"Don't you have anything better to do? You have a son of your own, remember him? Still you keep trying to take mine - what the fuck is your problem?"
Lucky was taken offguard by the sudden entrance into his home but after the initial surprise, it occurred to him that was exactly what he'd expected to happen. He could even feel bad for the poor bastard who'd been duped all this time and was still obviously living in the dark. Excusing himself from the conversation with the Contractor, he laid the tile he held onto the kitchen counter as the man exited the back door to give them privacy.
"Jason. I was expecting we'd talk today."
His emotions growing more furious with the passing minute and the man's unfazed appearance, in light of the upheaval he was raining on his life, Jason came to stop immediately before Lucky. "We're about to do a lot more than talk if you don't back the hell off!"
Sighing, Lucky walked to the fridge and grabbed a water, holding a bottle out to the steaming man in a friendly gesture, shrugging when it wasn't even acknowledged. He closed the fridge door and uncapped his own.
"Believe it or not, I know exactly how you feel right now."
"Somehow I doubt that!"
"No, actually I do. I spent months believing I was Jake's father, only to find out in a heated argument between my wife, her lover and his scorned ex, that I'd been living a lie the whole time. You at least got the news from somebody who cared to soften the blow."
"What the hell did you think was going to happen when I got your news? Shrug my shoulders, shake your hand and hand over my son?"
"My son." Lucky reached in a back pocket and withdrew a folded page that he held out to Jason, who didn't even glance at it before Elizabeth tore in from the living area.
"Jason! We weren't finished - please, can we go somewhere to talk some more?"
Lucky looked from her flushed, frazzled face that made it obvious she'd been rushing to get there, to the man who hadn't taken cold eyes off him since he arrived.
"Talk more - oh, so you got the full story already? You know that not only is Jake my son, but that Eliz…"
"Stop it, Lucky!" In a panic and hurrying to cut the words off that would undoubtedly seal her fate, Elizabeth rushed to Jason to grab him by the arm, "Please, Jason - let's talk, huh? We can go down to the docks, take a walk by…"
"I can understand why you've never really accepted that Jake is not yours," Jason eased Elizabeth aside and stepped around her to Lucky, who was looking at her with growing incredulity, "But fake tests aren't going to change what's already been done. You need to give this shit up already!"
"You're absolutely right about that - it's already done! Jake isn't yours, man," he pointed at Elizabeth, "She lied - again! Why don't you ask her? You have no choice but to accept what's in black and white, but ask her - she'll tell you too."
"Don't bring her into this - this is between you and me. You obviously have a problem with me and I get it - I slept with your wife - it was a shitty, dishonorable, out of character thing to do and I get that you're still pissed. But don't take it out on my son and Elizabeth. Just stop."
Lucky folded both arms and looked curiously at the man he'd known for a really long time, going from his angry stance to the panicked, antsy one behind him, and he realized how much had stayed the same.
"So, you're still defending Elizabeth, huh? She played you like a stupid violin, wrecked your relationship and took you for a fool for years, and you stand here defending her honor - to me, of all people too."
"We're not discussing Elizabeth - You too can do what you want - have at it on your own time - what I want is for you to stop hurting my son. How do you think this is going to affect Jake, or haven't you thought about that at all?"
"I will make this as little disruptive as I can for Jake, but it's too late to totally spare him, man. I won't pretend to my son to not be his father, just so his mother won't look like the lying, manipulative, controlling slut she is. Protecting her conjured image is not my job…I wonder if Sam knows it's become yours again?"
The words were barely out of his mouth when the force of a double armed push crashed his chest to send him flying back into the refrigerator behind him, as Jason took rapid steps to his face.
"I'm telling you for the last time - don't talk about Sam! Mention my wife again you'll swallow every teeth in your head!"
"Your wife, is it?" Lucky eased off the refrigerator and rubbed his suddenly throbbing chest with one hand as he stepped around the brute to catch sight of Elizabeth, who was still covering her mouth in a gasp from when he'd gone flying. "Did you hear that…still think you have a fairytale-ending coming?" He turned back to Jason and lifted a hand in his direction, "I'm going to let that go because I deserved that one…but you and I need to get a few things straight right now."
"Exactly! Like, I'm not going to keep having this stupid conversation about something we can't change. It sucks what happened to you and I'll spend my life making it up to Sam for the way I hurt her, but what's done is done. Leave it the hell alone and leave my son alone too!"
"This is ridiculous." Lucky looked to Elizabeth to shake his head in wonder, "You haven't told him, have you?"
"Lucky, Jason has a right to be in Jake's life - Jake loves him, don't you see that? He's going to be so angry if you do this…he might never forgive you for it."
"Jake needs to know I've been his father this whole time, and by blood too. Whether or not he finds out you've known all along and kept it to yourself, while you watched his "dads" go at each other's throats for your own sick pleasure, is up to you."
"Lucky, please!" Elizabeth took a rapid step in his direction but it was too late, he'd already uttered the dreadful words. Frantic eyes flew from him to Jason, panic bursting wide open when his eyes met hers and she realized from the narrowing of furrowing browns that he'd definitely heard.
"What's he talking about? What is he saying?"
"Oh, so you're finally listening now?" The purposeful jeer took aim and rendered its target stunned. "Not only did the test confirm Jake is mine, it also perfectly matches the first one…to a tee…and guess who knew what it said this whole time?"
Elizabeth wanted to faint. She wanted to see his reaction but she couldn't look, couldn't meet disapproving eyes that would never look at her the same again. A tiny spot on the kitchen floor got rivetingly interesting and she couldn't tear away.
"What is he saying?" Jason drew closer to her, instantly sickeningly aware of her refusal to meet his gaze. "Elizabeth, what is this?"
"What you and I have not been privy to - the truth!" Lucky tried handing him the paper again. "Why don't you look at it for yourself and finally wake up…like I had to!"
Jason looked from her to the man's face, to his outstretched hand, then back to his face and over to her. Suddenly it was like some slow-motion scene from a bad movie that churned his stomach and stirred bile. His gaze fell once again to the folded square held out to him and he took it slowly, alarm bells going off in his head because the unfolding drama was suddenly strikingly real. When he read the words, his head moved once again to the woman in search of some sort of negation, but she hadn't moved, the spot on the floor still the only thing she would acknowledge. Lucky's voice drummed through the haze to find him again.
"Look, I'm sorry, man - it sucker-punches you to the gut and turns your world a disgusting shade of grey - I remember - but it is what it is like you said. Jake is my son and this is now his home."
But Jason wasn't listening to Lucky. "Why?" The soft anguish left his mouth and his gaze still locked her frame, followed by a gutted bark that got her attention this time to startle her to jump a foot out of her skin, "WHY?"
Tearing up the only way she knew how, covering her face to hide her shame and elicit any sympathy he might have left for her, she bawled into her hands and garbled, "I'm sorry! Jason, I'm sorry!"
"You're sorry!" The labored steps to her sobbing form stopped him just a hair away and he wanted to shake her like he'd never wanted another woman in his life. "You're sorry? Damn your sorry! Explain! Explain why you would do this to Jake…to Sam…to me!" When she only sobbed louder, he made his noise louder still. "Fucking explain yourself! Do you know what you cost me? Do you?"
"Jason, please…I just wanted a family with you." She blubbered through hands that wiped the tears from her eyes as she dared to face him, "You wanted that too, remember? You did - you proposed to me when you found out I was pregnant and you didn't care whether it was yours or not!"
"Are you fucking kidding me? I felt sorry for you! You were pregnant and alone - the jerk had just ripped your heart out and left you with a kid and one more on the way - I felt bad for you! Sam and I were working things out - I loved her so much that I was trying harder than I've every tried in my life to forgive someone! I wanted to help you! I thought your children deserved better and I knew Sam would understand. You used that kindness - our friendship, against me?"
"It was more than that and you know it! If you were so in love with that whore…" she jumped a foot back when he advanced so fast she thought she had been struck.
Gritting angry teeth and physically pulling himself back in the last second, he snarled, "Don't you dare! Don't ever call her out of her name again, so help me!"
Fresh tears stung her eyes when the man she thought she knew was nowhere to be found and an angry, itchy one loomed over her cowering frame instead. She'd never seen him like this, whispers of the feared hitman coming to mind to give her a snapshot of how his enemies must feel right before he takes care of business. Her eyes sought frantically for Lucky across the room, where he leaned against a counter and shrugged in her direction.
"Don't look at me - you're a big girl - handle him the same way you have for years."
"Is that what you're going to do, Elizabeth? You're going to handle me?"
"Of course not - Jason, nobody means to me what you do. That's why I had to do this, can't you see that? I saw what you wanted so I made it happen - you have to see that!"
He couldn't be hearing her right. Just hours before, he was so damn happy…the love of his life had stuck it out and with her love beside him, his damaged brain finally eased itself back into place, reprising memories of a life he wanted more than anything to get back. He could remember his sons with such clarity, was so anxious to get their lives on track…but somehow, he ended up in this nightmare with this she-devil disguised as a caring human. Why was everything to do with this woman such a monumental boomerang mistake to his life?
"What I wanted!" The words sputtered on the tail of a disbelieving chuckle as he raised a hand to press a thumb urgently at his throbbing temple, unable to believe the last few minutes were really happening. "What I wanted was a life with Sam…a family, like we planned from the beginning! What I wanted was to be left alone to love her like she deserves…but you had other plans for our lives…and I just let it happen! I just let you happen to us!"
He was addressing her like an unwelcome stranger who'd invaded his inner sanctum, not the woman he'd promised forever, not too long ago. How had she gotten here again, to this place where he was constantly leaving? Only this time, it would be with hate for her? How could she ever live with that? His angry words kept coming.
"You will never stop…just one destructive, hateful lie after the other, masked behind the most selfish form of what you call love…you don't know what love is and you have no respect for what it means!"
"Please, Jason - will you please let me explain?"
"How? What could you possibly say to make me understand why you would spin such a wicked lie and allow me to bond with a little boy you knew wasn't mine? How could you explain watching me tear Sam's heart out, trying to do the right thing for a child you were lying about because it benefitted you? What is the matter with you?"
"I didn't know what to do. I was all alone with a little boy and a baby on the way, and Lucky was weak and unreliable…you weren't. I know I said I could do it on my own, but you were standing by me, showing me what a real man looked like, someone I could depend and always count on, someone who wouldn't leave me to carry a marriage and children by myself…you were the man my children and I deserved!"
"What you deserved? You selfish bi…I had to choose between my child and my life and I chose him…when you knew damn well it wasn't a choice I needed to make?"
She was shaking her head when the weight of his words would bog it down and ugly everything up. That's not what happened. They were in love! He'd wanted her at all costs! "Would you have chosen any differently, though?" She knew it wouldn't have made a bit of difference - she's the one he wanted.
"YES! YES, I WOULD HAVE!"
"Really, Jason? Even if the baby wasn't yours you'd still marry me - that's what you said! Those were your words!" She grabbed both arms in desperation for him to remember it the way she did, but he flashed and threw her off with the force of someone being touched by the worst filth.
"I wanted to help you! I was doing everything in my power to forgive the woman I loved so we could move on! You were my friend and terrified you would have to do it alone - of course I wanted to help you! You could've just told the damn truth."
"But you wouldn't have fallen in love with me! You'd have given that toxic situation you were stuck in, everything, and all I'd have been left with was friendship! When you believed I was carrying your child, we bonded in a way nobody can ever take away from me. The way you would look at me, knowing your baby was growing inside me…I wasn't about to give any of that up, Jason - I couldn't!"
Lucky couldn't believe the melodrama exploding in his kitchen! It appeared he'd been forgotten in his own home, run over by two people who were the least invited to be there. "Don't mind me - I only live here - same guy who had his life torn apart by your tortured, irresistible, undying love - but just out of curiosity - you two do realize that you're equally responsible for this whole, satirical debacle, don't you? If Sam and I had factored, even a little bit, into your decision that night, none of us would be in this place right now - you do see that?" He glanced between the two sets of eyes snapped in his direction, suddenly registering that he was still there.
Jason nodded ruefully, "You're absolutely right. I played a major part in this." He looked back to Elizabeth, seeing no remnants of the woman he thought he knew. "I left myself and my woman completely open so you could do this. They warned me, Carly and Sam - they both warned me that you were not the person I thought you were - but they didn't know how honest you were, they couldn't see what you only showed me…but I made that all up, didn't I? This is exactly who you've always been!"
"You didn't make anything up. This is me, standing in front of you, loving you every bit as much as I did then. I'm the same woman you wanted a life with."
"You keep repeating that like it should mean something more each time you say it! It doesn't, haven't you seen that yet? I'm not in love with you. I don't want a life with you. Can you hear any of that now - or are you still stuck in the alternate feed playing inside your head?"
When her mouth fell open at his uncharacteristically hurtful, lancing words, Jason turned to Lucky, shutting her down with a force.
"I need to be there when you tell Jake. Please…I need him to know that he did nothing wrong and this had nothing to do with him. I need to see he'll be alright."
Lucky knew he could pull the douche card and play it for all it was worth…but none of it would change anything. "Of course. I have nothing to gain from being spiteful when the welfare of my son is at stake. Things are quite different now, and believe it or not, I'm sorry you're going through this. I'm not sorry they worked out in my favor, but I am sorry it's in a way that will devastate my son."
It was like getting hit by daggers tipped with poison each time Jason heard the man refer to his son as…Jake really wasn't his? His little boy was really not a part of him? What hellish new reality was this?
Nodding tersely to Lucky, he looked back at the woman he hoped he'd seen for the very last time.
"Stay away from me…and stay very far from my family. Come anywhere near Sam and Danny with your poison, and I'll make you live to regret it!"
He turned and left before the boiling anger would consume him, cutting away from her strangled sob and tortured silent plea for pity, knowing the friendship he thought he'd at least always afford her, had crashed and died along with anything else he'd already buried once he'd started listening to his heartbeat's singular throb. Reeling from the loss of his son and the reality he thought he knew, instinct steered him in search of the one person who would know how to soothe the devastating hurt and help him to place it. He needed his fix like he needed the air she expelled, to breathe.
Edgy and too furious to be still, Sam had stormed from her mother's house to the driveway, with Captain in tow. Danny had been too engrossed in the word game he was playing with Molly to notice she'd slammed out of the kitchen, fiery after the initially stunned stillness. Too wired to get behind the wheel, she stomped back and forth by the SUV, numerous scenarios of increasingly painful deaths playing in her mind's eye as she occasionally paused to scream out her frustrating anger. She needed to hit! Preferably a soft face with a softer head that had dreamed up a lie so devastating in scope, leaving bodies in its wake from the moment it had been conceived. The pain they'd gone through! The agony she'd felt as a result of one careless, malicious act! The devastation father and son would now be subjected to, the unwitting participants being shredded at the materialization of this new development! The sheer, sheer gall of the lying, conniving instigator!
"Fucking bitch! Dead fucking bitch!" How was it possible to hate someone so definitively? Forcing herself to calm at the thought of Danny possibly seeing her out the window, Sam took a deep, stilling breath and opened the door to let Captain lead her inside the SUV.
An hour later, she'd had no luck locating the evil bitch - she wasn't on Spoon Island and Nikolas had no idea where she ran off to, telling Sam he wouldn't tell her if he did, given the murderous state she was obviously in. When he'd failed to convince her to stay and calm down, she'd stormed the woman's front door, pounding it mercilessly when there was no answer to the drilling doorbell, followed by her place of employment, then every coffee shop and known haunt - but she came up empty. The last spot Sam checked, her favorite - in line only to the penthouse and the little fuckshack they'd holed up for a sleazy summer - the pier, that spot they'd always seemed to just "run" into each other constantly. Knowing now those haunts were deliberate and coined for the systematic destruction of her relationship, Sam felt any calm that had begun to surface, quickly disappear to restore the rampant rage she needed to expel.
Watching as Captain took off down the pier chasing a wayward gull he'd disturbed from where it perched atop a wooden post, her senses suddenly came alive at a distinct scent, seconds before she was roughly grabbed from behind and crushed against a brute force, while a hand clasped tightly over her mouth and squeezed the scream that arose.
"Mmmmmhm! MmmmmmmmhM!"
Frantic to see her assailant, Sam fired off a backward kick with a heeled boot, while she wiggled one arm loose to reach back and claw where her hand landed to the neck of the brute who pulled her into the nearest alley. Her fingernails claimed flesh and blood but she was still being dragged, rougher now since she had the temerity to fight back!
"Fucking bitch! Shut up or I'll break your fucking neck!"
Her earlier fury now multiplied by a realization that she was in trouble unless she quickly got the upperhand, Sam raised an arm to crash a pointed elbow to his ribcage, causing him to bring them to a sudden stop, where she was thrust roughly to the wall now at her back and freed from gripping arms. Stopping to catch her breath, she faced the masked assailant, the black ski cap worn to hide his face now being rolled up at one edge, so he could gauge the extent of his scrapes with gloved fingers of his left hand.
"You fucking scratched me - you're gonna pay for that!"
But he'd made the fatal mistake of releasing her, compounded by the original one of grabbing the wrong woman on the wrong day in the first place!
