So what was the point of telling him? For that matter Nate didn’t need to know either. He made the choice last night to give me the best damn kiss I’d ever had and then leave when Aaron broke it up. If he had any actual balls he would have stood up for himself instead of letting Aaron win. I wasn’t going to forgive him easily for that.
The rest of the bus ride was quiet, except for the pestering thoughts circling in my head. The worst place that anybody could possibly be trapped is their own mind. Mine was specifically dangerous, because if I wasn’t careful a lot of horrible memories could escape from the walls they were locked behind.
Twenty minutes later, I was at the cemetery walking down the long trail that led to the back corner of the lot facing the woods. My father always loved the outdoors, and when he would only buy a plot that faced the woods where he used to hike. I never understood his obsession with the outdoors until he died. Aaron used to take me hiking on a trail closer to our childhood home to pass the time when Mom was having one of her episodes. We’d be out walking and playing for hours until he thought it was safe to go back inside.
I kneeled down in front of the gravestone, brushing off some dirt that was covering part of my father’s name. The grass hadn’t been mowed in a while based on the length, and it didn’t look like many people visited since there were no flowers.
“Hi Dad,” I whispered. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been around in a while, but after everything with Mom, it was hard. She just got so…well, I’m sure you’ve seen it all, huh?”
I pressed my lips together and closed my eyes.
Was I even doing this right? Talking to a stone only made me feel crazy, and talking to the sky would just make me look crazier. I never saw anybody try talking to their family members before. I mean, could they even hear us?
I repositioned myself so I was cross-legged on the ground. My hands ran through the thick blades of grass, as I watched some ants try to escape being crushed. I ripped the grass out of the ground and let the wind take it away.
“I don’t really know how to do this,” I admitted to him. “I watch a lot of movies, but none of them really show how to talk to your dead father. Well, maybe like a psychic movie or some sketchy Ouija movie, but I’m not that desperate. No offense. It’s just…hard to talk to Aaron about things because he takes it completely out of proportion, you know? You and Mom used to joke around about how he was going to be even more overprotective of me when I grow up, but he’s beyond that point now. He punched his best friend because of a stupid kiss.”
I blushed.
“Well it wasn’t stupid, it was…amazing. Not that you probably want to know that since you’re my dad and all. It’s just that Nate is a great guy, but he makes everybody think he’s just some player. I know him better than that, Dad. He’s just too stubborn to admit that he’s a decent guy. I think it’s because he’s got a kid or something. I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t care that he’s got one. I mean it’s…interesting because Nate never talked about wanting kids, but he’s got a son. He didn’t really seem to want to be involved, but when I saw him yesterday he was with the girl he got pregnant. That means he’s trying, you know?
“I don’t get why he wants to be seen as an asshole. You’d probably think he’s one because that’s your job, but he’s not. I promise. He has a lot to figure out, but so do I. We’re not that different, and maybe that should scare me, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel…”
“Less alone?” a familiar voice said quietly from behind me.
I looked over my shoulder at Nate, then abruptly turned around and ignored him. He was right. I didn’t feel alone when I knew that there was somebody out there who understood me, but that didn’t mean I was going to talk to him easily.
He walked over to me and sat down.
I stayed silent.
“Giving me the cold shoulder?” he guessed. “I guess I deserve that after last night.”
Silence.
“Okay,” he muttered. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, if that means anything to you. Clearly I needed to say that since you’re talking to your dad about me. Most girls that do that have nothing good to say.”
I looked down at the ground. “How much did you hear?”
“All of it.”
I just nodded.
“For the record,” he said, “I have good reasons to act the way I do. What happened last night wasn’t meant to hurt you, but your brother needed to cool off. If I tried talking to him, he just would have hit me again, and I didn’t really feel like having to fight back. I respect him, B.”
I looked over to see a faint bruise on his jaw. “He got you good, huh?”
He shrugged. “I deserved it.”
“You didn’t deserve to be punched.”
“I won’t argue with you over it,” he replied.
“You said there were reasons why you act the way you do. What reasons would you have to distance yourself all of the time? Besides that Aaron is my brother and that you respect your bromance.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not so sure we have a bromance anymore. I still have to talk to him, but I’m giving him some space. He probably doesn’t know you’re here, huh?”
I shook my head. “How did you know I was here?”
He gave me a soft smile. “I just thought of a place that you know your brother wouldn’t come to. Figured here would be a pretty safe bet.”
“You win,” I muttered, looking back at the gravestone in front of us.
“Nobody really wins in this situation.”
“We could,” I disagreed. “You’d just have to grow a pair and tell Aaron that you can make your own choices. About…us. If that’s what you really want.”
“We…” He paused. “The reason why I can’t make that decision is because I don’t want to make promises that I can’t keep. That’s not what you deserve.”
“I wish people would stop telling me that.”
“Well it’s true.”
“No,” I snapped. “It isn’t. Who knows what I deserve better than me? Apparently everybody does, because they seem to feel like putting their two cents in every frigging time I make a choice they don’t like. Who I want to be with shouldn’t be anybody’s concern as long as I’m happy. Am I wrong is saying that?”
“No, but—”
“No buts!”
He didn’t say anything.
“Tell me what your reasons are, Nate.”
“You won’t like it.”
“Try me,” I challenged.
He sighed and rubbed his face. “Okay. I’m afraid that I’ll make the same mistake I made with Erin. I had a one night stand with her and she got pregnant. I never manned up to be the dad my son deserves. I abandoned her. It wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. When I talked to you, I thought about it and tried reaching out, but she just wants to get together every now and again.”
“And you don’t want that?” I guessed.
“No, I don’t.”
“So what do I have to do with that?”
“I don’t want to make that mistake with you, B.”
Oh. “As in…you would never want to have kids?”
He looked away from me. “I’m not the father type. Not right now. You’re right when you said I never talked about wanting kids. That thought never crossed my mind, and when Erin called me one night saying she was pregnant I started thinking about my future. Kids weren’t part of that. I mean…maybe someday I’ll want a family, but now? It isn’t in the picture.”
“So what? You stopped sleeping around? We both know that didn’t happen. So what’s your deal with me that was supposed to offend me so badly?”
“Those girls aren’t important to me,” he finally said. “Erin doesn’t even want me involved in Cooper’s life. She just wants to hookup. The other girls are just…I don’t know what they are. Distractions, I guess. I could never do that to you, Blair. If I ever just caved and made the same mistake I did with her…”
“What?” I pressed. “So you’ll have pointless sex with random girls, but not with one that you actually care about? Do you know how screwed up that sounds?”
He shrugged. That was it. No “I knows” or any recognition that he sounded certifiably crazy. If he knew my secret he wouldn’t be so cautious.
He’d never sleep with you if he knew.
I hated to think that was true.
“Nate…”
He looked at me.
Tell him.
I shook my head. “Never mind.”
“What is it?”
“I just…it was stupid.”
“You never say stupid things.”
I eyed him. “We both know that’s not true.”
He smiled. “Maybe you say stupid stuff once in a while, especially if alcohol is involved.”
“Guilty,” I said, sighing.
“So what is it?”
He might tell Aaron.
I opened my mouth, but no words came out.
He positioned himself so his body was angled toward mine. He reached his hand out and brushed mine softly. When I met his eyes they were soft, egging me to tell him.
I was too chicken, because the secret I had might apply perfectly for this conversation, but it weighed too heavy on me. There were certain things that I just couldn’t admit, and this was the biggest one.
“I’m just a lot more like you than you think.”
I drew my knees up to my chest.
“I doubt that, B.”
“Then you really don’t know me at all.”
He eyed me. “Maybe I don’t.”
I rested my chin on my knees. There were days when I wanted the world to know the mistakes I’d made, just so the pressure wasn’t so bad. Then there were days like this when I second guessed myself about what was really worth sharing. I never fully got over some of the crazy things I did, and I accepted that I probably never would. Some of the mistakes could make people see me in a whole different light, and I wasn’t ready to be judged all over again.
I hugged my knees to my chest and stayed quiet, because I had nothing else to say to him. I liked to think that I knew Nate well, but he changed his mind about everything. How could I keep putting faith in a guy who only hooked up with girls that didn’t mean anything to him? He pretty much just told me he never wanted kids with me, and having sex risked that. Why would I keep fighting for him after that remark?
Maybe that was what he wanted.
He had a lot of reasons to be scared, but if telling me that was just an excuse to push me away then it hurt more than just being honest. If he didn’t want to sleep with me because he thought I’d get pregnant, he didn’t even have to worry about it. If I just told him…
He’ll pity you.
I hated it when people pitied me. Every time something went wrong it ended with people giving me that look of sympathy. When Dad died, everybody told us how sorry they were. When Mom got taken away, everybody told us how sorry they were. None of them were really sorry though. They were just compelled to say something so they didn’t feel like bad people.
That was when the pity started. The lunch lady at school would give me an extra pudding cup. My teachers would give me extended deadlines on homework. People around town would just give empty smiles as they let me pass them in line, but it never made a difference. Feeling like I owed everybody for their pity was a heavier burden than accepting the reason they felt bad for me in the first place.
I looked at my father’s grave one more time and thought about every look I’d received since he died. Ever since then my childhood went downhill, and started slipping into a black hole full of my mother’s depression and anxiety. Every episode she had would cause a scene to the neighbors. Every time she broke down in the store, she would cause a scene to the shoppers. It was a never-ending cycle that kept happening even after she was gone.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked me, bumping my shoulder.
I shook my head. “Everything.”
He took a moment to soak that in. “Everything as in…?”
I looked at him through clouded eyes. “My whole life has been full of disappointment and tragedy, and I have to wake up every morning knowing how much I’ve lost because I can’t pretend like it’s just a nightmare. Every time I look in the mirror, I see my mother. Every time I fall asleep, I see my mother. I can’t even fall asleep without having to relive everything that I’ve been put through.”
I could tell by the frown settling on his lips that he didn’t like me thinking that way, but he would never understand. There was no escaping the shell of a woman my mother became when my father died. All of the drugs she took to feel happy or fall asleep. All of the alcohol she drank so she could pretend she was a different woman. She cut herself every night to try easing the pain, and I had to watch it every single time.
There was nothing Aaron could do to distract me from the horrors I’d witnessed, but he tried like hell. I saw enough to remember it in vivid detail every time I went to sleep at night, and as much as Aaron and Nate hated it, it would never end. My therapist used to tell me that once I made amends with my mother, my conscious would stop replaying the most morbid memory I had involving her, but how could I make those kind of amends with the woman who lost her marbles? I refused to see her, which was the only way I could really manage to forgive and forget.
That was never going to happen.
“I know that you and my brother hate it when I think about things, but I’m not like him. He can pretend like the world is a perfect place full of fairies and unicorns, but I know the truth. He couldn’t shield me from everything when I was younger, and the more he tried, the more I just wanted a chance to do what I wanted by myself. That’s why…”
That’s why I was stupid enough to love Zach.
“You got involved with Zach,” he finished for me, as if he could read my mind.
I nodded.
By the time I was fifteen I was sick and tired of Aaron trying to distract me from the real world. He was so damn worried that I was going to find trouble that it led me straight to the source. When I met Zach in high school, he made me feel like I could have fun in life. For months I felt free, much to Aaron’s dismay. He used to try getting our grandparents to ground me because he didn’t like Zach. I was so love struck by Zach that I didn’t listen to Aaron, and defended Zach every time my brother trashed him. My grandma thought it was great that I was starting to move past everything I’d gone through. She never believed that Aaron fully had.
After a few months of dating, Zach and I had sex. He was my first for everything, and I didn’t feel pressured to do any of it. I just wanted to be somebody I never got to be. A girl who made her own decisions. The longer we dated, the more I felt like I was becoming my own person.
Then our relationship hit a wall.
I remembered that it was a month and a few days after our first time having sex. He seemed so in love with me every day since then, but when I told him that my period was late he got angry. He had moments when he got angry quick, but he always composed himself if I gave him space. I tried to do that when I told him, but he kept following me around his parents’ house.
Zach was only a year older than me, and his parents were never home because they worked long hours. I used to stay over at his house because I knew I’d never get to be alone with him if he came over to my grandparent’s place. Aaron would just glare at him the whole time, and that wasn’t how I wanted to spend time with my boyfriend.
Although that night, I would have preferred it over how Zach reacted. I remembered almost breaking down and telling Nate what happened when he found out that Zach used to hit me. Instead, I choked down the memory like it was fatal if I spoke of it.
It was fatal.
I closed my eyes. “I know it was stupid to stay with a guy after what he put me through, but I didn’t want to let Aaron know that he was right. You guys are so suffocating. It’s like I can’t live without getti
ng your permission to make choices on my own. That’s no way to live, Nate.”
He looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry you felt that way.”
I shook my head. “I still feel that way. Don’t you see? You guys are harder on me now because I wasn’t strong enough to let go of Zach when I was fifteen. Six years is a long time to learn about who I want to be, but you two still see me as a stupid love-stricken teenager. I’m not that girl anymore. I know what I want in life, and that’s a steady job, a place of my own and a guy that isn’t afraid to say that he loves me.”
Nate’s eyes lifted slowly to meet mine.
“If you can’t say that, then I need to cut my losses, because I spent months dating a guy that I gave everything to, and I mean everything. I can’t forget about how stupid I was back then, but I can acknowledge that I’ve changed enough to know I’m smarter now. You just need to give me a chance to prove that. So does Aaron.”
When he didn’t say anything, I got my answer.
“That’s what I thought,” I murmured, standing up.
“Wait, Blair,” he said, standing up quickly. “It’s not that I don’t think you’ve changed, because I know that you have. The person that you are is so beautiful and optimistic it actually makes me want to be a better person. I just can’t…”
“Say that you love me?”
He sighed. “You don’t need a chance to prove anything to me, okay?” he told me, ignoring my previous remark. “It’s me who needs to prove something to you, because—”
“I swear to Lucifer that if you tell me I deserve better, I will kick you in the balls. I’m not even playing around anymore.”
He winced. “I was going to say that I need to prove something to you, because I’ve done plenty more bad things that need forgiving first.”
I stared at him with my arms crossed on my chest.
His kind of ‘bad things’ probably didn’t compare to mine, but who was I to argue? I didn’t like to compete with anybody about how many bad things they did in their lives. I was too afraid I’d win.
“Give me some time,” he told me, intertwining our hands together.
A Safe Place to Fall (Places Book 1) Page 10