Fated An Alpha Male Romance - K. Alex Walker Page 0,56

loud as though someone had told a joke, while other times he would remain so still that I’d often glance down at his stomach to make sure that it still rose and fell. After a while, he was taken away. Months later, we attended his funeral.

“So, any embarrassing stories about Ethan when he was a wild child?” I asked, hoping to inject some levity into the atmosphere.

“Every waking moment in Ethan’s childhood was an embarrassing one,” Joseph replied. “Always in trouble at school. He had one teacher, Miss Boatwright, and she was always calling me at work. ‘Mr. Stewart, I can’t handle Ethan,’ ‘Mr. Stewart, please consider switching him out my class.’ He gave that woman such a headache. Never good with women, though. Ethan. He was never good with women. One could say ‘hi’ to him and the boy would turn red as an apple.”

I looked down expecting to find a smile on Ethan’s face, but his focus on his grandfather was keen and fixed. His right knee bounced anxiously and he seemed to be growing increasingly unsettled.

“Never had a girlfriend, my grandson. Just girls. ‘Make sure you are putting a hat on your jimmy,’ I always told him. No babies, so he must have listened. Good kid.”

Ethan’s face fell into his hands and I looked between him and his grandfather, then crouched next to him. “Ethan, what’s going on?” I asked.

He looked at me with cloudy eyes. “Is it me?”

“Is it you, what?”

“I come here and they tell me that he’s having a good day, but then when I sit down to talk to him, I get less and less time with him every single visit. What was that, twenty minutes?”

He pushed himself up and retreated to a corner of the lobby area. Tufts of hair were clamped between his fingers. I soaked up his despair, sharing in the unrelenting sorrow weaving through his veins. Then, everything suddenly came full circle as I realized that Ethan’s grandfather was the only person that had chosen him.

Ethan still wouldn’t share the reason that his mother was in jail, but in his head, whatever she’d done was ultimately her decision to choose not to be his mother. He’d had other family, but his grandfather had chosen to take him in. Now, although he had his grandfather’s physical form, life was still taking him away in a different aspect. It was as cruel as it was unfortunate to be able to touch and hold someone that eventually would no longer know who you were.

Then I, foolish Alexandra, had added insult to injury by telling him that I was making the choice to shuck my family’s antiquated ideologies about men, women, and the “supposed to,” in order to be with him. I’d made such an emotional statement about it in bed in California and in front of the fireplace in Colorado. But, what did I do? Nothing. I reneged on the only promise I’d really ever made to the man I claimed to love — yet still couldn’t say a simple three words to — and it turned out to be the most important promise that I should have kept. I hated myself more now than the static version of Alexandra that I’d been for virtually my entire life.

“E, this has nothing to do with you,” I said, walking towards him.

“Rationally, I know that, Alexandra,” he groaned. “But still…”

“Son?” Mr. Stewart called. “Are you okay, son?”

Ethan turned around, the grey in his irises nearly washed out by the moisture clinging to the whites of his eyes. He walked to something that looked like an iPad in a slender kiosk and entered in a few numbers which brought names onto the screen. After touching a name on the kiosk, a message popped up that said someone would be there shortly.

“We’ll leave after the nurse gets here,” he said, walking back over. “I don’t like to stress him out when he gets like this. Stress isn’t good for the brain or his circulatory system. I don’t want to throw him into another stroke, which isn’t uncommon with vascu—”

I wrapped my arms around him to help curb his nervous rambling and he hardened before returning the hug. I’d already disappointed him enough that day and wasn’t going to add to it by standing across the room watching him nearly ramble himself into hysterics.

A male nurse entered and walked directly over to Mr. Stewart without words as though the situation was a common occurrence. Ethan released me