I follow Elle to the kitchen as she checks her phone. Her smile suddenly gets wider as she reads a text message she must have missed.
“Yay!” she says, bouncing on the spot.
I laugh at her cute excitement. “What’s made you so happy? Apart from my stellar bedroom performance, of course,” I say, clearing my throat.
She looks over me, mouth agape. “Wow, someone think’s highly of themselves, don’t they?” she says, moving toward me and wrapping her arms around my neck.
I drag my hands around her waist and cup her ass, pulling her in close to me again. “I didn’t hear you complain. Once? Was it twice? Nope, it was three times,” I reply, curling my lips into a shit-eating grin.
She playfully hits the back of my head. “Listen to you brag! Show-off!”
I start laughing at her which just makes her swat me again. “Hey, c’mon. You know I’m joking. Okay, so what made you go yay?” I ask.
“Aunt Sylvia is on her way over. She’ll be here any minute.”
Shit! Fuck! Damn it all to hell!
My whole body freezes and as much as I’m willing it to move, it won’t budge.
“Brax? What’s wrong, babe?” Elle asks, feeling me go rigid.
I let out a deep breath. “There’s something you need to know about me and my birth parents,” I say, looking down at her.
“More surprises? Go me!” she says sarcastically.
“Sorry, it’s just never really come up. Apart from you meeting Evans at the restaurant that night, I didn’t think it would need to come up,” I try explaining to her.
She looks confused now. “I understand that, but you’ve already told me that Evans is your birth father.”
“Yup, so I probably should tell you about the woman that gave birth to me…” I start to explain just as I hear a knock at the door.
“Hold that thought, babe,” she says, giving me a quick kiss on the lips before walking around me towards the door.
“Elle, wait. I need to…” I try to spit out, but she bounds to the door and pulls it wide open.
“Aunt Sylvie!” she says with a squeal, going out of sight while obviously giving our guest a hug. “Come in. You’ve got perfect timing, actually. You get to meet Brax,” she says as Sylvia Brimstone walks through the doorway to our apartment. She stops suddenly when she sees me, her big smile fading the moment Elle says my name.
We stare at each other. This reunion has been twenty-five years in the making, but I can tell from my reaction that it’s still something she wasn’t prepared for. Hell, can you ever be prepared for something like this?
Elle looks between the two of us, noticing the strange tension in the room. I mean, what do you say to the woman who brought you into this world, then in a moment of desperation gave up her only child because she had no other choice.
“What’s going on, Brax?” Elle asks me with a frown. “Have you two met before?” she says to the both of us. The silence between us continues.
Finally, after another minute, Sylvia looks to Elle, snapping out of her trance.
“Elle, you didn’t tell me your boyfriend would be joining us, darling. If you had, I would’ve known that this would happen.”
Elle looks totally confused now. “What do you mean, Sylvie? How on earth would you know Brax?” she asks, looking between us again.
I haven’t moved. I’m still leaning against the doorway to the living room, staring. I clear my throat, then turn my head to look at Elle.
“Sweetheart, what I was about to tell you is that Sylvia Brimstone is my birth mother.”
12
I swear to god I wouldn’t have believed him had he not been standing in front of me, in the same room as Sylvia when I heard him say those words.
“Sylvia Brimstone is my birth mother.”
“I’m gonna need a minute,” I say, taking a seat on the couch as Brax rushes to my side. Sylvia walks over to the window seat and sits down, unable to rip her eyes off her only son.
“Hon, talk to me. Let me explain,” he urges, trying to get me to look at him, but I can’t. I know we still have a lot to tell each other, and still have a lot of things to work out, but surely he must have known when he met Uncle Harry all those months ago that Sylvia was his wife.
And therefore…
My head snaps up instantly. “How long have you known, Brax?”
I know he isn’t lying to me because he doesn’t hesitate and he doesn’t look away from me. Whatever he’s about to say is going to be the honest to god truth.
“I’ve known my birth mother’s name since I was fifteen years old and I asked Evans about her. At that time, he only knew her first name, maiden name, and her date of birth, but he did tell me that she had married some wealthy businessman in California ten years earlier.” He looks over at Sylvia, looking for some sort of confirmation. I look up and see her nod slightly.
In that moment, my heart breaks for Brax all over again. He looks lost, haunted even. I can’t imagine what it is like to come face to face with the woman who abandoned you as a two year old.
He clears his throat before continuing. “When Roger was dying, he gave me a photo of her and the last contact details they had. I tried looking her up, but everything kept coming up blank.”
I grab his hand and start rubbing my thumb over his knuckles like he has done to me so many times. He looks towards Sylvia again, and I see a shadow of a smile on her lips.
“I changed my name when I got married. I’d just left you in Atlanta, and I had to get out of Georgia and away from the poison that surrounded your father and that whole sordid situation. So, when I met Harry in L.A., and I told him about my past, and about you, Brax, he sealed all of the records so that it could never come back to bite us,” she says forlornly. “It wasn’t until recently that I was told by Harry that you were in Elle’s life. I already knew that Harry wanted to take over the company at any cost. It is one of the reasons why I left him. I couldn’t fathom anything happening to Elle. But knowing that my only son, the one thing I could never give him, was involved, seemed to spur him on.”
I sit there for a few minutes, just staring at her. This woman, my Aunt Sylvie, the woman who stepped in and was there for me when the rest of my family were ripped away from me, has been separated from her only son for twenty-five years, and I’m the reason why she left her husband. “I’m confused,” Brax says from beside me, interrupting my thoughts. “If Harry knows who I am, and who I am to you, why is he working with Evans?” I look back toward Brax, and he’s frowning; I can tell he’s trying to connect the dots in his head.