Luce Grace
One Year After New Aeterna Liberation
-1-
The tequila took my guard down.
I'd just come but he’s still going, thrusting at a steady pace inside my still convulsing body.
He somehow takes me over the edge again.
Then again.
Fuck. I didn't think sex could be this good at my age.
Alex had wanted this. He'd somehow found a callboy.
He said it would be hot.
And he was right.
He should be watching.
He should be completely turned on.
Instead, when I look across the dimly lit motel room, Alex is on his fucking phone.
The callboy–I couldn’t remember his name– slides out of me. He is somehow still hard. I open my lips to his and his pierced tongue laps the roof of my mouth. The sensation is so damn good I can almost ignore Alex.
“Can you do me a huge favor and see if she can nap in the nurse’s office until it's time for pickup ?” Alex says softly into the phone and it takes my attention away from the escort. “It’s just it’s….almost the end of the day and Luce and I have to see my son–”
“Lex. Is that school ?”
“Okay. Yes, I know," he continues quieter into the phone. “Thank you, Ms. Pearce. Bye.”
Fuck, it was the school.
“Stop,” I say to the callboy.
He pulls back from the kiss but leaves his warm palm flat on my chest.
I like the way it feels too much.
I’d wanted Sailor to take a year before going to school but the therapists seemed to think otherwise. She was 10 going on 11 but we’d enrolled her in 4th grade to give her time to catch up socially and academically.
It wasn’t going well.
Sailor had yet to make it a full week without a panic attack. They usually happened before lunch so we’d scheduled the prostitute for after lunch to make sure we were in the clear.
“Lex. What happened ?,” I call across the room.
Alex's attention is focused on unknotting his headphone wires from where they had tangled with the nasal cannula draped around his ears.
He listened to saccharine romance novel audiobooks nonstop and refused to get the wireless headphones because he couldn’t stand to be left with his own thoughts when they charged.
He was somehow getting the headphone wires and his oxygen tubes even more tangled than usual. “Alex–”
“Do not yell at me,” he says firmly.
I walk towards him. I was still naked and warm lube was dripping down the back of my thigh but he’d still found a way to completely extinguish the afterglow I’d been basking in seconds ago.
“What did the school say?”
He pauses the audiobook. “Sailor threw up in class…I told them let her take a nap in the nurse’s office until pickup–”
“She threw up ? We’re going to get her–”
“We have to drop off Nova’s paperwork,” he reminds me.
“We’re not leaving our daughter--”
“I want to see my son.”
“Our son--”
“No. He's my baby. You let him run away.”
I was not getting into this fight in front of a rent boy.
Alex had spent years locked in one of the most inhumane Helion prisons. When they'd liberated the cells he'd weighed 60 pounds and was covered in maggots eating the dead flesh in his open wounds. Both of his lungs were failing. Nobody had expected him to survive long but he did.
The day we found out Alex was stable enough to get out of the hospital Nova told me he was going out on his own.
He joined a New Aeterna relief program for liberated young adults. They'd arranged for him to get a job at an organic grocery store and lodging in a co-living space somewhere in New Jersey.
Alex had stupidly gone to Nova’s job and gotten weepy at the customer service desk until Nova came out. Nova, who now used his legal name Grayson, had been livid. He went no contact with Alex. My only communication from him for the last four months were single word texts.
I understood Nova’s need for independence. He'd spent his adolescence and early adulthood trapped in a New Aeterna, protecting his little sister. He wanted to be his own person.
But mentally he was still young. He’d been guilt-ridden that the only reason we'd been in New Aeterna during the Siege was because he had wanted to see a show in the city. It was like he was stuck there.
Nova’s W-2 had come to my apartment. He’d given Alex and I permission to come to the store to give it to him today.
“We can pick up Sailor and still meet Nova if we leave right now,” I tell him. I didn’t see Nova giving us more than a few minutes of his time anyway. “Let’s go. Get up–”
“You need to shower–”
“–We don’t have time–”
“–You promised me, Luce.” His voice raises slightly. “I won’t leave unless you do.”
“Fine,” I relent. I wanted to leave right now but I’d promised one of our million fucking therapists I’d be better about the obsessiveness he’d developed. “Meet me at the fucking car.”
“Okay, okay,” Alex says dismissively. He reaches for the black brocade patterned cane that was resting against the wall.
He couldn't walk well, he'd broken his leg before he was imprisoned and it never healed properly. The surgeons hadn't wanted to risk fixing it because he was too fragile for anesthesia.
Between his bad leg and one barely functioning lung it took Alex fucking forever to get anywhere. When he finally stands he slowly zips up the magenta colored yoga jacket, covering up the black lingerie that was tucked into the waistband of his leggings.
I wanted to touch him just once before he got it all buttoned up. Put my hand on the small of his back exposed by the sheer undergarment.
But I hold back.
I pay the callboy on Venmo for “lunch”, tell him that he could keep the motel room and hope he doesn’t shit talk us for leaving seconds after he gave me the best fuck I'd had in years.
The bathroom was clean for an hourly hotel. I brush my teeth and take a two minute shower. I don’t bother fully drying off before pulling on a clean pair of briefs, gray chinos and a white button up.
I hurry out the bathroom to find Lex still in the motel room--he's perched on a towel, practically sitting in the call boy's lap, telling him about the romance novel series he’d been annoying me to death with this week. The poor kid is listening as politely as possible as Alex goes on and on about the fictional town and family.
I crack open the bottle of scotch we never got around to. I pour two fingers into one of the hotel’s filmy glasses. “Lex, Why the fuck aren’t you in the car like I told you ?”
“Oh, Nash was helping me with these stupid headphones and I was saying he had the same name as the brother in the There Goes My Heart. He was the one who owned the diner and his father named him after Nashville, the city where he met his mom. Anyway, we were trying to figure out which book was Nash's book but I think his book might be in a different series.”
He clicks off the phone and picks up the garbage bag of bedsheets and sanitizer we’d brought to the hotel. “Okay, honey, let’s go.”
He starts for the door, every step a god damn eternity. My nieces had bought him a wheelchair but he hadn’t had the upper body strength to control it. He’d given it away to another Helion prison camp survivor.
I shuffle behind him until we are alone in the hotel’s parking lot. “I’m going to carry you–”
“Don’t you fucking dare. I don’t like it when you–”
I swing my arm under his knees and carry him across the parking lot to the car. The portable oxygen he carried in a leather purse across his chest weighed more than he did.
I deposit him in the driver’s seat of the car and he shoves me away.
I slam his car door shut and walk around to sit in the passenger seat. He throws an empty beer bottle at my face the second I sit down. It hits the window and rolls under the seat. He picks another empty beer bottle out of the cup holder and throws it.
It also misses.
“Lex, stop throwing shit. Drive.”
He throws the car keys at me next. “I don't like it when you carry me. If you want to get there so fast, Luce Grace, you can drive.”
“You were walking slow. Just drive the fucking car.” I toss the keys back to him and he flinches.
He starts the car but still doesn’t put it in drive. “You could drive for once if you stopped drinking.”
I drank a little more than I did before New Aeterna but I hadn’t driven a car since my accident 20 years ago. Not even the hell of New Aeterna had gotten me past that mental block. He knew that, he just liked taking low blows.
“Drive.”
Alex starts the car and his romance audiobook (which was about nothing, they were always about fucking nothing and never had any fucking) automatically plays through the speakers and he finally starts driving.
I have to remind myself to be patient. That he’d been through the unimaginable in a Helion prison.
But it was damn hard.
We spent every waking moment together and never stopped fighting.
Living with Ma and Twyla had been too much for Sailor. The near constant attention from them set her on edge so we moved to the New Jersey apartment I had from when I'd first been rescued by The Resistance. We’d been living off the $300,000 that was deposited in my bank account a few weeks after the liberation. I knew the money was related to the Resistance but I didn't care to look into where it came from.
Alex needed me, his PTSD was so bad he could barely keep a volunteer job and he didn’t like to go anywhere alone. Every day we lived attached at the hip in the same bitter loop of school drop off, arguing, grocery shopping, arguing, then therapy followed by more arguing and grocery shopping until it was time to pick Sailor up and do more arguing and grocery shopping.
Hiring the escort had been a nice change of pace.
“Text Nova and tell him we’ll be a little late,” Alex says.
I send the text. I see that my last few texts to Nova were me begging him to call Alex so he'd stop crying.
They’d gone unanswered.
Alex shuts off the car in the school parking lot and checks his appearance in the car mirror.
I graze his chin and turn his face towards mine. I touch my lips to his the way the escort had done to me. I’d wanted to see if some of the warmth I’d felt from that kiss was still there.
Alex always made me feel like an asshole for wanting intimacy. I’d only learned the Helions had cut his balls of when I overheard him recording testimony for one of the many trials going on. I’d looked up if he could still feel pleasure and he probably could.
But I didn't need sex from him. I just wanted to be close.
Like it used to be.
I pull on his bottom lip with my thumb to open his mouth and I barely get my tongue in before he pulls back.
“You had fun with Nash?,” Alex smirks, pulling his hair into a ponytail. He’d said he’d wanted to watch me with the escort. That it might be a start.
“It was good. We should do it again.”
Alex opens his car door and makes an unintelligible “Mm.”
I follow him out the car and he turns back to me disapprovingly. “You can’t go inside like that, Luce.”
“Why ?”
“You smell like liquor”
“No I don't. had one drink at the hotel.”
I close the car door and make a brisk walk the front doors of the school.
Alex speed walks to catch up with me and is absolutely winded by the time he gets in step with me. He snatches my hand, his acrylic fingernails digging into my wrist, and we walk into the school office hand in hand.
“Your two favorite people are here, Mrs. Garcia!,” Alex announces in a breathless sing song to the older woman at the front desk. "Oh, I love your new flower pens, they're so cute!"
As he adjust the flow rate on the oxygen tank the other workers in the front office come to greet us by name.
We got called into the office a lot.
“Are you, okay, Haley?,” Mrs. Garcia asks when he starts wheezing for air. He lets go of my hand to lean hard on his cane. “Sit down, we could have brought Sailor out to your car–”
Alex smiles and shakes his head despite the heavy panting. I put my hands on his waist to steady him and he brushes it off, walking closer to the woman's desk to lean on it for support. “Then I wouldn’t get my update about your crochet projects. Last time you said you were ordering hand dyed wool from Instagram? Did you get it yet ?”
The woman makes a call on her office phone and then they start talking about their favorite colors.
A young woman in scrubs I’ve never seen before comes down the hall with a miserable looking Sailor. She always tried to put on a brave face but every single emotion shows up in her pale skin.
She speed walks towards me and I kneel down to hug her. Her face is flushed but she doesn’t feel warm.
“Are you mad, Daddy? Am I in trouble ? Cause I told Nurse Bateman I wanted to stay–”
I try to give her a reassuring smile.
Her therapist said a one of the ways trauma showed up on her was her hyper fixation on rules and getting in trouble.
“You don’t get in trouble for being sick. We’re going to sign you out early.”
“I didn’t want to go home early. We're watching a movie in class and I have to see the end for the worksheet. I already missed some and I–”
“We’ll rent it and you can watch it--”
“...In New Aeterna, well, before I was arrested…” The bustling school office goes absolutely quiet as Alex continues mindlessly chatting with the school's bookkeeper. “The kids and I ate peanut butter all the time on these like…thin water crackers. But now I can't do it. I really like almond butter. There is a delicious one in a cute jar at this store where my son works...”
I never talked about New Aeterna. But Alex brought it up in casual conversation constantly and never shut up long enough to realize how entire rooms went silent when he did.
Everyone wanted a grisly New Aeterna story. We'd found out from my nieces that Nova had been paid by a Twitch streamer to come and talk about New Aeterna.
Alex stops to chat with the custodian before I finally push him out of the school. When we get into the car I have a text from Nova.
Nova: You don't have to come to my job. Don’t need the W-2 anymore, my boss gave me a copy.
Fuck.
Luce: Dad wants to see you. Sailor will be with us too. We’ll stop by quickly.
Nova: I already switched shifts, I’m not working today
Luce: Nova, please. We all want to see you. Dad is much better mentally.
It’s a lie, but I couldn't deal with the fallout if this fell through. It takes a few minutes for response to come through.
Nova: I’m already out of town with friends. Next time.
Alex is quiet a first when I tell him the news. He drives for a few more miles before the waterworks start. He turns up the volume on the audiobook and I need another drink
“HELION!” Sailor screams over the audiobook. I don't register that she’d unclicked her seatbelt before she launches herself into the front seat of the car and into my lap.
She accidentally kicks Alex in the head and he must panic because he hit the gas instead of the break and loses control of the car.
“Alex, hit the break!” I scream because I can’t see anything in the tangle of Sailor’s hair and legs. I pull her into my lap and cradle her to me as tight as I can. Alex was doing a shitty job controlling the car and if we hit something she wouldn’t have a seatbelt on.
They’re both screaming as the car spins out and slides into ditch, coming to a rough stop. When I look up Alex is white knuckling the steering wheel and his entire body is shaking.
I open my door and pull Sailor out of the car. I kneel, looking directly in her panicked face. “Never do that again. Nev–”
“–but I saw a Helion–”
“Never take your seatbelt off in a moving car–”
“I saw a Helion! I saw a Helion! I saw it!,” she shrieks in a high pitched half scream, half cry. "I saw it!"
I look back at the empty road where we’d just been.
I look up.
It was clear.
“Where ?”
She's trembling and crumbles into tears. “I thought…I thought I did…am I in trouble ?”
I turn to see Alex standing outside the driver’s door staring at us. He looked as terrified as I was but atleast I was trying to hide it.
Alex backs the car out of the ditch and we drive back to the apartment complex. I make him put his headphones in so I can have some silence in the car.
Sailor is still a mess when we get home. I take her backpack and carry her up the walk up’s four flight of stairs.
Alex trials behind us, struggling up the steps with the bags of groceries he'd brought earlier today. The property manager had offered us a lower level unit but Sailor liked the balcony on my unit had so we’d kept it.
I unlock the door, set Sailor on the armchair and fold out the living room couch for her.
The apartment’s only bedroom had been decorated for her by my nieces. But she said the mattress was too soft and she was terrified of the closet so she slept on the flimsy fold out couch with Alex–who also didn't like soft mattresses anymore.
I slept alone in her bedroom like an asshole.
I find a ginger ale in the stack of canned goods piled up against the kitchen wall. Alex was compulsive about the amount of food in the apartment. Every surface of the counters and tables were covered in cans.
“Are you hungry ?,” I ask her, opening the ginger ale and putting a straw in it.
She shakes her head. “My stomach hurts.”
I’m giving her medicine when Alex finally makes it up with his grocery bags. He's breathing hard and there are fresh tears running down his face.
“Why...did...you leave me by myself?”
“I was getting Sailor to bed.”
“She's too old for you to carry her.”
“She's sick,” I remind him.
He walks over and pulls Sailor off the armchair. “You can't sit on the chair in your outside clothes.”
She goes rigid as he puts his hand on the her forehead.
“Go change clothes and I'll make this for you,” he says, taking a can of chicken soup from the grocery bag, even though there were 80 cans of chicken soup under the bed.
“She’s not hungry,” I tell him.
“Yes, she is. She has to eat.”
“I threw up lunch,” Sailor whines.
“This is just soup. This one has vegetables and it's low sodium and I'll add water so it will be good for you to have it–”
“Shut the fuck up, Alex. You don’t listen to a god damn thing. She's not hungry. This is why Nova doesn't want you around, you need to shut the fuck up and listen."
He stares at me before putting the earbuds back in, turning around and walking into the kitchen. When I hear the can opener, I walk into the bedroom to keep from starting another fight.
I finish off the beer I'd left on the nightstand this morning and pour the scotch into the now empty bottle.
“I want a divorce.”
I turn to see Alex standing at the bedroom door.
“Why ? Because I told you to shut the fuck up ? You need to.”
“No. I called a lawyer last week,” he says.
“I don't care. We're not getting divorced. ”
He folds his arms. “You're a drunk. You can't even go an hour without a drink.”
“I need it to deal with your shit.”
“That’s your 8th drink today,” he says under his breath. “You’re a mean drunk and you know I won’t put up with that.”
“You’re just being pissy because Nova cut you off. ”
“Don't bring my son into this-”
“What about our daughter ? Maybe work on stop ignoring her. Give her the same Dad you gave Nova--”
“Stop brining Nova up. Sailor is fine. I want to be in love again and--”
“I love you,” I tell him. Mostly to see how it feels.
“We haven’t been in love for a long time.”
“You need to stop reading those dumbass books. That's not real life. We're not getting divorced. Who is going to put up with you ? You called me 6 times yesterday when I walked around the corner to the–”
“To the were ?,” he asks pointedly.
I was going to say liquor store. We’d gotten into a fight because he didn't like that I'd eaten two bowls of cereal and hadn't washed the bowl in between. I’d walked out and went to the liquor store.
“We made promises,” I remind him. “You don’t just end a marriage.”
“I’m not happy.”
“Nobody is happy.”
Our phones chime at the same time with the motion detection tone from the camera doorbell. I open the app and look to see a Helion woman staring inquisitively the door. And not just any Helion woman–the General’s wife.
We’d planned for this.
I bolt out the bedroom and into the kitchen, taking my gun out of the cabinet above the fridge. Alex walks as fast as he can to the living room and shakes Sailor awake. He pulls her into the bedroom and closes the door.
They can take the fire escape out the back balcony if something happens.
I disengage the safety and conceal the firearm in my back pocket.
I open the door, keeping the deadbolt on.
“Genesis sent me,” Aria says. Aria has her hands up, as if to say ‘I mean no harm.’
I look beyond her to see Leon standing in the parking lot. His eyes bore into me like a warning.
“Genesis sent me....she thought you might not want to see her, ” Aria says.
“What do you want ?”
“To offer you a job," she explains. "In the Royal Security Council's Cybersecurity Division. Any title. You can name your salary. New Aeterna needs your skills.”
“No. You people can fucking have your city. I want nothing to do with it.”
“Paris is trying to make things right.”
“Then give me the last 10 years back. ”
She seems to consider this.
“Is there any way you’d take the job ?”
“No.”
She turns to leave but then turns back around. “If you could turn back time, would you ? Re-do that last 10 years ? ”
“Yes. Wouldn’t everyone ?”
“Even if it meant you’d lose something ?”
“Yes.”
“Even if the something was your daughter ?”
“Is this a threat ?”
“No, I just…I’ve never asked a human about it. Genesis really liked you. So did Damien. They trusted you.”
“Don’t ever come back here.”
***
Two days later I get a package in the mail with a note from Aria.
It says inside the box is a choice.
I open the box and look at the thing inside. It 's supposed to give me my 10 years back.
But if I make that choice, Sailor may not still exist.
I make my choice and toss The Tempest in the river.
I choose my daughter.
I choose wrong.