by Malcom, Anne
And I spent years after that trying to prove him wrong.
Trying to fall in love with a thousand different guys so I could fall out of love with one.
Because I did still love him.
Even though he treated me horrendously. Callously. Even though his actions were unforgivable.
Actions were unforgivable. But love was not as easily swayed.
Broken hearts sometimes crave the person that broke them. No matter how unhealthy, ugly, and painful that need is, it doesn’t go away.
But I tried to cover it up.
Ignore it.
Prove to him that he did not own me.
Give my heart to everyone because I maintained the illusion that it didn’t belong to any of them. Not even me.
* * *
Four Years Later
“Polly!” Lucy yanked me into an uncharacteristic hug.
Lucy wasn’t a hugger.
I was. I was usually the one that had to wrangle her into any kind of affection. It wasn’t because she didn’t feel it, though it would seem like it on first glance. She was always wearing black, always elegant and in heels, her beautifully sharp features mostly sculpted into a mask of indifference. Even when she was hurting. Especially when she was hurting.
Which had been a lot from the moment she’d met Keltan.
Because people are not all smiles and happiness when they fall in love. No, if it’s real and true—like what Lucy and Keltan had—the smiles were rare, and misery was common.
A year ago, when this all began, Lucy smiled more than ever.
Which was the obvious sign of her misery, since she usually put more effort into looking happy when she was miserable.
There was nothing I could do, apart from hope that the universe gave my sister peace.
And a year later, a year full of misery and pain disguised by fake grins, her smile was real. Genuine.
It filled my heart.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said once she released me, fighting the tears that prickled the backs of my eyes. Tears of utter and complete relief that my sister was getting exactly what she deserved.
She grinned wider. “Oh, you’re not late.” She turned on her heel and walked farther into Keltan’s impressive apartment. I took this as my cue to follow. “I told you to come two hours earlier than I wanted you here,” she called over her shoulder, shouting because of the low thump of the music growing as we entered.
Of course, she knew me so well.
I didn’t mean to be late.
I tried my hardest to be early.
But Rain really needed my feedback on her routine for this comedy show she was doing. She was nervous. Her. The girl that flashed a cop to get herself out of a ticket. So I stayed and listened and laughed and gave her a little of what she needed. Most of it was going to come from her, she just needed someone to help her figure that out.
“Sorry we don’t have any kale juice or kombucha or whatever it is you’re into these days,” Lucy continued as I caught up with her. “But how about a beer?”
I grinned. “Beer sounds great.”
I smiled at a few people I kind of knew, but most were strangers. I smiled at them too. Not enough people smiled at strangers.
I hadn’t exactly mingled with Lucy’s L.A. crowd. I didn’t do much mingling with her friends back in Amber either. Apart from Rosie, and Ashley. And the Sons of Templar now and again. But the three of them did their best to keep me away from the notorious biker club saying I’d “bring trouble even someone like Gage couldn’t handle.”
But that was okay with me. As much as I respected their free-spirited life outsides the bounds of society, I was kind of against violence. Kind of being utterly and completely.
And they lived violent lives.
My crowd veered to a little more peaceful end of the spectrum. Not that I stuck to one ‘crowd.’ I wasn’t in a group in high school, I was the nomad who was friends with everyone and no one, who had a different boyfriend who took her to different parties where she met different people every week.
I was addicted to that. Knowing different people, how they lived their lives, how I could fit into some version of it. Sometimes I did. For a while at least.
It was only here in my loft in L.A. with the group of misfits that I was thinking maybe I might fit. But since I was exploring that, I hadn’t hung out with Lucy and Keltan much. To be fair, they’d only just gotten their shit together after over a year of painful separation.
They definitely didn’t need Lucy’s little sister cramping their style.
I knew Keltan owned a security company. Knew it was kind of famous. I kind of guessed there would be hot guys at this party, because if Keltan was anything to go by, then yeah.
Not my type.
Maybe because they were too conventional alpha male for me.
Or maybe because they reminded me of someone.
When I saw him, I thought I was hallucinating. Thought I’d let my mind stray to him and for that reason, he’d appeared. But if I was hallucinating, then I’d see him exactly how he was imprinted into my memory. Not with almost everything about him different apart from his eyes and the way they stared into me.
“Holy shit,” I murmured under my breath as Lucy handed me the bottle.
She frowned, not yet catching on to who I was staring at. “What? Is it not gluten-free? Is it made by corporate America so you can’t possibly contribute to the capitalist pigs by drinking it?” she asked dryly.
I barely heard her, though it was the truth.
Something worse than the capitalist ethos taking over the minds of our society was happening right now.
He was coming over.
Oh shit, he was coming over.
At a loss of what to do, I lifted the beer to my face and chugged. Yes, faced with the man I’d been fantasizing about for years, instead of looking my best and giving him an intense look like he was giving me, I chugged my beer like a frat boy on rush week.
“Alright, so your latest boyfriend owns a brewery,” Lucy teased, still thankfully oblivious.
Then he was there.
In front of us.
And everything came crashing into me. The power of the memories I’d carried and nurtured and pretended that it was something but not the thing.
Because there was more than something, something exciting, something passionate, something a little like love. There was all of that, and then there was the thing.
That connection.
The stifling and uncomfortable vibration in the air the second our eyes locked. The tightness in my lungs as invisible hands squeezed at them. The needles pressing farther into my heart with every rapid beat. The pulsating throb in between my legs.
“Ah, Heath, of course you’d lumber over here with less than chivalrous thoughts about the newest beautiful woman to enter the room,” Lucy said with a smirk. “I’m afraid this beautiful woman is taken by a man I presume owns a brewery and sleeps in his mom’s basement.” She gave me a wink.
I was trying to remember how to breathe.
“Also,” Lucy continued. “There’s the fact that she’s my baby sister and I’d just have to castrate you with a dull butter knife if you even got any ideas,” she said sweetly.
I recovered quicker than I thought possible, reaching out to the hand Heath had extended after Lucy had finished her threats that worked as her version of an introduction.
“Nice to meet you,” I said with a voice that was little more than a squeak.
Lucy introduced us because obviously we were strangers. To her, there was no way this man who worked for Keltan, and me had ever crossed paths before. No way would I—or could I—educate her on the truth.
The handshake was a bad idea.
No, scratch that. The handshake was a terrible idea.
The second his hand engulfed mine, my entire body went flush. I was catapulted roughly and painfully into that beautiful and ugly past.
Everything was stark and blurry at the sa
me time.
I tried to yank my hand back, for continued survival more than anything else. And because there was only so long I could hold it together with Lucy looking on.
But his grip tightened.
Almost to the point of pain.
He frowned at me.
No, he glared.
He hadn’t spoken yet.
I prayed that he played along with my farce. The lie that felt uncomfortable and itchy the second I decided to roll with it. I didn’t lie. Didn’t act. But here I was, doing both. Because I had no other choice.
“Polly,” he drawled, the word tearing at all those wounds that I’d thought were healed. My inner thighs clenched with the memory of him saying my name.
When he’d taken my virginity.
“Nice to meet you,” he murmured, letting go of my hand, but not of my soul.
I exhaled roughly. But the expelling of breath didn’t give me relief. My lungs were still starved and flooded with oxygen at the same time.
Lucy saved the day.
As she tended to do with me.
“Wine,” she near screamed, thrusting it at me, snatching my empty beer bottle.
I took it like a life raft, more for something to hold onto than anything else. Something to anchor me to the present so I didn’t do anything dangerous like try to get lost in the past.
I didn’t do that.
I never did that.
I never worried about yesterday and I never fretted for tomorrow.
My family thought that the reason for this was the reason for everything else I did...because I was just Polly.
But the real reason for this was standing right in front of me, hands clenched at his sides, the pieces of me ground up in those closed fists.
Lucy snatched my hand not holding the wine and started to drag me toward the sofa, oblivious to the fact I was leaving a huge chunk of myself in the clenched fists of the man she’d ‘introduced’ me to.
“Now, I need to hear about this cult you’re living in. And make sure you don’t drink the Gatorade,” she demanded, eyes narrowed.
I frowned. “It’s not a cult, it’s a community of...”
And then I lost myself in the familiar. In reassuring Lucy that my latest situation would not result in my getting on the news as the fifteenth wife of an eighty-year-old man and no, I was not preparing for any sort of apocalypse.
Familiar.
But made utterly freaking alien by the man watching me, yanking at the tapestry I’d knit over the broken pieces of myself.
There was only so long I could handle that.
There was only so long any human being could handle that.
So I left, feigning an event that I had to go to. Which wasn’t a lie. There was an indie rock band playing in the Hills. And I had been planning on going. Jett, my kind of boyfriend, who I thought I’d been kind of obsessed with—until now of course—was a member of the band and I had wanted to see him.
But now I didn’t want to see him because Heath had made me see myself, really see me, the me I’d become after four years of denial, and I didn’t like it one bit.
Lucy had let me leave easily enough—well, with a raised brow and an insistence to take the taser she’d shoved into my purse.
Heath had been clenching a beer, his eyes on me, gaze heavier than anything physical could’ve been. His stare was physical. It didn’t bow down to the years between us, the years that should’ve chipped away at the feelings, the memories, until they were nothing but pebbles to be carried around, maybe stumbled upon in the wrong moments of remembering.
But this was not a pebble.
This was a mountain, heavy and all-consuming.
And I needed to run from it.
So I ran.
I wasn’t surprised he’d followed me home.
Not that I knew that much about him—two nights, no matter how amazing and life-changing, cannot tell you everything about a person. But it told me enough.
As did the way he looked at me the entire night. The way he totally and utterly shredded my insides with that intense and knowing stare.
Like somehow he’d learned everything about me in those two nights all those years ago, and he’d held onto it, carried it with him, and then the stare presented me with the truth of that.
I thought I was prepared when I opened the door he had been banging on moments after I’d closed it.
I was not.
All of my breath left my body in a low exhale seeing him standing in front of me.
I expected him to burst into the living room, that for once, was empty. It was almost a miracle. The common area was never empty, due to the kind of people that were drawn to living arrangements like this. People who didn’t live by conventional means, by society’s timetable. At the loft, there was no such thing as ‘proper’ hours. People had breakfast at midnight. Dinner at eight in the morning. Did yoga at three in the morning. Decided to take up the drums in the middle of the day.
It wasn’t for everyone.
Or even the majority.
Which was kind of the point.
In the majority, people like us were lonely. But here, loneliness was actively fought against, and almost impossible.
And I’d never felt lonely.
Because I’d never let myself. My life was designed to look like chaos. But it was really carefully planned to avoid my own demons.
Tonight had straightened up my chaos. Lined up everything so I couldn’t avoid what I was trying to hide. I’d felt exceptionally lonely when I got back to the empty loft. I’d been lonely walking the bustling streets of L.A., amongst the throngs of people, until I got home to rare silence.
Until the banging on my door.
Until he yanked me outside and then began pacing the hallway, running his fingers through his hair.
He shouldn’t be doing that.
Because it made my own fingers itch to do that. I didn’t get to that first night. He was still in the Marines then. They had buzz cuts.
He’d grown it.
It suited him.
It didn’t soften his face as it would have with other men.
It made him harsher.
Wilder.
Before, that wildness was hidden, only slightly, behind his military issue haircut. Behind his clean-shaven face, his neatly pressed clothes. I saw it of course, felt it, biblically, in the night we do not think of.
When he shed his clothes that night, he shed whatever personality the trials and horrors of war had forced him to wear. I saw it. I imprinted that onto my skin. My soul. My broken heart.
I imagined he put it right back on—that military issue personality that matched the buzzcut—when he left me in bed that Sunday morning we do not think of. Seeing him in the flesh, he must’ve. Because he was here. And I knew a lot about war. Because I campaigned for peace. And you had to know the enemy and all that.
I knew it was only those people that wore the uniform on their bodies as well as their souls that survived.
Not just physically, but managed to survive enough when they got home not to spiral into a haze of drugs, alcohol, homelessness. I knew this because I volunteered at three different homeless shelters. The number of veterans amongst the residents in such places was staggering.
But Heath had shed that uniform completely and utterly on the outside, maybe because he knew he couldn’t shed it from his soul. Or maybe I was reading too much into the fact he’d grown the previous buzz cut into a shaggy, shiny and beautiful mane that brushed his shoulders. That his strong and angled jaw was now hidden by a long and trimmed beard. That his previously large but lean muscles were now bursting from the long-sleeved tee he had pushed the sleeves up to reveal corded arms.
He was wearing all black, down to his scuffed motorcycle boots.
I’d thought he was beautiful before.
But this was something less than beautiful. Something so much more.
His eyes darted around the hallway, flickering like the tired light
three doors down.
Mine stayed on him.
They couldn’t move.
And then he yanked me in. Not with his body, he still kept space between us. No, with his fricking gaze centered on me. Familiar and alien at the same time. Comforting and terrifying.
Calm and chaotic.
“This is where you live?” he hissed.
I jerked back.
Of all the things I thought he might say, this was not it.
Which was actually a good thing, because I likely wouldn’t have been able to react properly—with strength and willpower—to anything else.
The words, the judgment in them—judgment he seemed certain he had the right to possess—had my back straightening.
“This is where I live,” I agreed, my tone daring him to say more. I folded my arms and arched my brow.
His eyes flickered to my chest as I did so and I hated I felt that flicker right in between my legs.
“You shouldn’t live here,” he clipped, folding his own arms and widening his stance as if it were to reinforce the point that he had muscles, a great beard, and a penis and therefore his word was law.
I was sure that was the case with plenty of women.
And I didn’t judge them one bit.
Because it was tempting to let the beautiful man with great muscles, a greater beard, and an excellent penis—with equally excellent skills in using it—lay down whatever law he saw fit.
I had certainly fallen victim to a handsome face, pretty words, and a talented tongue.
His being the first.
Hence me not letting him lay anything. Especially me.
I wouldn’t survive it.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I returned.
His eyes hardened at my response. As if he weren’t expecting such a show from me. And I guessed he was right. I didn’t argue. Not if I could avoid it. The cold and harsh tone of my voice was foreign to me. I had an expression on my face that would likely be foreign too. It felt unnatural. Because I didn’t frown. I tried to give myself a reason to smile, to be kind, understanding and happy every day.
I truly believed happiness was a decision.
It was the hardest one to make, especially every single morning, but it’s how I lived my life.
Until now.