Back to Yesterday (Bleeding Hearts Book 2)

by Whitney Barbetti

  Part of me expected Mila to text me in the morning, just because she had an opportunity to. But it was for the best that we kept our contact to a minimum. I didn’t want to run off to Colorado when the wounds of what happened were still so fresh. I’d never had a healthy relationship in my life. My relationship with Colin had started out with me grateful and star-struck that he liked me. And I’d stayed with him after Ellie died as a way to somehow hold on to her.

  I had to remind myself that I left Jude because I didn’t want a relationship with someone who lied to me, who’d lied along with my ex-boyfriend and his sister about their relationship. But even more—I didn’t want to jump from one relationship to the next, without taking some time off in between to see what I wanted. Loneliness was my most loyal companion, and I didn’t want to drown it in a relationship just for the sake of not being alone.

  But in truth, it was getting harder and harder to remind myself of why I left him, when all I wanted was some of the steadiness he’d given me. The peace I’d felt on the many nights we’d spent lying on the roof and watching the stars move across the sky.

  But I tucked all that away in the corner of my heart as I finished the rooms I had to do and grabbed dinner after. The kitchen where I ate was blessedly quiet, so I retreated to my room to write a poem with a brain at peace.

  All that

  is holding me

  together

  is some foreign skin

  and fragile bones.

  Around my waist

  is a tether to you

  and I’m afraid

  it’s longer than

  I am strong enough

  to carry

  this sack of skin

  and pile of bones

  back to you.

  When I showed up to Charlotte’s room, she was in her pajamas and I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t sure if Charlotte wanted to pre-game with a bottle of wine in her room before we went out. But her pajamas told me she planned on staying in, which made it easier for me to agree to drinking more than I probably would have otherwise.

  “I bought the three-dollar wine,” she said, gesturing to the bottles on top of her mini fridge. “But I bought a ten-dollar one to start with. Start with the best because the other stuff will taste good once we get a little buzzed.”

  I shrugged and handed her my tumbler. Wine was wine to me. I couldn’t taste the extra dollars in a more expensive wine, so it made no difference how much a bottle had cost. I looked around her room, which was much more updated than mine, boasting a flat-screen TV on the wall opposite the bed and a table that looked like it had barely been used.

  “Nice room,” I said as my gaze moved over the white comforter that just screamed to be jumped on.

  “Yeah, it’s been ‘my’ room ever since I first stayed here.” She kicked the fridge door gently closed before sauntering over to me with one wine-filled tumbler in hand. “I put a little brandy in it and some lemon-lime soda, too.”

  “Fancy,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

  “I figured we could hang out and drink with a movie on?”

  “Of course.” I moved to the other side of her bed and sighed as I settled into it. “I think I need a room upgrade.”

  “You do,” Charlotte said with a contented sigh. She pressed the power button on the remote and then tossed it to me. “Find something to watch.”

  I flipped through the channels absentmindedly, watching Charlotte as she disappeared into the bathroom for a minute. I settled on a documentary on the Discovery Channel and my heart pinched, thinking of Jude. A part of me resented the hole inside of me that suckled on anything Jude-related, never letting me forget the fact that I was here and he wasn’t with me. But, in a small way, I understood why my mother was always seeking love. I was better with it than without it, I was learning.

  “What’s this?” Charlotte asked as she walked back to the bed.

  “A documentary on land mines.”

  “That sounds uplifting.” She raised an eyebrow. “I guess I thought we’d be watching something girly, you know—like a romantic comedy.”

  Tossing the remote to her, I said, “Then find one. I’m still not very familiar with the TV channels.”

  “You’re not?” she asked incredulously. “What do you do to entertain yourself then in that old-ass room?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to reply, “I write poetry.” But that would only invite questions and, most likely, her insistence to see said poetry.

  “I read a lot.”

  “Huh.” She scrunched up her nose like the idea offended her, and sniffed. It was then that I noticed her eyes were red.

  “Are you okay?”

  She side-eyed me before turning up the volume on the remote. “I’m great.”

  But she wasn’t. Her pallor wasn’t right, and the skin around her lips was reddened. “What’s wrong?”

  She dropped her head back against the headboard and I knew she had rolled her eyes. “Why are you even worried about it?”

  “I might not know you all that well, but I do know something’s up.”

  “I’m going through a breakup.” Her voice was flat and she sipped from her tumbler. “I’m practically in mourning.”

  But she wasn’t in mourning. Something wasn’t right with her, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “I know we don’t know each other all that well, but you can talk to me if you need to.”

  “Oh, is that a two-way street?” She raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips as she studied me. “Because I think you have more secrets than even I do.”

  I thought of the night on the roof with Jude. “Tell me something honest. And I’ll tell you something in return. A secret, maybe.”

  “What if I tell you something deep and you tell me something stupid in exchange?”

  I hadn’t ever had this thought with Jude because I’d trusted him. Instinctively. In all our exchanges of secrets and our open honesty, I’d never once worried that I’d tell him something deeply personal and he’d reply with something shallow. “I will tell you a secret that no one here knows,” I promised, hoping she’d confide in me. I wasn’t sure why I wanted her to, except that I was in short supply of friends at the moment and she looked like she could use one herself.

  “Fine.” She sat up in the bed and put the tumbler on her nightstand before turning to face me. “I’m bulimic.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised me, and I don’t think the surprise itself had anything to do with what she said but rather how she delivered it, like she was telling me her favorite color was blue. “Oh,” I said, fumbling for words. “Why?”

  She blew her bangs away from her face with her hand and I found myself examining her more closely than before. The lines around her mouth suddenly seemed deeper, and the dark circles that wrapped her eyes were louder than I remembered them being.

  “Because it’s the easiest way to lose weight. Because I don’t like feeling full. Because, why not?” She wore nonchalance around her shoulders and candor at her lips. It was a side of her I’d never seen—this brutally honest side.

  “But it’s dangerous,” I said, feeling stupid for saying something so obvious. “Why don’t you try dieting or exercise?”

  Once again she rolled her eyes, acting as if she had expected me to say exactly what I was saying. “I tried those things, Trista. But after I got on birth control a few years ago, I gained fifty pounds that year. Do you know what that does to someone’s self-worth?” She tucked her hair behind her ears and glanced at the television. But she wasn’t really watching. She was thinking. “I went to the movies with this guy once and he took me for frozen yogurt after. As we sat on the promenade, eating ice cream, he placed a hand on the one I had wrapped around the spoon and said, ‘That’s about enough for you, isn’t it?’” She turned her head to face me, and the light from the television played with the shadows on her face. “I asked him what he meant and his hand slid up my arm. I thought he was making a move and I leaned into it,
but then his fingers flicked against my neck and he said, ‘Your second chin is showing.’” I watched as she swallowed and looked down at her fingers. “I threw away the frozen yogurt and went home and cried so hard I vomited. And then I felt better, knowing I wouldn’t digest all that garbage.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d also had feelings of self-disgust, feelings that I was too overweight for anyone to find me pretty. When Jude had touched my collarbone and made me feel like I wasn’t as disgustingly large as I felt I was, it was the first time I’d believed him. Middle school teachers had cautioned us against eating disorders, but I’d never truly thought I’d meet someone affected by them. I’d never entertained the thought of shoving my fingers down my throat, but Charlotte’s casual demeanor made me wonder more about it.

  “How long have you been doing it?”

  She looked over at me, searching my face as if she was deciding how to tell me. “Well, after my date I didn’t do it all that often. Just once in a while, when I was getting a little chubby. But then. . .” She paused. “I was pregnant once.” She looked down at her stomach before flicking her eyes away. “I didn’t know I was pregnant until one day, I was brushing my teeth and once I’d gotten to my molars, I felt bile come up. That had never happened before—puking from brushing my teeth. One of the girls I was with at the time told me to take a piss test, so I did.” She brushed strands of hair from her face. “But after I miscarried, I had a pooch below my belly button I couldn’t get rid of, so I started brushing my teeth just a little too far back until I puked. And now I just use my fingers.”

  I tried to take it all in without a look of shock on my face. “Do you do it all the time?”

  She tilted her head. “Only once a day, usually. So I’m still getting calories. It’s not as bad then.” She sounded convincing, but I didn’t believe even doing it once a day was ‘okay,’ so I just rubbed my lips together as I considered. She pulled her brown locks into a bun and in doing so, I noticed a thick strand was wet.

  She must have seen my attention zero in on that piece, because she tugged on it, saying, “I got puke on this, but don’t worry, I washed it.” She said it so calmly, it was hard to imagine her bent over the toilet, letting the contents of her stomach empty themselves into the bowl. “But I had to, since we’re drinking. It was vomit my food or vomit my wine, and wine hurts when it comes back up.”

  I scratched along my forearm, just wanting to feel like this was a dream, like my friend wasn’t telling me that she puked regularly and it wasn’t a big deal to her. “Does Maura know?”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes and leaned back against the pillows. “Yeah, right. No one does. But you, and now you owe me a secret.” She sipped her drink and her eyes glittered in the low light of the room. “It better be a good one.”

  I turned to the television, which she had turned back on and changed to a channel with cheesy B-movies. I settled on the easiest thing to say. “I had a boyfriend in Colorado,” I said softly, the colors on the television blurring as I thought. “And I had a someone else, someone who I didn’t expect.”

  “Oh?”

  I could tell from the shift on the bed that she was sitting up straighter, but I was still staring off into the distance. “Yeah. I’d been with my boyfriend for a long time, but we were growing apart. Had been, for at least half of our relationship.” Saying it aloud made me feel silly, knowing that ‘half of my relationship’ was actually three years. Not just a handful of months. “His roommate was the someone else.”

  “What happened?”

  I debated unloading it onto her, telling her the whole story of my move to Colorado, of my breakup with Colin and my budding relationship with Jude. But the end of the truth always made me sad, and I didn’t feel close enough to Charlotte to trust her with something of that nature just yet. If I’d told Claire, I’d have this—probably irrational, but still—worry that she’d always look at me differently. That was the problem with divulging secrets—it changed how you looked to someone else.

  “That’s another secret, for another time.”

  Charlotte groaned. “But you were just getting to the juicy part.”

  And that, that was precisely why I didn’t want to tell Charlotte any more, especially not now. My heartache was not a spectator sport.

  Chapter Ten

  December 2011

  Months had passed uneventfully. I spent my days doing normal tasks around the inn, but since leaf peeper season—when all the tourists came to watch the leaves change color—was over, business at the inn had slowed considerably. Luckily, Maura had planned her renovations around the slow months, so the remaining un-renovated rooms were getting an overhaul, including mine.

  “You going home for Christmas?” Maura asked after I’d emptied the dishwasher one day, a few days from Christmas.

  “No,” I replied, as I closed the door to the dishwasher. I didn’t even know what constituted as home for me anyway. It certainly wasn’t my mom’s house. And with my grandfather in an assisted living facility, it would be the first holiday I didn’t spend with him in his trailer. Most holidays for the last few years, Colin had come up a few days after Christmas, staying for about a week before he returned to Colorado. But there would be no Grandpa, no Colin, no family. It didn’t make me sad, to think about it, but when Mila had texted me around Thanksgiving to give me an update, I realized how far away I was from everyone and everything I knew.

  “You should,” she said. “I was fine with you bumming around for Thanksgiving, but we’ve waited too long to start on your room.”

  “I can just move to one of the others while I wait.” I dipped my hand into the sink and pulled out the dishes that remained, running my finger over one of the chipped bowls.

  “We’re getting a wedding right before New Year’s,” Maura told me. “They rented out the entire inn for their wedding party.”

  “Wow,” I said, realizing that I would have no place to stay for a few days. “Okay, I’ll figure something out.”

  “I don’t want you to feel like I’m booting you out. But, I s’pose that’s exactly how it feels.”

  I waved her off. “It’s not a big deal. It’s just a little while. I’ll be fine.”

  And that was how I found myself agreeing to Charlotte’s offer to stay with her and her boyfriend’s family, even though I didn’t really want to.

  “It’ll be totally cool,” Charlotte assured me as we did laundry in the basement. “Brendan’s parents don’t want me staying in his room with him anyway,” she said with a mild look of annoyance across her face. “So I’ll have a room all to myself.” She shook out a towel with a snap. “Brendan’s family is super cool, you’ll like them.”

  I regarded her with a look of skepticism. “I’ll like them? I like three people in Maine. Three.”

  “That’s because you’re prickly.”

  I’d been pulling a towel out of the dryer when she said it and, hunched over, I paused. Jude had said something similar once, likening me to a cactus. It had been five months since I’d last seen him, and I still felt the weight of his impact on me.

  Part of me expected the wanting to fade, and another part of me wanted it to. It would be easier not living with all this regret. Because that’s how I felt now, like I regretted leaving Colorado. But I didn’t have the courage to return now, months after leaving and still no closer to figuring my life out.

  “Maybe I am,” I said softly, running my hand down the fibers of the towel. Looking at Charlotte, I said, “Or maybe I’m just not a nice person.”

  Charlotte laughed, which was such an opposite image of how she’d appeared when I first met her that I was taken aback a bit. I could hardly reconcile the Charlotte I met, with feral eyes and a hunger she couldn’t satisfy, with the Charlotte I knew now, someone with her heart on her sleeve and arms ever-reaching for the next thing. I envied her a little, envied her confidence in her decision-making. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t envy her trim figure.
After two seasons working for Maura, I’d begun to pack on a little bit of weight around Thanksgiving.

  “Because you’re an emotional eater,” Charlotte had explained to me then, but I’d never seen myself as one. I was an emotional writer, sure. But I didn’t eat to soothe the places I couldn’t touch. “I am too, which is why,” she’d continued, looking to see if Maura was listening in on our conversation, “I, you know.” She held two fingers up to her mouth, gesturing like I’d forgotten what she’d told me on her bed two months before.

  “Yo!” Charlotte snapped, holding a washcloth in front of my face. “You still there?”

  I shook my head. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “So as I was saying, Brendan has this sick house—including a pool house with a heated pool. You’ll have so much fun.”

  But it wasn’t fun I was seeking; it was a place to crash until I could return to my safe, cozy room at the inn.

  “See?” Charlotte said as we pulled up the gravel driveway to Brendan’s family home. It was a two-story monstrosity, with at least two dozen long windows across the front of it. The front porch appeared to wrap around the entire thing, and I saw at least four additional buildings on the property.

  “It’s a mansion,” I said as I leaned down to take it all in. “Are his parents rich?”

  “They’re old money. They’ve had this house in their family for like a hundred years or something.”

  But the house didn’t look a hundred years old. Maybe it had begun as a smaller building and had expanded. What sat before me looked like a cross between a southern plantation home and a New England cape home. But bigger—the biggest house I’d ever seen

  “Is it a bed and breakfast or something?” I asked. We stepped out of the car and grabbed our luggage from the back seat.