AFTER HIGH SCHOOL

Chapter forty three

AARON HERNANDEZ

I lower down and lean on the door as I realize Cassandra won't be opening the door for me. It's in the middle of the night.

But after drowning two bottles of bourbon, the best thing I could do was come and share my misery with this girl who stole my being.
She doesn't even realize that my anger stemmed from a place of tenderness and protection that I have reserved for her.

She doesn't realize, that I only care.
I'm not trying to control her life, I'm simply trying to keep her wrapped up in a bubble away from this harsh world.

Oh yeah, she doesn't know, maybe I should tell her.

"Baby girl," I call but she doesn't reply to me. I would have thought she had fallen asleep but there is no bed in there and besides that. I heard her sniffle and it sounded close, close like she was on the other side of the door.

So, I continue regardless that no one might be listening.
"I'm drunk, but don't think this is my blubbery drunkness because a wise man once said that a drunk mind speaks its truth. Now I know how that statement was true because,
I'm drunk but here is my truth." I say.

"I'm not mad you went without telling me, well partly yes, I'm a little bothered by it but not because I want to control you or your life but because I care and I want you safe. So, going without telling me in a foreign country steamed my madness but really, the real madness came from knowing you went somewhere alone and stayed all those hours with Hedrick." I sigh as I draw in a long breath.

"Hedrick and I have history and not a good kind of history. So, as soon as I heard you were together and that you wouldn't be reached every sort of dark emotion filled me up. It haunted me and terrorized me and a couple of hours ago when I raised my voice to you. It hit me that I was being unfair to you. I can't reprimand you for being with people, trying to make friends but here is my reason why you being with Hedrick triggered me.

A long time ago when I was fifteen it's when I came here to learn of my mother, my mother died a long time ago in Seychelles while giving birth to me."

CASSANDRA KHAN

I push myself closer to the door when I realize that Aaron is opening up to me. I don't want to miss a word he has to say.

It's ridiculous for me to be on this side of the door and him to be on the other in this kind of moment but on the other side, I think it is imperfectly perfect just like our relationship.

Chaotic but beautiful.
"At fifteen, mom's best friend in Seychelles came to me and told me this story about my mother, she was inside the room where mom was giving birth and among the nurse that was helping the doctor help my mother deliver. She told me of how she recorded my mother's last words, last cries to be specific." I should be out there with him.
Hugging him.

"But to be frank, Meredith is the reason I came here to Jamaica. I came looking for my mother's family only to learn she was an orphan but with friends that turned out to be my family. Elliot and Lucy. They took me in their wing and told me all I had to know about my mother and treated me with so much love and tenderness something that I never found in the Hernandez household, well beside my siblings." I hold my mouth when I realize in my mind that Aaron and his siblings are half-siblings. If his mother died at birth, then the other has a different mother from him.

"I grew up with a father despising me and always blaming me that I killed my mother and stole him the love of his life. His wife also despised me for being alive and always blamed me too saying I was the bad taste of her love, that I stood in between hers and my father's love life and I tell you that wasn't a great childhood company to grow up in.