Ghost Writer (Raven Maxim Book 1) (28 page)

“I have my suspicions, but why didn’t you just go ahead and tell her, Emerald?” He shrugged as he held onto his cigarette. “Sometimes we just have to be honest, just as we said before, right? It might upset someone, but that’s too bad. Besides, that’s Sugar’s problem, not Nikki’s and not yours.”

“All of that is true, but it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Why? You could just say, ‘Sugar, Nikki is gay. Pass the potatoes.’”

That drew a smile from her.

“Because I didn’t want her calling my child and harassing her, Sloan. She’d have her crooked minister on three-way, talking about she needed a demon exorcised from her soul or some mess like that. They’d try to make her say all sorts of prayers and then, before I know it, she’d be mailing me articles about clinics that can take the homosexuality out of someone.” She gritted her teeth and shook her head. “My daughter is
not
confused.”

“I agree with you completely. Michelle’s best friend is gay,” he said. “Her name is Andrea and I’ve known her practically her entire life. She and my daughter have been close since they were little kids and when she came out, I don’t believe too many people were surprised. We accepted her as a member of our family, before and after. She was the exact same person, so why would we treat her differently?”

She smiled across the table at the man, pleased to hear his stance on the issue.

“That’s good, because they need a good support system and with my daughter being Black, female
and
gay, well… there were going to be even
more
challenges along the way it seems. I won’t even get into what has happened to her in the army because of it.”

The man’s lips drooped and his brows furrowed. “I can only imagine.” He shook his head, clearly disappointed in words unshared.

“We’ve bumped heads as of late because she thought I was ashamed of her.” She sighed. “No, it wasn’t that. I was trying to protect her, Sloan. She just doesn’t get it. I have no reason to want to hide my child or any part of who she is. I just know I’d go to prison if someone hurt her… but she… she just doesn’t get it.” She blinked a few budding tears away as the emotions threatened to wash her face clean. “She thinks because she’s strong, everyone else should be. What Nikki doesn’t understand is that she can be strong because some of us are in the background fightin’ so she is able to stand tall.”

Sloan nodded, admiration and understanding in his eyes.

“Let’s switch gears. This conversation is exhausting me.”

“Hmmm, I definitely don’t want you to grow tired from anything we discuss.”

She looked at him for a spell, certain that a sexual innuendo lay somewhere in between there, or at least she hoped so… “You had mentioned your father a few times in some of our other conversations, and again you brought him up tonight. Can you tell me more about your parents? I’m curious.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath, crossed his arms over his chest and drew quiet, as if trying to find the right words to begin his tale. “My father was very particular, Emerald. He was a perfectionist. That’s not necessarily bad within itself, but it became unmanageable. You see, nothing was ever good enough, and so I worked very hard for his approval, which I seldom received.”

Emerald nodded in understanding, not the least bit surprised by Sloan’s confessions. A man like him didn’t become so tough overnight; that took
years
of molding.

“Everything I did I worked very hard at, even now, and it’s because of that. He was old fashioned, hypocritical. I guess we all are in some regard. Like, I tell my son all the time not to do certain things, you know? He’s grown, but I still tell him… And I did those things, too.” He placed his cigarette down in the ashtray.

“Like what?” She enjoyed probing the man’s mind, finding out what lay just below surface.

“Like telling him not to smoke weed, but I smoked it practically all through college. I told ’im not to run around with a bunch of women as it would only lead to trouble like unwanted pregnancies and diseases, but I’d done the same thing before I met his mother. In this whole honesty business and getting to know one another, I cannot tell you how many women I’d slept with before meeting my ex-wife, and I’m not proud of that, Emerald. You and I discussed this sort of thing previously, our sexual history, yadda, yadda, yadda.” She nodded. “It upsets me actually that I was being so reckless at his age, but there’s nothin’ I can do about it.” He scratched at the corner of his eyebrow and continued. “I can tell you how many after my divorce, because the number is so small.”

“You stated it was two when we spoke of our sexual conquests on the phone.”

He chuckled. “Glad to see you’re paying attention, but before that… forget about it!”

“Literally.”

They both burst out laughing until he drew serious once again.

“I blame some of that on the wild parties I used to throw before I got married, but anyway, I’m a hypocrite and my kids know it. It makes me feel like shit, quite honestly.” He huffed and hugged his chest again.

“As parents we can use our own mistakes to try and help our children not make the same ones, but it rarely ends up that way. They look at us like, ‘Oh, you had your fun and now you don’t want me to have any.’”

“Exactly.”

“I love Nikki so much, Sloan, and there is no doubt in my mind that you love your children, too. It’s obvious because I asked you about your own parents, but you turned it on yourself, and thought about you as a parent instead.” She placed her fork down onto her place. The zesty, rich flavors of the lasagna lingered in her throat long after she’d enjoyed the final bite. She didn’t mind; the meal had been delicious, but the memories this discussion awakened weren’t. Some were bittersweet, others laced in emotional poison. “Sorry for the interruption. I’d asked you a question then jumped in.” She smiled sheepishly.

He waved her off and resituated himself in his seat. Grabbing his cigarette, he gave it a final puff then smashed it in the ashtray, relinquishing himself of the thing.

“Nah, no problem… it’s called a discussion, not a lecture.” He winked at her, and she winked back. “Any more questions for me? I kinda like this… being interviewed by you.” He grinned seductively and she quickly looked away as a wave of lust overcame her. After a moment or two, she turned back towards him.

“Well… I haven’t heard you mention your mother yet. Is she deceased, too?”

“I don’t know, but my guess is yes.”

Her chest tightened at his answer. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

He shrugged. “I mean just what I said. I honestly don’t know. My mother left my father when I was about four years old.”

Emerald’s mind swarmed with questions, the pressure of them digging into her skull as her heart and mind had lightning fast meetings. The similarities between them were uncanny. Sloan was no longer just boyfriend material; he was so much more… kindred spirit, indeed.

“Do you know why?” she asked, taking a meager swallow of wine.

“I have some idea. She wasn’t a drug addict or anything like that. That’s what you usually hear, you know? Nah, that’s not what happened.” He scratched at the side of his mouth, a vacant look in his eyes, as if he’d removed himself from the pain and simply became a spectator to his own life. “My father said she left us for another man, but her mother, my grandmother, told me before she died that my father was emotionally and verbally abusive to my mother and it had nothin’ to do with another guy at all.” At that moment, a piece of the puzzle inside of her head slipped over and shoved itself into its rightful place in the equation. Their lives had in fact linked, the fabric familiar, stained in the same tears.

“I can’t believe this…” She tossed her napkin off her lap onto the table and shook her head, incredulous.

“What?”

“I told you tonight that I have abandonment issues because of my mother, but I didn’t tell you why. Sloan, my mother left my father and me, too.”

His eyes narrowed on her. He rocked back in his seat, over and over, as if not convinced, or simply trying to make sense of such an odd coincidence that she’d now confirmed. She began to enjoy trying to read his mind… what a perplexing playground it must’ve been.

“That is… that is strange.” Choppy laughter rolled out from his lips… lips she desired to draw close to and press her own against, feel the warmth and smoke all at once.

“It is!” She laughed nervously in return. “Of all the things to have in common, right?”

“Yeah, that’s wild, Emerald. So, what happened?” He seemed to settle down, the color returning to his cheeks.

“Well, she left my father because she was overwhelmed with being a wife and mother, from what she told me years later. It was nothing anyone did to her, per se. My father had told me the same thing—he didn’t embellish or talk bad about her, though I would’ve understood if he had.”

Sloan lowered his head, deep in thought. Before she could ask if he was okay, he looked back at her, pure sadness on his face.

“My little sister, Bea, had sickle cell. She was quite ill and I think my mother couldn’t take the pressure of that, either. She just wasn’t a strong person. Whenever something went wrong, she’d run. Soon after she left, my sister died. My father was never the same after that.”

“I’m sorry…” He reached back across the table, beckoned for her hand and held it tight.

“It’s all right… Bea was so young. So was I, but I still remember her. Anyway, my mother left her eldest child—my brother who she’d had from her first marriage—me, my sister, and my father…just up and gone one day. No one heard from her in years after she’d disappeared. I didn’t talk to my mother again until I was thirty-six. By then, she was very ill. She reached out to us, my brother and I, tracked us down, and I spent some time with her before she passed.” She drew quiet for a moment, drowning in memories. “You know what always perplexed me throughout this whole thing?”

“What?” He squeezed her hand.

“When I saw her for the first time after all those years, I thought I’d feel a certain way. Like, maybe… happy? Or possibly even angry, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“Sloan, I felt nothing at all.” Her shoulders fell limp as she shook her head, disappointed in herself all over again. “I surmised that’s how I’d look when I got older and kept it moving. I didn’t cry, didn’t get upset. I just reached out and hugged her like she was some child who’d dropped their candy on the ground. She was the one who ended up all undone, emotional. I didn’t feel nothin’ for her at all, and I think that’s what scared me the most. I questioned myself, asked myself, ‘What happened to me?’” She pointed at her chest.

“What can cause a woman to be abandoned by her mother, to not see or hear from her and then, when she does, not care about that at all? I consider myself to be a loving person, you know? A good person… I care, I give a damn. But this…” She lowered her head and shook it. “This was nothing like me. But it was all a lie, I guess. I cared so much that I didn’t want to acknowledge it at all. It was then that I realized I had abandonment issues, so I wanted to be the one to do the leaving if things ever looked like they were spiraling out of control—beat people to the punch, so to speak.

“I had never realized this until all those years later. The countless relationships I’d ended if the guy looked like he was going to start acting crazy. Beforehand, I always blamed it on other shit, but it was me, more times than not. I was running away, just like my mother… before it all went up in smoke. Once I saw I was doing that, I got a hold of the situation and stopped. I began to forge lasting friendships, talk them out and stay the course. It was like I had to completely retrain my brain to be what it was supposed to be like in the first place. I just don’t give up on people anymore… I can’t, because it was never supposed to be a part of my makeup in the first place.” She raised her head and met his gaze. “I looked at my mother, Sloan… and she was just…
there
. She might as well have been some stranger.”

“She was.” Sloan’s eyes reflected her image, broadcasting a view of her inner workings, which she’d never exposed in such a manner. “The woman you recalled was gone, Emerald. See,” he said, releasing her fingers and staring thoughtfully at his big hands. “The person you saw was the lady who gave birth to you. She didn’t
raise
you. Your father did; he did all the work.”

“You’re one hundred percent right.”

“You’d already mourned the loss of your mother. The anger, sadness—all of that happened during your childhood. You’d processed it for the most part, and moved on.” She nodded in agreement. “Moving on doesn’t make you heartless or a bad person, Emerald… it makes you smart. It makes you human. Self-preservation is within you, and that gives you stability. Holding on to that sort of pain is counterproductive. Anything we have,” he said, “anyone we love, then lose, whether we wanted to let them go or not, we gotta accept the truth about the situation first, then we have to feel all the emotions, the pain, the love, the confusion. We have to stand to the side of the issue, in front of it, behind it, below and above it. We’ve got to figure out what happened and be grateful for the experience, no matter how much it hurt. It’s a process.”

He picked up his lighter and twirled it about between nimble fingers. Around and around it went, captivating her while his deep, smooth voice coated the words, lulling her into a peace she grasped onto with both hands, never wishing to release.

“Like a grieving process,” she finally whispered, coming slightly out of the trance he’d put her in.

“It’s
exactly
like a grieving process.” He smiled ever so slightly.

“I think I felt quite a bit of guilt about that, all the same.”

“I can understand that.”

“I still feel protective of her, too, even after all of these years, for some reason. I think it’s because of the culpability, like me trying to make amends for not loving her the way a daughter should love a mother. It was a generic form of love, not sincere. The kind bred from obligation, but you’re right. You’re so right, Sloan. She wasn’t my mother, not in the sense she was supposed to be, but because family is important to me…” She ran her hand slowly across her chest, crumpling the fabric of her blouse along the way. “I just couldn’t be okay with my reaction. It’s bothered me, even after all this time. Made me think there was something sickening and ugly inside of me.”