Her liver was missing an entire lobe, but it was enlarged. We had the choice to put her on a respirator and keep her alive, with no quality of life, or let things happen as they would.

“I asked the doctor what letting things happened meant. He was straight with me: letting things happen meant she would probably die within hours. The respirator would only prolong her life for just so much time. She would need a heart transplant. She was going to have to go on a liver transplant list. And she wouldn’t be able to breathe on her own, ever.

“About thirty seconds after the words were out of his mouth, she started seizing. They managed to stop the seizure, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let this little life suffer. Casey looked at me with hate in that moment, and then one look at Ava in the incubator, jaundiced, sawing her breath in and out, and still twitching from the massive seizure changed her mind. As much as it was ripping our hearts out of our bodies, we had to let her go.

“We agreed to an autopsy, which seems perverse, but even losing my daughter I wanted to know what could be done to stop this. We buried her just four days after we welcomed her.

“I took all of Casey’s hate and anger on my shoulders. She screamed and yelled and ranted at me. She threw things. She pushed me away. She wouldn’t let go of me. She cried. She passed out from the overwhelming emotion. And I took all of it, because there were signs it was all genetic and she chose to blame me. I thought she’d come around and see it wasn’t just my genes that made Ava.

“What could have been worse than losing a daughter whose birth defects went completely unnoticed by any doctor? Finding out that every single one of her birth defects was due to fetal alcohol exposure. Fetal alcohol syndrome. My daughter’s blood alcohol level at birth was point-oh-3. She weighed six pounds and had a BAC like a one hundred pound man after eight drinks. Eight drinks. That’s death on an adult scale. Why was my daughter born drunk?”

He turned and looked at me, and there was anger, shame, hate, and disgust in his eyes. It took me back, but I didn’t move. “She was born drunk because her mother was an alcoholic. When they put the results of the autopsy in front of me that day, I knew instantly my whole life with Casey had been a lie.

“She was sitting on the couch when I got home and I didn’t approach this with thought or care. I came straight out and demanded to know where she was hiding her booze. Casey looked confused, and wanted to know why I was yelling at her. I threw the folder on her lap and told her I knew she was a drunk. She looked at me, and the tears started pouring out of her. Casey admitted she was an alcoholic and she didn’t know how to stop. I made her show me where she stored the drinks.”

Nick slouched back in the bed. “Deep in the basement, as it turned out, she’d found a wonderful niche. No one could see into it unless you knew where to look for it. She piled some light boxes in front of it, and when I pulled them away there were seven handles of vodka. I looked at her, shocked, disgusted, speechless. All of it.

“When we got down to it, she’d been drinking since she was sixteen. The way all alcoholics start, with a few beers each night. By the time Casey met me, she was up to a few shots of vodka a day. Just before the pregnancy, she was drinking a handle a day. One point seven-five liters of vodka. I had no idea because she’d learned to hide it all with me. The purchases, the consumption, the reek of booze. She was an expert at hiding it. She tried to stop the instant she realized she was pregnant, and couldn’t. All of the ultrasound pictures she brought me were off the internet. All the information she used was falsified. The doctors had told her the baby was sick, and she opted to never share that with me. She made up an elaborate lie, hoping they were all wrong.

“Casey knew Ava was going to die. She knew it. And she hid it because she didn’t want me to find out she was an alcoholic.”

Nick grabbed my hand and ran his thumb over my knuckles. “I kicked her out. I made her leave. I didn’t know this woman who lied to me. Who withheld vital information to the survival of our daughter. Who faked being healthy and normal when she was anything but. I called her parents and I could hear the defeat in their voices as well. She’d been through rehab, years ago. They thought it had stuck with her.

“I had them come pick her up. I might not have wanted her in my house, but I wasn’t such a bastard to just toss her out. When they came to get her, I left. I let them take anything they wanted, everything that was hers. Deborah called me later and said Casey had wanted to take everything and smash what was left. They put her in the car, but even that didn’t help much. They’d had to have her committed.

“I was staying away from her, but when she was released I called her parents. The first place she went after her release was the liquor store. I touched base with them a few times after that, but she never got any better. She blamed me for everything, including her drinking now.

“I hadn’t laid an eye on her until the other night. Three years, not a peep and she shows up asking for rent money.” He looked at me. “You understand why I threw the money at her?”

“You were caught off guard.” I nodded. “There was no hint this woman was going to walk back into your life after all this time, and especially so close to Ava’s birthday.”

He nodded. “I was having enough trouble with it, and to have her walk in and dump fuel on the fire...”

“There was a year. A year of emotional solitude. A year of ‘why is everyone still moving along, like there’s a life to be lived?’ A year of retching. A year of feeling nothing. The year passed. I still bottle it and save it for privacy, mostly. But the year passed. Then, one day, I noticed that the sun was shining. I had noticed it before, but this time—it didn’t make me angry.

“I still have the tattoo on my soul. I always will. But now, sometimes I’m allowed to not be angry, and have a life. I do both: I grieve and I also enjoy life. I’m glad I’m still alive, because as long as I’m alive, she will
always
make a difference in the world—in my world. It’s been four years. I’m still here, and I’m not lying most of the time when I say I’m okay. The pain never leaves. But eventually, the other feelings came back.”

I put my hand on his cheek and turned him to look at me. “Thank you. Thank you for telling me. Thank you for letting me in. I know this isn’t easy, but I’m glad I know now.” I pressed a kissed to his forehead. “Let’s get some rest and we can talk more in the morning. You’re exhausted.”

“Are you upset?”

“About what? You mourning your daughter? Your ex-fiancée? Not hardly, my good doctor. I have baggage. You have baggage. Now we can store it in the attic and forget it’s there. We’ll pop out to Macy’s and buy new when we need it.”