Steve & Kayla—The End (18)

Well, dear readers, this is it. I want to thank everyone who has been following this story, and encouraging me to continue with it. When I started, I had no idea how long and detailed it was going to become! A special thank you to esp13, whose willingness to obsessively analyze clip after clip with me was a tremendous help.

As always, to go back to the beginning, click here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Steve just can’t resist playing puppetmaster in Jack’s life. When Jack refuses to believe that his father is a killer, Steve arranges for Jack to overhear as he needles Harper into confessing. Afterwards, Jack firmly rejects Steve’s overtures of peace. “I don’t want your blessing,” he says, “and I don’t want to be part of your fairy tale happy ending.”

Kayla tells Steve that Jack is never going to grant her the divorce now, but Steve won’t accept that. He pours all his emotion and determination into his signing, thumping his chest and slapping his hands together, as he says, “Don’t you know by now that Jack can’t keep us apart? No one can.” He says that she will be his wife, and jerks her into his arms. Kayla puts her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes. If only she could be so sure.

At first it seems Kayla is right about Jack and the divorce. But Melissa finally tells him that if he can’t let go of Kayla, she’s not going to wait around for him anymore. Unwilling to lose the last person he has left, Jack comes to the loft, lawyer in tow, and brings out the divorce papers for Kayla to sign. And again we glimpse the pain behind Jack’s actions, especially here, when he is admitting defeat. He tells Steve, who is acting as translator, to “just make the sign for patsy and point at me.”

Later that day, Steve tells Kayla he has a surprise for her. He’s nervous and keyed up, and we see why when he unveils the surprise. He’s learned all the signs to the song “The Rose,” and he signs and sings it at the same time. Just as Kayla said to him once, Steve is telling her that she doesn’t need to be perfect, that love isn’t just for “the lucky and the strong”—or people who can hear. When he finishes the song, he asks her to marry him.

Kayla has been watching him with tears standing in her eyes, obviously incredibly touched. When he asks the crucial question, the tears spill over. She shakes her head.

Disbelieving, Steve asks, “Did you just say no?”

Kayla tells him that she loves him more than ever, but “I need to be happy with myself before I can be happy with you.”

Steve is hurt, but he accepts her answer. Kayla tells him she needs to be alone, and then, as he’s leaving, she tries to give him his ring back. I don’t think Kayla really expects Steve to give up on her, but she knows she’s being unfair and he wants the decision to be totally his own.

Steve has been manfully absorbing blow after blow, but at this he explodes. He refuses to take back the ring and in fact practically shoves it back on her finger (so romantic, I love it). “This is your ring,” he says. “This belongs right here on your finger.”

On the pier, Steve is sitting on the stairs playing his harmonica (“The Rose”) when Jack comes upon him. Seeing Steve here, alone, when he expected him to be out celebrating with Kayla, puts Jack in a less acrimonious mood. When Steve mentions that Kayla wanted to be alone tonight, Jack sits down next to him and says, “I guess neither of us Johnson boys was meant to have her.”

Steve doesn’t take offense. He just says quietly that he is going to marry Kayla and make her happy.

Jack nods, and the camera pulls back to show the two of them, side by side. For a moment, they almost look like brothers.

Kayla has a chance to restore her hearing, by undergoing surgery. She is hesitant, because if it is unsuccessful, she says, her last hope will be gone. Steve tells her again it doesn’t matter, they can still have a life together even if she can’t hear.

When Kayla protests that it won’t be a normal life, Steve—making an excellent point—responds, “Kayla, you picked me. Since when do you want a normal life?”

That night, they get a visit from a friend with a baby. Holding the baby, Kayla realizes that if she wants her dream of a life with Steve, a family with Steve, she’ll have to take a risk. She can’t stay in this holding pattern forever.

A hotshot ear specialist mysteriously becomes available to perform the surgery, and Steve finds out that Jack pulled some strings to make it happen. When Steve thanks him, he obviously feels—mixed in with gratitude, awkwardness about expressing it, and his overriding worry about Kayla—proud of Jack, proud that he set his personal feelings aside to help Kayla.

Jack brushes aside Steve’s thanks. He says, “Consider it a wedding present.”

Going into her surgery, Kayla is subdued, almost hopeless. Given the stakes she has set up, it’s no wonder. If the surgery succeeds, she marries Steve and all her dreams come true. If the surgery doesn’t succeed, all bets are off. She’s using the possible get out of jail free card the surgery represents to avoid accepting her life as a deaf person.

Steve is frustrated and hurt by Kayla’s attitude—but it just makes him more determined than ever. It’s really beautiful to watch Steve rise to the occasion here. There’s a symmetry that goes all the way back to where they started, when Kayla had to work so hard to get Steve into a relationship with her. Back then, she had all the faith, she did all the work. The least little discouragement made him run away so she had to start all over again.

Now, he’s the one who believes, he’s the one with all the faith. The good girl who never caused trouble for anyone, the strong one who was willing to fight on behalf of everyone else, now has someone fighting for her. Kayla always believed that if she could just break down Steve’s defenses, she would find the perfect man for her underneath. She was right. He is her biggest defender, her champion, someone who will always put her first—even if he has to fight her, now, to do it.

While Kayla is in her surgery, under the anesthetic, she has a dream. In it, she talks to a man, dressed all in white (who looks just like Steve, only without a patch). She expresses all her doubts to him, telling that it doesn’t matter what Steve says, her deafness is too much stress to put on a relationship.

The man points out a few home truths—he tells Kayla that she showed Steve what unconditional love is like. Why can’t she accept the same from him?

And finally, Kayla realizes—as she puts it to him later—that life with Steve, with or without sound, is better than life without him. When she wakes up in her hospital room after the surgery, and sees Steve next to her, she smiles at him with none of the hesitation she has recently shown. She’s happy, and confident in that happiness. When he sees her awake, Steve takes out the engagement ring. “No pressure,” he says. “I just like to see you wearing it.”

Kayla signs, her heart in her eyes, “Ask me again.”

Then it’s all happiness, all the time, as they tell everyone the news and start making wedding plans. They are out walking on the pier when Steve dangles a surprise in front of Kayla’s face: it’s her necklace, Jo’s necklace, the one he took from her so many months ago. Now he can finally give it back to her. “It’s yours,” he says.

They also prove that they can, indeed, work through any problems created by Kayla’s deafness when Marcus and Vanessa drag them to (separate) pre-wedding events. When Kayla realizes she will have to go somewhere without Steve to translate for her, she hangs back. Steve is understanding, but he doesn’t let his protectiveness get in the way of encouraging her to go. She decides to take the plunge, and Vanessa brings her to a surprise bridal shower. When Kayla arrives, all her friends and family sign in unison, “We love you, Kayla!” (This is the total extent of sign language learned by anyone besides Kim and Steve).

Back at the loft, Kayla’s ear begins ringing and hurting, and she’s worried it will interfere with their wedding plans for the next day. But this is just a prelude to getting her hearing back. She still can’t speak, which frustrates her, but with some help from Steve and Mike, she decides to be happy with what she has gained.

After dinner, Kayla tells Steve there’s something she wants to do. She turns on the stereo—”Lady in Red.” Now she can hear the music again, and she wants to dance with him. They kiss and turn in slow circles around the room, until Kayla pulls him down onto the couch to make out for a little while. (It is delightful to see Kayla’s characteristic sexual forthrightness again.) Then she kicks him out.

At the door, Steve starts to sign that he loves her, than stops, laughing at himself, when he realizes he doesn’t have to. “I love you,” he says.

Kayla signs, “It’s nice to hear that.”

The next day is the wedding. Kayla thinks they are getting married at the Brady fish market, but Steve has a surprise in store for her. Kayla has always dreamed of getting married on a boat, and Steve pulls out all the stops to make her dream come true. On the morning of the wedding, looking extremely hot in a white blazer and jeans, Steve sneaks into the sleeping Kayla’s bedroom to leave a toy boat on the bed next to her.

That’s only the beginning. This is a day nearly two years in the making, and the wedding unfolds like a fantasy from start to finish. They are both so happy, over the moon, in fact. Their friends and family are all there. The sun is shining, the water sparkling. The boat is resplendent in white tulle and yellow roses. The bride’s sleeves are bigger than her head, but she looks gorgeous anyway. The groom is wearing a bolo tie, but somehow it is perfectly appropriate. When Kayla gets her voice back just in time to say her vows, it seems a natural part of the magic of the day.

The bride and groom sail off from the reception in a gondola, and spend their wedding night on a private jet headed for a honeymoon in the Orient. The next morning, as the sun comes up, Kayla kisses Steve awake. “How do you like waking up to a wife?” she asks.

“I like waking up to my wife,” he says, kissing her and pulling her into his arms.

They are still flying high (literally), but this moment brings us down to earth a little bit. It reminds us of the most important thing: that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson are waking up together for the first time. The boat, the gondola, the private jet, the whole fantasy wedding—all of it is just icing. They have each other, and nothing else matters.

And so the thug and the good girl became man and wife, and lived happily ever after.

Well … sort of. This is Salem, after all.

Go back to part 17

screencap courtesy nicholsevansfan.com

 

Steve & Kayla—Kayla is deaf (17)

Note: this the seventeenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Steve sits by Kayla’s hospital bed, where she lies unconscious in an oxygen tent. The doctors aren’t sure what the extent of her injuries will be. Steve has been instructed not to touch her. He pleads with her not to die, not now when they are finally together and happy. He tells her he used to look in the mirror and see a bum, a one-eyed bum who would never amount to anything. “Now, I see the man that Kayla loves.” He’s crying now. “Don’t leave and take that with you.” A lot of people have changed their minds about Steve. But in the end Kayla’s opinion is the only one that matters. Without her, he would truly be rudderless.

When Kayla does wake up, we see it from her point of view—we see Steve looking at her through the oxygen tent. We see him running to get Mike, we see Mike. But we hear—nothing.

Mike says her eardrums were damaged in the explosion. Kayla’s fear and helplessness at being deaf are evident, and all she can do is cling to Steve like a life preserver. After she’s recovered a little from her other injuries, Kayla makes her way to the hearing center, where they give sign language classes. She watches the teacher and all the little children for a few moments, then turns and runs away.

The sign language teacher, Peggy, comes to visit Kayla in her room. Seeing how upset Kayla is, and how reluctant to begin, Peggy shares her story of how she lost her hearing. Then she teaches Kayla her first sign, the one thing she needs right now. Courage. Steve makes the sign also, looking at Kayla with all the love and encouragement he can muster. And Kayla looks like she’s about the break down, but she looks at Steve and tries to make the sign also.

When Kayla is released from the hospital, she still feels lost and at loose ends. She goes up to the loft roof one evening to find Steve listening to music. When he writes down the name of the song that’s playing—”Lady in Red”—she stands up and holds her hand out to him. He bows, and she curtsies. Kayla leans against him as they dance. She seems to be drawing strength from being in his arms, and can even smile a little and kiss him. When the music stops they just keep dancing, as traffic noises float up from below.

As the days pass, Kayla becomes increasingly frustrated at her inability to resume a normal life. When Adrienne invites them both to a party at the Kiriakis mansion, Kayla decides to stay home but encourages Steve to go. After he leaves she has a change of heart, puts on a fancy dress and heads over to the party.

She stands at the entrance, looking for a familiar face, then collides with a server, spilling his tray of drinks, when she doesn’t hear him say “excuse me.” Kayla is mortified and distressed to make a spectacle of herself like this, and turns tail and runs. Steve runs after her and catches up with her at the loft. When he tries to talk (actually write) to her about it, she doesn’t want to explain. She scrawls “can’t talk” on a piece of paper, and it’s true in more ways than one.

Steve calls Kimberly for help. Kim knows sign language from having worked with deaf children, and she offers to move in with Kayla at the loft and teach her. Steve goes out for awhile to let Kayla and Kim talk it over.

While he is out, he runs into Jo. They have found out from Melissa that Jack is searching for Billy, and Jo wants to prevent Jack from finding out the truth. Steve says it’s hopeless. Jack has detectives on the trail and he’s going to find out eventually. But Jo suggests that Steve go to LA, break into the orphanage, and switch the adoption records (!). Steve turns her down flat. He says he’s already done enough for Jack—too much, in fact. “I wouldn’t walk across the street for him now,” he says.

But after talking with Kim, and with Kayla, they all agree that Kayla needs a little space. It was wonderful for Kayla to have Steve to lean on when she was utterly at sea. But she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life like that. Her fundamental independence is asserting itself, and she needs to find her own footing. Steve obviously feels hurt at being sent away, but he knows it isn’t his needs that are important right now. He wants to help her above all else, so if going away helps her, he’ll do it.

After he leaves, Kayla stands holding a picture of the two of them, crying silently. How much she loves him and will miss him isn’t at issue. She’s afraid of how her deafness will affect not only her own life, but also her life with Steve. She doesn’t want Steve to have to take care of her all the time. What if they can’t recapture the right balance of closeness and independence they had before?

Kim finds Kayla crying and tries to comfort her. Then she teaches her to sign her first sentence: “I am sad.” It’s like being two years old and learning to talk all over again. Here she is feeling all these complex emotions and all she can say is “I am sad.” She’s taking a first, positive step, but in some ways it only serves to highlight her isolation.

When Steve comes back from LA at the end of the week, he has a surprise for her—he’s been learning sign language too. For the first time since she was attacked, they can really communicate. And they prove it by having a long conversation about Jack and Steve’s trip to LA. After some prodding from Kayla, Steve admits that it wasn’t just for Jo that he switched the adoption records. With his signs getting bigger and wilder, he says he doesn’t want Jack for a brother, he doesn’t want to deal with him. In fact, he hates him. If it weren’t for Jack, they would be married right now. Kayla looks at him with steel in her eyes and signs that Jack is his brother and Steve needs to face reality.

Steve protests—no, that’s not reality. But, he says, calming down, it’s okay. They will be married, and make up for all the time they lost. But Kayla just looks at him, her eyes showing her uncertainty. Finally she says that Steve might not care if she can hear, but she does. She can’t think about getting married right now.

Steve decides not to press it. Instead he brings out a gift he got in California. It’s a snow globe, a callback to their wedding in the snow, up at the cain. (I love the goofy grin he gives her when she opens it.) This perfect little gift breaks through the distance between them, at least for the moment. Kayla throws her arms around him.

Kayla’s next step in reclaiming her life is to go to the community center to touch base. (In a rare show of compassion, Jack restored the funding after her accident.) A street kid comes in and talks to her, then starts yelling and getting in her face when she doesn’t respond. Kayla is upset but, unlike at Adrienne’s party, she doesn’t run away. She is expressing her frustration to Steve when Melissa comes in with an update on Jack’s search for Billy. After Melissa leaves, Kayla asks what she was talking about, and Steve says it was nothing, not important.

At this, Kayla explodes. “Damn you,” she signs. “Don’t ever say that to me again.” When Steve is serving as her translator, he is her link to the outside world. If his natural instinct to protect her makes him edit what he translates for her, it really will change the balance of power between them—and that is her worst fear. She says, “We used to share everything … now we are far apart.”

Steve apologizes, saying he would hate it too if someone else dictated what he could hear, and he translates what Melissa said. But then he says that he believes they can overcome this together—they don’t have to be far apart—and pleads with her to say she believes it too. “Say you believe it,” he insists. Though her eyes show that she still has doubts, Kayla gives him the reassurance he’s asking for.

Later that day, Melissa comes to see Steve and announces that she is tired of this whole charade and she’s telling Jack the truth, tonight. Steve seems resigned. But Jo, again, ropes Steve into one last desperate attempt to keep the truth from Jack. He breaks into Melissa’s apartment and finds the adoption papers. He’s about the burn them in the fireplace when Melissa and Jack come in and catch him. Jack shoves Steve away, grabs the papers—and he finally finds out.

Jack doesn’t believe it at first. But after he talks to Jo, he is forced to accept the truth. Sitting on the pier alone later that night, he flashes back to when Steve offered him his kidney—it’s all starting to make sense. When Steve comes up behind him, Jack says, “You gave me Kayla, you gave me a kidney. You gave me my life back … no matter how much I hated you, you were always so good. And now I know why.”

And Steve can’t help opening up. Despite everything, this is a moment he’s been waiting for his whole life. Everything he’s been telling himself, that he hates Jack, that he doesn’t want him for a brother, falls away for the moment. He says, choking, “It was because I never stopped loving”—he stops short of saying “you”—”I always loved my little brother. I always loved Billy.”

Jack understands perfectly. He knows now that everything Steve did for him was out of love, not to play God or to have some kind of power over him. He knows there will always be a bond between them. And in a strange way, he even acknowledges it (later, talking to Harper, he snaps, “I suppose Steve Johnson gave me his kidney because he hates my guts.”)

But here, he says intensely, “It doesn’t make a difference who I am—Jack, Billy—I’ll always hate you.” He hates being a Johnson, his whole identity lies in ruins … but he finally found his weapon against Steve.

After Jack leaves, Steve is standing shellshocked on the pier when Kayla comes and finds him. Seeing his face, she doesn’t say anything, just puts her arms around him and leads him away. It’s important to Kayla that Steve can let her help him when he needs it—and he certainly needs it now. The last vestige of his dream of finding Billy has crumbled.

A few days later, Kayla is working with Kim to recover her memory of the night she was attacked. They have good reason to believe that the person who attacked her is the so-called riverfront knifer, a serial killer who has been killing prostitutes. As she reconstructs the attack with Kim, she remembers pulling a buckle off her attacker’s glove. When the police find it and trace it, it leads them to … Jack Deveraux.

As Roman, Abe, Shane, and Steve question Jack at the police station (Steve in overbearing big brother mode), Harper Deveraux sneaks into the loft to finish what he started. Kayla has been Harper’s target all along, in revenge for Jack’s humiliation at her hands. He ties up Kim and Kayla on the loft roof and is preparing to kill them, when Shane and Steve—”that white knight idiot lover of yours,” as Harper terms it—show up in the nick of time to save them.

Kayla signs shakily to Steve, “I knew you’d come,” and they fall into each other’s arms.

The next morning, after Kayla has a nightmare about Harper stalking her, Steve calls Peggy for help. Kayla tells Peggy that she still feels scared and isolated, and the more Steve and her family try to help, the more alone she feels. “What’s wrong with me?” she asks. Peggy tells her there’s nothing wrong with her, she just needs to accept her life the way it is now. She says, “You’ll realize this is it, I’m deaf. This is my life. And when that happens you learn different ways to deal with it … each day it will get a little easier.”

Kayla looks uncertain. If she really is going to be deaf for the rest of her life, could she really face that? Could she and Steve survive it?

Go on to part 18: The End

Go back to part 16

 

Steve & Kayla—the Community Center (16)

This is the sixteenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Let’s take a break.

An irresolvable dilemma for any fan of a soap couple is if your couple is featured in an exciting, front burner story, they’re almost certain to be unhappy in some way. Here, after the heartbreaking drama of the rape and Kayla’s recovery, Steve and Kayla step to the backburner and are used to introduce a whole slew of new characters. The upside of this is that we get to see them be happy for a little while.

The old Emergency Center burned to the ground a few months back, and Steve and Kayla both get involved with the building of the new one. They decide to start a new community center in conjunction with it, with Steve serving as a liaison for the street kids and gang members in the area. In between all this we get to see Steve and Kayla hang out like a real couple, tease each other, argue a little, make up, whisper sweet nothings to each other, and kiss a lot. It’s hard to complain about that.

Of course, into any soap life some rain must fall, and for Steve and Kayla right now, it is Jack. I think Jack’s actions here have more to do with Steve than they do with Kayla. It hurts to lose Kayla, but it hurts even more to lose her to Steve. Jack would like to dismiss Steve as someone of no importance, but he can’t. First because Kayla prefers him, and second, because of the kidney. Jack will always owe his life to Steve, and it makes him feel not grateful but at a permanent disadvantage. He’s forced to wonder why this man would save his life, and he doesn’t like it. So with Steve’s kidney stitched up inside him, Jack does everything he can to make their lives miserable. The first thing he does is promise he’s going to fight the divorce from Kayla.

Kayla goes to the Deveraux mansion to see Jack about the divorce, and runs into Anjelica instead. Anjelica, naturally enough, thinks that Kayla has traded down, and sneers that Kayla is “forced to live in virtual squalor with your one-eyed boyfriend.” But Anjelica can’t touch Kayla anymore, and Kayla neatly turns the tables on her. “You’ve never been in love … I guess that’s why I always pitied you.” Anjelica’s face shows that Kayla hit her mark, and Kayla pauses outside the door to smile to herself. Our girl is back.

That night, Steve makes dinner for Kayla and tells her how glad he is to be able to take care of her like this. “I missed you, Sweetness,” he says.

“I missed me, too,” Kayla says, and it’s an acknowledgment of how much was at stake, how battling back from the rape meant coming back to herself. Now, things are nearly back to normal.

Almost. Their physical closeness is back–the touching, the kissing, the slow dancing—but they have not yet resumed their sexual relationship. The tension of unfulfilled desire begins to build. One night after a difficult day at the community center, Steve puts his arms around Kayla and kisses her goodnight.

“Mm, you feel good,” Kayla says. She gets a speculative expression on her face and snuggles closer. Steve begins kissing her neck, then pulls away abruptly. “You’d better go up to bed,” he says. He’s obviously afraid that if she stays he’ll start pressing her, and he doesn’t want to do that. Kayla goes, slowly, reluctantly, giving one last look of regret at the bottom of the stairs.

(All of this is beautifully conveyed by Stephen Nichols and Mary Beth Evans without a word of explicit dialogue.)

A few days later, after a scare in which Kayla thinks the plane Steve was on has crashed (but he wasn’t on it after all), they are getting ready for bed. Kayla turns to see shirtless Steve standing before her. The look she gives him needs no words, but Kayla says them anyway. “I thought I would never see you again, or touch you again.” She trails her fingers over his tattoo. “Or be with you again.” She kisses him, her intentions clear.

Steve takes her shoulders in his hands. He says, almost whispering, “I want you to want this as much as I do.” Then, smiling a little, “You do want me, don’t you, Kayla?” He knows, but it’s been so long, and so much has happened, that he needs to hear it.

“Of course I want you,” she says, and she means it. And slowly, kissing all the way, they make their way over to the bed and reclaim what they lost.

Jack senses his essential powerlessness to destroy their happiness, and it’s driving him crazy. It’s what helps him see himself as the victim in all this. When Jack comes by the community center and tells them that he’s determined to close it down, Kayla asks him why, as an assemblyman, he would want to hurt something that is good for the community. Jack snaps that Kayla doesn’t care what’s good for the community: “All you care about is you … and him.”

Another day, after Jack has dropped by and issued one of his threats, Kayla tells Steve, “I have trouble remembering he’s your brother.”

But Steve says, “I have trouble forgetting.”

This reminds us that, in fact, Jack has a significant source of power against Steve, but he has no inkling of it. It has nothing to do with his money or his position. He has the power to hurt Steve because of Steve’s unkillable love for his baby brother.

That love is what prevents Steve from retaliating against Jack in any significant way. He will attack him physically—punching him when he insults Kayla, slamming him up against the wall, practically making a career of grabbing him by the lapels—but he never uses the biggest weapon in his arsenal. He never taunts him, never even comes close to it, with the fact that Kayla loves him, not Jack—wants him, not Jack.

It is very satisfying, though, when Steve and Kayla are able to successfully combat or elude Jack’s attacks. A standoff with some gang members at the community center (one that includes holding Steve at gunpoint) results in one of the gang members being shot by the police. Jack persuades Emilio, brother of the man who was shot, to appear with him at a press conference and blame the community center for his brother’s death. Steve, seeing the press conference on TV, shows up in time to swoop in and manipulate Emilio into admitting the truth, then amiably agree to be interviewed by the assembled reporters and put in a plug for the community center.

When Kayla decides to host a rape prevention seminar, Jack corners her and offers some suggestions at how wives can avoid being raped. 1. Never lead your husband on. 2. Never pretend you’re going to make love to him someday. 3. Don’t get caught sleeping around. (Notice he is not denying here that he raped her.) He warns Kayla not to allude to him in her speech at the seminar, but naturally enough, refusing to be intimidated, she does anyway.

Jack next crashes the opening ceremonies of the community center and pulls Steve aside. Maybe he’ll be more responsive to threats. Jack says that if Kayla publicly withdraws her comments about him, and apologizes, Jack will give Kayla a quick divorce. If she doesn’t, Steve and Kayla should prepare themselves for the longest, messiest divorce in judicial history. Steve treats this offer with the contempt it deserves. But then, as always when Jack behaves badly, it seems to pain Steve as much as anger him. How could this be his baby brother? He says, “I used to think you were a stand up kind of dude … how does a nice kid turn into a smart-mouth jerk like you?”

This slips past Jack’s defenses, and we glimpse a little of what is fueling his actions. He says that when you’re a nice, trusting guy, people stab you in the back. Your wife lies to you. The guy out there campaigning for you is sleeping with your wife. Nice guys are losers. He’s already lost Kayla, and he’s never going to lose again.

In the midst of all this maneuvering with Jack, there are many, many scenes during this storyline that establish nothing more than “Steve and Kayla are happy” or “Steve and Kayla are hot for each other” (and usually both). I think my favorite is the Emergency Center elves scene. Kayla is working late, and Steve is trying to get her to go home with him. He plays her a song on his harmonica (“I’m very sleepy, baby, oh, won’t you please come home?”) He kisses her neck (which does totally distract her), and finally he enlists the help of the “Emergency Center elves” who will do all the work if Kayla will only leave them alone. It’s delightful to see Steve and Kayla get the chance to enjoy each other’s company like this, just a happy couple in love.

Not long after this, Jo has to have surgery to remove a lump in her breast. The surgery goes well, and on the day she is to be discharged, Steve and Kayla come to the hospital to take her home. Before they can leave, Jack swoops in to Jo’s hospital room and offers to give her a ride home in his limousine. Jo is flattered and pleased and jumps at this chance to spend time with her younger son, while Steve can only stand dumbly by and try to tamp down his jealousy.

For Jo, the disconnect between Jack and Billy is still operating in full force, and the closest she comes to acknowledging the misery Jack has caused Kayla and Steve is to say brightly, “Maybe I could help him!” This unfairness registers only in the minds of viewers, however. Steve’s jealousy is an emotional reaction, not a conviction that he deserves Jo’s loyalty over Jack. And Kayla, who Jack has hurt most of all, makes it very clear through this whole time period that she has no interest in turning the whole world against him. Melissa, Jo, and even Steve—especially Steve—are free to form their own opinions about him.

Meanwhile, Camby, the reporter who took the pictures of Steve and Kayla when Kayla was married to Jack, is working with Jack to dig up dirt on the center. Camby finds out that Emilio’s sister April was stealing drugs from the Emergency Center supplies, and that Steve and Kayla declined to prosecute her. This looks bad enough that Jack is able to get the community center funding revoked. The same night Camby finds out about April, he scores another little tidbit of information—which he brings promptly to Jack’s attention. Jack is intrigued. It seems there is a third Johnson sibling, a skeleton from Steve’s past he doesn’t want found. Could this “Billy Johnson” be the key to getting his revenge on Steve at last?

Steve and Kayla call a board meeting to discuss ways to restore the center’s funding. They hold the meeting at the loft. Despite the problems at the center, they are happy. They laugh and talk about “the big M”—getting married. When Abe Carver calls to say the center has been vandalized, Steve goes there to check it out. He reassures a worried Kayla that he’ll be fine: “Just think about the big M,” he says. (Now we know something bad is going to happen.) While he is gone, the lights in the loft go out. When Kayla goes down to change the fuse, a figure in black attacks her. They struggle, knocking a gas can underneath the boiler in the process. Steve arrives home in time to hear the resulting explosion. He rushes in to the burning basement and carries Kayla out.

Go on to part 17: Kayla is deaf

Go back to part 15

 

Steve & Kayla—The Rape (15)

Note: This is the fifteenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Kayla is sitting on the couch at the loft, an expression we’ve never seen before on her face. Her eyes look sunken, almost dead. Her dress is torn, and there are bruises on her neck. Jack comes up behind her and touches her shoulder, and Kayla flinches.

Kayla takes a shower, and alone in the bathroom we see how close she is to breaking down. But when she comes downstairs the core of steel in Kayla’s character is on full display. She shows nothing to Jack, no confusion, no weakness, no pain. Jack is defensive and still angry, spoiling for a fight, and he asks where she is going. “To see Steve,” she says, throwing it in his face.

Kayla doesn’t tell Steve about the rape. How can she tell him his baby brother raped her? She begs Steve to leave town with her, to go and get away from everything. Steve is confused by her insistence, but willing to do whatever will make her happy. They drive to a cabin in the mountains. Here, far away from Jack, Kayla relaxes a little. They go for a walk in the woods, and Kayla points out how the snowy branches all around them look like a cathedral.

“It would be a shame to let it go to waste,” Steve says. They kneel down together in the snow, and Steve puts that ring—finally, permanently—back on her finger. Their vows are simple, but they say everything. “With this ring, Steven Earl Johnson and Kayla Caroline Brady become one. Right now, and forever.”

Back at the cabin, for their wedding night, Kayla desperately wants everything to be normal. She puts some powder on the bruises on her neck and asks Steve to turn out the light. But when Steve reaches for her, she flinches and pulls away. He asks her to tell him what’s wrong. She knows the time has come, that she’ll have to. But for tonight she asks him to just hold her. “I feel safe in your arms,” she says.

Steve knows something is very wrong, but he doesn’t press for answers, not now. He just puts his arms around her. It breaks my heart to see Kayla shy away from what she always relished, with Steve. She’s finally gotten what she wanted for so long, and she can’t enjoy it. Jack took that from her.

The next day Steve wakes up first, and he sees the bruises on her body. He insists she tell him who put them there, and finally, Kayla does. She tells him how Jack found out about their affair, and how angry he was. How he held her down, tore at her clothes, and raped her. “I hate him,” she says quietly. She, who could never hate anyone.

Steve jumps out of bed and starts pulling on his clothes. All of his reactions are crystallizing into one driving force—killing rage. “What are you going to do?” Kayla demands. “You’re going to go kill Jack, then come back here?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Kayla!” Steve shouts, and there’s a helplessness there too. He just knows he has to do something, to avenge her. “You’ll be all right here?”

Kayla slowly shakes her head, her eyes, so full of pain, locked on him.

All the rage drains out of him, and he kneels down by the bed like his rage was the only thing keeping him upright. What Kayla needs from him right now is not for him to kill Jack. He holds her and lets her cry out her distress on his shoulder.

But Jack is on their trail now. When Steve goes out to get more firewood, Jack’s henchman attacks him. Jack takes Kayla back to the loft with him and holds her prisoner there. The injured Steve slowly makes his way back to Salem. He climbs up to the roof of the loft, and he and Jack fight.

It is Jack who raped Kayla and held her prisoner. It is Jack who Steve fights with. It is Jack who falls from the roof. But it is Billy who lands, Billy who goes to the hospital, Billy who has serious internal injuries. In the hospital, Kayla puts her own issues aside as Steve struggles with the fact that his brother might die because of him. No matter what Jack has done, Steve doesn’t want that. When Jack needs a new kidney to save his life, Steve doesn’t hesitate. He gives Jack one of his kidneys.

After the surgery, Steve moves into the loft with Kayla. Now what? For the first time we see Steve and Kayla tentative and unsure around each other. There’s an awkwardness between them. Kayla is struggling to deal with her rape, and neither of them is sure how to handle it, or how to behave around each other. A strange role reversal is in play, where Steve is the one pushing her to open up, and Kayla the one who thinks he can’t understand.

He keeps pressing her, and finally she opens up a little. She’s wondering what she might have done to bring the rape on herself. “Maybe I led him on,” she says.

Gratified she’s talking to him about it, eager to reassure her, Steve tells her it wasn’t her fault. Nothing could justify what Jack did. Besides, if she’s going to blame herself, she has to blame him too. Kayla argues that it’s not the same, and he argues that it is the same, and Kayla bursts out, “It’s not the same! He didn’t rape you.”

This is the first open acknowledgment of the rift between them. They both may have made mistakes, but Kayla paid the price.

Realizing she needs more help than he can give her, Steve encourages Kayla to go to rape counseling. Jack, still recovering in the hospital, sees her outside the counselor’s office and tells her heatedly that it’s as good as announcing to the world that she thinks he raped her. Kayla counters that he should have thought of that before he did it.

After this encounter, Jack’s body begins rejecting the kidney. Steve comes to pick up Kayla from her appointment and they hear the news about Jack. Marcus says Jack’s doctors think this is a psychological rejection because of all the animosity between the three of them. If they go to Jack and tell him they forgive him, it might help.

“Then that’s just what we’ll do,” Steve says. Once again, Billy’s life is at stake, and once again, Steve is ready to do whatever it takes. Forgiving Jack or not has nothing to do with it. It’s just a means to an end.

Kayla is incredulous. She refuses. Steve says fine, he’ll go to talk to Jack by himself. “Are you going to tell him you forgive him for what he did to me?” Kayla asks.

When Steve says, yes, he is, and he hopes it saves his life, Kayla is appalled at this betrayal. “Do what you have to do,” she says bitterly.

Steve goes to see Jack. But, in the end, he can’t tell him he forgives him. He tells him the truth, that what Jack did to Kayla ripped her heart out, and that Kayla, and Steve, are both still angry. But, he says, the only one who will be hurt, if Jack rejects that kidney, is Jack. Why should he throw his life away just for pride and spite?

When Steve gets home, Kayla is sitting silently in front of the fire, practically vibrating with anger and betrayal. Steve gives her some yellow roses in a painfully futile gesture, then even more painfully tries one more time to get Kayla to talk to Jack.

“I already did my part to keep Jack alive,” Kayla says. “It got me raped.”

Steve broke her heart once, for Billy’s sake, and she understood and forgave him. When he risked his own life to give his kidney to the man who raped her, she understood that too. All along she has tried to respect his feelings for his brother, to not take sides, often going against her own wishes so Steve wouldn’t be caught in the middle. But if there’s no limit to what Steve will do for Billy—and it looks like there isn’t—where does that leave her?

That night, Kayla has a dream. Steve and Jack are fast friends, laughing and talking, their arms around each other. Steve says, “I’m really glad we didn’t let that little thing with Kayla come between us.” And Jack: “I know! She blew the whole thing out of proportion.” Steve: “She did, she did.”

This truly is Kayla’s worst nightmare. If Steve is taking his brother’s side, is it possible that he just doesn’t see what happened to her as being that big a deal?

Steve hears her wake up and comes in to try and comfort her, but Kayla jerks herself back from him. No matter where their minds were, their bodies always used to be in sync. That is no longer true. Now their physical separation mirrors the distance between them.

In her counseling session later that day, Kayla admits the truth: she’s angry not just at Jack, not just at herself, but also at Steve. She’s angry for everything he did to push her towards Jack, everything that led up to her rape. And she’s angry that after what Jack did to her, Steve still cares about him, cares about him enough to give him a kidney, enough to ask her to tell Jack she forgives him. “I was the one that was raped,” she cries. “What about me?”

So now Kayla is taking sides—her own. She comes home and tells Steve she’s been doing things his way and it hasn’t worked out so well for her. She’s not getting better. She tells him she needs to take responsibility for her own life, and deal with her own problems as best she can. And what she’s decided to do is press charges against Jack. If Steve feels caught in the middle, that might be a problem—but now it’s his problem, not hers.

It is a problem. One of the reasons Steve doesn’t like the idea of Kayla pressing charges is that he sees exactly what she sees: that he was complicit in the events leading to Kayla’s rape. For Kayla, that makes it all the more important that Steve side with her now. But in Steve’s mind, his guilt lessens Jack’s guilt. Why should Jack be the one punished when Steve set the whole thing in motion?

When Steve tells Jo that Kayla is pressing charges, for once she has good advice for him. She tells him that just because you love someone, it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pay for what they’ve done.

Steve says he knows Kayla is doing the right thing. Why can’t he feel it? He says, “I hated Duke, why don’t I hate Billy?”

Jo says, “Because Billy didn’t rape Kayla, Jack did.” This is nonsensical on the surface, but it articulates the disconnect between Jack and Billy for the first time. Steve can’t see his brother clearly because all he sees is the little baby in the orphanage. This is what is making him try to protect Billy from the consequences of what Jack did.

After Kayla has filed charges at the police station, Steve and Kayla go home together. Steve really does want to help Kayla. And Kayla wants to lean on him, but how can she? She can feel his ambivalence when what she needs is his strength. The one thing she knows would help—for him to side with her against his brother—is the one thing she isn’t sure she can ask for. It’s also the one thing she isn’t sure she would get if she did ask. So she has nothing to say to him.

Steve senses her hopelessness, and it scares him. He pleads with her not to shut him out. He says, “There must be something we can do.” He picks up a pillow and tells her to hit him with it. Kayla says that isn’t going to help, but she registers his desperation, and it gets through to her. “It’s just so hard,” she says, opening up for a moment. She truly doesn’t know what to do.

Steve responds to this opening, trying to touch her again, to reach her, but she turns away. He backs off, and they talk about him moving out. Steve says he’ll go out for awhile, give her some time to think about it.

When he comes back, Jack is there. He’s just been arrested, and processed, and he’s out on bail. He’s angry, and he’s grabbing Kayla and threatening her. Is this really Billy, his baby brother? Steve has to face that it is. He finally realizes he can’t be on both sides on this one. He throws Jack out, and he tells Kayla he’s on her side, he’ll stand by her whatever she wants to do. She says, almost desperate in her relief, “I’ve been waiting so long to hear you say that.”

He holds out his arms to her, and she goes willingly into his embrace. The wall has been breached.

A few days later, Kayla goes to the DA’s office to discuss the case. When she comes home she asks Steve, with trepidation, if he would be willing to testify against Jack.

Steve asks, “Did you think I’d put him before you?” He says it with resignation, acknowledging everything he did to make her think so. Then, briefly—he knows this is a touchy subject now—he tries to explain. He talks about how much he loved that little baby, how he would have done anything in the world for him. (Kayla’s face shows she knows that already, only too well.) But Billy was only a fantasy; the brother he loved is gone. There is only Jack, and Jack doesn’t deserve all the love and loyalty Steve was giving him.

“I’ll testify for you,” Steve tells her. “I’ll do anything to take away the pain I gave you.” Kayla comes into his arms and kisses him. No words are necessary. He knows how much he hurt her, and she knows how much that fantasy mattered to him.

At the hearing, Steve testifies about the bruises he saw on her body after the rape. But this is Kayla’s moment. She doesn’t shy away from admitting her mistakes. She had an affair. She wasn’t honest with Jack. She let him think that someday she would sleep with him. “But that night, I was honest,” she says. She looks directly at Jack. “I didn’t want you kissing me, I didn’t want you touching me, and I certainly didn’t want you making love to me … you had no right to take me against my will.”

The judge rules there is sufficient evidence to go to trial. Afterwards, Harper advises Jack to cut his losses. Jack’s lawyer offers a plea bargain. Jack would plead guilty to a lesser charge, assault, and serve a suspended sentence.

Kayla agrees to the deal. Jack admitted his guilt. Steve stood by her. She got to tell her story. That’s all the resolution she needed.

A few days later, Kayla comes back to the loft after filing for her divorce. We can see the difference in her, in the way she carries herself, the expression on her face. She’s feeling better.

Steve is lifting weights in the living room. He’s wearing a ripped tank top and an 80’s bandana headband. And yet somehow, in this horrible outfit, he still looks sexy. How does he do it? Kayla thinks so too. She touches his sweaty arm and smiles, and it’s a smile we haven’t seen for awhile. Steve recognizes it instantly. He kisses her, and she kisses him back with a return of the effortless passion they’ve always shared.

Kayla, welcome back.

Go on to part 16: The Community Center

Go back to part 14

 

Steve & Kayla—the Affair (14)

This is the fourteenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

All the time Kayla was with Jack, Steve wore on a chain around his neck the ring he never gave her. He was constantly taking it out and handling it like worry beads, pouring all his pent-up longing for Kayla into it. It became a symbol of his loss, his regret, and all that he couldn’t let go of.

One morning, still in the safehouse, Kayla finds the ring. She asks Steve about it, obviously hoping—but afraid to hope—that it is an engagement ring. He tells the whole story, simply and openly (is this really Steven Earl Johnson?): “I was going to ask you to marry me, and I bought that ring just in case you said yes.” They playact a little proposal scene, and he slips Jack’s ring off her finger and puts his own in its place. This is wonderful, but bittersweet: it’s what should have been.

The scenes between Steve and Kayla at the safehouse are a joyful oasis, a break and an escape. They talk, they share meals, they make love, again and again. But as Steve says, “Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with Jack.” Kayla wants to make a clean break, but Steve has not reconciled himself to the idea that Jack will have to be hurt. He still hopes to find a way to finesse the situation so everybody wins.

In the meantime, Jack continues to search for Kayla, and finally he tracks her down. When he walks into the safehouse, the scene is suggestive, to say the least. Steve and Kayla are together on a big double bed, and Steve is not only shirtless but has his pants unfastened.

They all look at each other. Jack picks up the phone “to arrest this gentleman for kidnapping.” I think Jack knows that isn’t true. But he chooses not to acknowledge it. He wants Kayla back, and his pride won’t let him take her back if he admits the truth. His denial is twofold: first, that nothing is happening, and, second, if anything is happening, it’s all Steve’s fault.

Kayla prevents him from calling the police by telling him Steve saved her life. Jack doesn’t believe it; this is just a story Steve made up so he could be a hero. Steve casually puts his shirt back on and fastens his pants. (Steve’s body language through all of this displays no guilt whatsoever.) Kayla puts her hands behind her back so Steve can take his ring off her finger. Before she leaves with Jack, Kayla thanks Steve and extends her hand to him—her left hand, with Jack’s ring back on it. Steve takes her hand and touches the ring. “Everything is going to be all right,” he says.

Kayla says she won’t go back to the house where she was being poisoned, so she and Jack go to her parents’ house instead. In the car, Kayla tries to offer some explanation for the scene he just witnessed, but Jack cuts her off.

Steve packs up their things at the safehouse. He is holding Kayla’s nightgown (actually, he’s smelling it) when Marcus comes in. Steve talks about how hard it is for him to contemplate being selfish and breaking up his brother’s marriage. But when Marcus asks him what he’s going to do, Steve doesn’t hesitate. He says with conviction, “I’m going to get her back.”

Steve truly is in agony over taking Kayla from Billy, the brother he loves so much. But then there’s “Jack,” the rival he almost hates. There is a near complete disconnect between the two in his mind. Soon after Christmas, Jack, Kayla, and Steve are at the police station regarding Kayla’s poisoning. Jack’s denial slips for a moment and he comes close to accusing Steve of sleeping with Kayla at the safehouse (which is, of course, true). Steve has no problem denying it with no apparent consciousness of guilt, and then going on the offensive: “I don’t like what you’re insinuating. Why don’t you keep your mouth shut about it?”

But when Jack isn’t around, he’s “Billy” again, the little baby who needs protection. Jack is running for the Salem assembly, with the election in a few weeks. A messy scandal in his personal life would almost certainly kill his chances of being elected. If Kayla stays with Jack until the election, if Jack wins, it will give him something else to hold onto, something to reconcile him to losing Kayla.

This is Steve’s scheme. It might seem (somewhat) plausible on the surface, but things quickly begin to unravel. When Kayla told Steve at the safehouse that she and Jack never slept together, she said, “He wanted to, but he didn’t push it.” I think this was part of the reason Steve felt so sanguine about sending Kayla back to Jack. They hadn’t slept together for months, what’s a few more weeks?

Well, Jack has decided to push it. Having “won” Kayla back, he wants to seal the deal—and, I think, prove he’s a better man than Steve–by getting her into bed. He sends her flowers, he buys her negligees. He moves them from her parents’ house (one of her flimsy excuses is that she would “feel funny” sleeping with him there) back to the loft, where they can be alone. On New Year’s Eve, as they prepare to go to a party at the Deveraux mansion, he tells her tonight will be their special night. He promises her he’ll go slow and be gentle, as if he is soothing a frightened virgin.

Contrast this to the woman we see with Steve, so frank and open in her desire for him. Jack doesn’t really understand Kayla at all. His image of her as a sexually timid “good girl” is an illusion—one that allows him to deny the reality of his wife’s feelings.

Kayla and Jack go to the New Year’s Eve party. Steve is concerned about her safety (because whoever was poisoning her is still at large), so he peeks into the window to check up on her. Kayla sees him and sneaks out to spend some time with him. Outside the house where her husband and his family are hosting a party, at midnight on New Year’s Eve when there is maximum chance she will be missed, Kayla and Steve climb up in a hay wagon and make out like teenagers.

And this is where their scheme really runs aground, on the rocks of one unalterable fact: they can’t keep their hands off each other. Time after time, despite good intentions, they take stupid chances, meet in public places, steal kisses when Jack is right upstairs or in the next room. They carry on right under Jack’s nose. They lose their heads and act like fools.

A reporter, sensing a story, begins following Kayla, snapping photos of them together.

Kayla feels all the falsity of her position, playing the devoted wife of one man when all she wants is to be with another. She goes along with the scheme largely for Steve’s sake, because she understands that Steve can’t build his happiness on Billy’s destruction. There’s already so much animosity between Steve and his brother because of her, and Steve already feels so torn. I think Kayla wants to be the calm one who rises above the whole notion of “sides.”

But she’s running out of excuses not to sleep with Jack. Steve might feel like he’s in the middle, but she’s really in the middle. A few days after the new year, Jack’s next move to seduce his wife is to arrange for a special compartment on his father’s campaign train (Harper is running for president), calling it “Kayla and Jack’s Honeymoon Express.” Kayla runs to Steve to tell him this has to stop. But Steve isn’t ready to give up on their plan to wait until after the election.

When Kayla challenges him about it, the disconnect between Jack and Billy collapses for a moment. His reaction becomes pure jealousy. “If any man ever touches you I’ll kill him.” At that moment, Jack isn’t Billy—he’s just another guy. Then there’s a knock at the door. It’s Jo. She has seen Kayla sneaking into Steve’s apartment.

It is somehow perfectly fitting that it is Jo who catches them, because she became such a supporter of Steve’s plan to push Kayla to Jack. I always feel it serves Jo right to see Steve turn his back on being the sacrificial lamb she kept praising him for being.

Jo scolds them for running around on Jack. Steve and Kayla look a little shamefaced but defend themselves. Kayla says she might be legally married to Jack, but “it doesn’t change the way I feel.” She says she can’t keep pretending all the time. When Jo hears that Kayla and Jack are not sleeping together, she seems to understand it’s a lost cause. She even helps Kayla continue to put him off, by getting her boss, Dr. Curtis, to provide Kayla with a medical excuse not to go on the campaign trip with Jack.

On the day of the election, Jack is having a rally on the pier. Kayla is there, by Jack’s side. Steve is there, drumming up support in the riverfront district. (“No one wants you to win this election more than I do,” he tells Jack.) The reporter who took the pictures of Steve and Kayla is there. He gives Jack a file with all the pictures inside. When the news comes that Jack has won the election, a jubilant Steve and Kayla sneak away to celebrate on their own for a few minutes. With the victory celebration unfolding behind him, Jack opens the file.

Jack doesn’t believe it. Not Kayla. He corners the reporter and accuses him of trying to blackmail him with old pictures of Kayla with her ex-boyfriend. The reporter points out the picture of Kayla on New Year’s Eve, asking Jack to remember what she wore that night. Wasn’t it a new dress?

New Year’s Eve. The night Jack wanted to be a “special night” for him and Kayla, when he tried to soothe her reluctance, and told her “I’ll be gentle.”

When Kayla returns to the victory party and comes to stand next to him, it’s as though Jack is seeing her for the first time. The good girl isn’t so good. He watches as Steve and Kayla exchange a private smile. When Kayla tells him she needs to pick up her car, and she’ll meet him at Blondie’s later for the victory party, he follows her. He watches her with Steve on the pier, watches them laughing and kissing and teasing each other.

And here is where Steve’s desire not to hurt Jack has backfired in the worst possible way. The irony is that if Steve had cared less, they probably would have hurt Jack less and certainly would have humiliated him less. With the best intentions to do it “the right way,” they ended up not only betraying him but rubbing his face in it.

Back at the loft, Jack conceals his rage under a cover of exuberance and triumph. He sweeps Kayla up in his arms and kisses her. When she doesn’t respond, he kisses her again, more aggressively. He’s no longer coaxing the reluctant virgin.

When she yanks herself away from him, he shows her the pictures. Kayla is dismayed but tries to calm things down so she can explain. But he’s not listening to her. “A simple question,” he says. “Did you sleep with Johnson after we were married?”

Kayla hesitates, and tries to say it’s not that simple, and he snaps, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

He asks her if she knows what a scandal like this will do to his father’s campaign, or to his own next campaign. Eager to defend herself on this point—if nothing else, they were thinking about his career—Kayla says, “That’s why we waited,” meaning waited to tell him.

Jack snatches up the pictures. “Do you call this waiting?” He flips through the pictures, one by one, until he gets to the one from New Year’s Eve. “Did you wait on New Year’s Eve? I waited on New Year’s Eve … I waited all night.” He throws the pictures down. “I was the only one who waited.”

He says she’s been telling him for months that she just wasn’t ready. “Tell me, are you ever going to be ready?” He sees the answer in her face. No.

“I’m ready,” he says, and he pushes her down on the couch.

Go on to part 15: The Rape

Go back to part 13

 

Steve & Kayla—Mrs. Deveraux (13)

Note: This is the thirteenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

It’s a miracle!

Jack lives! Almost immediately after the wedding, Jack is well enough to leave the hospital, and he and Kayla move into a fancy house with Harper and Anjelica outside of town. But Jack isn’t happy. He has nothing to do, and he feels useless. (In fact, he truly has nothing to do, because he’s not well enough to give Kayla a wedding night—much to her ill-concealed relief.)

So Kayla has an idea. She asks Steve to work with Jack on that old riverfront housing project. In this, one of their first meetings since the wedding, Kayla’s manner is friendly but formal. She stonewalls any attempt by Steve to treat her as more than a common acquaintance. When he tries to say that Jack wouldn’t appreciate him hanging around, Kayla says blandly, “Why would he mind?”

Steve comes to their house that night to pitch the proposal to Jack, presenting it all as his own idea. Kayla and Steve play good cop/bad cop expertly off each other, with Steve implying that Jack fell down on the job, and Kayla urging him to think of his health and reconsider.

Steve is clearly enjoying colluding with Kayla, helping his brother but being one up on him too. Then he sees Jack gently touch Kayla’s cheek, and his smile fades. This gives him a taste of what working with Jack is going to be like.

Before the wedding, Steve did not anticipate how truly crazy it would make him to see Kayla married to another man, to see them interact, and—especially—to imagine them in bed together. Whenever Jack touches Kayla, or kisses her, or they walk up the stairs together, Steve watches, holding himself absolutely still, as if on the verge of throwing himself at them and yanking them apart.

Kayla knows it. She knows him, she senses his jealousy and desire. And, subtly, she rubs his face in it. He asks her how she is enjoying married life, and she gives him a composed, noncommittal response. He continues, “With Jack being sick and all … and you being the kind of woman you are …”

She raises her eyebrows, not coming anywhere near meeting him halfway.

He’s extremely uncomfortable, but he can’t stop. “You’ve got a lot of passion in you, baby,” he says. “I just wonder if you’re … satisfied.”

Kayla says coolly, “I’m perfectly satisfied with the way things are.”

Steve looks at her closely, but he can read the truth in her eyes. So he smiles a sickly smile and says, “Well, good,” and walks away.

After he leaves, Kayla’s expression of triumph dissolves, and we see the hurt behind it. She won that round, but what does it get her?

For Kayla, too, the theory—I’ll give Jack a reason to live!—was one thing, and the reality—having a live healthy husband who wants to have sex with her—is quite another. Here at first, I think she does intend to sleep with Jack someday. She just can’t help her body’s response, which is total recoil. Whenever Jack leans in for a kiss, she gives a little nervous laugh and looks uncomfortable, even queasy.

With Steve, it’s a different story. She’s angry with him, baffled and angry, but she can’t mask the desire in her eyes when she looks at him. Whenever their eyes meet the air fairly crackles.

She might be married, but the dynamic between them has changed only slightly. Now that the immediate pressing need has passed, Steve has as much trouble concealing his feelings as he ever did. And Kayla has the same instinct to ferret out those feelings—it’s just masked by a smooth surface manner, and mixed up with hurt and a desire for revenge. This dynamic comes to a head when Kayla and Steve are on their way to Washington DC for a meeting regarding the housing project, and their car goes off the road. They are forced to seek shelter in an abandoned cabin.

Kayla exploits this opportunity to the utmost. She slips out of her wet clothing and wraps a blanket loosely around herself, draping it artfully to show some skin. She encourages Steve to take his wet clothes off too. She reminisces about old times. She stops (just) short of an open invitation, but makes it very clear that all Steve has to do is make the first move.

She hopes to make Steve cave, or, barring that, to make him suffer.

Steve is dying from temptation and lust, and the strain of trying to hide it. “What do you want, Kayla?” he asks.

Kayla’s nonchalant pose cracks, and for a moment she sounds like the old Kayla. She says, “I want to know why you did it, why you pushed me away.” She tells him he’s a coward, that she would have made him happy, and he blew it.

Steve asks why she is talking about this. “What’s the point? You’re married now.”

Kayla shuts up. She knows she’s in the wrong.

But even though she’s wrong, she’s right. That night, Steve gently touches her face when he thinks she’s asleep. Kayla is more convinced than ever that he still loves her, and that just makes her more angry that he gave her up. When they get back to Salem, a delighted Jack takes her in his arms and kisses her. Here, in front of Steve, Kayla accepts the kiss willingly, allowing it to lengthen, and lengthen, giving Steve a chance to see what he gave up.

Jack and Kayla go upstairs together, and Steve is left to torture himself with visions of what they will do up there.

Soon after, Kayla begins to feel sick and have dizzy spells, which at first makes her—and Steve, separately—think she might be pregnant with Steve’s child. They both have the same reaction: a wild hope that it’s true. But she isn’t. She’s being slowly poisoned by Senator Deveraux, on the dubious motive that he thinks she has copies of Jack’s adoption papers.

Jack decides Kayla needs a change of scene, and they finally go on their long-delayed honeymoon. Harper gives Kayla some poison-laced medication to take along, but Kayla accidentally leaves it behind (Steve picks it up). Kayla’s health rapidly improves on her honeymoon, but her disinclination to sleep with Jack continues unabated. She puts him off with threadbare excuses.

Hearing how well Kayla is doing, a jealous Steve attributes her recovery to rest, relaxation, and plenty of sex. He can hardly contain his satisfaction when he has to call Jack back early because of the housing project. Steve meets them at the Deveraux mansion as soon as they get home. As he and Jack discuss business, Jack casually rests his hands on Kayla’s shoulders for a moment, and Kayla flinches slightly and seems to want to move away.

Steve’s antennae are as ever tuned in to Kayla’s every look and gesture, so this small movement doesn’t escape him. Up until now, he has believed that Kayla is basically content in her marriage to Jack. Seeing Kayla shy away from Jack’s touch opens up a new possibility: that Kayla isn’t happy, she doesn’t love Jack, in fact, she can barely stand to have him touch her.

Soon after, Steve is off to Greece for Justin and Adrienne’s wedding. Back on the poison again, Kayla’s condition quickly deteriorates. She overhears the doctor say she might die.

Facing death, delirious, Kayla hallucinates Steve coming to her and telling her he’ll never be able to let her go. Disturbed, she musters her strength to write him a letter designed to push him away for his own good. She says that Steve was right to break up with her, and that she’s found happiness with Jack. She gives the letter to Melissa to give to Steve.

Steve first learns from Melissa that Kayla is sick again. He’s just resolving to go see her when Melissa gives him the letter. Reading it, Steve looks like he’s been punched in the stomach. At the wedding reception Jo sees him with it, and he tells her what it says. Jo is launching into a comforting speech when he cuts her off, saying, “It’s a lie!”

It’s ironic, and rather wonderful, that what makes Steve aware that something is wrong is Kayla telling him what he always seemed to want to believe. Now we can sit back and enjoy the ride as Steve snaps into action. He puts the pieces together about her medication, gets the pills analyzed, arranges for an antidote and a safehouse, and breaks into the Deveraux mansion and carries Kayla out.

While she is sick and barely conscious, Kayla instinctively leans on Steve and accepts his help. But when she wakes up it is a different story. When he tries to tell her that someone was trying to kill her, she says she doesn’t believe him—because she doesn’t trust him. She’s afraid to. “You always told me I was so naive … that I saw the world through rose colored glasses,” she says. “But I don’t anymore.”

She tells him that she still loves him. But she’s not making a declaration, or issuing a challenge. She’s just stating a simple fact. And whether she loves him or not, she isn’t going to get sucked in to believing him or trusting him again. Not after he hurt her so badly the first time.

This is where Steve must finally reap what he sowed, more than the pain of losing her, more than the pain of seeing her married. Here he must face that he destroyed an important part of her, a part that he loved—her natural optimism and boundless faith.

He tries to apologize, but she brushes it aside. She says he shouldn’t worry about her, because she has someone else to count on now, someone who loves her—Jack.

Steve starts to say he loves her too, but then he chokes it back. What right has he to tell her he loves her? So he just asks her to wait, to let him find a way to prove he’s telling the truth.

She doesn’t. As soon as Steve leaves, Kayla sneaks out. But she trusts Steve more than she is willing to acknowledge, because though she goes back to the Deveraux house she doesn’t go in. She ends up collapsing on the pier, where she is found by a strange man who takes her back to his house.

In the meantime, a friend of Steve’s from the orphanage, Marcus, has just moved to Salem. He helps Steve in his search for Kayla, and after many twists and turns, they find themselves outside the crazy man’s house. Desperate to find Kayla and bring her to safety, Steve pours out his heart to Marcus.

Steve talks about how despite everything, despite the fact that he hurt her and she ran away from him, somewhere, deep down, Kayla is counting on him. Here, in what may be the darkest hour of their relationship, Steve finally fully accepts the connection he has with Kayla. There is something between them that cannot break.

The man holding Kayla, overhearing this speech, agrees to let Steve take Kayla away with him.

When Kayla wakes up for the second time in the safehouse, she remembers enough of what happened to know that Steve found her and brought her back, that he cared for her and told her he loves her. Steve doesn’t say much, but she can read in his expression and his body language that he isn’t trying to deny it or push it away. It’s subtle, but it’s there. The immediate crisis is past, but it’s still there.

Kayla smiles. She doesn’t press the issue. She’s healthy again, she’s with Steve, she knows he still loves her, and she can’t help but be happy. So without confronting any of the issues standing between them, without kissing each other, touching each other, or openly acknowledging their feelings, the sheer joy of just being in the same room bubbles up between them. It’s wonderful to see them be happy again.

Kayla is the first to venture over the line. When Steve says delicately, “if you want to call Jack …” she tells him, “You know what I want.”

But there’s a reason Steve keeps hanging back. This is a man who hesitated about proposing to Kayla just knowing his brother was also in love with her—and the stakes are much higher now. When he tries floating the idea that she should go back to Jack, Kayla is appalled. She says, “How do you expect me to go back to Jack after all of this?”

Confused, glancing involuntarily at the bed, Steve says, “What do you mean, all of this? We didn’t do anything.”

“Not yet we didn’t,” Kayla says. I love her sexual forthrightness, but this also accurately sums up their situation. They both know where this is headed. Deep down, Steve knows that everything important has been settled between him and Kayla. He doesn’t have the heart to pretend he doesn’t love her anymore. But he doesn’t want to face the implication: that being with Kayla means stealing away his brother’s wife.

So he keeps saying that Kayla should go back to Jack. He says it weakly, without heat, but he won’t stop saying it. Finally Kayla has to force the issue, buying two tickets to California. If Steve won’t go with her, that’s his problem, but Kayla is not going back to Jack.

It takes hearing this, that no matter what choice Steve makes, Jack will not benefit, to make Steve break down. But finally he does, and he tells Kayla the truth: “He’s my brother.”

He hardly needs to say anything else. It explains everything. She knows what Billy means to him. The pain he felt about losing his baby brother was one of the first things she knew about him, that hinted at the real Steve, the man lurking under the scary exterior. It was part of what made her pursue Steve as she did.

But even though she understands, she’s not letting him off the hook quite that easily. She forces him to acknowledge what he never wanted to face, how much pain he caused her in trying to save his brother. When Steve says he never wanted to hurt her, she says, “What did you think all those times you saw me after we had broken up? That I was happy?”

He says his brother was dying, and he didn’t know what to do. Kayla says if he had told her the truth, maybe they could have worked something out.

“How?” Steve says. And Kayla doesn’t have an answer. She knows the lengths he is willing to go to for his family. If he was willing to kill for his mother, and go to prison for Adrienne, then wouldn’t he give up the woman he loves for Billy?

Well, he tried. He put them both through hell. But the truth is he never really let her go, not completely. He couldn’t do it, not even for Billy.

That’s why they’re here. That’s why they’re having this conversation. So Steve boldly takes the final step. He says, “I love you, Kayla. I’ll never stop loving you.” He takes her face in his hands, and he kisses her, and he carries her to the bed. Slowly, they strip out of their clothing so there is nothing between them. No more secrets. No more holding back. It’s a beautiful moment of redemption and renewal.

And adultery.

Go on to part 14: The Affair

Go back to part 12

 

Steve & Kayla—the Breakup (12)

Note: this is the twelfth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Steve is going to ask Kayla to marry him. He’s got the ring, the flowers, and a new suit. He’s getting ready to go to her apartment when he gets a call from Harper Deveraux, who wants to see him right away. Kayla is disappointed at the delay, and Steve reassures her: “Nothing on this earth could keep me from having this night with you.”

Why tempt the soap gods, Steve?

All the while Steve and Kayla were enjoying their brief period of bliss, the wheels of fate were turning. Jo had a ring that matched the necklace and bracelet she gave to Steve and Adrienne. Jo sees this ring in Jack’s hand when he’s daydreaming about proposing to Kayla. He tells her the ring belonged to his mother.

Billy?

Jo overhears Harper encourage Jack to give the ring to Kayla right away—not as a proposal, just as a promise. An engagement ring can come later. (He brushes aside the idea of a “two bit street hustler” being any kind of obstacle.) To prevent Kayla from seeing the ring and recognizing it, Jo takes it. She’s trying to figure out what to do with it when Steve, on his way out after meeting the senator, sees her.

When he finds out it’s Jack’s ring, Steve puts the pieces together. Billy is Jack Deveraux. The brother he hasn’t seen since he was a baby is here in Salem. He wants to be happy he’s found his brother at last. He wants to tell Jack, do something, but Jo talks him out of it.

After this, a shaken Steve finally makes his way to Kayla’s. The fact that Billy is also in love with Kayla is very much on his mind. Can he really prosper at his brother’s expense? Steve knocks on her door and when she opens it he walks in immediately, taking her hand and pulling her along. The first thing he does is put his arms around her—practically clinging—and say that he needs her, he never realized how much.

Kayla is confused, but responds to his obvious distress, telling him she’ll never leave him. “I love you, you know that.”

This pierces Steve’s turmoil. “I know,” he says, and laughs in relief. What has he been thinking? She loves me, she loves me. Nothing else matters.

He starts stumbling toward a proposal, trying to tell her how he feels. He’s all churned up from what he’s just found out, and can barely string two words together. Just as he’s about to ask the crucial question, the phone rings. It’s Anjelica Deveraux. Jack has collapsed. He’s in the hospital, maybe dying, and he’s asking for Kayla.

From this moment, Steve is a changed man. He pushes her to go to Jack, quickly, quickly. He drives Kayla to the hospital, encourages her to stay with Jack as long as he needs her, and beats a hasty retreat.

He goes to see Jo and tell her how Jack is doing. Steve has had a little time to absorb all that’s happened, and he talks about the day in the orphanage when Billy was adopted and Steve was left behind. In a lifetime filled with loss and pain, it’s always been clear that Steve feels most keenly the loss of his baby brother. All these years, Billy has haunted him, holding a special, not to say sacred, place in his heart.

Later he sneaks in to Jack’s hospital room and watches him as he sleeps. But it’s not Jack he sees. Jack’s person and personality hardly matter. It’s the mythical haze of Billy that Steve sees, a Billy that has been returned to him, who he has been given a second chance to protect. Steve projects the love he’s always had for his brother—all the bottled-up love he’s stored over a lifetime—onto Jack.

So he’s got a plan. Simple. Step aside, leave a clear field, give Jack a reason to live.

When Jo realizes what he is planning, she tries to dissuade him. She lucidly points out everything wrong with his plan: that Kayla loves him, not Jack. That Steve deserves happiness, too. That pushing Kayla away doesn’t mean she’s going to turn to Jack. That it’s doing Jack no favors to pair him off with someone who doesn’t love him.

But Steve just listens with a stubborn look on his face. In fact, he never agonizes over his choice. It might—and does—cause him agony, but he never questions it. He is sure that this is right, and he just puts his head down and runs.

The next time we see Steve and Kayla, some time has passed. Kayla catches him outside Jack’s hospital room and asks him why he’s been avoiding her. Steve says he’s just giving her space to be with Jack. He is jokey and distant. I think Steve wants to push Kayla to Jack without actually having to break up with her himself. He wants to just flip a switch and be over on the other side.

But Steve more than anyone should know that Kayla cannot be put off that easily. Later she shows up at his apartment, and demands he tell her why things have changed between them.

The time has come. He aims for the most plausible reason that someone like him would break up with someone like her. He says their relationship was exciting while it lasted, but he doesn’t want to be tied down. “The fact is, Kayla, I was using you, and now it’s over.”

During this speech, Kayla keeps her eyes locked on him. None of what he is saying makes sense. “I don’t believe you,” she says. She slaps him. “You’re lying.” She slaps him again. And again. She’s crying now. “I don’t believe you,” she says.

Steve responds to her pain, holding her face in his hands. “Please, I don’t want to hurt you anymore.”

She can read his love for her in his eyes. “Go ahead,” she says. “Tell me you don’t want me, that you don’t need me. Go ahead.”

Steve can’t. Just as she always has, she gets through to him. Shaking with pent-up emotion, he caves, and kisses her, and they fall on the bed together.

In the early morning, Steve, awake, holds the sleeping Kayla. She sleeps peacefully curled up against him, a slight smile on her lips. We can see from the way he clings to her that he has not, in fact, changed his mind. He is saying goodbye, in a way that he won’t be able to when she’s awake.

Kayla awakens in utter bliss, all doubts banished. She talks about their future, her confidence in him restored. Then Kayla has to listen, lying naked on sheets still warm from their night together, as he breaks up with her again, upping the ante of cruelty a notch. The expression of dawning horror in her eyes is hideously painful to watch.

Kayla goes to see her mother, and for the first time we see Kayla’s faith absolutely shaken. She says, “What if everyone else was right, and I was wrong, and Steve never really did love me?”

But Steve has a problem. He’s never been able to fully conceal his love for her. This is proven a few days later, at the hospital, when he and Kayla are stuck in an elevator together. Just as she can’t help telling him she loves him, he can’t help responding: he relents, moves to take her in his arms—just as the elevator doors slide open.

He knows that moments like these will keep Kayla hanging on. He knows words aren’t enough. Kayla has always ignored half of what he says anyway, looking instead at his actions to read how he feels about her and what kind of person he is.

So he sets out with ruthless efficiency to show her, not just tell her, that they are broken up for good this time. He plants a kiss on a pretty waitress so Kayla can see. Later he asks Kayla to give him her necklace back, implying he wants to give it to someone else.

But the capper is when Steve gets a chance to go undercover for the ISA, to penetrate the organization responsible for the attempt to kill Senator Deveraux. Steve would gain their trust by lying on the stand to clear Ed Daniels. Steve exploits this opportunity to make Kayla—and everyone else—think the worst of him.

Steve commits perjury, and Ed Daniels is cleared. Afterwards Steve commits perjury a second time, when he finally makes Kayla believe he means what he says.

Kayla is desperate for there to be some reason for all this, some explanation that will turn her world back right side up. She challenges him to look her in the eye and tell her that everything they shared was a lie. He says he can’t. This makes her light up for a moment, but he’s just softening her up. “I did feel something for you, but it was never like what you felt for me,” he says. He tells her that she “wooed” him, and she was so pretty and sexy, and fun to cuddle up to at night, that he couldn’t say no. With a slight smile, Steve delivers the killing blow. “You gotta admit, baby, you did kinda push yourself on me.” There’s enough truth mixed up with the lies to make the whole thing credible.

But even all this may not have been enough were it not backed up by the fact that he just lied to free Ed Daniels (presumably for money). Steve has hit on the one lever that will make Kayla give up: convincing her that he isn’t a good person after all. Perhaps he even means this as a spark of kindness to offset the pain he knows he is causing—if she thinks he wasn’t worth loving anyway, it might lessen her regret.

But Steve is breaking more than her heart. Kayla’s strength and determination stemmed partly from her confidence in her ability to read people, to look beneath the surface. Her faith in Steve is closely wedded to her faith in herself. If she was wrong about Steve, what else might she be wrong about?

For the first time, we see her repeatedly seeking advice, from Mike Horton, from Kim, from Caroline, from Adrienne, from Jo, from Roman. As never before, this is a Kayla who is vulnerable to the pressure of other people’s opinions.

And as it happens, there is something everyone is pressuring her to do. Steve tells her, the very first night in the hospital, that maybe she should “tell Jack what he wants to hear.” Anjelica tells her the same thing. Jack himself, who professes to love Kayla so devotedly, doesn’t trouble to conceal his satisfaction every time Steve hurts her, and seems to think nothing of playing on her guilt by telling her she could give him the strength to get well.

Wavering, distrusting her own judgment, Kayla begins to consider it. She asks Mike, Jack’s doctor, if it would help Jack if she let him have hope. Let him believe, not that she loves him now, but that she could love him someday.

She is contemplating no more than that. It is Jack, clueless Jack, who forces the issue by asking her to marry him. She asks for time to think about it.

In the stark terms that have been laid out—this is soap logic at its best—if Kayla says yes she can save his life, if she says no she can sentence him to death. No half measures. Even given all this, however, Kayla may still have found a way to safely navigate this minefield, were it not for Steve.

There’s a treacherous part of her that keeps whispering, “Steve still loves me, this is all a big mistake” (she’s right, of course). This part of her thinks that maybe, just maybe, this will bring Steve to his senses. He could never really let her marry someone else. So she runs to tell Steve about the proposal. Faced with this ultimate success of his plan, however, he maintains a poker face and says this is a good deal for her, that Jack will be able to give her everything she always wanted. He plays his part perfectly, that of the ex-boyfriend wishing his ex-girlfriend well with her new love.

This is the final push that makes her accept. She is thinking, you say you don’t care if I marry Jack? Well, I’ll show you.

Steve finds out she’s accepted when he runs into Kayla on the pier and sees her engagement ring. He congratulates her by passing her the fortune from his Chinese takeout: “You will find your true love.” (Kayla’s reaction, when she reads it, is to toss it aside with a look of pure contempt.) Steve dearly wants to believe that Kayla is no longer suffering. He’s not so deluded that he thinks Kayla doesn’t love him anymore, but he does think she loves Jack enough to marry him. I think Steve feels that, after the way he’s treated her, he deserves for her to find true love with Jack. Steve can’t quite grasp the idea that Kayla loves him so passionately and wholeheartedly that there’s no room for anyone else.

Kayla drags her feet about setting a date, and again it’s something Steve does that jolts her into action. As part of his undercover work, Steve pretends to expose to the world that Shane is having an affair, to disgrace him with the ISA. Kayla is incensed at this further example of Steve’s selfishness and greed, and Steve plays it to the hilt, crowing over the cash he got for betraying Shane. “You disgust me,” Kayla tells him coldly, and goes back to the hospital and tells Jack she wants to marry him right away.

Unlike many a soap heroine before her, Kayla has no illusions that she loves or desires Jack. She was miserable before she accepted his proposal, and she is miserable after it. She’s resigned, even fatalistic. If she’s going to be miserable anyway, she might as well save someone’s life at the same time.

Jack seems willing to accept her on any terms, and she takes him at his word. Where she is deceiving him is exactly what she told Mike Horton at the outset: she is allowing Jack to hope. She doesn’t think about what will happen if he gets well, and he finds out his hope was misplaced.

The wedding day dawns on the bride fantasizing about Steve coming to stop the wedding. But she doesn’t move to stop the wedding herself. Marry Jack, don’t marry Jack, it hardly seems to matter. Her father comes to her before the ceremony, and talks to her gently, sanely, giving her one last chance to back out. Kayla cries on his shoulder, but she doesn’t change her mind. She’s as ready for this marriage as a broken heart, a massive guilt trip, dash of spite, and an unquenchable desire for another man can make her. She walks down the aisle on her father’s arm and goes to stand by Jack.

Then, finally, here at the last minute, Steve has second thoughts. Can he really let this happen? Just as the ceremony starts, Steve arrives looking desperate. He moves to begin walking down the aisle.

It is Jo who prevents him. Jo, who has gone over to the dark side and become the enabler of Steve’s worst instincts. She has the same fantasy about Billy, the same festering guilt about abandoning him, and the same instinct for self-sacrifice. Jo reminds him of the reason he set this plan in motion. And so Steve watches as Kayla marries his little brother.

The plan worked.

Now they must all reap what he sowed.

Go on to part 13: Mrs. Deveraux

Go back to part 11

 

Steve & Kayla—Summer on the Run (11)

Note: This is the eleventh in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

It all starts as just another crisis bringing them together. An FBI agent named Ed Daniels approaches Steve and pitches a proposal to him. Senator Deveraux wants to fake his own death so he can go undercover. Steve will be the fake assassin, shooting the senator (with blanks) in front of witnesses. Mr. Daniels says that because Steve and Kayla were trapped in the lab explosion, they are already involved, they are already in danger. In return for Steve’s help, the FBI can offer them protection.

It doesn’t matter that there are holes in this plot than you can drive a truck through. Once Mr. Daniels mentions Kayla’s name Steve is a cooked goose.

It’s a setup. The bullets are real, the senator falls, and Steve flees, once again a wanted man.

There is no particular reason for Kayla to believe in his innocence. The circumstantial evidence is all against him. As Jack’s friend, it’s logical that her loyalty would lie with him in this situation. Jack himself is convinced of Steve’s guilt. But Kayla’s sympathy for Jack and his father, though genuine, is perfunctory and shallow. All her energy is focused on helping the man who shot him. And despite the tap on her phone, the guards at her door, and Jack sticking to her side like a leech, she finds a way. She brings Steve money and clothing, and no matter that the last thing he did before all this happened was break her heart (again), when she finally sees him she hurls herself joyfully in his arms.

Though Steve instinctively turned to Kayla for help, he does not want to draw her further into his trouble. Now that she’s found him, however, Kayla is determined to stay with him at all costs. Steve says it’s too dangerous, and she’ll only slow him down anyway, but when he can’t convince her he relents (for now).

Aware that most forms of transportation are being watched, Kayla suggests that they board a chartered rodeo train that will probably not be on the police’s radar (See? She can help!). They swipe someone’s luggage and change into rodeo garb. Kayla asks him to zip up the back of her silly, sexy rodeo gal outfit, and the leisurely, heated once-over Steve gives her as he does so ratchets up the sexual tension between them once again.

But the police do find them. Any possibility of appealing to Roman for help disintegrates when Ed Daniels comes up behind him. Steve gets them out of this sticky situation by pulling a gun on Kayla—which simultaneously ensures their escape and clears Kayla of the suspicion of aiding and abetting a fugitive. Of course, he’s also put himself in deeper hot water, but that doesn’t seem to faze him.

Since he can’t talk Kayla out of staying with him, Steve tries instead to sneak away. But that only makes her wander through the woods in search of him, calling his name, until her fear and ineptitude (she falls and hurts her ankle) force him to come to her rescue.

This is the show poking fun at the middle class princess on the run. But it is also important. Because Steve does agree to let her stay with him, when isn’t clear that she will be able to help him at all. In fact she might make things worse. But what she is claiming is the right to be with the man she loves. She says, “If something happens to you I want to be here.” And Steve, when he agrees to let her stay, is tacitly granting her that right.

As it turns out, Kayla does help him. When he falls over an embankment, she pulls him up. When it rains, she builds a lean-to for them. She insists that Steve, who scoffed at her claims of competency, apologize to her (and the Girl Scouts) before she’ll let him join her under its shelter.

Steve plays his harmonica, and they relax and talk about music, their body language showing their natural accord. Their eyes meet. It’s been a long time. Slowly, they lean in for a kiss, but they are interrupted by the radio (Timely Interruption #9) announcing the police are narrowing their search for Steve Johnson and his hostage.

The next day, Kayla, exploring, stumbles upon a natural hot springs. Unable to resist the thought of a bath, Kayla quickly undresses and slips into the water. When Steve finds her he teases her by taking her clothes, and Kayla ends up pulling him, fully dressed, into the hot springs. He has to struggle out of his wet clothing and lay them over a rock to dry.

They haven’t even kissed for months and months. Now here they are, plunged together in a hot springs, naked, with no one around for miles. Steve looks up and points out how bright the stars are, but Kayla doesn’t spare them a glance. She inches closer and closer. When Steve meets her gaze, and when their lips meet, and when their bodies press against each other in the water, it is deeply, powerfully thrilling. “I want you, Kayla,” Steve whispers. “I’ve wanted you for so long.”

And then this most painful of Timely Interruptions (#10) is a low-flying helicopter, sweeping the area with a searchlight.

It’s no accident that this scene—a symbolic turning point for them—takes place in the water. Again and again, key emotional moments in their relationship have been accompanied by a thorough drenching. There was the thunderstorm when Kayla came to see Steve after the failed date, the swim in the harbor when Steve rescued Kayla from Orpheus’s yacht, the storm drain in Stockholm where they almost drowned, the rainy night when Kayla told him she loved him, and the rain just last night when Kayla built the shelter for them to huddle under together.

What does all this water mean? Washing away barriers? A life-giving force? Drowning? Being swept away? A great excuse to take their clothes off? All of these, I think. And here, something more: baptism. This is a new beginning for them, a rebirth, particularly for Steve.

The first hint we get that Steve’s attitude has changed is after they evade the helicopter, when Steve is bitten by a snake. Kayla yet again proves her indispensability when she scores the wound and sucks out the poison. A feverish Steve sleeps with his head cradled in her lap.

The next morning, still weak, he struggles to stay upright so they can keep moving. “That’s all right,” he says, “With your little arms around me, I feel like I could go anywhere.” When has he ever turned to her for help so easily, so naturally? Suspicious, Kayla accuses him of teasing her. (How do you react when you’re being given your heart’s desire?) But he isn’t.

Next they come upon a collection of honeymoon cabins, and Kayla convinces Steve to sneak into one of them so they can clean up and rest a little. The cabin is extravagantly fussy and frilly, decorated everywhere with hearts, down to the heart-shaped bed. It is corny but somehow appropriate, because their time here will be a little honeymoon for them. Steve has finally let down his guard.

This seems backwards. Everything Steve warned Kayla about has come true. He has gone from being simply a lousy catch to a positive liability in her life. If he was wrong for her before, when at least he could keep himself in food, shelter, and harmonicas, then he’s a hundred times more wrong for her now. But by stripping all of those external factors away and reducing the world to just their two selves, it throws the essence of Steve—his sweetness, protectiveness, selflessness—into sharp relief.

We’ve never seen Steve so relaxed and open, so willing to share his feelings and be romantic, as he is here. He feeds Kayla in the bath, tends her wound, and tells her for the first time that he’s glad she’s there with him. “I would be dead three times over if it weren’t for you.” Kayla remembers the cliff, the snake bite, what was the third time? He says, “I think I was talking about the day I met you, baby.” He isn’t joking. He used to be a man who expected the worst, usually got it, and figured it was no more than he deserved. Kayla changed that. Her faith in him was a catalyst for him to reevaluate what he’d always believed about himself—and it also gave him a reason to change, so he could live up to that faith.

If we want to see how much he’s grown, we need only compare his behavior now to when he was a suspect in Britta’s murder. Then, he refused to defend himself, blamed Kayla when she tried to help him, and could think of no better solution to his problems than running for the rest of his life. Now, he openly tells his story, maintains his innocence, trusts that Kayla has his best interests at heart, and actively works to clear his name. He thinks he deserves justice, and even believes that he might get it—with a little effort.

Continuing the water theme, Steve sets off the hotel sprinklers to drive away some newly arrived guests. Steve and Kayla are soaked once again, and they strip out of their wet clothes and try to pick up where they left off in the hot springs. Kayla has wrapped herself in a big red towel, and she holds it open for Steve to step into. His look as he does so is tender, reverent, filled with sexual promise.

A little haste might be called for here, perhaps? But no, as always they are maddeningly slow, and yet again they are interrupted. When Kayla peeks outside through the curtains, they are shot at through the window (Timely Interruption #11).

They escape under cover of the crowd that gathers in the aftermath of the gunshots. Among the crowd are Justin and Adrienne, who join forces with them to help clear Steve. Their presence puts a damper on any opportunity to pick up (again) where they left off.

They track down a clue in Los Angeles that points them right back to a chemical company in Salem. Steve, however, decides to visit the LA orphanage where he grew up (though he doesn’t tell the other three where he’s going), and the others have to make their way back to Salem on their own. Because Ed Daniels is still working with the police, the three are forced to stick to the story that Kayla was held hostage.

Privately, Kayla tells Roman the real story and enlists his help. When Steve calls to say he’s back in Salem, she is delighted to tell him that Roman is on their side. But Kayla has her priorities. She asks Roman to wait until morning to bring Steve in, letting them have this one night together.

When Steve arrives, she demands that Steve tell her why he didn’t come back to Salem with them. After some initial reluctance—it’s still a sore subject—he does. He tells her about growing up in the orphanage, never being adopted, and how at sixteen he became “an emancipated minor—a kid nobody wants.”

“I want you,” Kayla says, and then sets out to prove it. But no sooner have they started their romantic evening—wine, candles, a nice negligee, really, is all this necessary?—the police burst in and arrest Steve after all (Timely Interruption #12).

Ed Daniels arranges for Steve to be transferred to a federal prison (he plans to kill him before he can get there). Kayla, Justin, Adrienne, and Alice Horton rescue Steve during the transfer, and hide him in a secret room in the Curtis mansion.

After breaking into the chemical company to look for clues, Steve and Kayla end up back at Kayla’s loft. It’s a hot summer night, and Steve makes his bed up on the roof. Kayla sits by an open window, trying to cool off, while Steve does the same upstairs. But it isn’t just the weather that’s making them so hot and sweaty, and cooling off isn’t what they want to do. Kayla comes up, and Steve turns to see her standing there. “Thought you’d never get here, baby,” he says.

No more interruptions.

They have waited so long for this. It all started with an attraction that reached across a seemingly unbridgeable gap. And no matter what else happened to them, desire was the one constant. Through hope and frustration, through love and alienation, through makeups, breakups, and timely interruptions, desire survived. Or rather, intensified.

But this is also a fulfillment of the emotional bond they forged at the same time—a bond inseparable from the erotic charge between them. Just as she saw something in him that no one else appreciated, Steve from the very beginning has seen and responded to the passionate, sensual woman in Kayla—even despite himself. Even when the last thing he wanted was to be involved with her, when he derided her compassion as naivete, and her integrity as complacency, he was always drawn to her sexually. Kayla, the good girl, finds that irresistible. It is no mistake that the song played here is “The Woman in Me.”

And for Steve, the trust that he feels for Kayla—unprecedented for him—allows him to fully open himself up during sex in a way that he never has before: as he says the next morning, sex with her was wonderful “because I love you, Kayla.” It’s the first time he’s said it willingly, and he says it looking her straight in the eye, with a look of absolutely open, naked vulnerability. We’ve been waiting for this almost as long as we’ve been waiting for them to have sex, and I’d be hard pressed to say which is more gratifying. (Luckily we don’t have to choose.)

After this momentous event, Steve goes back in his secret room, where he gets a visit from Jack, the man he once thought was so right for Kayla. Jack still thinks so, and he’s so certain that he’s willing to override Kayla’s wishes and make deals behind her back. He tells Steve he won’t turn him in to the police if Steve agrees to leave Kayla. He says Kayla is too blinded by love for Steve to know what’s best for her.

Only a few months ago, Steve firmly believed everything Jack is saying. So it is very satisfying to hear Steve refute Jack’s arguments point for point: “All the money, all the power, all the crap you want to give Kayla, and you think she wants, that’s nothing compared to what we have together,” he says. “Kayla has decided that she wants me … she loves me, and I want her. As far as I’m concerned that’s the only thing two people need to stay together.”

Kayla arrives in time to hear this. “I’m so happy to hear you say that,” she says.

As soon as Kayla comes to stand next to him, Steve’s body language shifts, completely shutting Jack out. He turns his whole body toward her, looks only at her, kisses her, touches her hair—everything signaling singleminded sexual intent. There is something primitive in this: my woman. Hands off. They’ve always generated sexual heat, but this is different—a sexual bond. This is what their night on the roof has given them.

With some help from Diana, Roman, Mike, and Jack, Steve and Kayla nail the real bad guy, Simon Hopkins. Steve is a free man. After it’s all over, Steve comes back to Kayla’s apartment, letting himself in with his own key. He’s come home. He finds her reading in bed, wearing a fuzzy pink bathrobe and the cutest, dorkiest black-framed glasses. Kayla is embarrassed. “You should have called, I would have changed … ” she says, but Steve cuts her off by kissing her.

“It’s not what you wear, baby, it’s not what you look like, it’s you,” he says, an echo of what Kayla told him so long ago: it’s not how you look, it’s how you are. Steve has finally banished his demons, and is on the same page with Kayla. They happily talk about a future together.

He has to go to Washington DC for a few days regarding the case, but when he comes back, he says, he’ll never leave her again.

If only. Ah, Steve.

Go on to part 12: The Breakup

Go back to part 10

 

Steve & Kayla—I haven’t forgotten

I know it’s been over a month since my last Steve and Kayla chapter. I’ve had quite a crazy summer (though not quite as hectic as having to run from the police and the bad guys after shooting a United States senator), and it’s been hard to find time to even finish watching the clips. I’ve just gotten through the part where Kayla, Adrienne, and Justin have to pretend that Steve really did take Kayla hostage.

With the advent of Ed Scott onto the Days production staff, I’ve been thinking more about the intersection of writing, acting, directing, and producing and how they all contribute to making a quality show.

Here we have exhibit A:

Honeymoon Hotel Part 1

Part 2

(They overlap a little, but go ahead and watch the yummy love scene twice.)

There are many little details that add up to make these scenes work so well. The irate couple is an effective piece of day player casting, especially the bitchy wife (“Wire hangers,” she says disdainfully). There are an appropriate number of extras who gather around the door after the gunshots, and their murmuring panic is a nice background to the scene.

The gunshots themselves are filmed to heighten their drama. They occur at the end of the episode to give us a cliffhanger, with slow motion, dramatic music, a closeup of the bullet holes, and a scream on the soundtrack.

The good guys are smart. Steve lights a match under the sprinkler to drive away the irate couple. Later, after a gunman has shot at them and a curious crowd comes knocking at their door, Steve and Kayla pretend that they, too, only came to the cabin to trace the source of the gunfire. (Steve pretends to be blind so he can use an enormous pair of blind-man sunglasses to cover his identifying patch.) They escape from the gunman under cover of the crowd.

(Okay, okay, I admit Kayla has a dim bulb moment here. Starlight? Really, Kayla?)

The director shows us all the necessary reaction shots. Among the crowd of extras, we see Adrienne’s joy at finding Steve and Kayla at last, and we see Justin preventing her from calling out to him in her excitement. At the close of the scene there is a shot of the gunman to keep us tense and interested.

Similarly, after the initial crisis is past, there is a short scene where Steve and Kayla acknowledge that they have been interrupted yet again from having sex, which shows their regret and still-unresolved sexual tension. Adventures are nice, but the show knows that this is what really matters to us!

The costumes and makeup are appropriate and realistic. They are able to clean up at the cabin but their clothes are still grubby and baggy. Steve is unable to shave, which is a nice attention to detail. When they steal clothing from the irate couple the clothing is appropriately, especially for Steve, not in their style. Though I have to admit it’s always been distressing to me how long Stephen Nichols is stuck in those horrible pleated trousers—especially when they are later paired with that fire-engine red CULA t-shirt.

Edited to add this picture of the ugly combo:

(and I must ask who chooses to put on a bright red t-shirt when they are attempting remain unnoticeable?)

After the irate couple leaves and Steve and Kayla get drenched in the sprinkler, Steve jokingly rubs a bar of soap over Kayla’s grubby clothes. At the exact moment when this playfulness turns into desire, the incidental music kicks in with a little slow, romantic tune. (The show used this little tune quite often for kissing and eyesnogging scenes.)

The over the top red of the decor in the honeymoon cabin, along with the ubiquitous hearts, are silly and cheesy, but when Steve murmurs during the love scene, “I can’t think of better place to be doing this,” somehow it seems perfect too. This is a little bit of a honeymoon for them.

I like how Mary Beth Evans makes Kayla sexually aggressive, how she starts stripping Steve’s shirt off as soon as they start kissing, and how she opens the towel for Steve to step into. But the thing I love most, and Stephen Nichols was the master at it, is the open look of vulnerability that Steve always showed during their love scenes. Watch his expression as he steps into that towel. This is what makes their love scenes romantic, what makes them love scenes, not just hot sex scenes.

It will probably be the beginning of October before I have the next chapter up!

 

Steve & Kayla—Jack Comes to Town (10)

Note: this is the tenth in a series. The series starts here: Steve Stalks Kayla

Even when he’s pushing her away, Steve is constantly teetering on the edge of giving in to Kayla. We can see why she keeps holding out hope. We can see why Jo and Adrienne resort to tricks and stratagems to get them together. It seems that the least little push will send him over the edge.

Jo and Adrienne prepay for a romantic dinner at Blondie’s and trick Steve and Kayla into arriving there at the same time. Steve uses the cover of not disappointing his mother and sister as an excuse to give in to temptation and spend some time with Kayla. They share a dance (which unfortunately the show cuts away from), and then a nice meal. When Kayla compliments the food, Steve says, “At least they didn’t serve you lobster.” Their eyes meet, and suddenly they are both thinking of that evening from so long ago, how happy they were … and what they planned to do that night.

At this moment a cheap hooker across the room begins making a scene. The maître d’ tries to escort her out, but she recognizes Steve and loudly proclaims she’s there to meet him. Steve is mortified to be singled out like this, in front of Kayla, and it’s enough to tip him back the other way.

How frustrating for Kayla, to have the evening turn out this way! They stand arguing out in the rain outside Steve’s apartment. When Steve asks her why she can’t walk away from him, she tries something new. She says, softly: “Because I love you.”

This stops him for a moment, but he says only, “Kayla, please, get the hell out of here.”

But Kayla’s declaration was more than a declaration, it was a challenge, and she tries to force him to acknowledge it. “I said I love you!” she says, louder.

He brings up what he knows is a sore subject: the first time he saw her, from inside the closet in Cleveland, when he watched her undress. “There’s nothing romantic about that. That’s something my old man would have done.” Kayla turns away, and Steve goes on, pressing home his point, “You don’t know what I’m capable of. Even I don’t know.”

This is why he keeps teetering back and forth. Here is a man who has so locked away his inner self that he truly doesn’t know who he is. Is he a good, decent man with a thin veneer of hostility and rage, as Kayla believes? Or is he a “sweet guy rough around the edges” as Duke was when Jo first met him, doomed to show Duke’s true colors in the end?

After Kayla has gone home, Steve has second thoughts. He flashes back to himself as a child telling Duke he would never be like him. Maybe Kayla is right about him. Maybe he can meet her challenge after all. He teeters, he teeters … he rushes over to the loft in the rain and bangs on her door.

The door slides open. But, it’s not Kayla, ready to hear his declaration of love and fall into his arms. It’s a stranger, a handsome stranger in a bathrobe, politely yet pointedly inquiring as to what purpose this man has come knocking on Kayla’s door in the middle of the night. Smoothly handsome, civil, self-contained. Everything Steve is not.

And just like that, Steve is back on the other side. But this is more than a momentary stumbling block. This goes straight to the unexploded bomb at the heart of their relationship: Steve’s belief that, no matter what she says, Kayla deserves better. He once promised her that someday she would meet someone else, someone better … “and then you’ll think of me, and you’ll thank me”—for breaking up with her. That future he promised her now has a definite shape. I think that Steve has signed, sealed, and delivered Kayla to Jack before Jack even opens his mouth.

But it’s one thing, in theory, to want Kayla to move on with someone else, it’s quite another to watch it happen (he thinks) before his very eyes. At Shenanigans the next day, Steve is sitting with Adrienne when Jack and Kayla come in for lunch. Steve immediately loses the thread of his conversation with Adrienne, and his eyes keep straying to the table where Kayla sits with Jack. And when Adrienne leaves, he can’t, he just can’t leave them alone. He marches over to their table, his face stretched into a false parody of an indulgent, knowing grin, and asks if he can join them. He calls them “you two kids” and quizzes them about how they met (at a fancy resort in Hawaii), and, in a cringeworthy exchange, asks Jack about Kayla’s bikini line.

It is truly pitiful how transparent Steve’s jealousy is, through his pose of the affable matchmaker. When, later that day, he learns that Jack is a senator’s son, and Kayla says she didn’t know either, Steve can’t stop himself from saying, “I guess he had plenty of other things to impress you with.”

Despite the contortions that Steve is twisting himself into to give his blessing to Kayla and Jack, it is clear that Kayla still loves Steve. There is a slight change in her manner, a dialing down of the eager availability she has consistently shown, that’s all. A few days later, Steve shows up at the Emergency Center to take Adrienne out to dinner, and instead ends up encouraging her to go on a date with Justin (they don’t know he’s a Kiriakis). Steve plays the role of the protective, loving brother, talking about checking out this Justin fellow and giving her a flower to wear in her hair. The tearful, happy Adrienne hugs Steve as Kayla looks on silently, her expression one of bittersweet envy.

After Adrienne leaves, Steve asks Kayla if she’d like to go out to dinner with him, but before Kayla can answer Jack swoops in and says breezily that the limo is double parked and they need to hurry.

How I wanted Kayla to tell Jack to stuff it and go with Steve instead! It’s clearly what she’d rather do. But in addition to not wanting to be rude, I think Kayla is reluctantly coming to a decision. If Steve is constantly teetering on the brink of giving in to his feelings for her, he’s also constantly vulnerable to falling back the other way. So easily discouraged that any little obstacle sends him scuttling away and breaking her heart all over again. Can she keep putting herself through that, over and over? Kim once told her that if Steve couldn’t overcome his fears—and it’s looking like he can’t—she would have to find the strength to walk away.

Maybe she can’t renounce him fully, maybe she’s as incapable of that as Steve is, but she can sure stop making it so easy for him.

But just as Steve’s flashes of jealousy show us how much he still cares, Kayla’s feelings make her unable to resist any opportunity to challenge Steve to change his mind. After seeing Bo and Hope sail off together, Kayla and Steve talk about dreams and whether they can come true. She tells him if he wants his dreams to come true, they can. When his reaction is to say lazily that he guesses he never wanted anything bad enough, she says furiously, “I don’t need you anymore,” and walks away in disgust.

Later that day, Jack convinces her to take the job as his night nurse (he is ill with Hodgkin’s disease). Her first assignment? To go on a picnic in the park. On this date, we can see she’s trying. They flirt, they look at stars, they share jokes. And Kayla seems to have a nice time. She seems to appreciate being fussed over and (gently) wooed. (It must have been a nice change of pace.) We can almost see her thinking, if I were in love with Jack, how much simpler it would be.

And who should come upon them but Steve. He’s on a date of sorts himself, with his friend Joanie and her son. Steve’s comment on seeing Jack and Kayla is to yet again ostentatiously give them his blessing. “You two look like the cover of a magazine.”

This is more accurate than he realizes, because it reflects the true nature of Jack and Kayla’s relationship, all surface shine, no depth. But Steve is dazzled by that surface, and by the contrast to himself and his perception of what he can offer. Steve is ready for Jack and Kayla to ride off into the sunset together. He has given her her happy ending.

We can see how well happily ever after is working out for Kayla when Chris finds her falling asleep over her coffee at Shenanigans. She explains that she’s been working two jobs (at the Emergency Center and as Jack’s nurse) because she hopes that exhausting herself each day will make her fall asleep as soon as she hits the pillow. Chris asks how well it’s working, and she says it isn’t. “I just lie awake and think about Steve.” And then, softly, like she’s saying something sacred, “I just feel it’s our destiny to be together. That’s just the way I feel.” To see Kayla attempt to admit defeat, to see all her fighting energy just running around in circles, strikes me as inescapably sad, almost tragic.

Jack’s stepmother Anjelica is working on a project to renovate the riverfront. When Jack, along with Steve, discovers that some low income families (including Steve’s friend Joanie) will be displaced because of it, Jack comes up with a plan to build some new housing nearby. After seeing how the displaced families look to Steve for leadership, Jack proposes they work together on the project.

The first thing Jack does when he comes in to Steve’s apartment is casually pick up the polaroid of Kayla that is Steve’s greatest treasure. Steve snatches it out of his hand. Then he rudely declines to help, telling Jack he doesn’t trust him.

When Kayla hears that Steve has turned Jack down, she goes to see him too. She lists Jack’s credentials for a project like this, ardently making the case that he can be trusted. Steve listens to her detailed knowledge of Jack’s history, then finally bursts out with, “I guess you learn a lot about a guy when you’re spending every night by his bedside.” This is what Steve has been torturing himself with, imagining them together night after night.

Kayla doesn’t deny it. (You can’t blame her for wanting to get a little of her own back.) She suggests that maybe Steve doesn’t want to do the project because he’s jealous, and when Steve denies it, she says, “Prove it. Work with Jack.”

Well, it works. Steve finds them at Shenanigans and says he’ll do it, and once again we see Steve’s broad painted-on grin at the prospect of spending lots of time seeing Jack and Kayla together.

By the night of the gala celebrating Mike Horton’s cancer research, the three of them seem to have reached a working peace. Jack and Steve have established a nice rapport—almost brotherly, in fact. At the gala, an attempt is made to lure Mike Horton to his lab before it is blown to smithereens. However, through a series of mishaps, it is Steve and Kayla who end up caught in the blast.

They survive, but they are buried under heaps of rubble, and no one knows they are there. Kayla has injured her leg and goes into shock. Steve takes care of her as best he can, but with no water or medical supplies her condition worsens. She loses consciousness, and a desperate Steve pleads with her not to die. “I would die for you,” he cries. “I love you, Kayla, I love you.”

Kayla does wake up, but she is feverish and weak. Steve finds some rubbing alcohol in the rubble and, soaking a cloth with it, uses it to stroke her face and neck.

“Am I dreaming?” Kayla says suddenly.

“Shh, shh,” Steve murmurs. “You might be having a nightmare, I don’t know.”

But Kayla doesn’t seem to have heard him. She whispers, “I thought I heard you say you love me … did you say you loved me, Steve? Did you say that?” She is delirious. “I must have been dreaming … I don’t want to ever wake up.” It breaks my heart to see Kayla this way, just a woman in love who wants to be loved back, a gambler who risked everything and might now be paying the price. She must have fantasized about Steve telling her he loves her many, many times.

When her fever breaks and the immediate crisis is past, but their oxygen is running out and there are no signs of rescue, Kayla tells Steve, “I want you to know, in case we don’t make it through this, how much I care about you, how much I love you.” And she asks him, if he loves her, to please, please, tell her now.

After two days of holding her and caring for her, acutely aware that he almost lost her, physically weak and facing death, Steve is in no shape to hold his feelings at bay. “Sweetness, sweetness,” he whispers, running trembling fingers over her face, her neck … and Timely Interruption #8 comes in the form of their rescue, at last.

The next day Steve comes in to the hospital for a checkup and Kayla finds him. Steve has not visited her since they were rescued, and his manner quickly makes it apparent that he thinks everything should just go back to how it was before they were trapped.

But Kayla did hear him, he said it. “You told me something very important about how you feel about me,” she says. “Now that it’s the light of day, can you say it again?” She knows this is the true test.

Steve says first, she imagined it. Then he says he knew she was injured and in pain and he just wanted to make her feel better.

Kayla says, “Do you hate me that much?”

Steve’s blank look of shock is almost comical. Hate is so far from what he feels. “I don’t hate you at all,” he says.

And Kayla calls him on the way he keeps teetering back and forth, keeps raising her hopes and then dashing them. She says, her voice rising, “You told me that you loved me. You said it, and you meant it.” And when he continues to stonewall her, her frustration boils over. She launches herself at him, hitting him and shouting, “Stop it! Just stop it!”

Steve grabs her flailing arms. “You stop it!”

At this moment Jack interrupts. “What the hell is going on here?” he demands.

Steve is still holding Kayla’s arms. Even upset and angry, trying his best to shut her out, once he’s got hold of her he can’t let go. Even when Kayla turns to face Jack so Steve’s arm encircles her body, he doesn’t release her. Kayla, too, doesn’t step away from him. Their expressions show their anger and frustration, but their body language is close, almost intimate.

As Jack continues to scold him, Steve finally lets go and Kayla steps away. Her eyes find his and hold them, and she says intensely in a low voice, “It didn’t have to be this way, Steve.”

What will it take to show him she’s right? Kayla can get him to crack temporarily, when his desire overwhelms his reason, but it doesn’t change his certainty that they don’t belong together. A rival doesn’t spur him on but only discourages him further. A near-death experience brings them closer during the crisis, but when it’s over they’re back where they started.

Kayla couldn’t do it, Jack couldn’t do it, nearly dying couldn’t do it. Is there anything that could make him change his mind?

Go on to part 11: Summer on the Run

Go back to part 9