start dickin’ with me, both of ’em, and I know they’re workin’ themselves up. They’re gettin’ tweaked. Then one night, Mister Oscar comes in while me and Shawn are hangin’ about, watchin’ the TV, and he takes me outside and he gives me two thousand dollars in cash and the keys to a piece-of-shit car, and he says, ‘Go, boy. Get out of Louisiana. Now. Drive.’ I looked at his face and I didn’t think. I took the money and the keys, and I got in that car and I got the fuck out of there.” He blew out a breath and finished, “I wasn’t seventeen.”
“You didn’t tell me that part,” I said softly.
“In the end, that’s Shawn’s story to tell.”
I shut my eyes tight, as with them, his folks, it always just got worse and worse.
“Lyla, baby, look at me.”
I took my face out of his throat and looked up at him.
“The thing about that was, Oscar gave me my freedom. I was free. I missed it. From that minute, I was free. And I made music. I made friends. I made a pretty girl love me. I went all the way around the world. I got my brother in a proper casket in a proper grave with a proper marker. I built my own fuckin’ house. And except for that last, they knew I did all that. And there I am, standin’ alone in some trees.”
“I’m understanding your epiphany and how important it was, but I would have liked to have been there. Been there, in that place, and been there for you.”
“You don’t get it, baby. That I had to do that. I had to carve my place in my mountain and I also had to do it by myself.”
“You’re right, I don’t get that because I can haul wood and hammer nails.”
“I was not a man you’d wanna be around.”
“I think I should have been the judge of that.”
“I can guarantee you, you would not be here right now if you’d been there.”
“You underestimate me.”
Abruptly, his expression changed.
Gentle but earnest.
And determined.
“Lyla, cher, love of my life,” he framed my head in his hands and put his face close, “you are not gettin’ me. I’m tellin’ you, what I said at your house holds true. I needed to give you the space to come out from under me and breathe and I needed the space to work all of that out of me and those two did not go together. There was no other way it could be, it had to go like that. And I know, given the choice, you would have stuck by me, and I couldn’t have that because I had to let my life go dark so I could find the light and I’d never let you descend in that darkness with me, so I’d make it so you went away. And when I did, it’d be in a way you wouldn’t come back.”
“Prea—”
“Lyla, baby, I love you and I will for the whole of my life and part of that, an important part, is back then, even if you didn’t wanna do it, didn’t know you were doin’ it, you gave me what I needed.”
My mouth clamped shut.
“At that beach, I walked away from you, and in my head, the same words tumbled over and over, ‘Don’t call my name, don’t call my name, don’t call my name.’ And I got up to that condo and was sick to my stomach. Puked in the sink for what felt like hours. Because you didn’t call my name and I was wrecked. I didn’t know how to be without your love shinin’ its light on me. And I was also so fuckin’ glad you didn’t call my name because if you had, I would have caved in a snap. Then I’d spend the next however long it took wrecking you, truly wrecking you, and I would not have been able to live with myself when I’d done that.”
My head fell forward so my forehead was resting on his line of his nose.
Then he whispered, “She finally gets me.”
“But I…there were…” I swallowed. “You should know…”
“You got a guy,” he stated flatly.
I pulled my head away, but my eyes went anywhere but to him, and I said, “Not exactly.”
“Cher,” he said warningly.
I looked at him. “I lied. Sonia did too so you would…um…”