Chapter Nineteen
~ Belle ~
My cell buzzed and vibrated against my leg and I fished it out of my pocket, vaguely recognizing the number on the screen. This number had called me so many times over the past couple of months, and each time I dreaded answering it. The voice on the other end was a stranger wearing a cotton candy smile, telling me all the things that I wanted to hear and yet knew weren’t true—no matter how much I wanted them to be.
I sighed and hit the accept button, putting it to my ear. “Hello?”
A robotic voice spoke on the other end. “An inmate from Emanuel Women’s Facility is trying to contact you. Will you accept the charges?”
“I’ll accept,” I replied numbly.
Mom. If she could really be called that.
My heart sagged right along with my shoulders.
“Sweetheart!” her overly happy voice filtered out of the earpiece, carving another piece out of my already damaged heart. “It’s me, your mama.”
As usual, whenever she said those words, my skin crawled and my stomach tumbled over and over like I was going to be sick.
“Hey,” I replied sullenly.
I could hear shouting and arguing in the background, the familiar chatter of women, and doors opening and closing, but she raised her voice to speak over them. “I’ll be ready to leave here in a couple of hours. Don’t be late to pick me up, okay? I want to get as far away from here as quickly as I can. Do you have everything ready for me?”
Staring down at my feet, I felt the familiar sense of longing and dread roll into one. I wasn’t stupid; I knew that this was all fake. I knew she was using me. But my heart wanted it to be real so much that I was willing to put myself through the misery anyway.
“Yeah, everything’s ready.”
She squealed loudly down the phone. “I can’t wait to see you! My little girl, all grown up! I bet you’re beautiful and successful. You know you get that from me, right? Your daddy was a good-for-nothing bum who couldn’t hold down a job, but I was destined for great things!”
My daddy.
Yeah, I’d wondered about him too, but I hadn’t dared ask her who he was, yet. Who my daddy was was the greatest mystery of them all. She hadn’t told anyone and his name had been left blank on the birth certificate. I was determined to find out though. I wanted to know my roots—who I was, where my blood came from. Even if he was as big a disappointment as she promised he was.
“So, if you can pick me up at four and then maybe tomorrow we can head down to my old storage unit to pick up some of my stuff. You remembered to get the tequila, right? Your mama loves tequila, and I deserve it after the hell I’ve been through in here!” She was babbling, conversing with herself rather than me. It was the one thing I’d realized pretty quickly about the woman that had birthed and abandoned me: she loved the sound of her own voice more than anyone else’s.
“Yes, that’s fine. I’ll be there,” I replied, feeling numb, feeling lost, feeling scared, but mostly feeling like a little girl adrift in the ocean with no one to save her.
“All right then, well, I’ll see you soon, sweetheart.” And with that, she hung up.
I sat down on the edge of my bed. The bed that she’d been sleeping in tonight. In the room that she’d be filling with her things. In the trailer that I called home. It was hard to believe that it was finally happening now. That she was almost here. I’d seen a couple of photographs of her through the years, but I’d never met her. Never seen her, or touched her hair. Never been able to smell her perfume or hear her voice in person. In all the years since she’d abandoned me, I’d never heard from her, not once. Yet every birthday I’d waited by the mailbox hoping that a card would come from her. At my graduation I still prayed that she would come to see me. At every special occasion in my life I had hoped she would show some compassion—some love for me—and come to see me. To meet me, and maybe tell me she loved me. But she never had. And now she was going to be here, under my roof, eating my food and sleeping in my bed because she needed me.
And I realized, with absolute clarity, that for the first time since I could remember thinking of her…I really really didn’t actually want her here. She didn’t know me and she didn’t really want to know me, and that was okay by me. If I let her into my heart, I’d be letting her break it forever, and I had to stop that from happening. It was the only thing left that I could control.
They say curiosity killed the cat, and that’s what I felt like now: a cat that was curious about who she really was and where she came from, but the thing was, I already knew that. My mother wasn’t a part of me. Sure, I’d come from her; her flesh and bones and her DNA, but a person was so much more than that. They were the good in their hearts, the sadness in their souls, the intelligence in their heads, and I already knew that part about myself.
Jenna had raised me with every ounce of good in the world. She’d filled me to the brim with love and laughter, with the brains to do whatever I wanted in life.
I suddenly realized why Jenna was so upset with me, and it wasn’t because I wanted to meet my mom. It was because she thought that she hadn’t been enough—that she hadn’t given me enough, when we both knew that she had given me everything.
I leaned over and put my head in my hands, pressing my palms into my eyes sockets to stem the tears. I’d cried so many times over my mother’s absence through the years and I swore she wouldn’t get any more of my tears, yet there I was, terrified of her rejection still, seeking her approval and trying not to cry.
How many times was I going to let other people hurt me before I said enough?
Beast was moving around on the other side of the door; I could hear his heavy footsteps walking around, the creak and groan of my trailer floor. And I hated that too. Beast and my mom were going to be living in my house. My home. Two mafia men were going to come in and try to kill me. My boyfriend was a narcissistic jerk. A motorcycle club was using me as bait. I had quit my job—a job I had trained really hard for and worked toward my entire life but didn’t really want.
How had this become my life?
I’d ruined everything.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that Jenna and I weren’t talking. That she hated me, and I had hurt her.
I had to fix this. I had to fix everything before it was too late.
Standing up, I pulled out some clothes to change into. The ones I’d been wearing held the scent of Beast, and even though I found it strangely comforting, I wanted him off of me. I opened my closet, seeing the box with all the cash inside of it that I’d been paid while looking after Beast, and hoped that I got to put it to good use someday.
Pulling out a dusty blue summer dress with thin spaghetti straps, I stripped quickly, kicking my underwear off and putting on clean ones. Fully dressed, I looked at my face in the mirror, seeing how puffy it was from all the crying I’d been doing. I hated crying, but who could blame me?
I had almost been killed today… I let that settle into my soul for a moment before staring into my own eyes and seeing the sadness there. Beast had intended to kill me this morning. We’d made love last night and I’d given him my heart…and he’d rejected me. He’d practically begged Shooter to let him put a bullet in my head, and all for what? Because I’d been a traitor to the club? He hadn’t even let me explain. I shook my head, the sadness mingling with regret.