Unbreak Me

by Alicia Cicoria

  The following week, the shop was gearing up for the upcoming car show. Bryant and I hadn’t spoken the rest of the weekend, though I was tempted to text him a few times. I didn’t want things to be weird between us, but the tension in the air covered the both of us like a black smog. And, we were expected to work together at the car show. That required talking, something neither of us were doing at the moment.

  Rejection? Yeah, I was feeling a bit of that. I kept asking myself what I had done wrong. He had done what he promised me he would. He had no other obligations to me, though I hadn’t thought he had any to start with. Maybe it was better that way.

  That box. That damned box. I couldn’t touch it since he’d dropped it off at my apartment, made me feel everything I wanted to feel again, and left. I scooted it under the coffee table, allowing myself to stare at the outside of it without revealing whatever secrets were inside. I knew there had to be plenty. But, for some reason I didn’t care at the moment.

  “Do you have everything you need, Amber?” Adam came up behind me as I was lowering a box of business cards into the trunk of one of the vehicles we were taking.

  Bryant had the duty of driving the dually that was hitched to the car trailer, while I was driving Adam’s favorite muscle car during the three-hour trip.

  “I think we’re good.” I dusted my hands and slammed the trunk down.

  I followed him back into the lobby where Cricket sat, talking to Bryant. They saw me and their conversation halted. I made a mental note to ask Cricket about it later. For now, I needed to focus on this drive that was about to kick my ass. I hated long road trips. They always left my stomach feeling more than queasy. I hoped Bryant was okay with making a few stops along the way. We were leaving in plenty enough time that we would make it in time no matter how many stops we made.

  “Ready?” Bryant turned to me, waiting for my response.

  “Yeah, let’s go.” He tossed Adam’s keys to me and lead the way out to the parking lot. I thought he might say something to me but he didn’t. He kept walking to the far end of the parking lot where the truck and trailer were parked. I chased after him and grabbed a hold of his arm. He stopped and looked down at my hand on his arm and then up to me.

  “I’m sorry.” I sputtered, letting my hand fall away from his skin.

  He hitched one of his eyebrows up as if having no clue to what I was referring to. “Forrrrr….?”

  His one word seemed to drag on forever while I thought of what I was going to say next. “I’m sorry for kissing you.” I shoved my hands into my back pockets and rocked on my heels. Now that I had said it, it sounded so stupid. I was sorry for kissing him?

  He was wearing sunglasses so I couldn’t read what he was thinking or feeling. As if on cue, he raised them to rest on top of his head.

  In the sunlight, the specks of brown stood out and complimented the dark green color of his eyes. “You don’t have to be sorry, Amberly.”

  “Yes, I do. You’ve been ignoring me all week when just last week, your hands were all over me. I can assume that I shouldn’t have kissed you.”

  “Have you looked in the box?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No.”

  He tried to walk away but I got in front of him and held my hands against his chest. “Why do you keep trying to walk away?”

  His jaw clenched and he pulled his lips in before releasing them so he could speak. “Amberly, I made a promise to you. A promise that’s only going to get muddy if we keep letting our emotions get the best of us.”

  “What if I want our emotions to overshadow everything else?” I protested, trying to reason with him that I could handle it. That everything I had wanted before no longer mattered.

  He turned his head to the left and looked to the distance, as if that would give him whatever answers he needed to relay back to me. “You and I both know that’s not what you want or need right now.” Another tick of his jaw. He looked at me then. I could see the tears forming. “Amberly, you are the strongest fucking woman I’ve ever met. To overcome all you’ve had to go through is amazing to see. The one thing you’re lacking is confidence. You lost that confidence the day you let yourself believe that you let Haylie down. I’d be an asshole to not give you that confidence back. From the day you had to let her go, you’ve wanted to give her the justice she deserves. I can’t stand in the way of what your heart set out to do from day one. Go through that box. Let it lead you to the answers you’re searching for. When that’s done then we can figure out what this is between us. For all we know this could be a physical attraction that even effort won’t hold together. Until both of our shit is sorted out, it’s a bad idea to let reason fall behind emotions.”

  I let him go this time and walked to Adam’s car. As soon as I turned the key the most appropriate song came through.

  Are we written in the stars baby, or are we written in the sand?

  Chapter 14

  How Not To

  Bryant

  My own words haunted me during the drive to Texas. I didn’t want anything from her. I’d said that same thing the other night. I had meant it. Wanting her was selfish, but hell if I didn’t want to be selfish right now. I convinced myself she needed me. Then, reality hit, and I knew what she needed was closure. I would get in the way of that. I didn’t know how not to want more for myself while I was giving her all of me. I didn’t know how to walk away. I’d spent all week mulling over every little detail of the time we had spent together. I prepped myself every morning before I stepped through the doors of Skrillex, giving myself a pep talk of how our exchanges needed to stay professional. The entire week had been hell, and I had almost told Adam I couldn’t make the show because I was sick. I didn’t trust myself to be alone with her. I figured if I kept my distance she would do the same. We could pretend the previous kisses, touches, everything had never happened.

  No, it happened and I didn’t want to take it back. I wanted to repeat it, over and over again. I wanted to pull her close to me and feel her body quiver against my touch. I wanted to hear her breathing become shallow and see her swallow down her fear.

  I hadn’t been looking for a damn thing when my divorce was finalized. Amberly became an equation to a problem I didn’t know I had. Fate? Maybe. I hadn’t believed in fate. Not after my divorce. I had believed that fate brought Mac and I together and when she filed for divorce, I obliterated every thought that fate even existed. God, then a woman who I hadn’t seen in so long walked in and made me forget what road I planned to travel. But if that wasn’t fate what was it? Why the fuck was Amberly Hodge in my life then? Was I supposed to help her heal? Was I even capable of doing that when I couldn’t think when she was around? When I wanted her for myself? When all I wanted to do was be around her even if she needed space to find herself again?

  I turned the radio up, drowning my own thoughts to suffocation. I was still pissed over what Lucas had told me Friday night. I wasn’t even mad at Amberly. I had pretended to be so maybe what I made her feel, she would forget about. It wasn’t as if she had intentionally appeared in my life. She didn’t ask for any of what she’d gone through. She was shattered and Cricket warned me, but I knew Cricket was also rooting for me. I was deflecting the real issue at hand.

  Lucas did some digging and found that Sadie Wilcox was a girl that Mac had been messing around with. He was equipped with evidence as well. Footage from a nearby mall confirmed what he was telling me. According to the evidence, Mac and Sadie were still involved, despite Mac’s relationship with my best friend, Ian. Well, ex-best friend.

  The news didn’t surprise me, it would have surprised me more if someone told me she hadn’t been messing around. Mac was never satisfied, and I had come to the conclusion that our divorce was all her. She wanted more, sometimes bringing women home from the bars she frequented. I had to sit on the couch in the living room and act like it wasn’t happening. The moans that came from the bedroom were unavoidable, unless I wanted to stand outside and wait it out. When t
he women left, I got to lay down beside her. She always fell asleep afterward. Our sex life diminished down to once a month. Weeks would go by before a light in her brain would go off that reminded her she still had a husband and hadn’t pleasured him in a while.

  As time dragged by, it became nearly impossible for her to get me hard. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I had become numb, half of the man I had once been. I blamed myself but kept up the façade that we were some happy married couple with no issues to the outside.

  Lucas said he would do some more digging to see if he could get Sadie to admit to planting the drugs. I told Lucas to do what he had to do, but I wasn’t as interested in going back to the police station to work. I was becoming attached to my new position. I’d take it one day at a time. If I was supposed to be there, I would be. Maybe I would have never gotten fired. A fleeting thought entered my mind. What if Mac had put Sadie up to it? That would make the most sense out of anything in my life. I couldn’t stop the thoughts. I played different scenes in my head, some made sense, others were so far-fetched it was unbelievable. It kept me busy during the long, boring drive.

  After five stops, we made it to our destination. We were supposed to get a hotel room for the night and head over to the show first thing in the morning. I got out of the truck and stretched my legs, while reaching up to the sky in an effort to stretch the tightened muscles in my back.

  “I’ll go get the cards for our rooms, you can start getting the luggage out.” Amberly said, locking the door to the car before taking off to the lobby of the hotel.

  Her tone of voice told me she was angry. I was sure she had thought about what I’d said the entire way down here. Without doubt she’d read between the lines, finding fault with what I had said to her. I tried to do the right thing.

  I lifted our luggage out of the back of the truck and rolled them behind me as I headed for the lobby. Two doors opened as I got closer. I swept passed them and sat the bags right behind Amberly.

  “What do you mean there’s only one room?” Amberly’s voice was frantic, laced with hostility.

  The woman behind the counter stumbled through her words, sounding incoherent as she tried to explain. “Mr. Levy only booked one room, not two.”

  Amberly pitched a fit and started to dig out her wallet. “Fine, I’ll pay for the other one and he can reimburse me later.” She slapped the bills down on the counter, making the receptionist flinch.

  The poor girl couldn’t have been older than nineteen. I cleared the bills from the counter and handed them back to Amberly. “Save your money.”

  She turned around, pinning me with a death glare. “I’m not sharing a room with you.”

  “Look, let's just take the luggage to this room, and we can call Adam to see if he can book another room.”

  The girl lifted a hand in the air as though she were asking my permission to speak. Amberly turned back to her and she began speaking, her voice stammering through the words. “I’m sorry, we don’t have another room to book. They’re all full.”

  “What the hell is this? Disneyland?” Amberly puffed, and her words bounced off the walls of the hotel. She acquired the stares of an elderly couple in the lobby who were enjoying brunch.

  I tried to shush her but she ignored my request. “Seriously, I want to speak to a manager. I fail to see how my boss made such a colossal mistake. There’s no way he would have booked one room.”

  I turned her around to face me, both of my hands grasping her shoulders. “Amberly, it’s not that big of a deal. We will be okay in one room. I’m sure it was an honest mistake.”

  “You always book one room.” The receptionist chimed in. At that point I wanted to throw something at her. She was going to make it worse before I had the chance to defuse the situation.

  Amberly pushed my hands off of her. “Yes, we always book one room. This year a guy came in place of Cricket, so we need two rooms.”

  “That’s not necessary.” I swiped the card keys from the desk and started towards the elevators. Our room was on the second floor. Either Amberly was going to follow me or she wasn’t.

  “I’m not sharing a room with you.” She argued when the doors to the elevator closed.

  I didn’t say a thing until we got to our floor. “It’ll be like I’m not even there.”

  “Please. You’re nearly six-foot-tall, how can I pretend you’re not in the room with me? Who knows, maybe you will keep me up all night. How do I know you don’t snore in your sleep?”

  I chuckled as I jammed the key card into the slot and pushed the door. I held it open for Amberly. She entered and threw herself onto the bed. “I don’t snore in my sleep.” I offered, shoving the bags into the closet of the room.

  She covered her face with her forearms, her legs dangling down the bed.

  “Amberly.”

  “Hmm.” She answered, not removing herself from the bed or her arms from her face.

  I ran a palm over the top of my head before I spoke again. I couldn’t predict if my words would disintegrate her mood, but I hoped they would. “I’m sorry for earlier.” There was too much silence in the room. “Fuck. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to do what you need, trying to be what you need. I’ve been trying all week to pretend nothing ever happened between us because we’re both so fucked up that I don’t think either one of us know what we need. I may pretend that nothing happened but that’s not what I want. I want to remember everything, and I don’t want to feel guilty that’s how I feel. But I do.” I rubbed my palms together before crossing my arms across my chest. There. I said it. I admitted, in a round-a-bout way, that I wanted her.

  She let her arms fall to her sides and, using her elbows, she propped up to look at me. “Why would you pretend that nothing happened?” She questioned, her voice breaking.

  I exhaled and dropped my arms, twisting the desk chair in the room around so I could straddle it. “Because, I’m distracting you.”

  She pushed herself up and paced back and forth in the room.

  “There is no easy way to say this, but I’m going to try.” She inhaled a deep breath. “The day Haylie died was the day I found out my husband had been having an affair. I walked in on the two of them. So, I practically lost my daughter and my husband the same day. He wasn’t dead, but he might as well have been. He became dead to me after that. He shattered my existence and I felt I had nothing else to live for. I haven’t even so much as looked at another guy since that day. I’m not sure why. I wanted to focus on school and myself for a while before I even thought of trying to date again. And then you,” She paused using one hand to glide up and down through the air at me, “show up and confuse the shit out of me. You make me question the path I’m on. You make me want to forget everything bad that’s happened in my life. Bryant, you’re not distracting me. You’re the reason I even started considering fighting for Haylie again. If anything, you’re the strength I never had.”

  I lifted myself from the chair. “Isn’t it a good thing if you forget the bad?” I held my hands out to her.

  “No. No. No, it’s not. It’s a bad thing. A very bad thing. I need to feel and remember the bad in my life. I can never forget her, Bryant. She was my entire world. She still is. Maybe I can’t do the whole relationship thing right now, maybe I can. I’m just trying to get through all of this and the only way I know how to do that is to follow my heart.”

  She stood up, her hands flying to her head as if it hurt physically to explain it to me.

  I pulled her down to the hotel bed and made her sit down while I kneeled in front of her. “Amberly, Haylie wants you to move on. She wants you to follow your heart. Remember what we talked about at the grave yard? Keep that in mind. You won’t forget her just because you try to find happiness. In fact, you need happiness. Whatever makes you happy, even if it's not me, you have to go for it. You can’t keep living in the past.”

  She burst into tears, her hands shielding her face from me. I pried them away and made her look at
me. “I have to live in the past because that’s where she is. I don’t want to be in a world where she’s not.” Sobs racked her body.

  I stood up and pulled her into me, smoothing down pieces of her hair as she cried into my shoulder.

  “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” I repeated the words until her cries were exhausted.

  When she settled down she pulled away and looked at me. I wiped away a few tears from her face. “What if happiness is with you? What if you walk away and take my strength with you?”

  “Amberly, whatever strength I gave you, I’ll never take away. You had a goal in mind before I came into the picture. I don’t want you to forget what that was because I showed up. I can’t be the reason you give up on that.”

  “What if you’re the reason I don’t?”

  Chapter 15

  Playing With Fire

  Amberly

  Silence penetrated the room, crawling into existence, uninvited. The beating of my heart became volatile, as if it would explode at any second. I’d never said something so bold before. I could feel the initial strength he had given me slip away, no way of grasping it or coaxing it back to me, when we were apart. Each time we spent around each other it came back full force. I knew he believed in me, in a way that made me believe in myself.

  I could feel how his heart slammed against his chest, confirming that we were both playing with fire. I couldn’t even speak, every vowel catching at the base of my throat, sticking like a web to create a barrier. We stood there, staring at each other. I didn’t doubt he could feel my heart as well, almost as if both of them wanted to be closer than what we were allowing.

  I licked my lips, waiting for one of us to be able to say something. Anything. It’s as though the world stopped as the minutes ticked by in slow motion, almost creating an alternate universe where seconds lasted for minutes and minutes for hours. I closed my eyes and lowered my head, letting my confession replay in my mind, wondering if I should take it back. At this point it was becoming uncomfortable. I wanted to know every thought that was crossing through his mind from the moment his words ended and my own began.