by Anne Jolin
I felt that way too.
I stared at her—or, well, through her. “I’m lost.”
“What do you mean?” She was concerned. It was all over her delicate features.
“I’m a lost woman,” I told her, not entirely sure I knew what I meant by it, but just knowing that was the only way I knew how to describe what I felt.
I’d been content for years with the guarded way I lived my life, but now I, for lack of a better word, I wasn’t.
“It’s not just Dean.” I shook my head. “It’s all of it. It’s Beau. It’s Maverick. It’s Henry. It’s me.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my hands.
“I don’t want to do this anymore.” A tear slid down my cheek.
“Do what, Char?”
I pressed my eyes tightly closed. “I don’t want to be in this much pain anymore.”
My best friend slid out from her side of the booth and into my side, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.
“I think it’s killing me,” I whispered for the first time out loud to anyone.
Leighton held me like that, even when the waitress brought back our drinks. She never let me go.
“Something has to give.” I stared into the highball glass now sitting on the tabletop.
She waited. She waited until she was sure I had nothing left to say, and then she spoke. “I love you, Charleston.”
“I love you, too.”
“I know you do. I also know that you’ll understand that what I have to say only comes from a good place.” I nodded. Leighton didn’t have a malicious bone in her body. “You have to stop torturing yourself. First, it was with Dean. Then, it was with Henry. And it’s been either one of them or something else you’ve picked up along the way for the last ten years.” She sighed sadly. “You need to find a way to forgive yourself for losing them. You need to find a way to let go.”
The tears from my eyes fell quietly, and she wiped them away as she continued to speak.
“It’s not your fault they left you, but Char, I mean it, it’s your fault that you left you.” She started to cry too, because she knew it would hurt me to hear her say that. “I know you’re lost. I know it feels that way. It feels that way, because you walked out on yourself before you ever gave yourself a fighting chance.”
It burned.
It hurt the way getting stitches without freezing did.
You needed the pain to close the wound.
A necessary suffering.
“I know you did that because it helped, but it’s not helping anymore. You need to let it go.”
I wrapped my arms around her.
“I’m trying,” I whispered. “I promise I’m trying.”
She leaned back and put her forehead to mine. “It’ll hurt like hell, but I’ll be here.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes.
Then she kissed my nose and moved back to her side of the both.
That was Leighton; she bulldozed through the hard stuff like a soldier, with a glass of the house wine waiting for her at the finish line.
She didn’t drag it out.
She didn’t sucker punch you.
She just…did it.
“Now, I want you tell me more about all of these babes you’ve got.” She whistled and brought her Chardonnay to her lips.
“All?” I winced.
Plural sounded bad.
One woman having men in the plural always seemed to rub people the wrong way.
Including me.
“Oh hush.” She waved her hand and the mood lightened. “It’s 2016. If you can’t date multiple men as a single woman in 2016, when the hell can you? It’s not like you’re in a relationship. Dating is just dating. Try a few people on and see what you like.”
True.
“So now Kevin says he’s Team Beau, but I’m not sure I’ve picked a team yet.” She fanned herself with the menu she’d been looking at and smirked.
“Oh, God,” I groaned. “I’m not sure I even like Maverick as a human being, and Dean made me cry, twice.”
I held up two fingers.
“Whatever.” Leighton ignored my protests.
Everyone was in on the joke but me.
This seemed to be a running theme in my life these days.
“If you had to choose, which one would you pick?”
I paused, rolling the rim of my glass along my bottom lip. “All of them,” I confessed, tipping the bourbon back and enjoying the burn.
You know the boy who cried wolf?
Well, I’m the girl who cried love… and this time, no one was coming to rescue me.
“Message me tomorrow,” Leighton called from the open window of her Lexus as she began to pull away from the curb.
I turned around to walk backwards. “I will. Goodnight.”
“Night,” she hollered.
I loved her.
She was something I’d done really right.
I spun around, enjoying my three-whiskey buzz, and climbed up the stairs.
My passcode was easier to enter this time, but still, I took the stairs. The pulled pork mac and cheese comfort food I’d had for dinner would no doubt soon be residing on my behind.
Not that I really cared, but I cared enough to take the stairs.
Yanking open the door marked 3rd Floor, I fell a little into the hallway.
I wasn’t drunk, but due to the fact I could probably count on one hand the number of times I had three drinks in a year, I wasn’t sober either.
Humming along to I’ve Had The Time Of My Life and searching for my keys, I missed it.
I missed him.
“Charlie.”
My head swung up to see Dean sitting on the floor outside the door of my apartment.
I stopped abruptly and started to back up.
“Charlie, wait.” He started to stand, and the booze in my veins started to move through me like molasses.
“Stop calling me that.” I shook my head. “How dare you call me that?”
My voice was getting louder.
Somehow, through the loss of some of my inhibitions, I’d surpassed flooding and grief. I’d arrived solely at unjust anger.
“What you saw today—” he started and I laughed without humour.
“What I saw today was your daughter. What is she, ten?” I laughed harder, like a lunatic. “Matter of fact, where’s her mother, Dean? Where’s your wife?”
I was on a roll and gaining speed quickly.
“Can we please talk about this inside?” he pleaded, taking another step towards me.
I scoffed. “No.”
“My daughter’s name is Alycia.” He sounded angry.
What right did he have to be angry?
“She’s nine.”
My heart plummeted.
We were still together when she was conceived.
“You’re a real piece of shit, Dean.” I was hurt, and there was no mistaking that in my voice. “Go home to your kid.”
“Alycia,” he corrected me. “Her name is Alycia, and right now, instead of being at home with her father on a school night, she’s with her grandparents so that I can be here talking to you.”
The bastard had some nerve, so I told him so. “You have some nerve coming here and trying to make me feel guilty.”
He shook his head. “Let me inside.”
“No.”
Stepping back, he waved at the hallways. “If you don’t let me inside, I’m going to do this right here, and at the rate you’re going, piss off all your neighbours in the process.” I flinched. “We are hashing this out one way or another.” He was aggravated and breathing hard. “So either open the damn door, or shut your mouth and let me explain.”
I pursed my lips. I liked my neighbours, but more so, I think I knew he meant what he said when he said this conversation was happening.
If he wanted to duke it out, fine.
I’d learned to use brass knuckles with my words over the last ten years.
; “Fine.”
Careful, so as not to touch him, I moved to open my front door.
The polite thing to do would have been let him enter first, but to hell with that. The polite thing to do was tell someone you were leaving him or her.
Stomping into my apartment, I threw my bag on the floor and turned around to face him.
He’d changed from earlier. His hair was still wet from a shower, and he had on a leather jacket with yet another pair of worn out jeans.
“Do you ever buy new jeans?” I scolded him.
His eyes widened in surprise and then dropped to my legs. He smirked.
I followed his gaze and was reminded that I had on ripped jeans.
“Whatever,” I hissed. “Talk. You have five minutes.”
My legs were spread hip-width apart and my hands were balled into fists at my sides.
I was prepared to fight.
“This is how this is going to go.” He moved towards me. “I’m going to explain, and you aren’t going to like it.”
I rolled my eyes.
“What you will do is let me finish before you start yelling.”
“Fine.”
Dean pointed towards the living room. “You might want to sit down.”
“Four minutes and fifty seconds,” I reminded him bitchily.
He didn’t like it, but he spoke anyway.
“I loved you back then.” That line, I took like a right hook to the cheek. “But I was young. We were so damn young and I was stupid. The summer you went to New York, I got lonely. I missed you, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I picked up an extra job in Langley building houses for cash, and I met someone.”
That, I took like a kick to the stomach. My face paled, but I kept my mouth shut. I’d waited a decade for closure, and I was going to get it.
“We fooled around for a few weeks, but I knew I’d made a mistake, so I called it off.” He took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his hair. “You came home, and I didn’t know how to tell you.”
Coward.
“Less than a year later, I got a call from her. Her name was Brooke,” he added, and this time, I did scoff.
Like I cared what her name was.
“She told me she was pregnant and that she was going to keep it. I panicked.” His tone was so desperate for understanding. It was some kind of plea. “I never had a family; you of all people know that. I had a chance to do the right thing and I wanted to. I wanted to be there for my kid like my parents hadn’t been for me. I was doing the right thing.”
I shook my head.
Bullshit.
“I couldn’t tell you, Charlie.” I growled and he flinched. “I tried. I tried, but I just couldn’t do it.”
My silence had hit an expiration date, and I exploded.
“That’s your big explanation? That you cheated on me? That you knocked up the girl you cheated on me with and then chose her over me? That’s it?” I was practically yelling now.
He threw his hands in the air. “Would you just shut up for one goddamn minute and let me explain?”
Dean had never yelled, not the boy I remembered anyway, but the man did.
He did so well enough that I shut my mouth.
“So I left. I left in the middle of the night like a little bitch, because I couldn’t tell you what I had done.” He took a step towards me and I took one away from him. “Brooke went into premature labour two weeks later.”
I crossed my arms over my chest like I was protecting my heart from what was coming.
“There were massive complications during labour, and they had to take her for an emergency C-section.” I closed my eyes. “She haemorrhaged on the table and died.”
Jesus Christ.
“I thought I’d done the right thing.” His voice broke a little, and my heart started to hurt for the little girl I’d seen this afternoon. “But now I was a twenty-two year old kid with a kid of his own, and you were about to go to school, and I couldn’t…” My eyes opened when his voice stopped. “I couldn’t burden you with that. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”
“The right thing to do would have been to tell me!” I shouted. “I’m sorry about what happened to Brooke, and I’m sorry you went through that, but you abandoned me too, Dean.”
“I know,” he whispered.
I took a step towards him. “No. No, you don’t know. Where were you when Henry died, huh? My world was falling apart, and where the fuck were you?”
I knew I’d landed a hit with that one when he flinched.
Maybe I was a callous bitch, but he deserved it.
“What happened to Brooke is tragic, but you knew her for weeks. You knew Henry since you were eight years old! You knew me! Where the fuck were you?”
He put his head in his hands. “I drove out for the funeral.”
I stopped yelling and felt my chest heave.
“I saw you, in that black dress, but I couldn’t do it.”
“You’re a coward,” I told him, the tears rushing down my face. “How dare you make me love you and then leave me?” I cried. “Did you really think so little of me that I wouldn’t be there for you? Even as your friend…”
“I—”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not going to forgive you just so you can feel better about yourself.”
Somehow as I spoke, I didn’t realize I was taking steps towards him.
“Do you know what it’s like on the days I forget to forget you?”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you?” I screamed, and saw his eyes close.
“No,” he said.
I leaned into his space. “It’s fucking horrible. It’s like being awake while someone cuts your heart from your chest.”
Forgetting was both a blessing and a curse. It knifed you when you were least expecting it.
“Charlie.” His hands settled on my hips, but I was too far-gone to notice.
“I thought I was looking for you in all the men I’d dated—”
He interrupted me, “Baby, don’t.”
“I am not your baby, Dean Porter. I am not your fucking baby.” My heart broke as I yelled at him. “I was wrong. I’d been so fucking wrong. I wasn’t trying to find you in them. I was trying to find me.” I cried black tears. “I was trying to find the part of me that died that year.”
“Please,” he begged me to stop, but I was a runaway train and there was no slowing down.
“That’s why it never works, you know. That’s why sometimes I’m so lonely at night that I have to talk to my dead brother just to feel whole again!” I was wailing now. “I’ve spent nearly a decade chasing men who will never love me back, because I forgot how to love myself. That year broke me.”
He tried to pull my body against his chest, but I pressed my palms into his middle.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he pleaded with me for understanding. “I loved you. I still love you. I’ve always loved you, Charlie.”
My tears came harder as I took that like a knife to the throat.
“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t just get to say that and make the last ten years go away.”
He pulled me tighter and my arms became trapped between us. “Please forgive me.”
“Show me that your heart riots!” I screamed at the wall of his chest. “Show me that you’ll bleed for something. Show me that you’ll fight like hell for once in your goddamn life.” My head was pounding and it felt foggy from the whiskey. “Show me that I matter. Show me any of that, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”
He looked down at me, fire in his eyes. “I’d do anything for you, Charlie.”
I glared at him like a sinner to a sin. “Then fucking do it before I remember to forget you again!”
His lips came down on mine, hard.
I fought his lips with mine and pushed at his chest with my pinned hands.
He was relentless.
Lips touching. Tongue tasting. Breath hot.
My fight
engaged and I poured my pain into him.
I made him feel my agony.
We kissed like enemies before a ceasefire.
I pushed at his jacket and he pulled at mine.
Kissing Dean Porter was like coming up for air after you’d been drowning. I was hopeless to stop it.
We fell together like old memories.
Long-lost lovers with too much to say and no words in which to say them.
His shirt. My sweater.
Our jeans.
It was effortless in the way you just knew the beat of your favourite song.
He took me in a way that both broke me and healed me until we lay sweaty and breathless on my hardwood floor.
I forgot sometimes. For a very brief moment in time, I would forget. I would forget I was broken. I was awarded a proverbial hall pass from my suffering. Then a shadow I wouldn’t recognize would come to pass behind me and I’d remember that not a single soul on Earth could fill the holes in my heart but me.
Sanctity was mine to choose, but wasn’t that the nature of things? Happiness was simply a choice, yet it was one I’d forgotten how to make.
“Charlie.” Dean kissed the bare skin of my back.
“Don’t.” I sat up, reaching for my sweater. “Only my family calls me that, and you lost that privilege years ago.”
My mind was catching up with me and I suddenly felt dirty.
“This was…”
Pulling my sweater over my head, I found my thong and shimmied it up my legs. “This was a mistake. You have to go.”
I stood and tried to avoid the way he sat naked on my floor like he belonged there.
“Are you serious?” The anger in his voice returned.
Picking up his clothes, one-by-one, I started throwing them at him. “Yes. Get out.”
Panic was crawling up my throat and I couldn’t look at him.
“You don’t forgive me.” He stood, stepping into his jeans.
I shook my head. “No.”
“This wasn’t a mistake,” he growled, and I swung around to face him.
“You don’t get it, do you?” I snapped. “You caught it by the handle, Dean, but I caught it by the blade.”