Our steamy Affair

Chapter 37

I could hardly believe my eyes! My own brother is making out with my ex-boyfriend! The brother who evicted me for taking his boyfriend away, that is. All through the movie I was more than hounded by those two sitting there snugly as a couple. How dare he? Angry, I walk over to them when the movie is done before Gabrielle could stop me.

"How dare you, Josh! Being mad at me and doing the exact same thing!" I look him in the eye now, which almost makes him fall through his chair in shame. Clearly, Tristan hadn't come out of the closet yet. Everyone looked and Josh pulled me out of the room.

"Maxine, not here," he says as he walks me to his apartment, with Tristan walking behind us. At the apartment, I start to angrily burn loose, "How dare you? Was this already going on vacation?" I ask them reproachfully.

"No! We've only just gotten together," Tristan says, to which Josh continues, "Remco and I have been broken up for a week, from the time I left our parents, he came in later and broke up with me."

He really did! He really dumped Josh. "So when did this start?" I ask. Tristan replies, "secretly we already had feelings for each other, but I couldn't admit yet that I fall for guys and Josh again didn't feel like falling into this trap, which I understand from his side."

Wow, just got a sting from Tristan, who is not averse to cheating himself, but Josh has to know for himself. "Does Remco know?" I ask, looking at Josh who nods his head, no.

After we got that cleared up, there was little left between us to say, and I leave back to my parent's house. I take the key to the front door out of my purse and walk in, where my father is walking around the hallways, "you're home," he says nervously, "is something wrong dad?" I ask, feeling the tension in his body. "Your mother has been taken away to the hospital, Maxine."

"What do you mean, dad? How can this be? What happened?" All the questions keep flooding into me! I don't understand what happened, and my dad just looks at me sadly like she's already dead! "She had a seizure" is all my dad says before we arrive at the hospital.

When the doctor comes back, she wouldn't have just had a seizure. She had had a stroke, due to the many surgeries and Botox that would have poisoned her body. My father, I can still hear mumbling that he had said to her that that mess was going to be her death yet.

"Is she going to heal, doctor?" I ask anxiously. It's not that my mother and I didn't agree that I don't care about her. "The damage that's already there is going to be permanent. We also had to take away her breast implants," My mother is going to be livid when she realizes what they did to her, her fake breasts were her great pride. Father almost had to hold back a laugh, which made me look at him angrily.

But when we step into my mother's room, I barely recognize the woman who made me. She's all sunken in, and it turns out later that she even had implants on her face.

"Are you sure this is Brianna Dewaluwe?" I ask the doctor nervously. Father stands there shaking his head, "who's the oldest now!" I looked at my father angrily, she had just had a seizure, and he was enjoying it.

Even when Josh arrived that night, he looked to us for confirmation that in the big bed was our mother, who you could barely see lying there.

Not to mention when she woke up and looked at all of us, whether she didn't even realize what had happened. "John, I can't move my left arm!" Cries, she panicked, until she realized she was in a hospital.

"No, Brianna you had a stroke from all that junk," It was as if my mother's world was collapsing. "Get me a mirror!" She yells at me.

"Mother doesn't do that, first try to heal from the surgery you just had," I tell her, afraid to show her the mirror. "Surgery!" Yells again angrily, causing our father to jump in who is no longer afraid of her, "They removed your implants," Father says, with a slight smile that surprises us both.

"No, not my breasts?" Asks mom in a panic, causing Josh to try to talk her into not provoking a second attack.

"Yes, Brianna! Your breasts, face and all the other places you had them in," Says my father, enjoying the moment of seeing her fall into the bed like a gray cloth. My mother was completely gone, she said nothing more to not one of us.

In the car going home, I speak to my father about his behavior, "what was that about dad? Why did you act like that to her?" I ask him.

Which causes him to almost pinch the steering wheel flat as if it were made of something soft. "Maxine, All these years your mother was mean to me. It may be childish what I'm about to tell you, but your mother's been blackmailing me for years."

Blackmailed you with what? And childish why?

"Your mother used her family money to save my business and when I brought up divorce, she wanted the money back that I didn't have." Shocked, I keep my hands in front of my mouth, what he kept from us all these years. "Childish? Because you made fun of her like that at the hospital?" I ask him, causing him to nod and look away from me back down the road.

Now I understand my father once so much more. He himself was a victim of our mother, just like us! He had as little to say as we did.

I may be more like my father after all than I thought. I also spent years letting her make me feel bad about myself and feel inferior because she did make it.

My mother managed the most expensive department stores in the neighborhood. Although this was not our mother, no. It was her ex-husband she had married years before she met our father. Was she just very lucky that he had to share in his successes at his mistakes by not sighing a contract before marriage?

Mother is now the phantom she once was, and later it turns out we will never know if she will completely heal mentally. Physically the healing process has already begun, but mentally she is completely lost.