Sugar on the Edge

by Sawyer Bennett

Page 24

  Savannah’s face pales and her beautiful brown eyes fill with crystalline tears. Her hand comes up to cover her mouth, and she lets out a half sob. “Oh, Gavin. No. No. Please no. ”

  My heart twists painfully, not only because it still hurts to say my beautiful baby boy is dead, but also because I see Savannah has taken on all of my agony onto her delicate shoulders. I nod my head at her, giving her the only thing I can… a sad smile.

  “Oh, baby,” she breathes out as tears stream down her face.

  She launches off her stool and scrambles onto my lap. My arms come around her to hold her in place, and she cups her hands to my face. “Oh, no, no, no,” she murmurs as her lips touch my forehead. Then my eyes, then my cheeks. She nuzzles her face into my neck, placing warm kisses along my skin that are immediately drenched in her tears, and then she buries her face against my collarbone and cries.

  My heart swells with her suffering for me, and the bitter ash of telling her that Charlie is dead is replaced by an immense need on my part to help alleviate her own suffering.

  Standing up from the stool, I carry her into the living room and sit on the couch, cradling her on my lap. “Shhh,” I croon to her and let her cry herself out while I stroke her back and her hair.

  While she pours out her sadness on to my shirt, my gaze travels over to the fireplace. I look at the four framed photos of the Corolla horses that she hung the other day. I had come down from my office to eat some lunch and immediately noticed them. She gave me a shy smile, and I kissed her deeply to show my appreciation.

  Studying them now, I find I like them very much in my house. Because Savannah gave me something of hers that was personal. Just as I just gave her something of mine that was personal.

  Savannah shifts in my arms and pulls back. She looks at me with tears still swimming in her eyes and says, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. ”

  I lift my hand and place my fingers against her lips. “It’s okay you asked. He’s not a secret. What happened to him isn’t a secret. ”

  She kisses the pads on my fingers, then grabs my hand and kisses my palm… my wrist, before placing her hand against the beating heart in her chest. “I can’t even imagine. ”

  I lean forward and touch my mouth softly to hers, and she takes in a stuttering breath. “I’m glad you asked. It’s something I want to share with you. I want to share him… with you. ”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Savannah,” I say as I cut her off. “You’ve turned my world upside down in the few weeks I’ve come to know you. There’s never been anyone that I’ve wanted to share Charlie with. Only you. ”

  Savannah settles on my lap, places her cheek to my chest, and strokes my arm. “Tell me then. Tell me about your sweet boy. Tell me how he lit up your world, and then left you in darkness. Share it with me and let it unburden you. ”

  “Oh, God,” I whisper as I lean down to kiss her on the head, squeezing her tight. “How do you always know what to say to me?”

  Her hand slides up my chest and rubs me over my heart. “Because I’ve seen what’s inside of here. I’ve felt it… beating true and strong. I feel it when you make love to me, and when you’re f**king me, and when you’re everything to me in between. ”

  “So sweet,” I murmur with my lips against her head.

  I decide to tell her every bit of it, starting from the beginning… starting with Amanda.

  The woman that killed my son.

  20

  My heart is breaking. Literally breaking in half, then the two massive pieces are toppling over within my chest, where they fracture further and throb with pain for Gavin. My lungs feel constricted and my head is pounding as fearful blood surges through me.

  “I met Amanda during my last year of university. It wasn’t love at first sight, but it was certainly complete and utter fascination for me. She was a poet… you know, one of those dark types that dressed in black from head to toe, smoked cigarettes, and quoted from Poe and Donne in her normal conversation. Her eyes were perpetually sad, and I used to think it was because she wrote sad poetry all the time. ”

  I listen to his story intently, noticing that there’s no fondness in his voice, but no bitterness either. It’s as if he’s telling me a simple story about a ship sailing past the shore one night.

  “At any rate, we dated… fell in love, lived our lives together. Amanda eventually moved out of her Goth phase but she continued to be morose, even when she wasn’t writing her dark poetry. After I graduated, I got a job as a technical writer for a company that developed training manuals for large corporations. By day, I’d work my job putting dry and boring words on paper, and at night, I tried to make Amanda happy. ”

  “Why was she so sad?” I ask, my fingers lightly stroking his chest while my face is pressed against his heart, so I can hear the thrum of his life.

  “She was depressed… or so we came to find out when I insisted she see a doctor. We were living together, and I was thinking about asking her to marry me, but I wanted her to be well. I wanted her to be happy and in love with me the way I was with her. They tried her on various medications, she seemed to get better for a while, and our lives marched on. ”

  “Did you marry?” I ask hesitantly.

  “No. But she got pregnant. We were just using condoms, and I guess one must of have broken. It was a surprise to both of us, but we were happy with the news. Nine months later, Charlie was born. ” Gavin pauses, clears his throat, and says in a raspy voice. “He was so beautiful. So perfect. ”

  “He looks just like you,” I say.

  “Except he had Amanda’s eyes,” he adds on. “At any rate, I was brimming with happiness, but Amanda seemed to become more depressed again. Her doctors tweaked her medication, but nothing seemed to be working as a permanent fix. Postpartum depression, they said, and that it would get better if we just gave it time. ”

  “But it didn’t?” I guess.

  “No, it didn’t. Amanda seemed to drift further and further away. I had to urge her to do simple things to take care of herself, like bathe and eat. I couldn’t trust Charlie with her, so my mum would watch him while I was at work. But I chose to ignore it, because Charlie was well cared for during the day, and at night I had him all to myself while Amanda would sit in front of the telly and watch game shows. ”

  “You must have felt so lonely,” I say quietly.

  “Sometimes… but mostly I wasn’t because I had Charlie. And he had me, and really… that’s all I cared about. However, there were times that Amanda seemed okay. She’d take an interest in Charlie and me, and I could almost pretend that things were going to get better. She even had times where she was perfectly normal and was able to care for Charlie just fine. ”

  Gavin shifts on the couch, pulling my body up tighter to his. He takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly.

  “One weekend, I got a call on a Saturday that a project I was working on needed some changes made before it was going to be presented for review on Monday. I had to go into the office. I tried to call my mum to watch Charlie, but she was out. Amanda seemed okay that day… had even gotten up that morning and made us breakfast. She assured me she would be fine with Charlie and urged me out the door. I was hesitant, but I looked at her as she smiled at me with reassurance, and I figured it was only a few hours. What could possibly happen? So I kissed her, kissed Charlie, and I left. ”

  My heartbeat is pounding madly within the weak walls of my chest, and I almost beg Gavin to stop the story. But I hold my tongue while he continues.

  “I was gone for two hours and twenty-three minutes. When I walked back in the house, I found Amanda sleeping on our bed. I couldn’t find Charlie anywhere. ”

  My stomach cramps as I imagine Gavin’s rising panic while he searched for his son.

  “I ran out the door… through the yard, calling his name. One of the neighbors heard me and came out to help me search. W
e went from yard to yard, until we reached the end of our street, which butted up against a small embankment that rolled down to a tiny creek at the bottom of the hill. We found Charlie there… in the water. He had a bruise on his head. The coroner thinks he must have fallen and hit his head, landing face first in the shallow water. He drowned. He was two years old. ”

  My fingers clutch desperately to Gavin’s shirt, clawing deeply and biting into his skin. My tears start up again, and I let them silently fall down my cheeks. He holds me while I hold him, burrowing my face in tighter to his chest while my tears wet his shirt.

  After several minutes, I lift my head and look up at Gavin with sad eyes. His own are swimming in the memories of his dead son, and I touch my fingers to his cheek. “How did you ever survive something like that?”

  “I didn’t,” he says simply. “I tried as hard as I could to kill myself with drugs and alcohol. I don’t even remember the first few months after his death, because all I could do was blame myself for leaving him with Amanda. ”

  I jolt upward and out of his arms. Turning my body, I straddle his lap and hold his face firmly in my hands. “No,” I practically shout at him. “That was not your fault. That was all on Amanda. She failed Charlie, not you. ”

  Gavin takes one of my hands in his and kisses my wrist. He leans forward, grazes his lips over mine, and gives me a sad smile. “It was on both of us, Savannah. I’ve accepted my role in his death, and I’ll always bear that cross. ”

  “What happened to Amanda?”

  “She had a breakdown. The police investigated, but no charges were filed against her. She had a legitimately documented medical condition of depression, and besides… I didn’t want her to go to jail for it. She couldn’t help her illness… that was beyond her control. ”

  “Weren’t you angry with her though? I don’t even know her and I’m angry at her, and I don’t care that she was sick. ” My voice is rageful and so unkind. So not me.

  “I wanted to kill her,” Gavin admits to me. “I wanted to drag her down to that little creek and hold her facedown in the water, so she could feel the water saturate her lungs and know what it was like to suffer that slow death. ”

  My body shudders over the violence in his voice, but then he takes another deep breath and lets it out slowly. “But I found another outlet for my anger. Outside of the drinking and drugs, I expressed my frustrations in other ways. ”

  Gavin doesn’t elaborate, and I have a feeling I wouldn’t like to know those other ways. But I think I really do know, because he has hinted at it before. “With sex?”

  “With everything,” he tells me honestly. “I did everything to the extreme, and much of that involved sex. I immersed myself in the dodgy underbelly of London, and I learned all the ways I could hurt a woman so exquisitely she’d orgasm multiple times. I took pleasure whenever it was offered to me, sometimes even paying for the privilege to forget my shitty existence while a woman would suck me down. I did things that would so thoroughly disgust you, Sweet, that I really have no right to even let you sit here on my lap and let you comfort me. ”

  His head hangs low with shame and dejection, and I didn’t think my heart could break further.

  With shaking hands, I grip his face tighter and lift it so his eyes meet mine. “You could never disgust me. Those things you did… they were but a moment in your life. Just a tiny, incomprehensible moment, and you did what you had to do to survive. And you did survive. Just look at you now… you more than survived. You flourished. ”

  Gavin shakes his head sadly. “No, love. I didn’t survive. And I don’t flourish. I just exist. It’s all I know how to do. ”

  Leaning in, I kiss him sweetly on his mouth, and he sighs into me. I kiss him a bit harder, and his arms tighten around me. I clutch at his shoulders and kiss him some more, trying to suck out every bit of pain and doubt that I can. I can feel him grow hard beneath me as I straddle his lap, but I pull back from him. “You’re wrong, Gavin. When you just exist, you have no emotion. No passion. But when you live… you seize opportunity, you drink of a joyful life, and you’re motivated. The man I know… the man I’ve let into my heart, he’s a man that lives. ”