by C. R. Jane
Hers.
I’d made myself start from the beginning. I’d read about how abusive her mother had been, how much we’d failed her by letting her hide it all from us when the signs should have been obvious to us. I’d read about how she both missed and hated her father, how some weeks, her mother had forgotten to get any food for the house. How sometimes, she hadn’t had electricity or running water, because her mother had spent all their money on booze and spa treatments she couldn’t afford and didn’t need. How hungry and alone Everly had felt. Constantly.
And then I’d read about Everly’s love story with my brother and I.
And it was a love story, just not the kind that Caiden had wanted.
I could feel the worship and veneration about the two of us, how she felt like we’d saved her.
Not realizing that she was the one who’d saved us.
Or at least, saved me.
It was obvious now, reading it after everything had happened, the way that Caiden had manipulated her…manipulated me.
Starting from when he stole her first kiss by lying about my first kiss.
I still remembered that day, about how she’d approached me with tears in her eyes. How I’d tried to tell her what happened, that Marcy had kissed me…I hadn’t kissed her. My pre-teen brain hadn’t understood why she was making such a big deal about something that had meant nothing to me.
But now I understood that Caiden, even at thirteen, had been doing everything he could to make sure that “our girl” was only his girl.
And then I got to that summer. The rage simmered inside of me, her words stoking the flames until they burned out of control.
Had Caiden wanted me to lose control that day in that fight at school?
I remembered that night when I’d come home, and how he’d told me that I almost hit Everly during the fight and that I was too dangerous to be around her.
I’d lied to her that next day. Destroying my angel with cruel words in an effort to save her. From me.
When the person she needed saving from was him.
I read his words to her, how he tore her apart all summer, how he controlled her every move. How she longed for me every second of every day.
Just like I’d longed for her.
By the time I got to that night, the one that changed everything, I could barely control myself.
Her words pushed me over the edge.
I read in disbelief how she’d finally gotten the courage to break it off, the guilt she’d felt. I read about me taking her virginity, something I’d so vilely thrown in her face.
I read about the text from Caiden.
And then I read about everything after that. Including that she thought I’d called her and had tried to scream into her phone for help.
It hadn’t been me.
My twin brother was the devil. And he’d destroyed my sweet, beautiful, perfect Everly. And I’d helped him.
It was like I was the one on the receiving end of every hit from his fist as I read her words.
I wanted to stop right there. I knew if I looked in the mirror, I’d see the black taking over the blue, but I knew that I had to read to the end.
And I did. I read about how alone she was, every fucking day, when she tried to recover from the injuries that Caiden had made to her body. And the injuries that I had made to her soul.
Long after I’d finished her last words, I sat there, thinking about all the time I’d wasted mourning Caiden and hating Everly.
Caiden should have died in that hospital bed.
The words came sharp and fast, and yet I knew that I meant them down to the marrow of my bones.
My brother had spent years of his life, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
The truth had been right there in front of me this entire time.
I might as well have been the one in that car with her, for all the damage I’d done.
The way she’d described what I said to her in that hospital room, when she’d just woken up and she’d been all alone, her body and life destroyed.
I screamed, the sound of my pain echoing through the room. I picked up my coffee table and flipped it over, the glass vase that my mother had decorated it with crashing to the ground and shattering everywhere.
The bookshelf was next, and then the TV. I destroyed everything in the living room before moving on to the kitchen.
And after I’d destroyed that room, I grabbed a butcher knife from off the counter and held it to my chest, thinking of how good it would feel to slice through the skin and bones and end everything right now.
I didn’t deserve to live.
Caiden didn’t deserve to live.
The thought had me throwing the butcher knife to the ground with shaking hands.
I sank to my knees and started to weep.
And then there she was, sinking to her knees in front of me.
“It was all Caiden, wasn’t it?” I choked out. “He did everything. He hurt you that night.”
She stared at me, her beautiful green eyes watery and unfathomable. The truth was there in their depths. The confirmation that every word she’d written was true.
The confirmation that I didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as her.
There wasn’t a difference between a broken heart and being in a prison, I decided.
The darkness took over after that. And I hoped it would keep me forever this time.
Everly
He didn’t answer when I knocked.
I huffed as I crossed my arms and looked through the windows, trying to see if I could find any sign of life.
There was no movement through the side windows, but on a closer look…everything looked…destroyed.
I knocked on the door again frantically, thinking Jackson had texted me because his house had been robbed. When he didn’t answer again, I tried the doorknob, and the door opened up quietly.
The house was completely still. But you could feel the violence in the air, feel how it had sunk into the walls of the house, and this place would somehow never feel the same.
I walked through the front foyer hesitantly, finally thinking about the fact that if he had been robbed…the robber could still be here. What if Jackson had texted me for help and I was supposed to have called the police?
I shook my head at the ridiculousness of my thoughts. Jackson would obviously have called the police first before “texting” the cripple he fucked on occasion.
I heard movement from the next room, and I continued to walk deeper and deeper into the house, despite the alarms blaring loudly in my head that I needed to retreat and get away from here as soon as possible.
I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Jackson.
I frowned when I heard his phone ringing in the next room.
I went as fast as my bum leg and crutches could take me and then stopped short as I noted the utter destruction of the living room. The foyer had stuff knocked over…but this… There wasn’t a single thing in this room that had been left unscathed.
A cry sounded from where I remembered the kitchen was located, and I stumbled towards it, stopping suddenly when I saw the pile of journals that had gone missing from my room.
Jackson had taken them.
He knew.
Looking around the room, I realized that the damage here wasn’t from a robbery.
It was from Jackson finding out the truth about the past.
I’d carried the burden of the past for a long time, I knew how heavy it felt.
Jackson was kneeling on the ground, his body racked with sobs. Utter destruction littered the floor around him.
I walked slowly towards him and then knelt in front of him, ignoring the pain in my leg. All I could focus on was his pain and how much it called to me.
He lifted his head and met my gaze, black orbs where blue was usually found.
He’d gone black.
“It was all Caiden, wasn’t it?” he asked me in a sorrow ridden voice. “He did everything. He hurt you that ni
ght.”
I couldn’t answer. For so long, I’d dreamed about telling him the truth, and then I’d let that dream go, deciding to let the past lie there because it couldn’t be changed, no matter how much I prayed.
And now here it was.
The truth didn’t taste as good as I thought it would.
And then Jackson was gone, taken to wherever the darkness called him to.
My heart broke all over again those next few days. I couldn’t examine how I was feeling about the truth finally being out, because Jackson was falling apart at the seams in a way I’d never seen another person do, not in my entire life. Finding out the truth had broken him.
He alternated between sobbing and screaming those first few hours, self-destructing spectacularly so that his pain was all I could see.
It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen happen to someone I loved. And I’d seen my daddy blow his brains out on the sidewalk in front of my house.
I’d written all my professors my excuses, telling them my injuries from the fall were too much. And I stayed in that destroyed townhome tending to Jackson. My phone died by the end of the day. I didn’t bother charging it.
The days were a blur. Sometime after the first two days, one of his old roommates came by. He’d looked surprised to see me, but he’d taken one look at Jackson’s dark eyes and haunted appearance and he’d quickly left, not wanting to deal with Jackson in this state.
I didn’t blame him. Jackson had been inconsolable and in an almost constant state of rage. His mind was like a tornado on a rampage, and nothing was safe those first two days.
He slipped into something else entirely after that.
The rage burned off, and something much more sinister took its place. During that time, I’d never seen someone drink so much in my entire life and remain standing. Though sometimes, he didn’t do that either and I had to sleep next to him on either the bathroom floor or the kitchen floor, because he was too heavy to move. Once, we slept on the floor of his shower because he’d passed out in the middle of me washing him. Alcohol was a depressant, this I knew, but he used it like a tranquilizer for his manic behavior, and he gave himself dose after dose until he was out cold. Each morning, I lay with my body wrapped tightly around his and waited. I waited, praying and hoping that would be the morning I’d see blue eyes.
I didn’t.
We lay in bed. I’d managed to get him there the night before by stripping myself of all my clothes and offering myself to his demons. I did this because when he wasn’t out cold, he was on me. Not in the way he had been those few times.
This was different.
It was rough, needy, crippling, and terrifying. I was a vice, and like the booze, I was soothing. The very fabric of his sanity was stitched into the beat of my heart. Sometimes, he lay for hours with his head on my chest, just listening. I let him. I let him do whatever he needed to survive. I was propped up on my side, leaning over to look down at him. Jackson looked so lost, but he was in there. I knew he was. Cupping his cheek in my hand, I watched as he leaned into it for comfort.
“Jackson. Come back to me.”
Leaning down, I rested my forehead against his. His eyes were so haunting, his ghosts flickering amongst the black staring back at me.
“Follow the sound of my voice and come home.”
His eyes closed at my words, and a tear slipped out. I kissed him hard, pouring every piece of whatever this was that I felt for him into every swipe of my tongue, graze of my teeth, and movement of my lips.
I was crying by the time our kiss ended. “Come back to me, Jackson.” He didn’t answer. He rarely did.
After the anger had subsided, he rarely spoke at all. He would whisper my name sometimes when he slept, but that was it. He didn’t even say my name when we fucked. It was like this part of him was incapable of connecting with any of the feelings he knew when his eyes were blue.
I hated that for him. My tears fell onto his cheeks, but he didn’t hold me. His body lay practically unmoving in my arms, but his eyes never left mine.
I resorted to begging after a while.
“You aren’t allowed to be like this. You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself, Jackson Parker. You should have believed in me. You should have loved me the way that you’d promised all those years ago,” I raged at him.
Nothing. No reaction.
I grabbed his face and kissed him even harder than before, so hard I could taste my tears on his lips. Then I lay on his chest, holding him tighter than I’d held on to anything in my entire life.
I realized once again how in love with Jackson I was. I’d told myself that I wasn’t, but the truth was right here, practically streaming out of every one of my pores as I held him tightly.
Love for me had always been dark and ugly, only seen in those shadowed places that no one wanted to speak about.
That’s why it was so easy to deny. Because I wanted to believe in the happily ever after, in the prince who charged in on the white horse and saved me.
But I was a fool.
I knew that now.
So, I waited. It took seven days. For seven days, I warded off every nightmare with my heart pressed naked against his. For seven days, I chased away every doubt-induced fever. For seven days, my body was Jackson’s salvation when his soul needed safety.
I was fucked raw, emotionally exhausted. Jackson took everything from me. Just like he always had.
Then he opened his eyes.
And I cried when I saw that my favorite shade of blue had once again returned.
But I also cried because despite the fact that Jackson now knew the past, it couldn’t change the present. It didn’t change the fact that Jackson hadn’t been there for me all those years when I needed him the most.
I cried because those eyes of his told me that Jackson Parker loved me.
I cried because it was too late.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jackson
The problem with being bipolar was that when I went into those truly black cycles, I couldn’t remember much…if anything when I emerged.
But this one was different.
Because for the first time, I hadn’t been alone.
Everly had stayed.
When I came to, I saw my marks on her body, I could recall flashes of using her body over and over again as an outlet for my pain. I remembered her tears as she cried for me, the demon who didn’t deserve her grief.
Unlike the other times, where I’d woke up to piles of trash and regrets, my body felt sated and satisfied. Like it had been loved over and over again, brought back to life by her touch.
“Hi,” I murmured.
She smiled, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
If I was thinking that me knowing the truth was going to bring her back to me, I’d been wrong. That much was clear.
She stayed with me for the rest of the day but we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t mention anything dark or heavy, even though I was bursting to beg her for forgiveness, to beg her to love me again.
She left with a muted goodbye, my thanks echoing after her. I’d used her body for days, yet we didn’t even part with a hug, much less a kiss.
She waved goodbye before limping her way out the door. She’d stayed with me for so long that her leg had healed enough that she didn’t need crutches anymore.
The sun faded away as I watched Lane pull up to the house. Lane asked Everly something when she opened the door, and she just shook her head. She looked exhausted and pale as she got in.
Like always, I’d taken something from Everly without giving her anything in return. That she wanted that is.
Everly had my entire heart and soul.
But I didn’t think there was a piece of her that wanted that.
So I sat there as Lane pulled away. And I was furious at myself, yes. But my anger soon drifted towards the person whose real sins this all was.
The Judas who’d kissed me on the cheek while stabbing me in the back.
My brother, who hadn’t even sent one text message in the seven fucking days I’d been out.
My fury towards Caiden built while I sat there, until I no longer could see the sunset. All I could see was his face and how much I wanted to destroy it.
The betrayal was so thick that I could taste it. I had to rethink everything, look back on our whole lives together in a different light, examining everything to see just how far his manipulation had gone.
And I didn’t just want revenge because of what he’d done to me, how he’d ripped the love of my life away from me and convinced me to cast her aside like yesterday’s used goods.
I wanted revenge for her. There wasn’t anything I could do to truly give back to Everly what she’d lost, but I could at least make Caiden pay.
I got into my truck, and I headed towards campus.
I wasn’t a violent person. I kept my crazy side locked in tight so that it could only escape when I went black. This was the first time that I was intentionally looking to incite a fight with a perfectly cool head.
I had tunnel vision by the time I parked outside the apartment where he stayed with two others from the team. I knew there would be consequences.
But I couldn’t fucking care less.
I ran up the stairs and pounded on the door, adrenaline coursing through me.
Derek, a second-string wide receiver on the team opened the door.
“Oh hey, Jackson,” he said, reaching out to give me a high five.
I ignored him and pushed my way into the apartment.
Caiden was in the living room with two others from the team, all of them drinking beers and holding Xbox controllers.
Caiden looked up, and our gazes locked.
“Well, isn’t this a pleasant surprise—” he got out before I walked over and grabbed his shirt with two hands, hoisting him off the couch and giving him a hard shake.
I could hear my teammates yelling faintly, but everything else was white noise.
There was only Caiden and I.