For the August challenge - there will be 5 chapters, some longer than others, and posted as quickly as possible given that it's only August for...another hour. Happy almost-season-2 y'all!
Rayna Jaymes tells white lies. Everyone does - don't they? Everyone says they've done their homework so they can go to the house party, pretends their friend doesn't have atrocious taste in men even though the guy they're ogling at the bar has a septum piercing and a penchant for tie dye. White lies are part of the foundation society is built on - shampoos that will fix your split ends, powdered shakes that taste like something died in them but hey - they'll make you lose 30 pounds in a week!
Rayna tells her children they need to concentrate in Algebra class because it will come in handy when they're older, tells her manager that she definitely did not ever have sex with Deacon in the bathroom of the tour bus, thank you very much, tells her sister that her hair looks great when it's poofy at the back but it's too late to do anything about it.
She is a master at telling white lies.
But Rayna Jaymes has told some Goddamn black lies in her time too.
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Her first black lie was a second hand one.
Livy Jaymes was two hours late when she married Lamar Wyatt. He waited, and waited, in the old stone church that held three hundred people and two hundred bunches of ribbon-tied flowers, all of which co-ordinated perfectly with Livy's dress and none of which she'd chosen. She'd let Lamar's parents and her mother make the necessary arrangements, nodding her consent without ever really looking at the bridal magazines and the fabric samples and the white boxes with slivers of cake they could tier five-high, if she wanted. Lamar paced the aisle, up and down, over and over, like she might appear if he did it enough, and she did, eventually.
The only thing Livy did choose herself was her dress. She was breathtaking in it as she walked towards him and Lamar silently thanked whoever he'd sold his soul to in exchange for her. She was ivory lace and vintage pearls, silken copper curls spilling from a handmade veil that covered her face like she was in mourning. He never asked her where she'd been, not that day while she looked him in the eye and told him she'd be his forever, not that night while he kissed her and tasted champagne and promises that were already broken, not the next day when they boarded a plane and left for the honeymoon they hadn't chosen. He never asked if she'd had second thoughts, if she'd repeated the words of the priest in his neatly pressed robes with her fingers crossed behind her back.
He thought she'd change when they had children. He couldn't have her, he knew it; she was like the hidden image in one of those magic eye paintings that slips just out of sight when you look at it head on. The day she told him through a blur of tears that she was pregnant, he'd been so full of joy he'd convinced himself they were happy ones, that she would finally stop fighting whatever it was that kept him at arm's length, stop running long enough to look at him and see how desperately he loved her. That night she slipped out of their bed after she thought he was asleep, and he stood at the window and watched her get into her car, still in her nightgown, cold bare feet and no coat. It was October, and the leaves had fallen from the trees and left them exposed and shivering. He never asked where she'd gone. Lamar Wyatt listened to his wife cry herself softly to sleep every night afterwards until she gave birth to their first daughter, and then he listened to the baby cry in a cruel echo that would never let him forget.
Livy's second pregnancy was different. He knew before she told him - he'd heard her throwing up early in the morning, had seen something in her face that gave her away. He watched her pass a gentle hand over her still-flat stomach when she didn't think he was looking, saw her gaze out of the window miles and miles away from him. He knew it was coming, and when she sat him down and told him Tandy was to have a brother or sister, the only tears were his. For nine months she was still, content, a peace he'd always hoped he could instil in her but had always known he never could. It fascinated him as much as it repulsed him, made him burn with the envy he would never let himself succumb to. It was his ring she wore, it was his name that formed half of hers, just as it was supposed to be, two halves of a whole. But it wasn't his child that grew inside her, that swelled her belly and made her smile like she was in love. She was. Just not with him. He never asked her to speak the truth they both already knew, to say the words aloud that would shatter his heart into pieces he would never be able to scrape up from the floor. He never asked if the baby's father knew. They didn't talk about Watty.
The day Rayna was born it was cold outside. Cold and drenched with clean, fresh sunlight, one of those crisp days where you feel like you can breathe, where the sky is so blue it looks like an oil painting parody of itself. Lamar stood outside the hospital letting the air cool his lungs and watching it fog around him. She had the same eyes as Livy, the same heart shaped mouth, the same brilliant hair, little tufts of it framing the face that looked just like her and nothing like him. He didn't understand how he could feel such a tug on his heart when he looked at her, and in the same moment feel so very inadequate, so knowingly and willingly deceived.
She was perfect. A perfect, tiny lie, with ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes.
The years passed and Rayna grew, more like her mother and less like him every day. Every time she called him daddy she was an unwitting accomplice. Every time he picked her up from school and she ran to him when a teacher pointed and told her 'Your father's here,', every cake she baked him for his birthday with his name in piped icing letters. There was a picture on the refrigerator she'd drawn in crayon, held up with magnets they'd bought in a museum gift shop on vacation. It showed four people holding hands like paper dolls. She'd drawn her mother with long hair and a guitar, wings where her arms should be, her older sister in a prim dress with pigtails, and him, her father, with a briefcase and a silly hat on his head. When he'd asked why Livy had wings she'd told him it was because her mother flew away lots and no one knew where she was, like a bird. The four of them, in wobbly primary-coloured lines - a family. If Lamar looked at it hard enough he was sure he'd see a fifth person, right there in the back.
And then Livy was gone, and there was no more time, no chances to ask all the things he never had.
He'd loved Rayna as much as he'd resented her, but he couldn't stand to look at her, afterwards. She was a constant reminder of all that was over, of all that he'd never truly had. And then she started playing music, and the frayed rope he'd held onto all her life started to unravel, him at one end and her at the other, both of them lost. Lamar didn't think there could have been a bigger slap in the face than when Watty stepped in to help her, had her playing some show in a bar she wasn't old enough to get in to, but he was wrong. It figured, really, that Watty would be the person to introduce her to Deacon Claybourne. If he'd seen in them a chance to fulfil the happy ending he never had, he'd been wrong. Lamar would never let it be so.
The worst day of Lamar's life was the day Tandy closed his office door and told him Rayna was pregnant with Deacon Claybourne's child. He saw Livy in her so vividly every time he looked at her during those months, so much so that he couldn't meet her eye, and he knew she thought it was because she'd disgraced him - not that she cared. She was vulnerable, her turmoil clouding the vibrancy that usually poured from her, her determination never to listen to him faltering, and he'd acted in her best interests and his when he'd said that accepting Teddy's proposal was the best thing for the baby, that she should put the child first, like her mother never had.
But Rayna wasn't Livy. Rayna never looked at her daughters like they were any different, never favoured Deacon's child any more, never punished her for reminding her every day of the love she'd lost. She was there in the middle of the night when they woke from a bad dream, to stroke their hair back from their foreheads and tell them it was okay, to check under their beds for ghoulies and chase away evil demons and spiders with wriggly legs. She was there for their school plays, to make them popcorn and snuggle through saccharin movies, to soothe their scraped knees when they fell off their bikes. They never woke to the creak of the third step, never crept downstairs to see the door closing behind her quietly and wonder where it was that she disappeared to, how many days it would be before she came home.
And yet.
The bitter taste of the love and the lie that died with Livy Jaymes was a taste her daughter's tongue would know too well.
'Well thank you,' Rayna said to the woman with the poodle perm at the Country Club, the one with the ass her husband told her didn't look big in the dress she'd poured herself into. 'She sure does have Teddy's eyes.'
