Free Step Scandal - Part 3 by Rossi St. James Page A

Ambien was a last ditch attempt to get a bit of shut eye.
    “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I mumbled, fumbling my way through the early morning darkness of my apartment until I reached the door. I pulled it open, only to be faced with Harper herself.
    Her blonde hair was piled high on the top of her head and large, black sunglasses covered her eyes. Her lips were pinched and pursed and her hands rested on her hips. “So you are alive.”
    I widened the door and let her pass on through. “Sorry, I’ve been, uh…”
    She glanced around the messy shit hole my apartment had become. An empty pizza box and half-empty beer bottles lined my coffee table. Dirty laundry sat piled in a recliner, and the place hadn’t been vacuumed in days. I would’ve been embarrassed, but I was still half asleep.
    “You’ve been avoiding me,” she said, making it more of a statement than a question.
    She was right. Partially. I hadn’t been so much as avoiding her as I was avoiding the decision I had to make. If I cut ties with her, my mother would be happy but she would be crushed. And the tattoo shop would become the pipe dream it had always been. If I stayed with her another couple months, until the end of our agreement, my mother’s heart would be even more broken than it already was.
    My mother’s distraught face flashed into my mind, punching me in the gut and tugging at my heart. I knew what I had to do.
    “It’s not like that,” I began to defend my actions, though my words ceased when I realized nothing I could say to her would remotely make up for the fact that I was two seconds from hurting her. “The other day, when I came home -”
    “Save it,” she cut me off. “This is just like it was six years ago. You get a piece of me and then you run off. I should’ve known you were going to do this to me again! God, I’m so stupid.”
    “That’s not what -”
    “For once, Xavier, be honest with me. Tell me why you ran off again. Why do you keep hurting me like this?”
    Tears streaked down her cheeks, trailing out from behind the dark sunglasses she’d neglected to remove when she walked in. Maybe she was trying to hide something. Maybe she’d been losing sleep like me.
    “The truth is,” I said, clearing my throat as the words seemed to lodge themselves right there. “I can’t pretend with you anymore. I can’t pretend to be with you when all I really want is to be with you. And I can’t be with you anymore because it’s hurting people I care about.”
    “What, like Conrad?!” she scoffed.
    “No, my mother.”
    She hung her head, seeming to be concentrating on the dingy tan carpet of my apartment. Pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, she sniffled before saying, “Shit. I didn’t think about her.”
    My mother was like a cloud of light, always remaining in the background yet silently illuminating the space around her. Harmless and lively. Sweet and kind. No one hated her. Not even Harper – though they’d only met a handful of times over the years.
    “Okay, fine,” Harper said. “That makes this easy enough.”
    She held her head high as she tightened her purse strap over her shoulder and turned to leave. Harper stayed silent as she lingered for three seconds before disappearing out the door.
    There was nothing she nor I could’ve said anyway. Nothing either of us could possibly say would’ve made the situation easier to stomach.
    We wanted to be together, but we couldn’t. It was simple. I didn’t need to go chasing after her, much as I wanted to. And I didn’t need to go making things more complicated than they already were.
    If there was anything I’d learned in my 26 years, it was that life was fucked up and unfair.
    I ambled over to the living room window, watching as she climbed into her car and tugged the glasses off her face to wipe away tears. Before I realized it, my hand had gone sailing through the air and pummeling into the wall next to the window, driving a gaping hole into