Complicated: A Tainted Love Novella by Ghiselle St. James Page B

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck! Ben doesn’t know! Ben doesn’t fucking know! Shit!
    “You must have us confused with someone else, son,” dad tells him.
    Goddamn it, I want to get them off of this elevator right now. This was not how Ben was supposed to find out about Delilah. She was supposed to tell him. She’d hoped he would leave before she had to, but as it stood, this guy was going nowhere. This is bad. This is very, very bad. Not just for me, but for Delilah. There’s no telling how Ben will react once he knows the truth.
    Her name is not Sullivan Beal, but Delilah Keyes.
    “Aren’t you, Sullivan’s parents?” Ben asks, confused.
    “Who’s Sullivan?” Mom queries, looking at Dad. She has an impassive look on her face, as if she’s already psychoanalyzing Ben.
    My heart is hammering inside my chest and I wish that something catastrophic would happen, anything to drown out the impending doom, the clusterfuck that is sure to break out in this small space. Ben’s eyes connect with mine and I have a mild freak out, feeling heat rise to my neck, choking me. I have to come clean before things get worse.
    “Mom, dad…” I take a deep breath and release it heavily. “Sullivan is Delilah,” I confess without looking at anyone. I find an interesting speck on the floor beneath us that I find more appealing to look at than either of their faces. “We had to change her name to hide her from Rick.”
    A loud slap echoes in the elevator and I feel a stinging against my face. Mom slapped me – hard…as she should. My parents have been through hell because of our deception. I’m surprised it took her so long to unleash her fury. I thought for sure that as soon as she saw me outside of the hospital just now that she’d pounce. All along they’d thought she was traveling Europe, “finding herself”. They’d agonized, trying to find her, always coming up with nothing more than the fake cards I would deliver to them pinpointing a certain location she was at, but never really was.
    I deserve the current ringing in my ear and the stinging pain on my cheek. I deserve a whole lot worse since Delilah could have died.
    And her blood would have been on my hands.
    “How dare you keep this from us, Marshall?” Mom snarls. “We’ve been in hell for the past five years. I guess your so-called protection didn’t work, did it? He still got to her.” She turns and sobs into dad’s chest and he gives me a hard stare, one that compels me to say…something. I don’t know what, but I do; anything to make them understand why I did this, and why I kept it from them.
    “Mother, I couldn’t risk it,” I defend, brokenly. “She was looking at serious jail time if we didn’t do something drastic and the only thing we could think of was for her to run.”
    “That is not how we raised you!” she spits at me, dashing away angry tears, and I know that. I fucking know that, which is why I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me.
    “Never back down from your problems,” mom reinforces, pointing a finger at me before turning back into her dad’s chest.
    “It was the only way,” I mumble, turning my pleading eyes to my father.
    Something passes in his eyes. Resolution, maybe? I don’t know, but the hardness I saw earlier has disappeared. He gives me a small nod, enough to convey that he understands, that he would have done the same. My features slacken with relief from this, and as soon as the elevator dings and opens, we all get off, except Ben. I’d almost forgotten he was there.
    Shit, he looks pissed. I don’t blame him. Everything he has come to rely on as truth, he is coming to realize was all a lie, a ruse to protect my sister; a ruse that failed.
    “Please, don’t abandon her now,” I plead with him. “She needs you.” And she does, whether or not she knows it or even wants to accept it, she needs him.
    “What am I supposed to do with all this, Marshall?” he asks me honestly; because really, this shit is heavy