“Faye—” I made to reach for her, but she jerked backward as if my touch would scald her.
“No. Don’t do that!” she screeched. “Don’t baby me. Don’t act like I can’t take this. Like I can’t handle the truth. I know that’s what you see!”
“Faye—”
“Shut up! Just shut up!” She jerked her hands through her hair. “I see it too. Every day when I look in the mirror. I see the things he did to me. I see the scars in my skin. The one’s he gave me.” She ran shaky fingers over her face. “And the ones I gave myself.” She touched her wrist and I flinched. The scar was normal, pink and thick on her arm. Healed flesh.
But the image came back. The one of her sprawled across the bathroom floor, vomit leaking from between her lips. Blood dripping from thick slice on her arm. It was so red. So dark and endless against the white tile of the floor.
Her eyes. The same eyes that stared back at me now. They were glassy, but in a different way. Vacant in that bathroom. Gone. She had been gone when I found her. Barely holding a to the life she hadn’t wanted.
My heart twisted in my chest until I was certain it would rip apart.
“I’m sorry.” I heard myself say the words.
“You’re sorry?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t save you from him.” I didn’t know it until that moment, but I had been waiting to say those words for years. Since I found my father raping her in that bathroom just months after her attempted suicide. Since I knew the truth. I hated myself for that reason. For not being able to save her from him.
“That’s stupid.” She practically spit the words.
“I mean it.”
“Oh sure. Everyone is sorry about the things that are done. The things that can’t be changed. I’m really fucking sorry you didn’t save me either, but that doesn’t help anything does it, Rhett? It doesn’t change the fact that it happened. Over and over and over. For ten fucking years.”
“Shit, I know, Faye, I know.” I took a step forward, but she backed away from me again. “I hate myself for that. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand that those things happened to you. That I could have helped and didn’t.”
“You don’t mean that.” Her cold words were like a slap in the face.
“I mean it.”
“Great.” She mashed her lips together. “Terrific! You’re sorry I was fucked by your father. Thanks.”
“What do you want me to say, Faye?” I walked up to her, moving faster than she anticipated. I grabbed her elbows. “What do you want from me? Do you want to know how much I hate myself? How much I fucking loathe myself. Because I do, Faye. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about you. About the things that happened with my father.”
She stared up at me, her eyes jeweled, tears hiding there ready to spill. “But that’s the problem, Rhett,” she whispered, the words so quiet I could barely hear them. “That’s why we can’t go on pretending it didn’t happen. Because it did happen. Because you will always think about the things he did to me. Every day. Forever. It will never go away. Just like the things you said to me on the day six years ago, when I gave you my heart. When you stomped on it.” She shook her head. “We will always end up here. In the past.”
The tears spilled over onto her cheeks when she blinked. The little orbs were so clear against her skin. I reached up and brushed one away. The warm liquid slipped against my thumb and smeared across her skin. It smeared like her blood had on that tile floor when I found her. Like it smeared across her face in the bathroom at the hotel when I’d found my father raping her. It smeared like all the things I’d wanted to say but never had.
“I came back for you.” The words were thick, like I had a mouth full of cotton. “That day.”
“What day?”
“The last day.” I couldn’t bring myself to say it. To repeat the things I’d said to her. “The day you left.”
“W-why?”
“Because I made a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“Yes.” I brushed my fingers against her face, smearing more tears. “I shouldn’t have left.” I could remember what it felt like when I walked out the door. When I left her standing there in the middle of my apartment with that look on her face. The look that said I ruined everything. That I broke her into a million pieces. I got in my car and drove back to Sarah like a robot, feeling dead inside.
“But you did.” She took a step back and I let her go.
“But I came back. For you. I left Sarah. At dinner. I ended things.”
“You broke up with her that day?” An ashen look fell over her face. “And you came back.”
“Yes. I came back and found your note and your things.”
“I was gone.” Even though she was here with me, her mind was far away.
I nodded. “It was you, Faye. It’s always been you for me.”
Her gaze met mine again, as if my words jerked her back to the present. “Me,” she whispered. “Me? It wasn’t me when you fucked Sarah the same night you fucked me.” She took another step back. “It wasn’t me when you rubbed it in my face that you fucked her.” Her voice was louder. “It wasn’t me when you left me all alone there in your apartment. I was just a nuisance to you and to her. It was never me!”
“I came back for you.” My words sounded broken, pathetic. Like a man falling apart.
“Oh, but you came back for me! You. Came. Back! Ha!” She threw her hands up in the air. “Oh, you came back all right. That’s why a week ago I saw you for the first time in six years. Six fucking years, Rhett!” She shook her head, a disgusted look on her face. “You’re so full of shit. You never came for me.”
“You were already gone, Faye…and I just couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t what? Come after me. Find me? We both know that’s a lot of bull shit. You’d done it plenty of times prior.”
“This was different.”
“You know what, just spare me.” She turned away, but I saw it in her eyes before she did. It was just a glimpse. A look, a flash of realization in her dark irises.
She’s going to leave me.
Something inside me splintered apart with panic, with desperation.
“No, Faye, no. Wait!” I grabbed her arm and spun her around. “Don’t do this. Don’t leave. I can’t handle it again. I can’t be without you. Not now. Not when I’ve just gotten you back.”
“I can do whatever I want.”
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I pleaded. “It doesn’t. It can be different. This week…it’s been amazing. You know it has. You know it. Don’t throw this all away because I was stupid before.”
“Throw this away,” she repeated. A smirk flittered over her features. “This is nothing.”
“You know it’s not.” I didn’t care what she said. She knew this was something special. This thing between us. “You know it’s so much more than anything you’ve been a part of in your life. You know it’s not just fucking nothing.”
“It is nothing. We’re just two unfortunate people in a fucked up situation.”
My words. She was repeating my words. Words I spoke to her on that day before I walked out. The last day before six years passed.
“A fucked up situation that means nothing,” she said quietly.
I broke. I broke like a fucking flimsy piece of particleboard. The fragmented pieces that had been barely put together inside my chest splintered apart.
“No, Faye. No.” I fell to my knees. “That’s not true.” I grabbed her hand, but she jerked it away.
“It is true.”
“No, it’s not! I came back for you. I loved you then. I fucking loved you.” There they were. The words I had never been able to say. The only truth I had left in me. “But I wasn’t man enough to admit it. I wasn’t good enough for you.” She shook her head, but I didn’t stop. I inched forward on my knees and grabbed her hand again. “I fell apart after you left. I was nothing without you. Nothing.” I could feel them. The tears. T
hey pressed at my eyes. “I always thought you were the broken one back then. That you were the one who needed saving.” Her hand was smooth in mine, small and fragile. “But it was never you. It was me, Faye. It was always me that needed you.”
I can’t lose her. Not again.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
She stared down at me. The most beautiful woman I had ever met. The woman I loved. “I don’t love you.” There was pain in her eyes. But it was far away. Removed, distant. Behind the mask she greeted me with that day in her classroom. “You were right, back then.” She jerked her hand away. Her mask slipping more firmly into place. “I don’t think I ever loved you.”
“No…” My word came out as a choked sob. “No, don’t say that. Don’t…Just don’t say these things. Tell me something else. Something better. Please, Faye, fucking…just please.”
“Better?”
“Just don’t…just don’t say goodbye. Tell me you love me, Faye. Please just…just tell me.” I was someone else. There. On my wood floor on my knees before the woman I loved. I was a broken shell of a man. Desperate for love I didn’t deserve. Desperate for Faye. “Tell me you’ve loved me all along. Lie to me.” The tears came then. Great ugly waves of tears ran dripping down my face. “Don’t-don’t say goodbye.” Snot dripped from my nose. Tears splattered on the dark wood. But none of it mattered. She mattered. She was the only thing that had ever mattered.
“Goodbye, Rhett.” And she turned away and left me. Just like I left her all those years ago.
FOURTEEN
Faye.
I sat in my apartment. It had been three hours. Three hours since I left Rhett at his home. Three hours since he told me he loved me.
He loves me.
I shook my head. “He doesn’t love me,” I said aloud to my empty apartment. My TV rumbled in the background, what was on, I didn’t know. I’d only been staring at it for the last two hours.
He loves me.
“He doesn’t. He doesn’t even know me. Not really.”
He loves me.
My mind flashed to yesterday morning.
I woke up before him in his big bed. The sheets were dark blue and soft. The softest sheets I’d ever felt.
I laid there staring up at the picture over the bed. The one with him and the manatee. The one that I’d wanted to rip apart a lifetime ago. It had been taken with an underwater camera. The water was so clear. The flippers on Rhett’s feet were black and matched his wet suit. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but at the manatee next to him. I had always thought they were high-fiving. That’s what it appeared to be, but as I laid there looking up at the picture, I realized they weren’t. Rhett’s hand only appeared to be close to the large animal’s fin.
“Are you okay?”
I glanced over at Rhett who looked sexy as ever with his sleep-tousled hair. “You aren’t high-fiving the manatee?”
A frown creased his forehead before he glanced up at the picture. A smile crept across his lips. “No.”
It didn’t matter, really, what he was doing in the picture. It was just a stupid image taken years ago. But somehow it mattered to me. “Then what were you doing?”
He turned on his side and leaned against his elbow. “That’s Martha. She’s the oldest manatee at the Woodington Aquarium.” His eyes stayed focused on the picture, crinkling in the corners as his lips quirked up even more. “I was just an assistant when I worked there getting my undergrad in college. But since I loved diving so much my boss let me swim with Martha after hours. You see, Martha loved me because I would always feed her chocolate.”
I blinked. “Chocolate? Can they have that kind of thing?”
“Technically, no.” He laughed. “But one day I was eating a Reese’s by her tank and I dropped it in and she swam over and ate it before I could fish it out.”
I giggled. “Really?”
“Yes. I was terrified too. I just knew it was going to kill her or something like that.” He shook his head, his eyes going far away. “But she didn’t. She was fine. She didn’t forget that I did that though. Any time I was near her tank she was right there at the side waiting for me to drop more in.”
“So you did?” I leaned up on my elbow too.
“Well, of course. How could I say no to that face.”
I glanced back at the picture. Martha was turned almost sideways, her face toward camera. “I suppose that would be hard.”
“So I would bring her a Reese’s once or twice a week.”
“Did anyone ever know?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I never told anyone, though I always suspected my boss knew something was up, since Martha was so taken with me. So then I started swimming with her after hours whenever he would let me.”
“Was it scary?”
“I was a little nervous the first time, but no, not at all. Swimming with Martha was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever done. You see,” He sat up, pointing to the picture, “this picture was taken by my boss a couple months after I started swimming with her. He thought it was so interesting as to how she would swim with me, as if I was her friend.”
“It sounds like you were.” I stared at Rhett in awe.
He nodded. “Yes, I think we were.” He paused for a moment, still staring at the picture.
I sat up. “So you weren’t high-fiving?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, this picture was taken just before we hugged.”
“Hugged?” I looked back at the picture. “You and Martha hugged?” I could see it now, how they were in the motion to hug one another. That big animal that weighed thousands of pounds and Rhett.
He laughed. “All the time.”
I stared at him intently. “You miss it, don’t you?”
He shrugged, looking away from the picture. “Some things are just dreams. That’s all they will ever be.” He didn’t sound sad or disappointed, just neutral, okay with the choices he had made that led him away from Martha and being a marine biologist. I watched his form disappear into the bathroom and glanced back up at the poster. Wondering why my heart throbbed in my chest at the sight of it.
The vibration of my phone snapped me back to the present and away from Rhett, his soft blue sheets, and Martha.
Casey: I miss you.
I stared the text message for a good minute before I realized I was crying. They were silent tears. Not the kind that left me gasping for air and crying out. These were the tears of realization. They were tears that told me I was stupid for loving Rhett, because I did. I had never stopped loving him. They were tears that told me I had to move on. Tears that told me to leave the past where it belonged. They were the same tears that led me to respond to Casey’s message.
Me: Come over.
FIFTEEN
Rhett.
The engine hummed quietly as I sat in my car. I stared at the front door of her apartment. I’d been sitting there for thirty minutes. As soon as I’d had the ability to pull myself off the floor of my home where I’d lain for I didn’t even know for how long with Badger running circles around me. As if he didn’t realize that his master was shattered into something completely unrecognizable. Something disgusting and broken. A slovenly version of my former self.
I laid there until I realized that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t survive without her. And I knew it wasn’t just me. My love wasn’t singular. I wasn’t alone in this. I had to prove myself to her. I had to show her that this wasn’t something random. That I wasn’t just blowing words out my ass to keep her around so I could discard her later.
This was real. My feelings were real.
And I wasn’t going to let her go. Not without a fight.
I just hadn’t had the nerve go knock on her door yet. I wanted to say all the right things. I didn’t want to go in there and fuck it all up like I had at the house. I didn’t want her to see the sniveling shell of a man I had been reduced to. I wanted her to see the strong Rhett. The man who loved her. The man who wan
ted to be her future, no matter how fucked up the past was.
I took a deep breath and turned off the car.
I love her. I can do this. I can save us.
My feet moved on the concrete with purpose. I was a man on a mission. I thought about that time, after she came home from the hospital all fucked up from the things my dad had done to her. When I finally knew the truth. I would watch her sleep. It was pathetic, really. She hadn’t known I was there, in her room. That I would sneak in on those nights where the images of my father on top of her body on the bathroom floor plagued me.
I watched her because I was in awe of her. I was baffled by the fact that she had survived something so horrid, for so long. That she had survived it, and yet she could sleep. She found a way to fall into a slumber, when one view of it kept me up for months. I had watched the rise and fall of her chest, the slow movements. They were rhythmic, comforting, proof that strength existed—that she existed.
And when she would wake up with nightmares, the ones where he stalked her, where he raped her over and over again. I was desperate for her to tell me about them. Desperate for them in a way I’d never needed anything else. I had to have that pain, to share it with her. I deserved to live it, if she did. I deserved to be plagued with the images her dreams would conjure.
I had loved her then, I’d just been too stupid to realize it.
I stopped in front of her door. It was just a plain brown door, nothing special, but it was, because it was hers. I lifted my hand to knock and paused.
There were noises. Sounds. Moans. They came from behind that brown door that shouldn’t have been special and was. They belonged to her. Faint. The sound was faint. My cock awoke in my pants, stabbing into my zipper. But then there was something else, a groan. Deeper. It could only belong to a man.
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