by Bromberg, K.
“And–and I assume that you ended things with them then?” He nods cautiously, the cogs in his head turning as he tries to figure out why I want to know. “Did you love any of them?”
“Jesus, Rylee!” he barks, running his hand through his hair, “What the fuck is this, fifty questions?” He walks a couple of feet away from me, exasperation emanating off him, but I’ve asked this much, I might as well find out what I really want to know.
I sit down in the sand, aware that Baxter is a ways down the beach, and hug my knees to my chest, twisting my ring around and around on my finger. “No, I need to know what I’m getting myself into.” Colton’s eyes snap up to mine, an indiscernible look on his face. “What I’m already into.” I sigh more to myself than him, but I know he hears because I see the muscle in his jaw tic at the words. “You told me that you sabotage anything good. I need to know if you loved any of them.”
He steps next to me and runs a hand through his hair. I have to crane my head up to meet his eyes. “I’m not capable of love, Rylee,” he deadpans, his voice a haunted whisper, before staring out to sea and shoving his hands in his pockets. “I learned a long time ago that the more you want someone, the more you covet them, and need and love them … it doesn’t matter. In the end they’re going to leave you anyway.” He picks up a shell and tosses it. “Besides, someone can tell you they love you, but words can lie and actions can fake something that’s not.”
A shudder runs through me. What a sad, horrible way to go through life. To always want, but to never have, because you think it will be taken away without notice. To be so hurt that you think it’s the words and actions that hurt rather than the person behind them. My heart is wrenched for the poor little boy who lived a life without unconditional love. It aches for the man before me. A man so full of passion and life and possibility but denying himself the one piece that can help make him whole.
Oblivious to my line of thinking and my overwhelming pity for the lonely boy within him, Colton continues. “Did I think I might have loved any of them? I’m not sure, Rylee. I know how they wanted me to feel. How they wanted me to demonstrate and reciprocate, but I told you, I’m just not capable of it.” He shrugs his shoulders as if this is just a simple fact of life. He turns and looks at me, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “What about you, Rylee?” he asks playfully. “Have you ever been in love?”
I look at him for a beat and then back out to the waves, searching for the memories that are there but slowly fading. A wistful smile plays on my lips as they come back to me. “Yes. I have.”
“Baxter, come!” Colton yells before holding his hand out to help pull me up from my seat in the sand. “Let’s head back,” he says as he keeps my hand in his, and it’s not lost on me that he has not responded. We walk in silence for a while, and I can sense he wants to ask more but is unsure how.
He sighs. “I have no right to even feel this way,” he says, running his hand through his hair, “seeing as how my past is so …” He drifts off without finishing when he meets my eyes. “Why does it bug me? Why does the thought of you with someone else drive me absolutely crazy?”
A part of me likes the fact that it bugs him. “You surely can’t think that I’ve been waiting around my whole life to be your plaything, Ace.” I laugh, shrugging away the unease I feel about the next question I know he is going to ask. I rarely talk about what happened. I never speak of the after effects. Of the indescribable loss that can never be forgotten. Of the horrid, callous words his family said to me. Their accusations that still haunt me to this day.
Despite the passage of time, I still feel that sharp pang of grief when talking about it. Time has dulled it some in the two years since the accident, but the images burned into my mind will never fade. The guilt still weighs so heavily on me at times that I can’t breathe or function. In the past it has prevented me from living again. Taking risks and putting myself out there. From taking a chance like the one I am taking with Colton. I try to hide the shiver that runs through me at the memories and prepare myself for how much I to want to reveal.
Colton looks at me, a ghost of a smile on his sculpted lips. “Spill it, sweetheart. What happened?”
I take a deep breath. “There’s not much to tell,” I begin, staring at the sand in front of us as we walked casually. “We were high school sweethearts, followed each other to college, got engaged, were planning our wedding ...” I feel him stiffen beside me at my last words, his fingers tensing in mine. “And he died a little over two years ago. End of story.” I glance over to find him looking at me. I’m glad the tears that usually fill my eyes don’t come. How embarrassing to be in love with one man and crying about another.
He stops, tugging on my hand until I falter. Sympathy fills his eyes as they search mine. “I’m sorry,” he says gently, pulling me into his chest and wrapping his arms around me. I bury my face in his neck, finding comfort in the steady beat of his pulse beneath my lips. I wrap my arms around him, inhaling his delicious scent—so new yet so comforting. He brushes a soft kiss to my temple, and his tenderness is so unexpected that tears burn in the back of my throat.
“Thank you,” I whisper, leaning back to look at him and smiling softly.
“You want to tell me about it?” he prompts as he runs a hand down my arm and grabs my hand, bringing it up to his mouth and placing a kiss on it.
Do I want to talk about it? Not really, but he deserves to know. Most of it anyway. He pulls me to his side and puts an arm around me as we start to walk again. “There’s not much to tell, really. Max and I had pre-calc together. He was a senior and I was a junior. Typical high school romance. Football games, prom, each other’s firsts.” I shrug. “I followed him to UCLA, stayed with him throughout, and then we got engaged my last year of college.” I watch Baxter bite at the waves again, and it offers a welcome diversion from what I’m going to say next.
“One weekend, Max decided to surprise me with a road trip. He said it was just what the doctor ordered before …” I falter, wondering how I should continue. Colton squeezes my hand in encouragement. “Before life got more hectic; new jobs, marriage … everything. We had no set destination, so we just drove. No one knew that we were going anywhere, so there was no one to expect us back home. We headed north and ended up by Mammoth, passing the town, but veering off a two-lane road not too far from June Lake. Thankfully it had been a dry winter, so there wasn’t much snow on the ground. Just a few patches here and there. It was early afternoon and I was starving, so we decided to explore and find the perfect spot for a picnic. Stupid us.” I shake my head. “We had cell phones with us, but without any service, we turned them off to not waste the batteries.” I stop now, needing a minute to remember those last carefree moments before life changed forever. I release Colton’s hand and wrap my arms around myself to stifle the shivers that race through me.
Colton senses my anguish and wraps his arms around me, his body ghosting mine. “You guys were young, Rylee. You did nothing wrong. Don’t put whatever happened on yourself,” he says as if he already knows that the guilt eats at me like a disease on a daily basis.
I take in his words, grateful that he’s said them but still not believing them. “We came around a corner on this winding road we were driving on. There was an elk in the road and Max swerved the car to avoid him.” I can hear Colton suck in an audible breath, knowing where this is going. “We veered into the oncoming lane and the tires grabbed the edge of the road because Max had overcorrected too much. I don’t know. It all happened so fast.” I shudder again and Colton holds me, his arms squeezing tighter around me as if their strength can ward off the inevitable. “I remember seeing the first trees as we went over the edge and started down the ravine. I remember Max swearing and it struck me as odd because he rarely swore.” My stomach lodges in my throat as I remember the weightless feeling as the car lifted from the ground and the centrifugal force that tossed me around like a rag doll as the car tumbled down. I reach up and wipe the single t
ear that has slid out of the corner of my eye. I shake my head. “I’m sure you don’t want to hear all of this, Colton. I don’t want to put a damper on our evening.”
I can feel him shake his head as it’s resting on my shoulder. His arms are wrapped across the top part of my chest, from shoulder to shoulder, and I bring my hands up to hook onto them. “No, please continue, Rylee. I appreciate you sharing with me. Letting me get to know and understand you better.”
Maybe if I open up to him, he’ll feel comfortable enough to explain his past to me as well. I think about this for a couple of seconds and realize that as much as I can hope this might happen, the reality is that I feel relieved to be talking about it for the first time in a long time.
I draw in a shaky breath before I continue. “The next thing I remember is coming to. It was getting dark. The sun was already past the crest of the mountain so we were in the shadows of the deep ravine we were in. The smells—oh, my God—they were something I will never forget and will always associate with that day. The mixture of fuel and blood and destruction. We were at the bottom of a ravine. The car was sitting on an angle and I was on the high side while Max was on the low. The car was mangled. We had rolled so many times that the car had crushed into itself, making the interior almost half the size it should have been.
“I could hear Max. The sounds he made trying to breathe—trying to stay alive—were horrifying.” I shudder at those sounds that I can still hear in my dreams. “But the best part about those sounds were that he was still alive. And at some point in those first moments of waking up, he reached over and held my hand, trying to take away my fear from regaining consciousness in the hell we were embroiled in.”
“Do you need a minute?” he asks sweetly before pressing a kiss to my bare shoulder.
I shake my head. “No, I’d rather just finish.”
“Okay. Take your time,” he murmurs as we start to walk again.
“I panicked. I had to get help. It was only when I went to release my seatbelt that I felt the pain. My right arm wouldn’t work. It was visibly broken in several places. I let go of Max’s hand with my left hand and tried to undo the belt, but it was jammed—some freak thing the manufacturer studied after the fact. It was the result of metal jamming in the mechanism from the crash. I remember looking down and feeling like it was a dream, when I realized I was covered in blood. My head and arm and midsection and pelvis were screaming with pain so intense I think I would rather die than ever feel that again. It hurt to breathe. To move my head. I can recall Max mumbling my name, and I reached over groping for his hand. I told him that I was going to get us help and that he needed to hold on. That I loved him. I grabbed a shard of glass. Tried to use it to cut through my seatbelt but only ended up slicing my hand some and stabbing myself in the abdomen. It was brutal. I kept blacking out from the pain. Each time I would come to, the blinding panic would hit me again.”
We reach the steps up to his house, and I watch Baxter bound up with endless energy. Colton sits on the bottom step and pulls me down to sit beside him. I use my toes to make mindless imprints in the sand. “The night was freezing and dark and terrifying. By the time the sun started to lighten the sky, Max’s breaths were shallow and thready. He didn’t have much time. All I could do was hold his hand, pray for him, talk to him, and tell him it was okay to go. Tell him that I loved him. He died several hours later.”
I run the back of my hand over my cheek to wipe away the tears that have fallen and try to erase the memory in my mind of the last time I saw Max. “I was beside myself. I was losing my strength from all my blood loss, and I knew I was getting weaker and worse off by the hour. That was when the panic set in. I was trapped, and the longer I stayed in the car, the more I felt like it was closing in on me.
“When night fell near the end of the second day, the claustrophobia was smothering me, and I completely lost it. I couldn’t deal anymore with the pain and the feeling of defeat so I thrashed around in fear, in anger, and in defiance that I didn’t want to die yet. All of my movement somehow dislodged my cell phone that had gotten stuck up under the dash amidst the tumbling down the hill. It fell to the floor beneath me.”
I take a deep breath remembering how it took every ounce of determination and strength that I’d had left to get that phone. My lifeline. “It took what felt like hours to reach it and when I turned it on there wasn’t any service. I was devastated. I started yelling at everything and nothing until something clicked in the back of my mind about a story I had heard on the news. About how they’d found some missing hiker by following the pings on their cell phone despite a lack of service.
“I knew that when I didn’t show up for work in the morning, someone would call Haddie and that would get the wheels in motion. She’s a worrier and knew I was preparing for a big meeting I had that morning that I would’ve never missed. I figured that maybe they’d be able to track my cell phone to our location. It was a long shot, but it was the only hope I had.” I touch the ring on my finger with my thumb. “I clung to it and willed every thought I had that it would work.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Colton says before clearing his throat. I’m sure that he never expected this to be my story. Nonetheless, I am impressed by his compassion.
“There’s nothing you can say.” I shrug, reaching over to place a hand gently on his cheek. A silent thank you for letting me talk and for listening without interjecting. Without telling me what I should have done as most people do. “It almost took another day and a half for them to find me. I was hallucinating by then. Freezing cold and trying to escape the confines of the car in my own head. I thought the rescuer was an angel. He looked in the window and the sun was behind him, lighting him up like he had a halo. Later he told me I screamed at him.” I laugh softly at the memory. “Called him an SOB and that he couldn’t have me yet. That I wasn’t ready to die.”
Colton pulls me onto his lap so that my body is cradled between his knees and softly kisses the tracks left by my tears. “Why does it not surprise me that you’d tell off an angel?” He laughs, his lips pressed to my temple. “You’re very good at telling people off,” he teases.
I lean into him, accepting and being grateful for his comfort. I close my eyes and let the heat of the sun’s rays and the warmth of Colton against me melt away the chill deep in my soul. “I told you, Ace. Baggage.”
“No,” he says, his chin resting on the top of my head, “that’s just a fucked up situation in circumstances way out of your control.”
I wish everybody saw it that way. I shrug the errant thought away. “Too many sad thoughts for such a beautiful evening.” I sigh, leaning back and looking at Colton.
He smiles wistfully at me. “Thank you for telling me. I’m sure it’s not the easiest thing to talk about.”
“What do you want to do now?”
Colton grins wickedly at me and grabs my waist, lifting me off of him as he stands up. He doesn’t release me and continues to lift me up, ignoring my growing shrieks as I realize his intentions, and places me over his shoulder.
“I’m too heavy! Put me down!” I squeal as he starts to trot up the stairs. I smack him on the butt, but he continues.
“Quit wiggling.” He laughs as he reciprocates the spank. By the time we reach the top, my sides hurt from laughing so hard and Baxter is barking loudly at us. Colton continues to carry me despite reaching the patio, and I swat at him again.
“Put me down!”
“It’s taking everything I have to not toss you in the pool right now,” he warns.
“No!” I screech, kicking wildly as he swings me so that I can see how close we are to the edge.
He hovers there momentarily as I cry out, but then steps away and I sag in relief. He stops and pulls my legs down, and my body slowly slides down the length of him. When our faces are even, he tightens his arms around me so I am standing on air, acutely aware of my chest pressed against his. “Now, there’s that smile I like,” he murmurs, h
is breath brushing over my face.
“Very funny, Ace!” I chastise. “You—” My next words are smothered as he captures his mouth with mine. Soft, tender, and seeking, I yield to him. Needing the virile man against me to make me forget my story earlier and to remind me why it’s okay to move on. We sink into the kiss as he lets me slowly slide the rest of the way down his body, my hands holding his face. The calluses of his hands rasp across the bare skin of my back as he slides them down to hold my hips.
I mewl in protest as he pulls back from me. Emotions flicker through his eyes that are impossible to read. “You hungry?” he asks.
Yes, for you. I bite my bottom lip between my teeth and nod to keep the words from slipping out. “Sure,” I say, stepping back from him to turn and find a table set up to the left of us, complete with food. “What? How?”
Colton smiles. “I have my ways.” He laughs as he leads me over and pulls a chair out for me. “Thank you, Grace,” he says toward the open doors into the house, and I hear a faint reply from inside.
“Your secret weapon?”
“Always!” He pours us wine. “Grace is the best. She takes care of me.”
Lucky woman. “It smells delicious,” I say, taking a sip of my wine as Colton dishes out what appears to be chicken with artichokes and angel hair pasta.
“It’s one of my favorites,” he muses, taking a bite. He watches me as I taste it, and I can see him visibly relax when I hum with approval.
Dinner is light and relaxed. The food is excellent, and I despise Colton telling me that Grace does not divulge her recipes. I tell him I’ll talk her out of it somehow, someway.
We talk about our jobs, and Colton asks how Zander is doing. I tell him that he hasn’t spoken any more words yet, but that he seems to be responding more. I tell him that hero status has been definitely bestowed on him by the boys, and that they can’t stop reliving how he pulled up to the school. I explain what needs to be done next to get permits for some of the new facilities when Corporate Cares gets the green light.