Chapter Forty-Three

      I avoided Layla for several weeks after she read that letter from my father. We went from talking once a day to maybe twice in a week—when I couldn't hope to avoid her any longer without raising suspicion. And even though I was supposed to return to Paris for a few shoots, I rescheduled with my agency to delay my return as long as possible.

      I was running again. Running and hiding from all my problems and drowning in my own fury. Is it any wonder that I did not want Layla to see me that way? When I knew she would try to stop me?

      But you can't run forever. Nor can anyone rock hide you much better than the last. And, eventually, your rage is spent so entirely on something so unsatisfactory that you drop to your knees, scream at the world for its injustice, and cry it all out. At least, that's what I did when Layla dragged me home.

      Rehabilitation doesn't necessarily pertain to drugs, alcohol, and other illegal substances. Sometimes there's something so emotionally distraught in a person's mind, they need to be shut away for the safety of both themselves and the world. Thus is how I was treated when Layla returned me to my own bed.

      Prime modeling season peaked in the early summer, and I was sent to bed for most of it. Layla allowed me just enough jobs to lay the rent in the three months that followed me return to Paris. She was the photographer for each shoot and resolved not to let me out of her sight. I don't know that any other person could be more gratifying to my existence.

      Many late nights she stayed up with me and heard my complaints and listened silently to the injustices the world forced upon me. And more often than not, she was the one who tucked me to bed with tears streaming down my face. Even then, she did not abandon me.

      Time is a great healer of all wounds. Especially when one gives over to the need of being healed. In my first couple months, I'd not yet reached that point. When I broke, however, it was a forceful, monstrous, degrading thing that I could never look back on without wincing. I tore through our apartment with a vengeance, smashing fragile things that I had never missed before, tearing up photos once precious to me just because they reminded me of him, and then cursing both him and Alec and Amelia at the top of my lungs in as many languages as I could bring to mind. A hurricane had less fury than I, and much less cause to be furious.

      Only a short time did I suffer thus, however. For when I broke, my mind was in desperate need of true and conscious healing. With Layla's help, I found that piece by piece. Slowly, I was able to rented my profession as if nothing went wrong. Soon after, I was able to rented into the Parisian society I'd known before. And not long after came a return to London and the accompaniment of all my old friends.

      But complete recovery does not come without its own vices or sacrifices.

      It was in late August that Layla informed me during breakfast that we had another shoot coming up. Since I'd passed through the most tumultuous period of my emotional emergency, I didn't think much of it. At first.

     "I'll be on the coast," she detailed. "Rocky outcroppings and huge waves. It should be very dramatic. And Vlad will be there."

      My head raised quickly. I'd not seem Vlad since that one day I met him, but I'd been keeping my ear to the ground for notice of him rise in the business. It appeared my slight interference was paying off, if he was to join Layla and I...

     "Where are we going again?" I asked before taking a bite of my toast.

     "Northern California."

      I almost choked on my food.

     "C-California?" I inquired once I could bread properly.

      Layla nodded. "The one and only. I figured you might as well do a few jobs there while you were preparing for Rebecca's wedding."

      Once again, it became hard to breathe. I couldn't think of returning to the states without the slightest feeling of claustrophobia. It felt like a steel trap just waiting to sink its piercing teeth into my ankle. Never, in all my life, could I escape the feeling that something would happen in my homeland that would ensure that I never leave it again.

      It was a fear Layla was determined to cure me of. Starting with an early September shoot at one of the country and a couple more along the way back to Charleston, South Carolina. And it was also during that fateful trip that I was to meet the rest of Layla's family in New Orleans.

      We left the first week of September. The flight seemed to be much less than the twelve hours it was said to be. Isn't that always the way of things we dread, however? They come along us all too swiftly and with a pleasurable viciousness in their task.

      Setting foot on American soil for the first time in four years hardly made my legs quake.  Four years may not have seemed like long for most people. But to me, it was a lifetime ago. And the man who returned here was not remotely the same as the boy who had left.

      As I followed Layla silently through the airport, my thoughts lingered on the last time I'd been in America. Of the same nervousness that had plagued me before getting on my first cross-Atlantic plane. The feeling of bats dive-bombing inside my stomach stayed with me until well after we were over the ocean. By then, there was absolutely no turning back.

      So there I stood. Back in my native country with complete strangers whose ways were as foreign to me then as if I'd never lived among them. It was the oddest sensation in the world.

      Yet, despite the shortness of the plane ride, it felt equally as brutal when the car ride north seemed to take twelve hours though it was much less. I sat in the passenger seat with a baseball cap pulled over my eyes most of the trip. Curled up in a comfortable leather jacket, the vibration of the vehicle almost induced me to sleep. With the thoughts and feelings still thrumming throughout my entire body, however, sleep was very far from my mind.

      At last, we arrived on the scene of my first in a lengthy trial of American jobs. Perhaps the only being to boost my morale—Layla was currently not in my good graces for for in me on this trip—was my first sight of Vlad.

      True to this world, I noticed as we pulled into the parking space that there were a number of rock outcroppings stretching out into the sea. Equally as defiant, massive waves roared in off the ocean, defying gravity as they rose ever higher before crashing down again in a cascading white foam. It was upon one of these outcroppings, defying the sea's threats and promises, that Vlad stood in an unbuttoned shirt and pants. His chest exposed to show off his tribal tattoos.

      For a moment, the young man stood there with his hands at his sides. Yet, as another wave threatened to knock him from his perch, he raised his arms up high and chuckled into the wind. Captivated as I was, I could not but help chuckling with him. It was a promise in itself, that chuckle. It dared to say: even beneath the might of the sea, a will such as his would not bend. Would not yield. And certainly would not break.

      As I continued to watch him, it felt as if I was seeing Vlad for the first time.