Unbreak Me

by Michelle Hazen

  “You’re leaving.”

  He glanced back, and she stood in the doorway of his bedroom, looking terribly small. Exactly the way she had last night when he left her. He stopped, a pair of boxers dripping off the top of the pile he held. They fell across the toe of his boot. “I’m sorry, Andra. I know I said we’d talk this morning, but I’ve got to go.” All the time he was messing with French toast recipes, he should have been thinking of what to say. Because here was his chance to set things right, and he had no idea how to do it. Instead, he clutched at what he did know. “My mama’s sick.” His insides wrenched, because saying the words aloud made them feel way too real.

  “Um, okay.”

  He dumped the boxers into the suitcase and ripped open another drawer, that odd jangling feeling returning to his head. “I tried to call her this morning, but her phone was disconnected.” The next drawer banged out so hard it came off the rails. He had to take a second to thread it back in, hoping he hadn’t broken the dresser. God knew he didn’t have the money to spare right now. “I called the restaurant, and they said she’s been out sick for almost two weeks.” He punched down the mound of jeans, trying to make them fit inside the suitcase.

  “Two weeks?” Andra’s voice sounded worried now, and only then did he realize she hadn’t believed him before.

  He swallowed. “My mama will go to work even when she’s too weak to cook. They’ll let her man the cash register, because she can set up on a stool and hold herself steady on the counter, even when her ankles swell all the way to her knees.” He looked up at Andra, at her wide green eyes, and his stomach twisted. He should be reassuring her, not dumping his problems on her, but the more he thought about his mama sick and alone, the more frantic he got. “She’s not even going to work right now. I have to go home.”

  She was already nodding as she stepped forward. “Right, of course. Can I help you pack? What do you need?”

  “Everything. Your daddy’s going to kill me. Probably he’ll throw away anything I leave, with me taking off without giving notice. Oh! Mary Kay was favoring her back left leg yesterday. I couldn’t find anything, but I thought I’d check it again this morning and see if she shook it off. And there’s a rail loose in the big arena. Two posts down from the gate. I meant to fix it this week, but Curt’s going to have to do it. Hold off on training Taz with the rest of the group I got ready for you. She’s still iffy about ropes, and I’ve got an idea I want to try on her, if your daddy will give me another chance after this.” He spotted a stray boot and threw it in on top of the jeans.

  “I’m not going to let him fire you.” Andra grabbed a crumpled tote bag off the closet floor and started folding shirts into it. “If your mom’s sick, you have to go. Leave anything you want to. It’ll be here when you get back, and it won’t fit on the plane anyway.”

  “I’m taking my truck.”

  She stopped moving, and he ducked around her to strip shirts off hangers, wadding them into the empty corners of his suitcase.

  “What for?” Her voice was so small he almost didn’t catch it.

  “The buses barely run to the Lower Ninth, and ambulances are even slower. We don’t have a hospital nearby since Katrina. If Mama needs help, I won’t be able to get it for her without my truck.” He slammed his suitcase shut and ripped the zipper closed.

  “That’ll take days to get home. I’ll drive your truck down, and you can fly. You’ll get there faster. I mean, if she needs you right now . . .”

  “Can’t afford gas and a plane ticket, too.” Not to mention they’d need every penny for medication and supplies if she was sick again. He grabbed his suitcase and the tote Andra had packed, then hefted his saxophone case and headed for the door. That’d have to be enough. He’d do without everything else. “I’ve got a friend looking in on her for now. He’s supposed to call me as soon as he gets over there.” He nodded toward the kitchen. “Will you turn off the coffeepot, please? Pour it out so it doesn’t mold.”

  She rushed to do it, and he’d tossed his stuff in the bed of his Datsun and was halfway to the barn by the time she caught up. “LJ, what do you need your saddle for? You said you didn’t have a horse to ride back in the city.”

  He ground his teeth, striding down the dark barn aisle. He’d forgotten to hit the lights, and the sun was barely up. She was right; he was wasting time. He almost left it, but no. “It’s my saddle,” he muttered. He never went anywhere without it. Even the thought felt wrong.

  Andra stopped. “LJ, if you want to leave, just say it, okay? You don’t have to lie.”

  He came back out of the tack room, and the betrayal in her face nearly sent him to his knees. He dumped the saddle on the nearest bale of hay and crossed to her, pulling her into his arms. He was too desperate to be gentle, and his chest ached as he squeezed her as tight as he’d allow himself.

  “Not lying,” he said gruffly. He wished to God he were. “Listen, I’ll call you as soon as I can, okay?” He bent to look her in the face, searching those gorgeous green eyes. Jesus, no wonder she thought he was a liar, running out on her right in the middle of everything that had happened last night. “I’m sorry, Andra. So damn sorry, and I wish I could tell you when I’ll be back, but I never know how long her spells will last. One way or another, I’ll come back and we’ll talk all this out—I promise.”

  Now he felt like a liar.

  All last night, he’d been awake, wondering if she’d be better off without him, and it wasn’t until this morning that he knew his mama needed him. Besides, there was always the chance this would be the flare-up that never released its grip. He hadn’t been there for months, and there was no way to know if Mama had been eating right, or remembering her meds when she was working long shifts. The woman would probably drop dead before she’d call and pull him away from the job she’d been so proud of.

  Andra’s eyes started to shine with tears, and he turned away and grabbed his saddle. If he made her cry, he couldn’t take it. Not right now. And every minute he stood here was a mile closer he could have been to New Orleans.

  When he made it to his truck, he turned back to say goodbye, and she wasn’t there. He stood, shifting his weight from boot to boot. But he didn’t have enough words to fix everything he’d done wrong, and there was no time to make it up to her, either.

  God, he was a failure. His mama was lying sick and alone, thousands of miles away, and he’d left the woman he loved crying over him in a damned barn. Not to mention he was about to wave goodbye to the career he’d hoped all his life for, because no way did he have enough time to go to the house and plead for time off from Bill, who was itching to fire his ass anyway.

  LJ threw himself into the truck and cranked the ignition. He’d call and beg every kind of forgiveness later, but for now, his family needed him.

  Twenty-one

  “Asafetida.” Andra wasn’t sure if it was her voice that sounded funny or the word itself. Tapping the little plastic spice container with one fingernail, she said it again. “Asafetida.” She bent a little more forward, the beer bottle in her hand clinking against the counter. LJ’s spices were a foreign language, smells and shapes and colors gathered into shakers with labels she wasn’t sure how to pronounce.

  She ran her finger down a container of coriander, so softly that she could feel the seam where the plastic had been melded together. She wished she could feel LJ’s fingerprints on it, too. Before she had cleaned his apartment, she should have thought of all the marks of him she was wiping away. Andra wondered if his fingerprints were still on her skin. After six days of sweat and showers, probably not. If the FBI dusted for signs of his presence, they would be all over this apartment and her cottage, too, but she would be clean. It didn’t seem right, didn’t seem possible that he could have disappeared from her life so completely.

  Tipping the bottle against her lips, she took a drink, wincing at the burn of the carbonation in the
beer. It had been years since she’d had a drink. She’d barely made it through the neck of the small bottle, and already her head felt light, the lines of everything in LJ’s apartment a little more vivid than they had been. Until she’d cleaned out his fridge, she hadn’t realized LJ even liked beer. He’d never drunk one in front of her, but there were two beers on the shelf of his fridge, the other four to the six-pack missing. He must think she was terribly fragile, that he couldn’t even have a beer when she was around. The thought had made her angry, and she’d cracked one open for herself.

  She’d had enough of the past dictating her present. It had driven LJ all the way across the country from her. She knew he would have gone whenever his mom needed him, even if they weren’t fighting. But that would have felt more temporary, the space between them shrunk to nothing by teasing text messages and calls full of laughter. Not this gaping, silent lack in all the moments that used to be filled up with his gregarious presence.

  She circled the kitchen, trailing her fingers over things as if her fingerprints might make up for the lack of his. The wobbly table didn’t wobble anymore. He’d fixed it at some point. But of course he had: LJ fixed things. That was who he was.

  It was why he couldn’t stand thinking he was causing her panic attacks, but it wasn’t him at all. She felt safer here, among the few things he’d left behind, than she did anywhere else on her own ranch. Of course, he couldn’t know the truth of that, because he wouldn’t even answer her calls. It was sex she was messed up about, not him, even if she couldn’t make him understand the distinction.

  She’d listened to his voicemail message enough times it was stuck in her head. It started with a chuckle, as if just by calling, you were part of a joke he was sharing only with you.

  Y’all probably called this number by mistake, but just in case your taste in friends is really this bad, leave a little ditty at the beep, and I’ll call y’all back.

  She loved the slow wrap of syllables around the word “y’all.” He’d never said that word to her, but there it was in his voicemail. Twice. Maybe it was one he used all the time, and she hadn’t known him long enough to notice.

  Maybe there were a lot of things she hadn’t noticed about him. The LJ she knew would never have ignored her calls—not for anything. That had never changed until her messed-up reactions had ruined their first time in bed together. No matter when his mother’s health improved, she suspected he wasn’t coming back, because he probably thought it was better for Andra that way.

  She tipped the bottle up and swallowed over and over again until it was empty.

  The floor tilted under her feet as she walked to the door, and she had to catch herself against the wall. Either that beer was especially potent or what little tolerance she’d had in college was long gone, but the buzz felt surprisingly nice. It had been beer in a red Solo cup that Gavin had slipped the drugs into, but it was about damn time she stopped blaming every bottle of the stuff for the sins of that single long-ago beverage.

  The beer was the first step: peeking inside the door to her past when for so long, she’d kept it bolted shut. She wanted to throw that door open now, rip it off its hinges, and burn it to cinders, like a smoke signal that would call to LJ to tell him it was okay to come back.

  Andra let herself out of his apartment and started the long journey up to her cottage. Why the hell had she built it so far from the rest of the ranch, anyway? It was so deathly quiet up there. She used to want to be left alone, but now . . . she wasn’t so sure anymore.

  She mounted her porch steps and opened the door. Pausing for a second, she studied the clean white surface. If she were to paint an X across it, and her own numbers, would it help? The date she’d escaped. One man. Nineteen hours. Zero bodies. That zero should count for something. At the least, it was kinder than what LJ had been through.

  Andra walked into her empty house with the couch on one side, the kitchen on the other.

  Sex.

  It was the root of all the problems in her life. But how could she work on getting more comfortable with it when he was all the way down in Louisiana? There was absolutely no way she was going to download one of those hookup apps and let some stranger put his hands all over her. Of course, at least with a stranger, she wouldn’t care if she disappointed him.

  Andra’s eyes narrowed. Maybe there was something she could do without getting anyone else involved. She crossed the room to her couch and grabbed her laptop off a side table. When she opened it, it glowed to life on a page of equine nutritional supplements. She called up a new tab and typed “sex toys” into the search bar. Her eyebrows shot up at the images that appeared. “Wow, okay,” she mumbled, and tried a different search term.

  She’d never owned a sex toy herself—she hadn’t missed sex after Gavin, and she hadn’t had a lot of experience before him. It wasn’t until she met LJ that she even remembered what it felt like to get that little tingle, that warmth that tugged and asked for more. There were a lot of things she never thought she’d want until she met him.

  The new site loaded with a whole page full of pictures of dildos. She clicked on one and stared. There it was: the one thing that had ruined her life for the last five years. From the first moment her body had been violated, her personality had started twisting itself into knots she had no idea how to unravel.

  The plastic penises didn’t look intimidating at all right now. But then, they didn’t look like much fun, either, and that’s what people bought the synthetic versions for.

  The urge to call LJ flitted through her head. Surely he would answer, the way he had when she’d called him from the dressing room. He was busy a lot of the time when she called, but when it was important, it was like he always knew to pick up. But what would she say to him? “Hey, I’m trying to get over my penis phobia because I happen to want yours. But when it’s not attached to you, it looks kind of weird.” No man wanted to hear about that.

  She returned to the main page, scanning all the different choices. A catch took hold in her throat as she tried to figure out what size would be most effective. How many times would she need to deliberately trigger the panic before it lost its grip on her?

  She’d had hundreds of those attacks, and the feeling of impending death never got any less real. But if she could make it past the fear, maybe it was peaceful beyond that. Free of loneliness and disappointment.

  Just free.

  She scrolled down so fast the pictures began to blur, until she stopped on one of the largest dildos. It was the most realistic looking, and every rib in her chest drew tight and brittle as she stared at it. Well, good. It was fear she was looking for, fear she needed to batter herself with until she could finally stop caring.

  The little arrow hovered over the “Buy” button while her vision wavered around the edges, tears blurring the screen. Maybe she should pay extra to ship it faster, to start this miserable process sooner and just get it over with.

  The arrow began to shake, and she took her fingers off the trackpad. She snapped the laptop closed and shoved it off her lap. It hit the edge of the couch cushion and flipped onto the rug.

  Nothing about this felt right, and she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t.

  Andra curled around herself like her belly was an open wound, and began to cry.

  * * *

  • • •

  The window had been dark for hours when she finally quieted, her eyes so swollen she couldn’t have seen even if there had been light. She sniffled, the arm of the couch wet beneath her face. It was late, and she was exhausted. She hauled herself upright and shuffled across the house to the shower, turning on only a single light as she went. She shed her clothes mechanically and stepped under the spray, the shh of the warm water soothing her aching head. Her mouth was scratchy with thirst, but she wasn’t hungry even though she hadn’t eaten dinner.

  Why hadn’t she eaten? Why didn’t she ever
fucking eat unless LJ was there to cook? She didn’t need to lose weight, didn’t need to shape her body to anyone’s pleasure. Her best friend was a cook, for Christ’s sake, and even Wild Falls had restaurants. It was like some part of her didn’t think she deserved food.

  She swallowed past her tattered throat and remembered how hard it had been to look at herself in the mirror at all those department stores. She kept trying to hide her body under fabric but from who? From what?

  Gingerly, she reached down and touched her belly. It was a little concave, the skin velvety and dotted with water droplets. She lifted her hand and laid it over one breast. She didn’t touch herself except when she was washing up, and her nipple felt odd against her hand.

  It shouldn’t, though, should it? It was hers. It was her.

  Her lip trembled and she cupped her breast, cradling the weight in her palm as the water slipped over her shoulders, surrounding her in warmth. This was how LJ touched her, no matter if it was her back, her elbow, her knee. Even her hair. His hands were always smiling, and he was never careless in how he put them on her.

  She wished she could touch herself with the same respect.

  That website should have been exciting, maybe even a little arousing. She could have been clicking through to the most interesting toys instead of choosing the one that scared her the most. She’d been approaching the purchase as if it were a vaccination instead of a joy. Planning on using it roughly, a punishment against a body whose reactions kept betraying her. Everything about that suddenly struck her as wrong.

  When her wrists had been bound to Gavin’s headboard, her body had felt like a cage she couldn’t rip her way out of, but it wasn’t a cage or a burden. It had carried her. Through nineteen terrible hours, and out the window. Her fingers had worked those screws free, even after her fingernails had broken and bled.