HADES Page 3
“My beauty…wow. I’m beginning to see why I got so serious about improving my high school French.”
She laughs in a delighted way that makes parallel timelines play out in his head. What would it have been like to date her like a normal guy? To have married her and raised a family with her as Nanan Cherise had wanted.
“Did I call you mon beau?” she asks with a hopeful tone.
“Non, you never called me that,” he admits, struggling to keep the conflicting thoughts off his face.
He must not have done a great job of it.
Her smile fades and she asks, seemingly out of the blue, “My mom’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” he answers, fully in English. “How did you know?”
She just looks away and asks, “And my father too?”
The painful knot forms in his throat again as all her forgotten memories flash through his head. He can’t talk. Still can’t speak that man’s name out loud. So he simply nods.
And she blinks a few times before saying, “I think I must have known that. I don’t feel upset or shocked. Just a little sad.”
Just a little sad….A silent movie of all the events that ruined their happy ending unspools in his head. “Hades, don’t. Please, don’t. If you truly love me, don’t do this.”
“Did my mother die before or after we became a thing?”
Her question pauses the terrible movie mid-frame.
“We were a thing the moment our eyes met,” he snarls. “You were mine from the start, even if I had to wait…”
He breaks off. Remembering the situation. Remembering himself.
“You dropped out of college to be with me. But she didn’t know about us before she died if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay, I get it.” She gives him a chagrinned smile. “I wasn’t able to resist you when you showed back up in my life. But I also wasn’t able to disappoint my mom. That tracks. You must have hated me for being such a coward.”
“I…I could never hate you. Even when I wanted to—badly. Your father, though…”
Now. Now is the time to tell her. To fully confess the entire story. But the words won’t come.
He imagined their parallel timeline so often on the road to ruining any chance at a relationship they might have. But he’s never gotten a chance to actually experience it. And the way she’s looking at him—her expression open and gentle, her eyes wide with trust—it’s addictive. Better than heroin, even.
“Is that why we moved to Ohio?” she asks into all his torn silence. “To get away from my father because he disapproved of our relationship? I know he would’ve made life harder for us in Louisiana.”
One of the doctors—the neurologist—enters before Hades can answer.
It’s a good news, bad news situation.
The good news is that Persy’s amnesia looks to be purely retrograde and severely isolated, which means she won’t have to relearn basic physical functions as many patients with traumatic brain injuries and memory loss have to do.
Also, she appears to be having no trouble forming new long-term memories, and her mood and temperament are presenting as steady, which means she’s managing her emotions just fine.
”I’d go as far as to say great, even, considering the situation,” the doctor tells them.
The bad news: Her many scans were somewhat inconclusive, so they’re having trouble determining if her retrograde amnesia is neurogenic, psychogenic, or a mix of both.
In laymen’s terms, they can’t say for sure if her memory loss is here to stay or temporary.
“We’re leaning toward temporary, given all the other positive factors,” the doctor tells them in reassuring tones. “We’ll keep you overnight for further observation, but since you didn’t sustain any other major injuries, the best thing might be for you to go home with your husband and reinstate your normal routine.”
To his surprise, Persy eagerly nods along with the suggestion.
“Yes, home.” She speaks to the medical professional but gazes up at Hades. As if he is the only thing that matters in the universe. Her one and only sun. “I want to go home with you.”
Home…
He could deny her nothing, but he also had to tell her.
If not the full truth, some version of it.
“Give us the room,” he commands the doctor as if he were a minion, not a highly trained, world-class trauma neurologist.
But the VIP suite comes with certain perks, or maybe the doctor can tell how dangerous Hades truly is underneath the suit he’s wearing. After assuring them a nurse will come back later to talk with them about follow-up care, he quickly departs the room.
“You asked how we ended up in Ohio,” he says when it’s just Persy and him.
“Yes, I did ask that,” she agrees, proving the doctor’s point about her still being able to form new memories. “Why Ohio?”
She wrinkles her nose, letting him know she wouldn’t have opted for this particular Midwestern state if she’d had a choice.
The real answer was that she’d chosen Ohio because she didn’t think he’d be able to find her here. But out loud he answers, “You have an aunt here named Tess. After your father died, I think you assumed she’d be a good caretaker for your little sister.”
“Daphne—oh gosh, how old is she now?” She lifts her eyes to the ceiling to do more of the mental calculations the neuropsychologist was so impressed to see her do earlier and concludes, “Fifteen! I can’t believe I missed so much….”
She lowers her eyes back down on that regretful note. “Was I visiting her when I had my accident?”
“Not exactly. We were…” A partial version of the truth unfurls. “We were officially together for about four years. But after your father died, we got into some big kind of fight. It was all my fault. I took you for granted, and I didn’t treat you as well as I should have. So, you left me and moved to Ohio. Eventually, I came to my senses, and I followed you up here. I was hoping we could work things out, that I could be the husband you deserved.”
This doesn’t even touch the surface of their tumultuous relationship story. Yet, it feels like he’s never said anything truer in his life than when he tells her, “You got hit by a car before I could prove myself to you again. And now you don’t remember me, and it’s too late.”
“We were estranged?” She shakes her head, confusion etched across her face. “For how long?”
The number clogs his throat, and he has to choke it out. “Three years.”
“Three years?” She juts her chin forward, her eyes widening with shock. “Are you serious? Did I find out you were cheating or something? I mean, did you get another woman pregnant?”
“I could never cheat on you—not after you gave me your virginity.” This isn’t an honorable declaration, but a basic truth. How many times had he tried after the first time they had sex? And in the months after she ran away?
He’d barely been able to bring himself to flirt with another woman after that fateful night—much less touch one in the way he only wanted to touch Persy from that moment on.
Still, he had to give her some kind of explanation she’d understand. “We disagreed about how I handled a delicate situation. You wanted me to do one thing, and I chose to do another. I should have listened to you, and I paid the price when you left me.”
In some ways, she is lucky—at least temporarily. All the painful memories she’s lost rise like shadows inside of him, excoriating him like a whip.
“You don’t have to come home with me,” he tells her as the memories lash him. “Your Aunt Tess and your sister—they live in a two-bedroom apartment. But I’m sure they’d be more than happy to have you stay with them for as long as it takes for you to regain your memories. In fact, if you want a bigger place with a room of your own, I’ll get it for the three of you.”
> No, he isn’t giving her the full truth. But he is giving her something he never has before: a choice. “Anything….I’ll do or get you anything you desire.”
He gives her a choice, and he takes her hand again. One last touch when she isn’t repelled by him, just in case he never gets the chance again.
Then he says, “Tell me….just tell me what you wish to do.”
CHAPTER 3
TESS
“Can I? Can I kiss you?”
Tess blinked. Hard. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re dreaming, right?
And she had to be dreaming. There was no way—no way in H.E.-double hockey sticks—that Benjamin Brady Keane, the tall and fine athletic god from Boston, was seriously asking for permission to kiss her.
She was a chubby and mere Black mortal from…well, that was complicated. Whenever anyone at her high school bothered to ask, she had to tell them the long story of how she’d been born on a mission trip in Angola and had lived in some of the poorest nations all over the world before convincing her mother to settle back down in Ohio, the state her family originally hailed from, so she could finish up her high school education in the U.S.A. and hopefully land a college scholarship.
It was a somewhat confusing and complicated story. She hadn’t gotten many follow-up questions. Or managed to make many friends who were as dedicated to service as she was.
Not until Benjamin walked into her mother’s trailer office at the Ohio Valley site for God’s Works Youth Missions.
The area had flooded earlier in the year, wiping out a slew of homes. He’d come to Ohio—along with a host of teenagers on a special God’s Work mission trip—to help fix, and in some cases completely rebuild, the homes people had lost in the flood.
She’d worked enough of these summer missions to know that most of the high schoolers were here for stories to include in their college admission packages. Those kids weren’t so bad. At least they worked hard to earn their end-of-summer letters of recommendation.
But then there were the other high schoolers, like Benjamin’s jerk of a friend, Donovan, who’d been bemoaning being made to come here all summer.
His parents actually thought eight weeks of hard labor under the Ohio sun would somehow magically fix everything wrong with the entitled brat they’d made with their sixteen years of indulgence. And unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one. Donovan’s cabin was filled with guys who spent more time comparing their abs and biceps than actually working.
Benjamin lived in Donovan’s cabin, but he wasn’t anything like his friends. He didn’t need to build character or content for his college applications. He’d come to the mission with character already installed and guaranteed admission to any Division 1 university with a hockey program.
Not only was Benjamin beyond fine—with wavy black hair, friendly blue eyes, and the kind of strong, square jaw comic artists like to draw on superheroes—but he was also a truly good guy. He’d been helping her cover for her alcoholic mother all summer without revealing to Tess that he knew the real reason she was so overworked.
Not until that day, the magical Fourth of July when he confessed everything: that he had an alcoholic parent too, that he wasn’t helping her out of pure generosity.
“I’ve been wanting to kiss you all summer….I like you. I really like you,” he’d told her.
Then he’d asked if he could kiss her.
So, yeah, this definitely, definitely had to be a dream. There was simply no other explanation.
Even if she wasn’t waking up after many eye blinks.
But if it really was a dream, what was the harm in saying yes? Of indulging herself for once in her life of service?
In the end, she consented to being kissed for the first time ever with a simple nod.
A huge smile broke out across Benjamin’s way-too-handsome-for-her face. “Yes?”
“Yes. Yes, you can kiss me,” she confirmed, whispering the words.
Because if this really was the dream she suspected it was, she didn’t want to wake herself up.
She wasn’t intimate with the phrase “too good to be true” back then, but soon she’d swallow down that bitter pill of a lesson.
And she’d remember the terrible taste for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER 4
BENJAMIN
“Yes.” She raised her big brown eyes to his and whispered, “Yes, you can kiss me.”
Benjamin’s heart stopped beating, and his ears filled up with fireworks that had nothing to do with it being the Fourth of July.
He’d secretly pined for this girl since the moment they’d met on the first day of his God’s Work mission trip. He’d told her more about his personal life than anyone, including his so-called best friends on the hockey team, one of which was here on the mission with him. He’d fallen for her even though with braids, dark brown skin, and a lot of extra padding, she looked nothing like the puck bunnies back in Boston. He loved the way she looked, though, and he’d taken the chance of telling her how he really felt.
And lo and behold, this girl…
She liked him too!
He’d made the decision to spend this eight-week break working with a Christian-based mission to rebuild homes in the Ohio Valley purely out of desperation. It had been the one alternative he could come up with quickly to spending the entire summer with his father, who liked to start throwing punches when he was drunk—which was almost always these days.
These weeks were simply supposed to be a holding space until he returned to school in August to start back up with hockey practice. But just like that, the summer became the best one of his life.
He’d asked to kiss her. And she said yes!
“So, are you actually going to…?” she asked over the fireworks exploding inside his head. Her voice was tentative and unsure. “I mean, we don’t have to do that. We could just do something el—”
It had taken him weeks to work up the courage to tell her he liked her, and he crashed his lips to hers before she could reconsider her answer to the scariest question he’d ever asked.
She’d said yes, and there would be no takebacks. Happy Fourth of July.
He kissed her in the front seat of the God’s Work Youth Mission van they’d taken into town with fireworks exploding in his head. Then he spent the next week of the mission kissing her whenever he got her alone. In the morning, when they did all the set-up work Tess’s mother should’ve been handling. At lunchtime, when everyone else was too busy scarfing down sandwiches to notice them sneak away.
They even attempted to sneak in a make out session by the lake after lights-out one time. Tess had thoughtfully brought a picnic blanket, so they could lie down under the moonlight as they kissed. But to Benjamin’s embarrassment, he had to end the make out session just a few minutes after it began.
“We have to stop! Fuck, we have to stop,” he said, yanking himself away from her and sitting up.
Tess sat up on her forearm with a worried look. “Did I do something wrong?”
Benjamin blushed, then chided, “Yeah, you did something wrong. You underestimated how much I like you when you laid this blanket out.”
Tess just stared at him, her expression wicked-confused.
And Benjamin had to flat-out admit, “We have to stop. Or else something’s going to happen, and you can barely say the word ‘kiss.’ So I doubt you’re ready for anything like that.”
“Oh…” Understanding finally dawned on Tess’s face, and she quickly withdrew to her side of the blanket too.
“Maybe we can just lie here for a little while,” she suggested. “Look at the moon?”
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, his Southie accent coming out a little thicker than it usually did.
They lay on their separate sides of the blanket for an awkward minute or two, pretending to be way more interested in the half-moon hanging above them than they really were.
Until Tess suddenly said, “My mom…She’s not really my mom—at least
not in the birth order sense. She’s my grandma, and my dad was my stepgrandpa, I guess. She had my real mom when she was sixteen. And my mom got pregnant with me when she was eighteen, while my grandma and stepgrandpa were on a mission to Angola. The plan was for the two of them to help her raise me. But I guess my mother saw the way my grandma struggled to bring her up and figured, nope, not for me.”
Tess let out a chuff that in no way sounded gleeful. “She moved to New Orleans, reinvented herself, and ended up married to some rich guy. She had another daughter, and she’s always bragging about her on Facebook, like I don’t exist. She never even sends me birthday cards or anything like that. It’s like I’m dead to her—even though I’m alive and back in the country, only a few hours’ drive from where she lives. She just left me here with this pretend mom I basically have to take care of all the time these days.”
She suddenly stopped talking, and her breath hitched like she was about to cry.
“Tess…” Benjamin tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away.
“I’m alright. I’m fine,” she insisted. “I’m happy to help my grandma. She was a good mom to me before my granddad/dad died. And they raised me right. It’s just…”
She let out a shaky breath. “She’s been so mean lately. It’s like she needs me to get by, but she resents having to raise me alone. And that’s why she drinks. Sometimes it feels like this is all my fault, and no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to make up for being born. But everything going on is this big secret that I’m never supposed to talk about with anybody.”
She was never supposed to talk about it with anybody. But she’d told him.
A week ago, she literally ran away when he tried to talk with her about the woman he thought was her mother being a barely functioning alcoholic. And now, she was telling him all of this?
Benjamin’s heart swelled in his chest, and he ended up making a confession of his own under that half-moon. “I know how it feels to be abandoned by your ma. Fuck my dad for being a shitty alcoholic. But at least he was there.”