“I saw Liz. She fixed my mess of a hair for me.” He looked at my hair, but he didn’t offer a response, I guess a simple compliment was too much to ask for these days. I didn’t wait for it. I knew it wasn’t coming. I went on and said, “I had lunch with my mother.” He rolled his eyes and smirked at that. My mother and the fact that I’d continued to have a relationship with her had been the source of more than one of our arguments over the years. He thought I should be ashamed of her and cut her off completely. I thought that she’s still my mother in spite of her character flaws. I would probably never completely cut her off. I really believed that in spite of it all, she did her best. I went on and said, “Then I went to the beach for a while and took a walk on the pier.”
“Hmm,” he said, completely disinterested. Sometimes I wasn’t sure why he asked or why I bothered. “Do you see the lawyers tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Are things progressing?”
I shrugged. “I wanted to talk to you about that. I saw Alexander today.” That got his attention.
He sat up off the couch and with his eyebrows pulled together he said, “Why? Didn’t the attorneys tell you to stay away from him?”
“They did and I have been. I just ran into him and he wanted to talk.”
Jason snorted and said, “I hope you told him where to go.”
“No, I sat and talked to him for a while,” I said. He looked annoyed, but I went on quickly before he could interrupt me. “He says that he never wanted any of this. He was confused like I was. Before he even had time to think it all through, his lawyers took it out of his hands. His legal counsel is driving this lawsuit…”
“Of course he said that, Vicki. This is exactly why you weren’t supposed to see him. He’s going to try and make you think he’s the good guy here. You’re too naïve to deal with this.”
The naïve comment bothered me, but I let it go, for now. “He’s not a bad guy, Jason. This is just an odd situation. I don’t think either of us meant to put ourselves here.” I know that I didn’t want to be here and I’m sure from his reaction he didn’t either.
“That’s not the point. He was the smart one here. He should have known better than to dip his wick…”
“Excuse me? He was the smart one?” First I’m naïve and now I’m stupid.
“You know what I mean. He’s the owner of a multi-billion dollar corporation. You’re the maid.”
I stood up, getting aggravated and beginning to feel angry. “Jeez Jason, why not just slug me in the face. It would hurt less.” He was being as disparaging as Alex’s lawyers had been.
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” he said, simply. He didn’t apologize for it though, or take back what he said. I think he truly believed I was too naïve to handle my own life… or stupid.
“I don’t think you’re ever trying to hurt me, Jason. I’m beginning to believe that you’re just really that oblivious to my feelings that you don’t care either way. It’s like this lawsuit. It’s all you ever ask me about. I went to the doctor yesterday; did you even bother to ask me about that? Did you know that I had an ultrasound and found out the sex of my baby?”
He looked at me long and hard and then he asked, “What is it?”
“It is a baby, Jason. It is a child. It is a little boy and I’m his mother and I love him. I’m tired and I don’t want to do this lawsuit any longer. I don’t want to fight any more for things that I don’t even really want or need.”
He sighed like he was growing weary of indulging me and then he said, “You don’t want or need millions of dollars? Wow, you’re a bigger person than most of us,” he said, sarcastically. I didn’t care for his tone and again, it made me angrier. “Listen to me, Vicki. I am thinking of you and the baby even if you don’t believe me. How are you going to support it?”
“Him Jason! Him! Stop calling my baby an it!”
“Okay,” he said with his palms up. “Jeez, calm down. You’re missing the point…”
“No, I get it, I do. You are worried I might ask you to support “it” if I don’t have millions that I won in some stupid lawsuit that I don’t want to be a part of. I get it.”
“I wasn’t worried about you asking me to support… him, Vic. But you and he deserve more than to just be ignored by the man who started all of this, don’t you think? Especially when a few hundred thousand a month wouldn’t even faze the man”