"I'm sorry about my wife..we're going through a lot right now and both of us are very, very angry with one another. I didn't mean to drag you into this mess."
Keena nodded her head and smiled as she touched the plants in the garden. "It's okay, I understand." She brushed past different fruits and flowers until she stopped and turned around to face me.
"You love her, right?"
I sighed but nodded. "Yes, very much. She's my love. I can't just not love her. I've given her all of me. Everything that I had left in me to give, she has."
Keena placed her hands on my shoulders. "Go to your queen."
I shook my head and backed away from her. "No, you don't know what happened...what she did to me can never be forgotten. She cheated on me with my cousin, my best friend. Now she's pregnant with a child that's not mine. I will always think of what she did whenever-"
"Go to her. I don't care what she did to you or how she hurt you and your feelings. She's pregnant, right? Go. It may not be your baby but you'll have some part in that child's life because she is your wife."
Whether I like it or not, Keena had a point. It would be selfish of me to not see how she was doing or check up on her while she was with child.
"You do understand that you being out here with me is just giving your cousin the chance to-"
"Taz, can we talk?"
Justin came from behind the vines with nothing but a pair of sweatpants and shoes.
I glared at him. "Where are your clothes?"
He just grinned and extended his hand out to Keena. "I'm sorry about last night. I'm Justin."
"Keena." She smiled and shook his hand. "It's alright, I would've been drinking my life away too if I was going through what you two were going through."
Justin eyed me and I nodded. "She knows."
Keena turned on her heels and walked down the long pathway. "I'll see you two at the palace."
When she was far gone, I walked up to Justin and punched him directly in the nose. He fell to the ground while holding on to it.
"Shit, okay, I deserved that. I know." He lifted his free arm out and I grabbed it to pull him back up. "Now we can talk."
We started walking down the pathway slowly so that we could have more than enough time to discuss.
"Okay, I guess I should start by saying how sorry I am for messing around with your wife and allowing her to hurt you that way. I'm your cousin. You're family. I'm supposed to be there to protect you at all times and make sure that you have someone there on your side no matter what it is and all I've done for the past two years is mess with your wife and pretend like nothing was going down when it really was and I can't stand it. I've been holding this in for so long and I just...I'm sorry. Now I don't know if the child that I've been waiting my entire life for is mine. I really want it to be but you...you have to have this baby."
He was looking down at his shoes. In all my 21 years of living, I've never heard Justin apologize so much and I was grateful for that.
"Thank you for that but I don't know if I can trust you anymore. It'll take a long time for us to get back to the way things used to be..."
I took a deep breath and prepared to spill myself to him. The first time talking about the problem is always the hardest.
"Justin, I love her. I'm in love with her still. Even after all that she's done to me and said to me, I still find a way to look at the good in her. In what we have here. We are the same in many ways. One being that we want the same things out of life. Love, happiness, power. It took me awhile to understand what life was all about but I feel like now I have a clearer version of how it could be and man, I don't want to lose it. I don't want to miss out on something amazing because of a little bump in the road. For you, it was just sex but for me it was so much more. I made love to her over and over because I meant it. Because she has my heart and I wanted to show her just how much she meant to me. You on the other hand just wanted one thing from her and you got it. So if this baby is in fact yours, I'll let you be the father. No matter how hard it would be for me and my dynasty. I'll let you man up and step up to the plate for that child because he or she deserves that much. The child didn't ask to be here but it was brought into this mess anyways because my wife didn't know what she wanted. She probably still doesn't know but hey, that's alright too. Right?"
Justin stopped in his tracks and turned to face me. "I didn't know you loved her that much..."
I shrugged. "At this point, it is what it is. I'll always love her no matter what she chooses or who's child she's carrying. It would be nice if it were mine though." He grabbed two peaches off of the branch and handed me one of them. Just like when we were kids. I took it and took a bite out of it. "I imagined having kids with her, you know. If they look anything like their mother then they would be gorgeous. Breathtaking."
Justin rolled his eyes and took a bite out of his as well. "Please, you and I aren't bad looking ourselves. If anything, the kid has no choice but to be beautiful."
We continued to walk and I shrugged the thought out of my head.
