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Up From Here	By : aliciakristine Category: Singers/Bands/Musicians > Eminem/Marshall Mathers Views: 3454 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I do not know Eminem (Marshall Mathers). I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
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Tara took
a shower after Marshall went downstairs to talk to the girls' nanny and dressed
in a pair of his boxers, a baggy pair of sweats, and a t-shirt. She looked at
herself in the mirror and shook her head ruefully. Wasn't it ironic, she
thought, that the last time she'd dressed like a boy, she'd been around
Marshall then, too? Her hair was wet and clung to the sides of her face,
hanging down to drip on the chest of the plain white t-shirt she wore. No
amount of toweling would get her hair dry, and she searched his bathroom
quickly for a blow-dryer with no success.

She went
and found her parka, still tossed carelessly on his bedroom floor, and found a
rubber band in the pocket. Her mind was racing and she was so confused she
didn't even know where to start figuring things out, and she tried to
sort through the piles of thoughts in her head while she pulled her wet hair
back into a knot at the nape of her neck.

For the
first time, she allowed herself to think back ten years. She'd been fourteen
when she met Marshall, and he was nearly eighteen. The age difference had made
things nearly impossible, but there was chemistry between them that neither
could deny. Their relationship had been complicated: the first time they had sex,
he refused to talk to her for weeks out of shame. After that, they had sex
regularly, but it had been more than a year before Tara asked him if she was
nothing but a steady fuck.

Marshall
laughed in what seemed like disbelief. "Of course you're a steady fuck,
Tara, we steadily fuck, right?"

"But
is that all I am?"

"You
know better than that."

"No,
Marshall. I don't."

He
laughed again. "That's not my problem."

"It
is your problem,
Marshall. I want to know what I am to you."

"I
don't know what you fuckin' are, Tara, except fifteen fuckin' years old."

"Apparently
fifteen is old enough for you to fuck me," she said petulantly, yanking
the sheets up over her bare chest. She was embarrassed now, and she wanted him
to leave.

"No
it ain't," he said, reaching for his boxers and pulling them on. "But
I do anyway."

She
watched him dress in silence. "Are you leaving?"

"Yes.
I'm leaving."

"Why?"

"Because this is too fuckin' much. You're a kid, Tara, a fuckin' kid,
and I gotta deal with all this fuckin' shit inside my
head over a fuckin' kid."

"What
shit?" she asked, scared that he'd tell her she was nothing to him,
nothing but a pussy with arms that wrapped around him and legs that spread for
him and a back that arched against him.

"You
wanna know the truth, Tara? Huh? You wanna know the fuckin' truth?"

Suddenly,
she wasn't sure if she wanted to.

"I
love you. Okay? I've never loved anyone before, not any girl at least, but I
love you, and you're four fuckin' years younger than me. I could go to jail for
fucking you, do you get that? There's no risk in this for you. None. You get with me and you're gonna
have a backstage pass to all the fuckin' rap battles and you're gonna get to hang out with me and my boys, but you don't
think about what that means for me. I could go to jail, Tara, because I can't love
someone my own fuckin' age."

"Nobody
knows I'm fifteen," she said quietly, her mind reeling. He loved her? Since when?

"I
do. I do, and that's enough." He pulled his shoes on hastily. "I gotta go, Tara. I gotta go."
He paused at the door and looked back towards her. "I'll call you, okay?
I'll call you."

The
memory still hurt a little, but she wandered into his bedroom with a smile on
her face, thinking of what happened after that. The hems of the baggy sweats
she wore curled around the heels of her feet and she reached down to pull them
up out of the way. She circled his bedroom, glad for
the opportunity to see how he lived. There were no framed photographs on the
wall, but every flat surface supported at least one. Pictures of Hailie and Laney, pictures of him and dozens of men Tara
didn't recognize in studios and radio stations, pictures of Nathan and Ronnie
and the woman he'd called Nana for as long as Tara had known him, a black woman
with dreadlocks held up with wide scarves and a huge smile.

And then,
as she circled the room and looked at the pictures displayed on a waist-high
bookshelf, her heart thumped against her ribcage. A picture
of her.

She was
younger then, sixteen or seventeen. Her hair was pulled up in a messy pony tail
and there was a goofy smile on her face as she reached towards whoever was
taking the picture. She picked up the frame with trembling fingers. The
photograph was a normal glossy 4x6 framed in crystal, and she turned it upside
down and quickly took the back off the frame. There, in Marshall's handwriting,
were the words "Tara, 1995, K.C."

It was
impossible for her to believe, but she knew it would have been impossible for
him to stick the picture there for her benefit. Besides, Marshall didn't do
stuff like that. He wasn't a romantic. He didn't think of sweet things to say
or do just to make someone else smile. It wasn't his style.

She put
the back on the frame and set it in it's spot on the
bookshelf, then went and curled up on his bed, the sheets still bunched
together at one side. The comforter was on the floor and she pulled it up over
herself, remembering the day three weeks later, the day that Marshall had come
back and everything had changed so drastically.

"I'm
not going to be your booty call," she said, angry with herself for giving
in to his gentle demands. He'd been at the house she shared with her mother for
only ten minutes before they wound up in bed together, and he hadn't answered a
single one of the questions she'd asked him.

"Shut
up, Tara. You've been my booty call for a year."

"Yeah? Well, it's gonna
change."

"I
know," he said softly, and rolled over to face her. "Tara, come here.
Don't be mad at me, okay? Don't be mad at me."

"You
just ran out of here when I-"

"I
know. What do you want me to say? I'm sorry? Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I
didn't know what to fuckin' do, Tara."

"You
told me you loved me and then bounced. I haven't heard from you in three weeks.
This isn't fair, Marshall, I can't keep doing this to myself. You can't keep
doing this to me."

"I
know. Would you listen?"

She
waited, but he didn't say anything. Finally, she nudged him with her elbow.
"I'm listening, Em."

"The
whole jail thing is bullshit," he finally said.

That
was the last thing she expected to hear, and she felt her eyes well with tears
almost immediately. "Oh," she said. "So there's no excuse."

"Would
you fuckin' listen, Tara? Stop assuming the worst. I hate that you always
assume the fuckin' worse."

"Quit being so mean to me. What else am I supposed to
assume?"

"Assume
that I'm a dumbass," he said. And, awkwardly,
because Marshall Mathers just didn't do shit like this, he cleared his throat
and said: "I'd really like it if you'd be my girlfriend."

Things
hadn't been perfect. She expected more out of him than he could give, and they
fought a lot. He cheated on her twice, once with Kim. Kim had eventually been
the straw that broke the camel's back, but Tara wasn't angry anymore. She'd
been angry until she married Rob, and she'd fallen so deeply in love with him
that she couldn't blame Marshall for feeling the same thing about someone else.
Tara and Marshall had loved each other, but it was an impossible love. They
were too different, too alike. They fought too much and apologized too little.
It would have ended eventually, and Tara wasn't bitter that it ended under the
pretense of another woman.

There
were no pictures of Kim in the room, and Tara wondered about that. She knew as
much as any fan with MTV and the Internet - Kim and Marshall fought, she
cheated on him, she was addicted to cocaine, they
divorced and remarried and divorced again. But she didn't know the specifics.
She didn't know if Marshall left Kim, or if Kim broke Marshall's heart. She didn't
know if the rumors were true or if it had been a media game they played after
they mutually decided to part ways for the sake of Hailie.

She knew
Marshall, though. She knew his jealousy and his inability to provide anyone
with anything solid. Sure, he could give someone all the money in the world now
that he was capable of it. The man was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
But he was didn't like to be someone's emotional support. He didn't like to be
depended on.

After a
few minutes, she turned on the TV. All three screens flickered on. Her brow
furrowed when she realized she was looking at live feeds of his front and back
yards, and she looked down at the complicated remote in her hand. It was
impossible to figure out and she finally turned the power off.

Bored and
restless, she opened Marshall's bedroom door and looked both ways. She'd been
pretty high when they'd come upstairs, but she remembered the direction they'd
come from and went the opposite way, peeking in bedroom doors. The girls' rooms
were on different sides of the hallway. One was covered with posters of pop
stars and actors, the other decorated with Precious Moments and porcelain
dolls. Tara didn't know the girls well enough to tell which room belonged to
whom, but she was willing to bet money that the second was Hailie's.
She stepped inside cautiously, afraid of being caught intruding.

There was
only one poster on the wall that didn't fit with the girly theme, and it was
framed. She smiled when she recognized it. It was one of the first press shots
that had been nationally released of Marshall, and he looked young and unsure
of himself. He wore a white wife beater and a pair of baggy blue pants, and he
knelt down in front of a wall spray-painted with graffiti. The camera angled up
at him, and she saw by the firm set of his jaw that he was doing everything he
could to act comfortable. Of course he wasn't. Marshall wasn't one for all the
attention despite what so many people thought. He was quieter, more dynamic
than some appreciated - he liked to be the one producing and directing and
creating.

The
Marshall framed on Hailie's wall - if this was, in
fact, Hailie's room - was one that Tara recognized
all too well. She realized that this picture was probably taken not long after
she stopped seeing him.

A
Precious Moments bed set covered the full-sized canopy bed, and on a white end
table was a framed portrait of Kim. So this was Hailie's
room. Kim, too, was young in this picture, smiling broadly. When Tara looked
more closely, she saw a tiny bundle in her arms. Hailie
as a newborn, was wrapped in a lavender blanket, her
tiny face barely showing beneath mounds of soft fabric. Kim's face was more
round than Tara had ever seen it, but the joy in her eyes gave her entire face
a beauty that was breathtaking.

She
turned and left the room, pulling the door closed behind her, and paused a
minute in the doorway of the other girl's room. There were no posters of Eminem on these walls, no framed portrait of Laney's mother
on her bedside table. Only posters of young R&B stars, some autographed. A
G-Unit collage was autographed in bright blue marker, and a man's handwriting
had scrawled, "Come see us whenever u want" above an illegible
signature.

There
were three bathrooms on this floor, and three more bedrooms that Tara assumed
were for guests. They resembled little suites more than bedrooms, with private
bathrooms and small sitting areas curved around plasma TVs fastened to the
walls. Each were identically decorated.

Another
staircase led further up, and she hesitated only briefly before climbing the
steps. This story was much smaller, tucked under the eaves of the house. Dozens
of boxes were stacked beneath windows and the roof and walls were unfinished.
There were no rooms, only beams supporting the roof. A few odd pieces of
furniture sat in random places, all of them older than what she'd seen
downstairs.

She liked
it here beneath the skylights, and she sat down on an old leather sofa and
stretched her legs out. She could imagine lying here with a notebook or a
laptop computer on her lap, writing the novel she'd been trying to write for
most of her life. She could be inspired here, looking out through the great
domed skylights at the clouds overhead. It was nearly four o'clock and the sun
was sinking lower behind the tops of neighbors' houses to the west, and as Tara
sat there in the growing darkness, she felt her eyelids grow heavy. It was so relaxing.

Marshall
went upstairs to find Tara after he'd talked to the girls' nanny and made a few
phone calls. Against his better judgment, he decided not to go into the office
tomorrow. He was still sending the girls to school, so he didn't tell him about
his rare day off. It'd give him a bit of time to talk to Tara and try to figure
out what she was doing there, and they'd get home early enough for him to spend
a few hours with them before bed.

She
wasn't in his bedroom, nor was she in the bathroom, but he didn't go looking
for her just yet. Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the
shirt she'd been wearing, turning it right-side out. It was a plain yellow
t-shirt, small enough that it could have been mistaken for Laney's, and it
smelled like her perfume. The shoulders of the shirt smelled like her shampoo.

He was so
confused! Damn her, doing this to him. Things were going fine. Sure he was lonely, sure he needed to spend some more time with the
girls. But he was on the right track, getting over Kim and settling his
lawsuits and just settling. He bought a big house, set up trust funds
for the girls, cemented his wealth in the very
promising careers of some up-and-comings. There wasn't anything else he needed.

Within
two hours of seeing her for the first time in eight years - eight fucking
years! - they wound up in bed. Her meekness evaporated
as soon as her clothes came off and she turned into some kind of lioness, doing
tricks with her mouth and her body that still had him reeling. Only Tara would
squeeze such a pussy thing to say out of him after sex. "No, I don't hate
you for coming back," he mimicked himself in the empty bedroom. "I
hate you for waiting so long." He sighed and tossed the shirt down, then
pulled himself up to his feet. He had been trying to tell her why she couldn't
be back, why things wouldn't ever be how they used to - and then she'd fucking
seduced him-

No. That
wasn't fair. She hadn't seduced him at all, at least not intentionally. Her big
sad green eyes and the petulance in her voice had seduced him, and then when he
pulled that beanie off and saw the piles of hair - those were the things that
seduced him. Not Tara. Of course she was capable of seducing him, and she
always had been. She'd been fourteen the first time she seduced him, and she'd
kept him under her spell for nearly six years. And maybe he was nothing but an
idiot, but he believed her when she said her intentions hadn't been what he'd
initially thought.

He felt
his dick harden when he thought about her mouth, her tongue, the way she'd
pressed a kiss to the tip of his cock before climbing back on. That wasn't an
act. He'd been with enough women to know by now what it felt like when a bitch
was just trying to get something out of you. There was no patience, no
selflessness, no eye contact. With Tara, there had
been nothing else.

He went
back downstairs and looked for her in the living rooms and game room, but the
only two he saw there were Hailie and Laney.
"Have you seen Tara?" he asked them. They were on their fourth game
of Uno Attack, and both shook their head
distractedly. He sighed, went back upstairs, and checked every room before
going up to the attic.

There she
was, sleeping on an old sofa beneath the skylights. He didn't turn the lights
on even though it had grown nearly dark in the room, but he pushed the door
shut behind him and approached her quietly. Her chest rose and fell
rhythmically and a tendril of hair had fallen across her mouth. Each breath she
took pulled it against her lips, and every time she exhaled, it rose a fraction of an inch above them. He smiled, hating the
tenderness that came to the surface when she was around. He was Marshall
fuckin' Mathers. He didn't care about any girl,
especially one that he shared a history like this with.

He was
lying to himself and he knew it.

"Tara?"
he whispered, brushing the hair from her face. She stirred and smiled at him
without opening her eyes.

"Did
I fall asleep?" she asked groggily, reaching for him blindly. Her hand
found his face and curved against his cheek. "I'm sorry. I was
exploring."

"It's
okay." He was still whispering, and not because he wanted to stay quiet.
Something lodged itself in his throat and his Adam's apple wouldn't move.

"What
time is it?"

"Just after five. I'm sorry I left you alone for so long. We were going over
the girls' schedule for this week."

"It's
okay." Her eyes finally opened and her eyes were unreadable. "You
told me already. You don't have time for me."

He opened
his mouth to argue, but she pressed a finger to his lips. "I'm not picking
a fight, Marshall. Don't think I am."

"What
are you doing, then?"

"I
did nothing but avoid the truth in my marriage, and look where it got me.
Homeless, broke, and without my son. I don't want to hide from the facts
anymore. Rob cheated on me, and I was a fool. I allowed him to do what he did
simply because I was so afraid of losing my comfortable little Victorian house
on a shady street. You don't have time for me, and that's okay. I didn't expect
you to drop everything and rush to my side."

"What
did you expect?"

"I
don't know," she said honestly. She wasn't high anymore, and it was easier
to put the complicated thoughts into words. "I just wanted to see you. I
just wanted to know that I had someone somewhere who cared, even if it was only
for a little while. I'm so tired of being alone. My mom died."

The last
three words had trouble sinking in, and Marshall blinked. "Say what?"

"My
mom died. I really don't have anyone anymore, Marshall. And I'm not trying to
guilt-"

"I'm
sorry," he said, not caring that he was interrupting, and sat on the couch
beside her. Tara and her mother had been inseparable even if the older woman
hadn't been the best mother. She'd been the only person Tara had in the world
beside him. "When?"

"A year ago. I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay."
He knew what that felt like. He didn't want to talk about a lot of shit.

"But
I'm not trying to guilt-trip you, Marshall. It isn't your responsibility to
take care of me just because there isn't anyone else. I just..
I wanted to know there was someone. I can take care of myself. I've done
it for a long time now. That isn't what I needed, a caregiver. Do you
understand? I just wanted someone to look at me and feel like they were looking
at me because they wanted to, because they knew me, not because they had
to, not because I was bringing them food in a restaurant or came through their
line in a grocery store."

"I
understand," he said softly. "You can stay with me for awhile if you
need to."

"I
need so much more than a place to stay, Marshall," she said, sighing.
"I need a new life, I need my son back. I need Cameron so much-" Her
voice cracked and she stopped abruptly, looking back up at the skylights. It
was almost dark outside now, and Marshall's face was a shadow. She hoped it was
dark enough to hide the tears on her cheeks.

It
wasn't.

"I'll
help you," he said. "I've got an entire army of lawyers that sit
around with their thumbs up their asses, waiting for someone else to sue me.
I'll assign two, three, eight of them to your case. I won't stop until you get
your kid back."

She
laughed humorlessly. "Do you think it's that easy, Marshall? Even with the
most expensive lawyers in the world, a judge isn't going to care about anything
but the best interest of Cameron. I'm nobody compared to Rob. He makes hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year, he's married to a
society girl whose family has ties with every major political figure in the
state of Massachusets. Cameron is enrolled in the
best private daycare in the Northeast, did you know that? I don't even have a
degree. I don't have a home, a car worth it's weight
in peanuts, a job, a savings account." She sniffled and wiped her face
with the back of her hand, a new habit that was already endearing to Marshall.
"I've already accepted it, Em. I'm stuck.
There's nothing I can do."

He pushed
her away from him. "That's bullshit, Tara, that's fucking bullshit.
There's a fuckin' lot you can do. Look at me and ask me to help you. Isn't that
what you came here for? Didn't you come here so you could say 'Marshall, I need
your help, please help me'? I'm not mad. I would have done the same thing if
the situation was reversed. Ask me for help, Tara, and you've got it."

She
pushed him back. "You don't owe me anything. I wanted to ask you for help,
but not all that. Not for lawyers and houses and cars. Not for that."

"Then
for what?"

"For me. I wanted you to help me."

He took
her chin in his hand and tilted her face up to look at him. It wasn't a gentle,
tender touch; his hand was rough and impatient. "Help you? That's what I'm
trying to do, Tara."

"Marshall..."
Her voice broke again and she pushed the hand away that was holding her chin.
"I'm sick, Marshall. I have cancer."
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