Living Without
Part Nineteen
"Get your hands off of me!" Michelle yelled as she pulled her arm away from Danny's grip just as he slammed the door.
He leaned against it and stared at Michelle, who was standing across the room from him, breathing hard and on the verge of hysterics again.
"That wasn't so bad," Danny remarked, breathing in the same manner. "You should try being a little cooperative next time."
"There won't be a next time."
"I don't think I could go through anymore of your squawking anyhow," he said as he moved away from the door and towards her. He was about to pass her when he noticed something shining on her finger and he lifted up her hand.
He stared at it for a while before running a finger over the band and then raising his eyes to look at Michelle. "You still wearing this?"
...."I believe this is yours," Elisabeth said, showing Michelle item she had in her possession. Michelle stared at it for a long time before taking the ring from her. "I found it in the bathroom. I'm assuming it must've slipped off."
"Thank you," Michelle forced a smile and clutched the ring tight in her fist....
Michelle snatched her hand from his grasp. "The last time I checked, I didn't sign any divorce papers," she harshly said to him while moving to the sofa and plopping down onto it. "And if you didn't know then, know now that I happen to take forever seriously. Our marriage actually meant something to me."
"It meant just as much to me!" Danny argued.
"I'm sure it did. That's why you're getting married to that hoochie coochie of an ex-girlfriend of yours!"
"You don't even know her!"
"I don't think I want to!" Michelle yelled back. "And how did you happen to pull this divorce off, Danny? Did you forge my signature? You know that's a felony in this state."
"Be assured that I know all about felonies and misdemeanors, Ms. Bauer."
"Of course you would, sweetheart," she mimicked his mock politeness. "Your family spends their whole damn day trying to avoid being slapped with all sorts of charges!!"
"Believe what you want, Michelle."
"I believe in the truth and sometimes it just comes back and unexpectedly bites you in the ass," she remarked.
"I think you're mistaking the truth with secrets, but since you brought up the topic, why don't we try a little game called 'Telling the Truth'? I'd finally like to get some of that out of you," Danny told her.
"I've already given you the only truth that I know! I don't know what else you want me to tell you, Danny."
"You could start with why you've been hop scotching around Diego."
"I didn't have an-"
"That's not what I'm talking about," he cut in before she could finish, and she exhaled her physical and emotional exhaustion from this roller coaster she had been on since last Friday. "Why didn't you tell me about what he was doing to you?"
"He wasn't doing anything..."
"Could you stop this?!" Danny yelled and then inhaled to calm himself back down. "I want you to be honest with me about this for once! If our marriage meant anything to you-"
"It meant EVERYTHING to me!" Michelle interrupted defensively.
"Then just tell me what really went on with the two of you! I know I've gotten Pilar's version, but I want to hear yours."
"Danny..."
"Michelle, don't do this!"
"I can't go back there!" she told him as she stood up and wandered away from him. "I can't. You can't make me do this! What does it matter now? It's in the past."
"Michelle," he turned her around and held her by the arms while she was shaking her head no. "You just said that we meant something to each other. Please, I need to know what happened. I need to hear it from you," he said, staring her in the eyes. When she agreed to tell him, he let go of her arms.
"I'm guessing Pilar only told you about our confrontation the day after you traveled to Barcelona," she spoke as she blinked away from him, her eyes filling with tears she promised she wouldn't shed.
"But there's more?"
"Yes, a lot more," she replied, taking in some air before beginning. "Do you remember when I told you that Diego had been harassing me? Well, you had then said that you'd take care of it, but I never knew if you did because your cousin just got worse. He went from orally taunting me to locking me in the wine cellar of Carmen's house and attempting to...to..." her voice cracked with emotion and she paused to recollect herself. "He just tried to do it, but I was lucky enough to have gotten my hands on a bottle of wine. I took that sucker and smashed it over his head. That's why he had to go get stitches and then make up that phony story about him getting into an altercation with some fool at a bar."
"Did anyone else know about this?" Danny asked and Michelle shook her head.
"It was my word against his and he knew that he had that advantage. Dietz, your mother, Ben. They'd all back him up and I would've been the only person singing a different tune."
"You could have told me! I would've..."
"Done what?" Michelle asked. "You were half way around the world and your mother wouldn't even allow me to contact you! She said it was important that your 'full attention was on legitimizing the business,'" she imitated Carmen's voice. "I knew she didn't give a damn about that or about me, so I called you anyway. And when I did, I either got the phone hung up on me or I was put on hold for hours. I tried to be patient and to wait until you got back, but I guess I got fed up before then and I decided to confront him."
"W-who? Diego??" Danny asked incredulously. "Were you out of your mind?! That guy was thrice your size! What were you thinking?!"
"I was thinking about our children and how much of a threat that man was to them!" she screamed, still fighting back her tears. "I had to do something before he did something to them!"
"Michelle, Diego would never touch my kids..."
"Don't you tell me that!!" Michelle snapped. "Don't you EVER tell me that because you weren't there and you don't know how it was!!" she yelled and at that point, her tears spilled from her eyes. "I had to let him know that I wasn't afraid of him and that I wasn't going to take his shit anymore!!"
"And that's when he hit you," Danny said and Michelle was silent. "He's the real reason why you went to your Aunt Meta's, isn't he? Damn it, Michelle! Answer me!"
"Yes, alright?! Yes," she closed her eyes. "He was the primary reason, but he wasn't the only," she said and they both went quiet for a while.
"Did anything else happen?" Danny started up again.
"Not after that because I left with the kids, and then some men claiming to be from you bum rushed my aunt's house and snatched them away from me," Michelle replied.
"And you tried to find the kids, but couldn't, and then there was that call you got saying the children were at Towers," Danny thought out loud, putting everything together, and Michelle just stared at him as he did this. "But they weren't because that call was made to lure you over to Towers...to Diego's place. So when you got there, you were dragged into the room and probably drugged, only to later wake up next to a very dead man...." his voice trailed off as he turned to look at Michelle. "The set up."
"You were listening to me when I explained this to you the first time?" she asked, a little surprised.
"I was listening," Danny replied. "I just had a problem allowing it to sink in. Juan figured some of it out."
"You mean most of it, right?" Michelle asked and Danny just bipassed the question by continuing with the conversation.
"Pilar said something about you threatening Diego,"
"Danny, everything I said that day was out of anger. It's not like I was actually going to do any of it," she told him.
"What did you say?"
"That I was going to kill him," Michelle quickly said and Danny blew out a tunnel of air, scattering his hair with his hand.
"You threatened to take his life. I don't believe this. Didn't you learn anything while you were with my family, Michelle?? You don't make threats like that without expecting something to happen!" Danny scolded her as if she were their daughter. "Only God knows how many people heard you! Sam Dietz, Ben Warren..." he stopped when he saw that Michelle had started crying again. "Michelle..."
"Just leave me alone," she softly said as she stood up from the sofa and Danny slowly followed behind her. She laid her head against the wall and refused to turn around.
"Michelle," Danny called again once he reached her and all he were her sniffles. "I can't begin to tell you how sorry I am right now," he spoke, his eyes glazed with his own tears.
"Leave me alone, Danny," she told him.
"Listen to me," he said as he spun her around. "Michelle..."
"Don't look at me," she tried to turn elsewhere, not wanting him to see her weak anymore, but he wouldn't let her look away.
"I'm not going to hurt you..."
"But you already have!!" Michelle screamed, steady streams finding their way down her cheeks and she broke from his hold. "I don't think I will EVER forgive you for this or for all the things you said to me! All those names you called me back at the Church?!"
"I'm sorry..." Danny was saying when she slapped his hand away from her face and moved to the opposite side of the room, forcefully wiping at her tears herself.
"You're sorry," Michelle laughed. "You're sorry?! I will NEVER forget your words, Danny! NEVER! You completely insulted and humiliated and degraded me!! You grounded me down into the smallest, most worthless piece of garbage ever imaginable. You made me feel like NOTHING!!!" she yelled at the top of her lungs and then ran her shaky hands through her hair.
"I believed that you had...that you had slept with my cousin! That you had ran away with him!" Danny cried. "I thought you had left our children!"
"That is not an excuse, Danny! You wanted so badly to hurt me and now you have," Michelle told him. "Congratulations! You finally succeeded! Please, don't let me stop you from gloating."
"Is this what you think of me?! You look at me as some guy who just wants to purposely hurt you?!" he asked and then backed away from her and rested his hands waist in an effort to hold his tongue. "Okay, so you're right. I did want to hurt you, but it was only because I thought you had betrayed me...betrayed our family. My intent was to do major damage, but no matter what I did, it wasn't going to take away what I was feeling! Either way you looked at it, I was still going to lose!"
"So this was about winning!"
"No!" Danny shouted. "No, it was about making you feel all the pain that I've been feeling since the day you walked out on me. I just wanted to make you pay," his voice faltered as more tears blurred his vision. "But you know one thing, Michelle? You can't put this all on me! You didn't exactly give me any reason to believe otherwise!"
"Because I couldn't!" she replied. "There was a threat on Dani and Michael's lives! I couldn't risk it. The only thing that you should've held onto was your faith in me. In us! You had us," she added as she stared at Danny with eyes of regret. "I guess I never really meant that much to you."
"You know that is not true! That is NOT true!" Danny pointed. "You have always been my everything!"
"But that somehow changed, huh?" Michelle commented and turned to a window.
"At first, I was thinking Mama was behind it. She had to be since she was the only one who wanted you out of our house and out of my life more than anyone else. But as time went by with no letters, no calls, no appearances, I became confused and later my confusion turned to anger and all I wanted to do was to see you tortured more than I was. I was determined to make you pay for breaking me the way that you did," his tears rolled nonstop. "You think you're the only one who got hurt in this?! I may have had our children, but I was broken, Michelle! When you walked out that door, I went out right with you! I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going....not until Alejandra showed up."
"I'm guessing that's your fiancée," Michelle breathed as she rolled her eyes upward.
"She helped me deal with a lot, including the kids," he spoke thoughtfully. "Without her, I don't know what I would've done with myself."
"I take it that she's your guardian angel," Michelle said, trying not to sound jealous.
"She was there for me. That's all," Danny got defensive.
"That can't be all," Michelle turned to face him. "That definitely is not all. You are getting married to her!"
"I did receive signed divorce papers, Michelle. That normally is the kind of thing that tells a person its time to move on!"
"And so you moved on over to the first available hoochie coochie."
"Could you stop calling her that?" Danny asked.
"Why? Am I...disrespecting her? What are you going to do to me that you haven't already?" Michelle questioned and her eyes rolled full circle. "Look, if you got signed divorce papers, you sure as heck didn't get them from me," she snipped.
"Yeah, well, now I know that," Danny said back in the same manner.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing," he said as he cleared his voice.
"I thought we were being honest here!"
"We are."
"So what do you mean about the papers?"
"It's just that your brother and I talked about it...among other things," Danny mumbled the rest under his breath. "I had a little difficulty getting a word out of him, so just in case he tries to make up some wild story about what happened, I want to be the first to tell you that I broke his finger. He's okay though!" he was quick to add.
"You did what?! How could you have done that?! Are you crazy?!"
"Rick seems to think so," Danny remarked and Michelle's face wore this shocked expression. "It was the only way I could get him to talk! Intimidation wasn't doing the trick."
Michelle stared at him in silence, not sure of what to make of his technique of getting the truth out of a person, but she wasn't going to bother arguing with him about it.
"I can't believe you did that," she murmured before asking, "What did he say?"
"Just that he had schemed to keep us apart."
Michelle watched him for a moment and then asked her question again. "What did he say to you, Danny?"
"I just told you-"
"You're summarizing!" she bit. "I know you are! What did he say to you??" she demanded to know and Danny exhaled, looked at Michelle, and then exhaled again.
"He admitted that he was working with Ben Warren," Danny started. "He said, for reasons he wasn't willing to explain, that he found himself in a situation that required him to cooperate with Ben in a plan to break you and I apart."
"A situation?" Michelle asked in wonder as to what that could be.
"Yeah. He wasn't going into details, but he said that Ben, for reasons unbeknownst to Rick, wanted you out of my family. Ben didn't want you to get hurt because you were his daughter's good friend, and so this was the safest way to eliminate you."
"I-I don't understand."
"Okay, it's like this," Danny began again. "Rick got his ass in some shit and Ben somehow found out about it. Now in order to keep Ben hushed about whatever it was Rick was hiding, Rick agreed to go along with some plan Ben had concocted to break us up. Your brother says that he didn't want to go along with it, but was persuaded otherwise when Warren said you'd be killed if you stayed with me. Imagine how fast Rick jumped to the offer after that! Ben had told him that you'd be somehow set up and that after it was all said and done, you would have no way of returning to the house or to me without getting yourself killed," he stopped and went up to Michelle, who looked like she was about to pass out. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"Umm hmm," she nodded rapidly as she stepped away from him. "Go on."
"Rick claims that he didn't know that they were going to set you up for murder, but when he learned about it, he had to do everything he could to get you out of Springfield. He says that he hated doing it, but that he wasn't going to lose you...lose you to me," Danny blinked hard and Michelle knew he was fighting back his anger which was on the brink of revealing itself. "So he lied and he schemed to keep you from finding out the truth. He even helped formulate that story about you having an affair so that I'd be quick to draw up the divorce papers..."
"No!!" Michelle shouted out as she zipped past Danny. "Rick wouldn't hurt me that way!!"
"He had your signature forged, Michelle!" Danny followed her and she covered her ears so she wouldn't hear anything. "And do you know why the affair was made up and children taken away from you? So I wouldn't have a reason to come after you!"
"Stop!!"
"And why were you allowed to know that you were being set up for a murder you didn't commit?! Why did they make threats on the kids should you not leave town?!" Danny breathed hard as more tears escaped from his eyes. "It was so you would have all the reasons to stay away from me!!"
"No!!" Michelle yelled again, getting more information than she had bargained for. "Those are not my brother's words! He would NOT do this to me!"
"Rick is the one who put this whole thing in motion! He was a part of the set up, he made up the lie, he signed the papers, and he continued to lie to the very sister he claims to love so much just so he could protect himself!!"
"Stop!! I don't want to hear anymore," Michelle begged just as she broke down into loud sobs and she fell into Danny's arms.
"I didn't want to tell you," he whispered, his tears running down into her hair. "I know how much your brother means to you..."
"He means NOTHING to me!" Michelle pulled away from Danny, but he wouldn't let her get far. "Do you understand that?! Nothing!"
"Come on, 'Chelle," he pulled her back to him. "You and I both know that isn't true," he said and Michelle turned her head elsewhere to only have Danny redirect her attention to him. He searched her sad eyes and sighed.
"I never thought I'd live to see the day that I'd be the cause of all the pain I see in your eyes right now," his words came out in a hush, his finger brushing aside some loose strands of hair from her face. He proceeded to wipe away her tears with his thumb, the whole while staring at her so preciously with eyes full of pain of their own.
Michelle searched his eyes as he stared at her and her new tears flowed now for a different reason. For the first time since she had been reunited with this man, she didn't see the anger and the hatred that had always dwelled there, drilling into her whenever he looked her way. All she saw now was pain and regret and sorrow and she couldn't help but to feel partly responsible for that.
She closed her eyes and lowered her head when she felt a sob threatening to escape from her throat and she attempted to silence it, but a whimper made it out instead. She felt his soft caress gently stride across her face and then her lips, his fingers moving as graceful as a feather, and her eyes gradually opened as he was raising her chin to him.
"I'm sorry," Danny whispered close to her mouth. "I am so sorry...." he was saying when his lips brushed against hers and he kissed her slow and soft. Once Michelle responded to him, their kiss immediately intensified. Danny held her head between his hands as his tongue delved deep within her mouth and became entwined with hers. He hungrily kissed, savoring the sweet taste of her lips that he had been deprived of for so long.
His hands moved from her face down to her waist, and he pulled her closer to him, in the process lifting her off her feet as she slipped her arms around his neck. They kissed one another as if they were the other's salvation, relishing the moment that they were in.
Danny blindly made his way over to the sofa with his woman in his arms, not knowing when they had reached the seat, and Michelle fell back onto it and Danny landed on top of her. Their mishap jolted them back to reality and they both burst into laughter and tried to gasp for air at the same time.
Once his laughter had subsided, Danny watched Michelle with such adoration. She soon stopped as well and wondered why he was staring at her.
"What?" she asked.
"That's first I've heard you laugh in a long time," he replied in a near whisper. "I've almost forgotten how much more beautiful you are when you smile. I've missed you," he told her and he felt the tears ready to pour from the rims of his eyes. "And I am so sorry for ever doubting you."
"I'm sorry too. I'm not completely innocent myself," Michelle said, her tears falling from her eyes as she reached up to wipe away his.
"I'll make this up to you. I swear," his voice cracked as more tears stained his face. "I swear..." he barely mumbled as their lips once again engaged in a kiss, taking away his words and whatever else he had on his mind.