Before & After You

by Michelle Chamberland

  But he was faster than me, already two steps ahead.

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  He pulled me around the corner, fingers gently biting into my arm, forcing my back against the wall with the amount of space he was giving me.

  I sucked in a breath. I could barely breathe. Could hardly muster up the words I knew I needed to say because of the way he was staring at me, like he was staring straight into me. It threw me off-kilter.

  He’d never looked at me like that before. Had never seemed that angry before, either…or this close to breaking.

  “What do you want?” I finally managed. But the words lacked their intended weight, coming out as a soft breath instead of the angry growl I’d felt churning inside.

  “Why would you lie about sleeping with Jaymes, Jess?” he asked. There was a layer of hurt and betrayal beneath the anger in his tone.

  “Screw you,” I said. It didn’t matter why. It was too late, and it was none of his damn business, anyway. He didn’t get to care now. Not when he’d practically forced me into Jaymes’ bed in the first place.

  He moved closer, his mouth inches away from mine, and I choked back the desperate need for him to close that distance between us. Those last two, maybe three inches between his lips and mine.

  “Why, Jess?” he asked—almost desperate.

  I swallowed thickly, refusing to answer. My breaths had picked up, and I focused all my energy on trying to hide that fact.

  He tilted his head to the side and lowered it, whispering into my ear. “Were you trying to make me jealous?” He laughed darkly.

  My heart sunk, dropped into the pit of my stomach. He thinks this is funny? This is a joke to him? I was one second from pushing him the hell away from me when he pressed his body flush against mine.

  My heart climbed its way back up into my chest and started pounding—racing—my breaths coming and going in short bursts. I couldn’t hide the way he affected me even if I wanted to.

  “It worked, Jess,” he growled. “It worked, and I’m pissed at you for lying, but I’m also so fucking relieved, and I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “Go to hell?” I breathed, my last-ditch effort at pushing him away, because I knew—I knew—what was coming next. I could feel it with every bone in my body, with every heartbeat that thrashed against my ribcage, with every breath that rushed in and out of my lungs.

  He pressed himself against me harder. “Been there. Done that,” he replied, and finally, finally, finally, finally, after all this time of waiting, his lips slammed down on mine. Hard, relentless, angry.

  I moaned against his lips, and his tongue pushed into my mouth. Teasing, consuming, igniting. Every cell, every nerve ending, raged with a fire that burned through my veins. I grasped his shirt and pulled him closer, tangling my tongue with his. He tasted like mint, and chocolate, and Greyson; he tasted like pure bliss.

  I had no idea how it had happened, exactly. How one second our eyes were glued to each other’s, and in the very next, our lips were touching, crashing, pushed together with the force and intensity of weeks, and weeks, and a lifetime of waiting. But I didn’t care; I didn’t need to know how it had happened.

  Because in those moments, I could feel just how much he’d wanted this, all that time, too—how much he’d wanted me—in the way his mouth moved against mine, slow and devouring. In the way his hands were hurried, and impatient, and smoothing over the curves of my body. In the way he was pressed right up against me, pushing the evidence of it into my hip bone.

  Relief, like the weight of a thousand pounds being lifted from me, warred with the desperate need for more—like the strength of that weight being shoved right back down my throat.

  I slid my hands around his neck and pulled him closer, kissing him harder, deeper, pulling his hair between my fingers. He made some small, deep sound that slid over my tongue—a grunt of approval, maybe; it set my soul on fire.

  His tongue caressing mine; his teeth grazing my lips.

  Our mouths pushed and pulled, and fought and danced, and nipped and soothed, and this kiss—this kiss—felt like the only thing I’d need for the rest of my life, and yet the single thing I couldn’t go on living without. I wanted more, and more, and more.

  And I was ready for more. I was ready to go as far as we could. All the way. Right then and there if he’d asked me to. I would’ve given him everything. Every piece of me. He could’ve taken every last broken one of them and never given them back, and I wouldn’t have cared. I didn’t care anymore.

  But he pulled away abruptly. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He slammed his hand against the wall beside me.

  The look of regret on his face shattered my heart into so many pieces I wouldn’t have known where to begin putting them back together again.

  So I shoved him, as hard as I could, and choked back my tears. “Don’t you ever fucking talk to me again,” I nearly screamed.

  I hated him. In that moment, I truly fucking hated him.

  Forty Before

  I RUSHED DOWN the hallway, tore through the restaurant, and pushed my way outside. I couldn’t help the tears that broke free as soon as I burst through those doors.

  And it immediately hit me, what I had just done: Cheated. On Jaymes. Technically. Or not technically, but just flat-out, blatantly, and clearly cheated. It honestly hadn’t even been a thought in my mind when it was happening.

  Why? Why am I such an idiot?

  I shook my hands out and kept walking. I kept walking, and I had no plans to stop. I would walk all night if I had to, all the way across town.

  Because I could still feel the whisper of Greyson’s lips on mine, could still feel the ghost of his fingertips pressing into my skin—on my waist, and my ribs, and my hips, and my thighs.

  I rubbed my hand across my mouth, angrily wiping away the traces of himself he’d left behind. I swiped away at my tears, too, at the steady stream of them spilling down my face.

  Why did I let this happen?

  Why was I so desperate that I ignored the flashing red “Do Not Enter” sign plastered across his forehead time and time and time again?

  Why did I want him so badly that I was willing to take any piece of him I could get, no matter how much it broke my heart?

  Because that’s how I felt: Broken. Split wide open.

  My mind was spinning, reeling. I couldn’t latch on to a single thought or emotion I was feeling; there were too many.

  But every single one of them was cradled by a hurt I couldn’t ignore, no matter how badly I wanted to. It crept over my skin and reached inside my chest, seizing my breaths.

  Was it so much to ask, that someone simply love me?

  No ulterior motives, no hidden agendas, no secret list of all the reasons for why they shouldn’t. For someone to love me, not because they were high or lust-filled or guilty or trying to take advantage. But because they simply…loved me, for everything and all that I was. Every scared, and scarred, and hurting piece of me.

  A new wave of tears rolled in, and I couldn’t stop them from falling. They were determined to spill, and spill, and spill and never let up. I could barely see two feet in front of me. I gave up and sat down on the curb, taking a deep, shuddering breath, squeezing my arms around my middle—my desperate attempt to suffocate the pain.

  It wasn’t coming in waves anymore; I was drowning in it.

  Greyson’s feet stepped into my blurry line of vision. I hid my face in my hands and shook even harder, crying even deeper than before.

  It felt pathetic, this broken version of myself. But I guess that’s what I’d been hiding from all this time. The abandoned little girl inside of me who was crying for her dead mother, who was desperately waiting for someone to come and pick her up and hold her and tell her that everything was going to be okay. That the world was not as cruel, or as dark, or as damaged as it felt. That I was not broken, I’d just been through the wringer and was pieced back together a little differently.

  Greys
on sat down beside me, his arm bumping mine. “I’m so sorry,” he said—quiet, honest, full of remorse.

  “Go away,” I barely managed to reply, squeezing my knees tighter.

  “I can’t do that, Jess.” He took a deep breath and released it. “I have to make sure you’re okay. And I need to explain some things to you. I need you to understand that I never meant to hurt you, and I never meant to be such an asshole. I want to tell you everything—I need to tell you everything, if you’re willing to listen. If you’ll just hear me out…

  “Will you please let me explain, Jess?” he asked, and the desperation in his words gave me pause, but I didn’t think there was anything he could say that would change any of this. That space in my mind where I’d dreamt of him and I was now a big, black void. An endless expanse of darkness. No end, and no beginning, and nothing in-between. We never were, and we never would be. I got that now. I understood it in the way my heart ached at the idea that this something between us never was. It had all been in my head.

  It took me a long time to respond, to nod my head and hear him out, but he waited patiently until I did. I didn’t do it for him, but for me. I wanted to hear whatever words he had to say so I could walk away from him once and for all with a clean break.

  But his next words obliterated every thought, every feeling, I thought I knew when it came to Greyson.

  “I tried to kill my dad once,” he said, and the world around me stopped spinning.

  Forty-one Before

  “WHAT?” I ASKED. There was no way I’d heard him correctly.

  “Last year,” he swallowed, “after one his benders, after my mom had caught him cheating, and I’d found her…” he paused, clearing his throat. I swallowed my fear, and my feelings, and looked him in the eyes. They were full of pain. A pain I’d known my entire life. But he wasn’t trying to hide it from me. He sat there, looking at me, imploring me to understand. “I found her on the bathroom floor in a pool of her own blood…”

  I sucked in a breath, held it. Oh my god… I understood so much more than he knew. “I am so sorry,” I whispered, releasing the weight of the world in four words.

  He shook his head, shrugged. “She’s okay now. But that night… she had tried to kill herself.” He was still shaking his head, lost in the memory. “My dad—this selfish piece of shit who called himself a man—had reduced this amazing woman, my mother, to someone who felt so fucking low that she wanted to leave it all behind—leave me behind. And I just…I lost it. I wanted to kill him for it.”

  He swallowed, his hands gripping his knees tightly. “…But that part didn’t come until later; I had to take care of her first. It was the only thing on my mind when I found her. I hardly remember it—going through the motions. Dialing nine-one-one, and holding her until the ambulances came, praying to any god who would listen that she’d be okay. I didn’t leave her side the entire time…sat in the hospital with her all night…

  “At some point Jaymes picked me up and brought me home to grab some things from my house, but when we got there, my dad—my fucking dad—was shit-faced and had no clue what had happened. He was too busy bitching about dirty dishes in the sink and, ‘Why wasn’t there any damn dinner on the table?’

  “I’d planned on getting in and out, on running upstairs and grabbing my shit and getting the hell out of there. But then I heard him dragging himself up the steps. Screaming for my mom to get her ass downstairs and make him something to eat or he’d pull her down into the kitchen himself.”

  He slowly folded forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.

  “I snapped,” he said quietly. “I don’t remember walking into his room; I don’t remember pulling the gun from his safe and loading it. But I remember the look on his face when he attempted to take that last foot up the stairs and his forehead met the metal barrel of the gun in my hand instead.”

  Holy shit. I took a deep breath, pulled my knees in closer to my chest. I was at a loss for words. This shit was…fuck. This shit was insane. But I didn’t feel myself judging him for it. Call me crazy, but I…I didn’t blame him. Not for one second did I blame him for what he’d done.

  “My finger was on the trigger,” he continued, “and I swear to God I was going to do it, Jess. I was going to shoot him; I’d never been so sure of anything in my life. In that moment, I was only thinking…he didn’t deserve to keep living this privileged life when he’d spent half of it pushing my mom to take hers, you know?”

  The haunted look in his eyes made me want to reach over and touch him. To run my hand through his hair and brush my fingers over his cheek and tell him that it was okay. That I got it. That I completely understood, and had I been in the same situation…I probably would’ve done the same exact thing.

  “But Jaymes stopped me.” Greyson’s words cut through my thoughts, and puzzle pieces finally began clicking themselves into place. “I can still hear the words he drilled into me like it was yesterday. ‘This piece of shit isn’t worth your life, man. Think of your mom. Think of your future.’ It gave me enough pause that he was able to rip the gun from my hands, and that’s when my dad gave me this,” he ran a finger across the scar on his chin.

  “…I regret it every day, allowing myself to sink that low…

  “…I don’t want to be like him,” he finished, his words soft and low. He looked up at me, his green eyes holding mine.

  And I saw myself in him then. In his vulnerability. In the way he’d opened himself up to me but was still fighting to protect himself, too. I think it was ingrained in us, in the people who had been through hell and back, to always be on guard and expect the worst in others.

  I reached out and grabbed his hand, sliding my fingers through his. I wanted him to know that I was there, that he didn’t need to be afraid of what I thought of him, because after everything he’d told me, after he’d let me in and placed his darkest secrets in the palms of my hands like that, he’d honestly never looked more beautiful—real, and flawed, and breathtakingly beautiful in the broken way he looked at me.

  He squeezed his fingers around mine, tightly hanging on. Our eyes were locked together, a deep and irrevocable understanding passing between us. A recognition and acceptance of what we hid from the rest of the world. It connected us, our familiarity with the kind of darkness most people couldn’t comprehend.

  “Jaymes saved me from a lifetime wasted in jail and a future I could’ve never gotten back,” he said after a while. “I’ll never be able to repay him for that.”

  I nodded, understanding him completely. It all made sense now. And while I couldn’t believe that Jaymes, douchebag Jaymes, had done something that amazing, that heroic and selfless, it finally all made sense now: Why Greyson was so loyal to him. Why he felt indebted to him. Why he wasn’t willing to take something from him when he had essentially handed him back his life that day.

  After what felt like a lifetime, I finally found my voice. “For the record, I don’t think you’re anything like him—like your father. And I know it sounds insane, but—I don’t blame you, for what you did…

  “I can’t tell you how many times I expected to walk into our apartment and find my mom on the floor, OD’d and unbreathing…Or how many times I must’ve thought about how it would probably make everything easier.” On her. On me.

  He squeezed my hand again, pulling it into his lap, his thumb skimming over my knuckles.

  “But then it actually happened,” I said, the words broken and quiet. Tears fell down my cheeks, and I wiped them away. I forced myself to finish even though I could hardly find my breaths. “But the worst part,” I swallowed past the knot in my throat, a sob begging to break free, the worst fucking part, “is that I was right.”

  Forty-two Before

  “THAT DOESN’T MAKE you a bad person,” he immediately responded. But didn’t it? Didn’t it make me a terrible person for ever thinking, or wishing, or feeling something that ugly?

  “Sometimes people are too far gone,” he continu
ed. “That it feels like they already are.”

  I nodded, wiping away more tears. That’s exactly what it felt like. Like she’d been there without ever actually being there. A shell of a person, of a mom, who’d flipped on the vacancy sign and had long given up on life.

  “You haven’t said much about your mom, but from the sound of it…she was in pretty deep?”

  I nodded again, because again, he was right. Besides the obvious fact that drugs had taken her away from me, I’d never known a sober mother. There were only three versions of her I knew, and sober had never been one of them. There was the euphoric, blissfully high version of her. The mom that blasted music from her “good old days,” and constantly burned food in the kitchen while begging me in vain to “live a little,” and “dance with me,” and “just try it; one hit won’t kill you, Jess.”

  And then there was the version of her that I sometimes, albeit reluctantly, found myself feeling sorry for, even though she was in a hell of her own making. The mom who’d lay in darkness for days at a time, sleeping and drifting in and out of deep depression. The mom I heard hurling her guts out at three-a.m. because she was coming down and hadn’t been able to get her fix. The mom who cried, and prayed, and promised that this time she would get sober, that this time she would be better.

  But the version of her I got the most, especially in the end, was the same side of her that I hated the most. The fiend; the angry, and screaming, and willing to do whatever she had to do—to hurt and manipulate and steal from whoever she had to—to get her next fix, version of a drug-addicted mother.

  That, or she wasn’t there at all.

  “She was,” I answered Greyson’s question out loud, releasing a deep and shaky breath. “I don’t think she could’ve stopped even if she wanted to. I mean…I know she couldn’t. I knew…I knew she would go out like that…that it would end like that…