Despite the cooler temperature that has everyone in this town but me freezing, today is not an exception. I stand by the window and peek inside, but to my disappointment, Cash and Snow are the only occupants of the couch.
As I open the door and walk in, the feeling that something is not right only deepens.
The first thing I notice is that Lexie’s purse, which is always neatly stored over the dresser in our bedroom, is carelessly lying on the floor by the door. A frown forms on my face as I pick it up, and go greet our pets.
“Where’s Lexie, guys?”
As if they understand my question, Cash lifts his head from the cushion to look somewhere behind me. As Snow jumps up and run to the hallway, I glance behind me and see an open cupboard door in the kitchen. Weird.
I scratch Cash’s ears one final time, and I go close it. Things become even stranger when I see that my half-empty bottle of whiskey is missing. “What the fuck?” I mumble, and close the cabinet door.
My heart races as I make my way to our bedroom. Through the half-opened door I see Lexie’s coat lying on the floor, and that makes me race toward the room. The only time her clothes scattered everywhere is when I’m the one doing the removal, which makes me officially worried. Once I reach the room, I pick the garment from the floor and push the door the rest of the way open.
Her dress, boots, stockings and bra are also scattered on the floor, but I don’t pay much attention to them. All my focus is on Lexie, sitting beneath the covers with her eyes closed as she hugs a mostly empty bottle of Jack.
Breathless—and not in a good way—I put her stuff over the dresser, and take careful steps toward her, so as not to wake her. Her breathing is heavy with sleep and too much alcohol. I pry the bottle from her hand, and place it on the side table, before sitting down at the edge of the bed. I push a few locks of her hair aside to see her face. As soon as I do, I wish I hadn’t.
Thick black lines run from her eyes to her mouth and chin. Black circles of smeared makeup rim her puffy eyelids. Lexie is the most positive and the happiest person I know. I don’t even want to imagine what has her so upset.
Everything inside me compresses and twists with dread, pain, and horror. Worry that something happened with Kodee, Greg, or another one of our loved ones makes me want to shake her awake so I can ask her what went wrong. But I can’t bring myself to do that. I want her to rest and heal. I also want her to be comfortable, something she doesn’t look at the moment.
I pull the covers back from her body to rearrange her in the bed, but before I get to it, I see a brown folder trapped between her chest and arm. My brows pull together at the odd sight. Carefully, I take it and look at it. It’s a simple paper file, similar to the ones they used at the firm to organize each case, only skinnier. I look at the white tab on top and see my name written in a scrawny script.
“The hell?” With brows tightly knit together, I open it.
The first page I see is a police background check that points the finger at the loser responsible for this mess: Kyle. An uncontrollable desire to run to his house and punch his bulldog face in washes over me, but then I start turning pages, and the cool air around me suddenly feels so hot it’s hard to breathe. All thoughts of violence become self-directed.
Years of reading endless lawsuits have made my eyes expert in speed-reading. I use that skill to go through twenty-something pages of all the skeletons I spent eight months working hard to keep from Lexie in only a few minutes. My stomach sinks lower as Lexie’s odd behavior, and the splotchy makeup, finally makes sense.
In that moment of horror, my mind drifts to the cosmos and my favorite cosmic event: supernovas.
Looking at images of supernovas can make a person a breathless. They’re full of color and amazingly beautiful to anyone seeing it through the lens of a telescope. For the actual star going through the process, however, it’s a whole other story. Supernovas happen for one of two reasons: one, a dwarf star steals enough energy from another star, or surrounding star remains, to raise its core temperature and cause a nuclear fusion; or two, the core of a massive star becomes too unstable due to excess energy, causing it to suffer a gravitational collapse. Either way, it’s an inevitable event that has only one possible result: a massive explosion that rips the star apart and turns it into a black hole.
It’s safe to say that if I were a star, I’d be a greedy dwarf about to go supernova.
I close my eyes, and hang my head as I search for a way out, for something that can stop my own decaying process, even though I know that I’m the one responsible for my own inescapable fate. I find nothing.
Then a low, cold voice that bears little resemblance to the sound I love comes from my right. “Are all those things true?”
And the nuclear fusion begins.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Lexie takes an audible breath. In my mind I see her lips parting, and her pulling air into her chest. It’s one of my favorite things she does. “Is Lea why you left Seattle?”
Shame and guilt I repressed comes back. It chokes me, like a hand gripping my throat, not allowing words to form. A slow nod is my reply.
She stays quiet for a while, and when she speaks again, disappointment and disgust are clear in her voice. “Tell me about her.”
I turn my face to look at her. Those gorgeous green eyes that made me live again, look dead in contrast to the pink background. Seeing the sadness in the face I love so much is so excruciating that I want to close my eyes and lie. But I can’t. Not to her. Not anymore. “Lea was a friend with benefits. She’s also the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”
“Do you mean because she lost a leg, and it was your fault?”
Something about the way she looks at me tells me she’s holding onto hope that I’ll say no, and by God I want to. “Yes.”
“Oh, my God.” The words pass her lips as quiet as a breath.
I can’t help remembering all the other times she’s said those three words to me in the past. All of those memories belong to happy, sexy and passionate days that filled my heart with so much joy I could barely hold it in. All of those other times made me feel alive. This time they don’t. This time, those words make me feel hollow.
I open my mouth to try to explain. I have no fucking clue of what I could say to make this better, but I sure as hell want to try. However, as soon as the first word comes out of my mouth—“Love . . .”— Lexie brings a hand up to halt me. I shut right up, waiting for her to speak.
She doesn’t. Minutes of silence and sighs go by, before I hear her voice again.
“Why does the report say the accident happened because of snow?”
The hand continues to choke me. But she needs words, so I manage to push some out. “Because the truth would put me in jail, so my father bribed people to keep things quiet.”
That’s the first time I’ve admitted that out loud, and quite honestly, I don’t think I’d feel more embarrassed if I were standing naked in the middle of a stadium filled with people.
Lexie’s eyes close, and she shakes her head. I wonder if she’s making a parallel between me the good-for-nothing coward who killed her best friend and ran to cover his ass. I sure am. A moment later a single tear rolls down her cheek, confirming my suspicion.
It crushes me from the inside. I toss the papers in my hands over the bed, and reach forward to touch her, comfort her, but as soon as the tips of my fingers touch her arm, she recoils. Her back presses against the bed-frame, as if she’d rather become one with the wood than feel me.
“If you feel anything for me, Mathew, please don’t touch me.”
My arms fall limp to the mattress. My breaking heart beats inside my throat and water pool in my eyes. It’s like we’re back to that first Saturday at The Jukebox, when all I wanted was to be close to her and all she wanted was my head on a platter. The difference, however, is that after eight months of touching her at will, the lack of contact is physically painful.
“Feel anything, L
exie? I feel everything for you.”
Emotionless eyes open, and stare straight at me. “Everything except the need for honesty and openness, right?”
I run a hand through my hair, and attempt the impossible task of breathing. “I didn’t tell you about Lea, but I’ve never lied.”
She laughs, a fake and hysterical laugh. “Do you have so little respect for me that you’re gonna try to lawyer bullshit your way out of this? Seriously? Omission is the coward’s lie, Mathew.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”
I stand up, and pace back and forth. I search my brain, trying to find some words that will make sense and won’t make me sound like an ass, but I’ve got nothing. Lexie, however, has plenty.
She goes on her knees and picks up the folder. She points it at me and screams. “Then what are you trying to do? Because all the pages in this file say that you’ve been lying to me for the past eight fucking months. So please explain, because I’m dying here.”
I comb a hand through my hair. “I didn’t mean to lie. I just really didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to forget my past, okay?”
Lexie lets go of the file, and brings her hands to cover her face. Her chest goes up and down in fast, labored breaths. She stays like that for a few minutes, and then she sits on her heels, and from the middle of the bed, looks at me. Her watery eyes seem tired and sad as she shakes her head.
“Do you think I wanted to talk about my mother?” Lexie’s voice doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. There’s no life, or light, or Lexie in it. It makes me feel as small as dust. “Do you think I wanted to talk about Leigh? What about Kyle beating the shit out of me? Do you think I wanted to talk about any of that, Mathew?”
I have nothing to say. I know that I fucked up. I fucked up bad, and I can feel the first spark of the supernova explosion happening in my core.
Broken, I kneel in front of the bed and shake my head. A tear falls from my eye at the same time as one falls from hers. “I’m just . . . I’m not that person you read about. I stopped being that guy the day we met. I didn’t want to bring that into us. I wanted a clean slate with you.”
Lexie looks at me, her breathtaking eyes cold like I’ve never seen before. She locks her jaw, and angrily wipes the tears from her eyes.
“You don’t get a clean slate here,” she yells so loud and with so much anger that it knocks my breath away. “Out there you can be Matt, the gardener with the unknown past. But here . . . here you had to be you. Here you had to be honest. Here you had to be different than all of the liars, and cheaters, and the fucking cowards I’ve known.”
I pull at my hair in frustration. “But that’s the point. The only way I could be different was by actually being different. I was a liar, a cheater, and a fucking coward. I was all of those things until the exact moment when I met you. And I was honest about that. I told you about wrecking bars, and being no good. I told you about being an asshole and never caring about anyone until you. But then you changed me.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s not. Love allows us to be who we really are, and you did that for me.”
I bring my hands up on the bed and place them near Lexie’s. It kills me, but I don’t touch her because she asked me not to. I beg for whatever force guides the universe to help her see the honesty in my eyes.
“Loving you gave me strength to be who I wanted to be. And I wanted to be the guy who loves you more than life itself. I don’t care about all the shit I cared about before, and I took responsibility for my past. I’m better because of you.”
She laughs that sarcastic laugh again. “How did you take responsibility for your past if you didn’t even acknowledge it to me?”
“I reached out to Lea. I sent her an email the night we started dating. She never replied, but I tried, and that’s the best I can do. Try.”
Lexie’s eyes open so wide they nearly pop out of her head. She fists her hands in her hair, and pushes past me as she gets up from the bed. I watch from my prostrate position as she paces for a while. Then she looks at me, shakes her head, and with a groan, storms out of the room.
Desperate, I get up from the floor, nearly tripping on my own feet, and follow her. “Where are you going?”
She doesn’t look at me. “I need air. And distance. And . . .” She turns on her heel to look at me. “Are you an idiot?”
I blink a few times, not understanding why she’s asking that, but knowing for a fact that my deer-in-the-headlights expression is answering her question with a big, fat yes.
“An email?” She closes her fists and shakes her head with anger. “The woman loses a leg. You leave her alone, and months later you send her a fucking email? And even worse, you actually believe that you’re not the asshole you were when I met you because you tried. You think that trying is actually taking responsibility for your actions? Things don’t work like that. Apologies without actions don’t mean shit.”
Lexie takes several deep breaths, and turns toward the back porch door. She takes a few steps toward it. Like a paper clip following a magnet, I walk too, but then she stops and turns to look at me.
“Oh my God, Mathew,” she blurts out those words again. “Do you think that if the little idiot who killed Leigh had written us an email apologizing, things would be okay? Do you think that if my mother had left me a letter saying she was sorry she abandoned me, things would be fine? Kyle apologized in person many times; do you think I should forgive him?”
“Those aren’t fair comparisons.”
“The hell they aren’t. It’s all the same. You’re all the same and I knew that the day I met you. I knew you were trouble. I knew you’d break my heart, but I’m stupid and you said pretty words, so I gave it to you anyways. I gave you my mended heart’s last chance. I invited you into my life, my body and my house, and you hurt me worse than anyone ever did before.”
“C’mon, love. Don’t say that,” I beg, and run a hand through my hair. Her face goes red and a vein pulses on her forehead, but I don’t let that stop me. I finally have words to say, and I’ll say them. “I know that what I did to Lea was awful. I know that it’s hard to deal with my past. I’ve done some pretty fucked up shit and I have no idea how to even try to fix it. I told you that Sunday on the beach that I suck at apologizing, but I’ll do whatever you need me to do to make things better.
“We can go to Seattle together, and I can apologize to Lea and everyone else I hurt. I can go to the cops and confess to everything. I can go to the press. I can sell all of the shit I have back home and start a charity . . . I don’t know. I’ll even chop my own leg off if you think I should. Whatever you need, I’ll do it. I’ll make things right. I’ll make them right for us.”
I’m pretty much breathless by the time I stop speaking. I’m also really hopeful that my words, and the honest intent behind them, will make Lexie see that I’m committed to redeeming my past. I’m hopeful that it’ll be enough to make her see that I’m different now.
For a really long time she just stares at me from under lowered brows. Then she taps her index finger on the side of her leg. Lexie’s thinking. My lips pull in a sad smile as I bring my hand up to tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear. The moment I do, her finger stops moving and she shakes her head.
“Do you think this is about your past, and how you’ve handled it?”
I tilt my head, confused, but nod nonetheless. Her hands come up to cover her face. Pale fingers with green nail polish press against her eyes for a moment. When her arms fall back to her sides, tears flood and fall down her cheeks. They make me hate myself.
“I don’t care what you did before you met me.” Her voice is a calm monotone. “Yes, I think you were despicable and selfish. And yes, I feel bad for Lea. Not only because of her leg, but also because those reports say you were friends and lovers for years. I feel bad because in those pictures she looked at you the way I do—like you’re gravity, and there’s no choice but to fall for you. I feel bad, because sh
e was alone when she needed you the most. But that can’t hurt me because it’s your problem, not mine. It’s a problem I would gladly have helped you deal with, if only you had included me, as partners should. But you didn’t. And that’s what hurts me.
“All I wanted was you. I knew you were an asshole for most of your life, and I didn’t judge you. I have a shitty past too, so I’d never judge anyone for his or her mistakes, let alone you. But you didn’t trust me—you didn’t love me enough to open up and let me make up my own mind about you. Instead, you gave me bits and pieces of you to love. You played and manipulated me into loving someone I don’t even know.”
I shake my head, because she does know me. She knows me better than anyone else. I take a step in her direction, and to my surprise, she doesn’t step away from me this time. Instead, she brings her hand to cup my cheek. As always, her touch feels amazing, and I lean my face into her palm.
“And the worst part of it is that I would have loved you, Mathew. If you had shown me who you really were, if you had stripped down your defenses, if you had taken down the lies and the doubt—if you had just given me a choice, I would still have loved you.”
I bring one hand up to cover hers. A knot forms in my throat as a couple of tears spill from my eyes and fall to her hand. Her free hand comes up to tuck a lock of hair behind my ear before drifting down to the back of my head. She holds me tight, curling her fingers in my hair as she inches her face toward mine.
The softest and most perfect lips I’ve ever kissed cover my own. I bring my free hand to her waist and hold her tight. My fingers dig into the soft fabric of her pajamas as our lips and tongues dance their familiar tune of lust and a deeper love than I could have ever dreamt about.
A part of me wants to rip our clothes off and show her that she’s mine, that she’ll forever be mine. But another part, the one that wins, wants to kiss her slowly and enjoy the smell of honey and vanilla, the minty taste of her mouth, her moans, and every other little detail I love about her. And I do.
The Reason I Stay Page 21