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I turned in my chair and did something I had been aching to do since I first laid eyes on the man who'd been half way responsible for my being born. I reached out to him. So as not to spook him, I didn't touch his face, but his arm instead. I laid my hand upon the fabric of the black trench coat he wore, resting it gently on his forearm, almost hovering, barely touching.
His entire body visibly stiffened, and he turned those brutal eyes on me.
"What are you doing?" He asked in a careful voice.
"The only person responsible for Vivian's death is Vivian," I said in a shaky voice. It wasn't the words I was speaking that left my voice shaky, but the man I was touching who did it. I couldn't believe after all this time that he was actually sitting here before me, and that I could reach out and physically touch him, he was that close to me. It seemed surreal, yet here we were, and I had my hand on his arm; he felt very real to me in that moment.
"If you need someone else to blame, then I suggest you blame me because, if not for me, none of the others would have been there, put in that position to defend me against the only mother I ever knew. It's not their fault she's dead. Please, don't hold it against them."
Rain leaned into me in what I was sure looked like a threatening manner to the others, because I heard more than one chair scrape against the floor as they were pushed back so the guys could stand.
I removed my hand from his arm and swallowed thickly. The look in his eyes nearly brought me to tears. How they could go from empty to damn near bursting in the blink of an eye was an incredible mystery to me.
"She was not your mother," he whispered fiercely.
"I do not remember anyone before her," I whispered back just as fiercely.
He nodded, once, briskly. And, that too, looked painful.
"That may be so," he agreed. "You were very young when you were taken from us, but, I assure you, she was very real at one time, and she loved you more than anything on this earth."
The words came out low and dark, clogged with gravel, and sounded like they'd been ripped from his throat painfully. His eyes shined with an unholy light that held the promise of nightmarish things and, this time, it was him who reached out for me.
In a blur of speed I was incapable of tracking with my eyes, his large hand moved towards my face, only slowing when it reached my skin. He traced his thumb across the scar on my cheek and his burning eyes followed in its wake.
"I cannot give you back your mother," he whispered. "But I can give you back as much of her as I have left."
"What does that mean?" I asked in a hushed voice. I wanted to tell him I'd take anything he wanted to give me, just so long as he never left me again.
"Photographs, stories, jewelry, her journal," he said. "Anything that I have of hers is now yours whenever you are ready to receive it. She wrote to you in her journal, from the moment she found out she was pregnant and going to be a mother, she started writing letters to her child. There are videos as well, if you want to see them."
I wanted everything he had to give me. Every word she'd ever written, I wanted to read. I wanted to watch every home-made video that he had with her in it, and I would likely watch them more than once, until I had every aspect of her face and mannerisms memorized. I wanted it all. And, inside my chest, my heart squeezed in painful regret for all that I had lost at the actions of a crazy, jealous psychopath.
"I'd like that," I croaked.
"Not tonight," Quinton said.
Rain and I moved back away from each other quickly, and we both turned sharply to glare at him. He'd interrupted our moment, and I was unhappy with him. I wanted to hear more about my mother and the happy family that I had once been a part of, but now remembered nothing about.
Quinton held up his hands with his palms out facing us in surrender, as if to say he meant us no harm, and was trying for innocent. Normally, Quinton would fail spectacularly at looking innocent because he was just so far from the sentiment that it was downright laughable to think of him as such. I didn't laugh at him or call his gesture of innocence as ridiculous as I would have thought it to be. His eyes held such a look of raw, tender love that my breath caught in my throat and tears stung my eyes.
Did Quinton love me? I couldn't be entirely sure, but I thought the look in his eyes meant that yes, he most certainly did love me.
"Baby," he said in a quiet, sweet voice that I'd only ever heard him use with me before. "Rain doesn't have those things on his person right now. He'd have to go and get them or take you to wherever they are and, right now, you're in no position to be running off anywhere on any sort of adventure. You need to take a shower and get the blood out of your hair. Dash might have been able to get a good deal of it out with the washcloth but there's still some there, stuck to your scalp and very visible due to your hair color. It's also crusted to the back of your neck and probably further on down your back, too. Which means it's probably stuck your clothes to your skin in places back there. You'll need to shower to wash it all off, it's not the kind of mess you can clean off with a rag in the sink. And, that bump you've got on your head is pretty serious. Christ, you were wobbling around on your feet not moments ago, and let’s not forget the fact you blacked out in the back yard after hitting your head. What you need is rest and food. You can run off with your dad tomorrow, just so long as you come back, that is. But tonight, I'd feel better if you showered, ate something, then laid down and took it easy. I'm not saying you need to sleep, but the guys got you a tv for your room, so if you don't want to watch something downstairs with the rest of us maybe you can lay down and watch something in your room. Either way, I'd like for you to take it easy for the rest of the night."
I scowled at him, already forgetting the tender look of love he'd given me just moments before. Rain was here, and I had been waiting for this moment. Like hell I'd just lay down and go to bed like the good girl he wanted me to be. He had to be joking, right?
He wasn't joking.
I started to argue with him but stopped when Rain jumped in as the voice of reason and won me over.
"Baby girl," he said in a voice that was almost as sweet as Quinton's had been, but was deeper and full of gravel. "He's right. You lost a lot of blood, and it makes me sick to my stomach to see it still clinging to parts of your head. A shower will do you some good, and it will make this old man feel a whole lot better. As long as I'm looking at you and seeing the blood on your hair like that, I'm going to be worrying about you keeling over again. Shit, girl, when you went down like that I damn near had a heart attack. It almost killed me to think I'd finally got you back just to have to watch you hurt yourself and bleed all over the place."
I almost argued with him that it hadn't been my fault I'd been injured and bleeding, but his fault becausehe'dscared the bejeezus outme,but he was being very sweet, and it would make me not so sweet at all to have pointed that out to him and the others.
“You shower, and we can talk after.”
It sounded so reasonable that I agreed to do what he’d suggested, and I didn’t even argue with him once.
