The Hardest Thing

Chapter 2

~*~*~*~*~

Brenda walked through the airport gate from her plane, watching the crowd she was following.  She seemed to be the only person walking alone.  She carried a briefcase and a cell phone in one hand to make it appear she was in South America on business.  Her carry-on bag was perched on her shoulder.  A few people jostled against her as she started to walk through the hallway, on her way to the baggage claim.  She gave one of them a dirty look when he copped a feel up her side as he bumped into her.  She immediately checked her side pockets for her belongings, keeping the guy in sight until she accounted for anything that was supposed to be in her pockets.

Suddenly, a tall man wearing a baseball cap pulled low on his head came rushing towards her.  As he approached her, he put his arms forward and when he reached her, he swept her up in his arms, kissing her fully on the lips.  A few of the passengers from her plane looked startled and a few of the men chuckled at the display.  Out of the corner of her eye, Brenda saw one woman looking on with interest.

Brenda wrapped her arms around the man’s neck, pressing her body more fully against his.  She felt his hands shift to hold her tighter against him.  She allowed a few more minutes to pass in the kiss before she broke off, breathing hard.  It had been awhile since she had been kissed like that by him.

Gently, he put her on the ground, refusing to let her step away from him.  Brenda reached up and moved the baseball cap up on his forehead so she could see his face more clearly.  Knowing she still had the attention of the people around her, she smiled and put her hand against his cheek.

“That was some hello,” she said coyly.

“I thought you might enjoy it,” he responded, laughing lightly.  His eyes sparkling mischievously. 

Brenda laughed and leaned in towards him so only he could hear her next words.  “Only you would,” she said as she kissed the side of his face, directly next to his ear.  She drew away smiling sweetly.

He took her carry-on bag from her and slung it over his shoulder to carry it for her.  Grabbing her hand firmly in his,  he entwined their fingers together.  “Well, sweetheart,” he said loudly.  “We should get moving, the car is waiting for us.”

To anyone who watched them as they walked towards the lower level, they appeared very much in love.  He picked up her suitcase from the luggage carousel and before she had a chance to miss it, had taken her hand in his again, leading her to the waiting car.  He held the car door open for her as the driver put her bags in the trunk.

As soon as she was in the car, Brenda pulled her hand from his and slid to the other side of the seat.  She wiped a hand over her lips and waited impatiently for him to get into the car.  He was giving the driver instructions on where they were headed.  Finally, he swung his legs into the car and sat next to her.

Brenda turned towards him and hit him squarely on the arm, as hard as she could.  “What the hell was that, Jerry?!” she exclaimed loudly.

Jerry Jacks, Jax’s very own infamous brother, gave Brenda a withering glance as he rubbed his arm where she had hit him.  “You certainly don’t pull any punches do you, girl?” he growled.

“Damn right!  Not when it comes to you!”  Brenda kept her eyes only on him, her stare piercing into the side of his face when he refused to look back at her.  “I want to know what that was all about.”

Jerry’s lips curled into his signature cunning smile.  “I was just letting you know how much I’ve missed you,” he teased.

She refused to back down.  “Cut the crap, Jerry,” she said sternly.

“You certainly know how to take the fun out of everything, don’t you?”  He flashed her an annoyed look before reverting to his smile.  “You were being watched, Bren, and don’t tell me you didn’t see him, either.  I’ve trained you better than that.”

Brenda didn’t want to admit he was right.  She thought as quickly as she could to remember anyone she had thought was the slightest bit suspicious.  Jerry had just said it was a man, so the woman with the annoying laugh sitting behind her on the plane wasn’t her tail.  There was that guy who sat next to her on the plane.  He wouldn’t leave her alone until she had pretended to be sleeping for most of the flight.  A tail wouldn’t have been that obvious about direct contact, though.  That was it!  It was the man who had bumped into her in the airport, the one who felt her up, probably trying to make it seem like a random incident.

“It wasn’t the guy who ran into you,” Jerry cut into her thoughts.  He shook his head and made a tsking noise.  “Are you that out of practice?”

“Give me a break, Jerry,” she sighed.  She hated when he thought he had the upper hand.  “I haven’t had to watch for the bad guys in more than six months.”

“That’s not an excuse, and you know it.”  He was looking at her sternly, like he was admonishing a child.

“Are you going to tell me who it was or not?  Or at least give me a hint, will you?”  She crossed her arms and waited expectantly.

It wasn’t a game to him.  Their lives were in danger every day when they were sent on missions like this one.  If Brenda had been distracted enough to not even notice a fairly obviously tail, they were going to have a major problem.  She had to focus on this mission.  More than just their lives were at stake here.  “Your tail was the guy standing by the coffee stand just as you walked off the gate.  He wasn’t even being subtle about it, either.  He stopped when you stopped and he moved when you moved.  I saw him an hour ago when I came in to take a look around.”

Now that she thought about it, she had seen him and he had been staring at her when she walked by him.  She hadn’t really thought anything of him.  He had looked harmless enough.  “Do you know who he worked for?” she asked, still not wanting to admit she had been off her game.

“My only guess is the same man we’re here to get information on.  Luis Alcazar’s brother.”

~*~*~*~*~

“Why are you so obsessed with Sonny Corinthos?!” Elizabeth Webber yelled at the man standing before her.  She had been dating him for the last three months and all he seemed capable of doing was trying to become Sonny’s lackey. 

The man in question was Ric Lansing.  He watched Elizabeth closely to judge just how angry she was with him.  She had her arms crossed and was standing on the opposite side of the room from him.  Understandably, she was upset because he had just cancelled a dinner date with her to go to a meeting for Sonny.  Holding his hand out to her, he started to cross the room.  “Elizabeth, I know you’re upset,” he began.

Elizabeth moved away from his outstretched hand, starting towards the doorway.  “Upset?!  You think I’m just upset, Ric?” she asked, sarcasm edging her words.  “You have cancelled two dates this week alone.  I won’t even begin to count the number of times your cell phone has rung in the middle of our evenings, just to have you jump to for Sonny or Jason.”  She bit the name of her ex-boyfriend out in barely suppressed anger.

Ric stood with the couch between them, trying to get her to calm down.  He took a few minutes before he continued the argument.  Elizabeth Webber was a complication in his life.  A very beautiful, sexy, and lovely complication, but nonetheless, a complication.  She had entered his world without any idea of who he really was, and he couldn’t tell her. 

Tell her he was a federal agent sent to Port Charles to break into Sonny Corinthos’s circle of people to get as much incriminating evidence as possible against him?  That was a joke!  She’d only look at him like he had three heads and she’d be gone for good.  She would ignore the little bit of good she knew about him and be out the door in a heartbeat.  He couldn’t risk losing her…not when he had finally found her.

“Please try to understand, Elizabeth,” Ric tried again.  His frustration was bubbling beneath the surface, but he knew he needed to control it.  He shoved his hand into his jet black hair and tried to smile gently to ease his wrongdoings.  It came out more as a grimace than anything else.

“That’s just it, Ric, I don’t understand.  And you don’t tell me anything, so it’s impossible for me to trust you.”  Her lower lip started to tremble and she cursed herself inwardly for not showing complete strength to this man.  The last person who was able to make her this weak was Lucky.  She had been desperately in love with him, too.

Ric wanted to wrap his arms around her and hold her until she felt safe.  She could make him do things no other woman on earth had been able to make him do.  She could make him want to explain his actions.

“You can trust me, I swear you can,” he tried to assure her.  But he couldn’t tell her why she could trust him.  The WSB would never allow such a breach of security and certainly not for the sole reason that he was in love with this woman.  Sean Donnelly would not understand that.  And that was the problem.  She had no reason to try to understand him or his motivations.  He had to continue to appear to want to be Sonny’s right-hand man with no ulterior motives.  And all she could do was continue to compare him to Jason Morgan, the ex-boyfriend who had hurt her so deeply by keeping so many secrets.  She would never understand that he was keeping more secrets than Jason ever could, even if they were in the name of justice.

“Give me one good reason why I can trust you, and I’ll stay,” Elizabeth said, beginning that slide back into his arms.  She wanted to believe him and trust him.  Ric was so handsome and could be so caring and gentle with her.  He had something no one else had with her, not even Lucky, and she couldn’t even put it into words if she tried.

He lowered his head at her request, easy though it was.  The only good reasons he had were his badge and the law, but she would never believe that and he couldn’t risk telling her his secrets like that.  And he couldn’t risk scaring her off this quickly by telling her straight out that he was in love with her when he had no idea if she felt the same way about him.  So, he said the first thing that came to his mind, “Because you can.”

Elizabeth shook her head sadly at his answer.  It was nowhere even close.  “I said a good reason, Ric,” she said softly, as she opened the door and left the apartment.  She closed the door quietly behind her before he could see the pain in her eyes or the tears on her face.

Ric watched her walk out the door without saying a word.  He knew nothing he said right now would get through to her.  He threw the first thing he grabbed, a decorative crystal paperweight, at the wall, not even seeing the shards of crystal as they rained down on the fireplace.  Turning, he started for his bedroom to get ready for Sonny’s meeting.

He had chosen this life, to be an agent in the World Security Bureau, but there were times when he really hated his job.

~*~*~*~*~

Jax opened the door to his suite at the Port Charles Hotel and walked inside, greeted only by silence.  It had been one week since Brenda left town, and honestly, he could not remember a single day of it.  It had all been a blur of days melting together with nothing to distinguish one from another.  He hated this feeling.

At least, when she was gone the first time, four and a half years ago, he was able to think she was never coming back.  Though he had never wanted to believe she was dead, there was a finality in having a memorial service for someone.  The mind just accepted the person was not coming back, while the heart lived in memories.  He had done that for so long after Brenda’s first disappearance – lived in memories. 

He sank down onto the couch, rubbing a tired hand across his eyes.  He hadn’t slept much in the past week, since most of his thoughts were still occupied with Brenda.  The few hours of sleep he did get were always filled with dreams of being with Brenda.  He didn’t want to let her go.  He wished she wasn’t half a world away.  But in the end, he knew it was better for both of them that she was.

One thing kept standing out to him when he thought of her, but he always pushed it to the back of his mind in an effort to move past her, impossible though that was.  It was her last words to him the night she left.  ‘There are things you don’t know.’  He knew she wanted him to find out what those things were.  He knew, from somewhere inside him, that she wanted to tell him herself what those things were, but that she couldn’t…or wouldn’t.  There were certainly a lot of things she apparently couldn’t tell him in the past several months.

Jax ran his fingers through his tousled blond hair as thoughts of the night Carly came to him in tears to tell him of Sonny and Brenda’s kiss played back through his mind.  He winced inwardly at Carly’s conviction even while thoughts of Brenda’s proclamations of love threatened to soften the pain of the memory.  She never did tell him why she had kissed Sonny.  He hadn’t wanted to hear it. 

Closing his eyes and groaning softly, he got up off the couch and removed his overcoat.  Taking off his tie and loosening the buttons on his collar and shirt sleeves, he shook his head to himself.  He was tired, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep.  Another night would be spent as he stared out the window at the frozen river running in front of the hotel.  The city didn’t sleep, that was something he had noticed.  Sure, it got quieter at night and there were fewer lights in the buildings that housed the offices.  But if he opened the terrace doors, even just a crack, he could hear the sounds of the people on the streets below, even in the earliest hours of the morning.  There was never just silence, not like the silence that greeted him when he walked into the room every night.

He picked up the decanter filled with amber liquid from the bar and poured a generous drink for himself.  It was kind of odd, he thought as he looked at the liquor in the glass, even though he hurt now more than he ever had when Brenda had disappeared the first time, he had yet to use alcohol as a shield from the pain.  It would certainly be nice not to be able to think about Brenda for the rest of the night.  But that wasn’t his way.  He had to confront the feelings and deal with them head on, he knew.

Moving softly to the other side of the room, Jax opened the terrace doors a crack to hear the activities below on the streets.  Someone shouted as a taxi drove off too quickly and someone laughed, the sounds echoing as they floated up to him.  Staring at the still untouched drink in his hand, he wondered when the last time was he had laughed.  Before the wedding, he knew, thinking it must have been the day before.  Probably at something Elton said or insisted on doing that was so completely unconventional that all he and Brenda could do was laugh once the wedding planner had walked away.

He remembered in every detail that last kiss before they had parted the night before the ceremony.  He had lifted her off the ground, he was so happy to at last be marrying this woman.  She had giggled delightfully and then met his lips with hers.  He could feel her smiling against his lips, almost as broadly as he was smiling.  He could feel the approving looks from his parents as they watched the two of them together again. 

Inevitably, thoughts of Carly’s visit intruded on his moment.  Her tear-stained face flashed in front of his eyes and then he saw Brenda standing there.  She was so beautiful in her wedding dress.  Her hair was long and flowing over her shoulders.  Her eyes practically glowed as she shared her vows with him.  He felt his heart constrict when she promised to love only him.  He had to force himself not to look away from her gaze. 

“Do you, Jasper, take this woman to be your wife?”

He hadn’t heard those words in years, it seemed, though he knew he had.  It wasn’t the same and the look in Brenda’s eyes as she waited expectantly for his answer was something he had ached to see his entire life. 

“No.”

The word was simple enough, but somehow that one, little word had torn their worlds apart.  Her giddy smile had come crashing down as she pulled her hands from his and he could only stand there and watch her try not to run back down the aisle.  She had been gone by the time he went to look for her.  The only thing that remained of her was the engagement ring lying on the corner of the table.

Jax tossed the drink back and tried to think only of the liquid burning his insides as it traveled through him.  Nothing could erase those thoughts, though.  He had a distinct feeling that nothing ever would.

 

Chapter 3