Fruit à la Fox - You Once Were

Show: Passions
Characters: TheRox
Disclaimer: I don't own Passions or any of its characters. This is purely fan made.

He got caught the other day.

His wife is now in the arms of another. He swears at the top of his lungs that he hates their family. That they have caused him nothing but pain. He wants to hate his wife, but he has loved her too long to let his love for her go.

The man she is with now had no money to afford a lawyer. The lawyer that was doing his case was his brother. Their mother won’t allow Ethan to put him in jail. For once Fox is glad for her meddling.

He can afford lawyers. He can not. It is that simple.

That is until is father realises that Theresa is still in power. That though Ethan Martin is Ethan’s son, he was still the appointed heir to Crane. Her money can out-bid him in all endeavours.

Miraculously she sends her old lawyer. A man that has won her many cases before she became a Crane. Her family is wondering why she won’t buy a team of lawyers like Fox has, and frankly he wonders too.

He hates their family. He hates the brothers. He hates their mother. Why will she not buy the lawyers that would beat him, instead of a civil servant that hasn’t won a case since he came in contact with their family?

When they gather in the Crane mansion, them demanding an answer from her, and his family just watching, curious to know why she would betray her family. Was she truly a Crane now?

Her family yells at her, his family sneers at her. But somehow she takes it all silently. When they all have run out of nasty words, and demands, when they have refilled their glasses in anticipation for the answer, when their ragged breaths calm down she gives and answer.

“Because I owe him more than I owe anyone in my life.”

It’s a cryptic answer. And many of them are left scratching their heads. But not he, no Fox understands completely. And he is moved beyond words. After all this time, after abandoning her when she needed him, after accusing her brother of false accusations, after insulting her mother in every possible way she still believes she owes him something and that he is worth waiting for.

Later as she sits on the gazebo, he comes to her. He watches her for a moment and realises what she is eating and he can’t believe she remembered.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Possibly.”

“Why aren’t you helping your brother sue me?”

“You mean after you insulted my brothers, and my mother in every possible way? After you put my brother in jail? After you nearly destroyed Miguel’s relationship with Kay?”

She was angry.

“Yes, why?”

“Because I still believe.”

“In what? What is there to believe in?”

“I believe that the playboy is still in there somewhere, and I believe that if I keep goading him he’ll come out.”

“Why do you want him to come back? As I recall he was considered terrible for all his womanizing.”

“I want him back because at least I can read him. Because that man is my kindred spirit. He can look at me and know exactly what I’m thinking because we just know. That man is a man after my own heart. That man gave up his life to help me, to help my son. Than man I hope still exists and I can only hope and believe that the man I fell in love with once upon a time still is alive because I miss him very much.”

“You love me?”

“No, but I loved him”

She left him to his thoughts. Had he had everything he wanted and was just to blind to see it? And for a moment he slips back, back to a time where he hadn’t had a care in the world, where she was his best friend and was an open book to him. But only for a moment does that man return. He leaves the instant she slips back into the shadows headed back to the mansion.

The End.

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