“I, for one, am not about to tempt fate twice,” he declared. “Now let’s go get lunch.”
Chapter Sixteen
Matthew and I had killed all of the time we could. We had eaten a long, leisurely lunch at our favorite Italian restaurant, then headed over to the outdoor mall nearby for some window shopping. We hadn’t been looking for anything in particular, we just didn’t want to go back to either of our places prior to heading over to Blake’s. Staying in public was crucial if we were going to keep ourselves from ripping each other’s clothes off.
I was still apprehensive about showing up on Blake’s doorstep unannounced. Matthew did his best to assure me that she would welcome me with open arms, but I still wasn’t sure. He reminded me that she hadn’t cashed the check I’d left on the counter, nor had she hounded me at work after the initial phone call she’d made. Both were good points, but I didn’t think they guaranteed that she would simply smile at me and pretend that the last five months were just water under the bridge.
“Why not?” Matthew asked in all seriousness from the passenger seat as we headed to my former home. “We were able to work things out fairly quickly.”
I checked to make sure the path ahead of us was clear before turning to him in disbelief. “If you remember correctly, we were well on our way to another screaming match until you grabbed me and kissed me. I seriously doubt that I can employ that tactic on her.”
“Though it might be fun to watch you try,” he mused.
I reached over and punched him in the shoulder. “Now I see why Blake hits you so much.”
“Ow,” he whined dramatically, rubbing the affected area.
“Can I ask you something?” I changed subjects quickly, my eyes turning back to the road.
“Anything.”
“After I moved out,” I involuntarily winced again as there really was no good way to phrase the truth that I had walked out on him and his sister, “did you talk to Gracie at all? And by talk, I mean on the phone, in person, text, email, anything.”
“No.” His answer was simple and immediate. It was also the same account that Gracie had given me. “Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason.”
“Come on, out with it.”
“She was just adamant that you were in love with me. I half expected her to set up an intervention on your behalf.”
“Gracie is incredibly perceptive.”
“What did you talk about in the car on Thanksgiving?”
“How big of a douchebag Eric is.”
I laughed, letting the matter drop. Somehow I didn’t think I was getting the whole story or that I ever would. But I would let them have their secret conversation; in the grand scheme of things it just wasn’t that important.
“And what did you and my dad talk about?”
“How wonderful of a daughter he raised.”
I blushed despite myself. Again I knew there were things left unsaid, but that was still okay. Whatever he had discussed with two of the other most important people in my life, it had cemented him in their good standing.
We pulled into Blake’s driveway and I automatically navigated the Mustang as if I was pulling into my usual spot in the garage. Obviously I wasn’t though, and with a nervous laugh I parked. My hands trembled as I killed the engine and took the keys out of the ignition.
“You’ll be just fine,” Matthew smiled, reaching over and steadying my wrist.
I nodded weakly and he was gone, rushing around the back of the car to open my door for me before I could react. He extended his hand to help me up and didn’t let go once I had exited. I attempted to give him back his keys, but he refused to take them from me.
“You do the honors,” he persuaded when we reached the door. Matthew, of course, had his own key to Blake’s house so it was unnecessary for us to ring the doorbell to announce our arrival. Or at least he didn’t need to ring the doorbell. I, on the other hand, should probably have called or sent an email first.
I hesitated, the key hovering in the air as I lifted it to the deadbolt.
“Come on,” he urged, his tone filled with encouragement rather than annoyance.
I closed my eyes and inserted the key. Operating on feel only, I turned it until I heard the deadbolt retract. Pleased with myself, I pried open one eye and continued down to the doorknob. The lock turned easily and I opened the door.
“Welcome home,” Matthew said softly.
I stood frozen in the threshold, half expecting to burst into flames. Everything was just as I remembered it being when I left, as if it had been preserved in a museum. I stepped inside and took everything in for a moment. From down the hallway, I could hear Blake blow drying her hair.
Then I smelled the smoke. Once I realized that it was not coming from where I stood, I hightailed it to the kitchen. So much for my walk down memory lane.
“Damn it, Blake,” I muttered as I propped open the oven door.
My culinary instincts were still surprisingly well intact, and I got to the culprit before it really caught ablaze and set off the smoke detector. However, I wasn’t skilled enough to determine what she had been attempting to make.
I grabbed a pot holder and set the offending dish down on a cooling rack. Matthew and I hovered around it, poking at it as if we were conducting some sort of autopsy.
“What do you think it is?” I whispered, not wanting to speak ill of the dead.
“I have no idea, but I’m really glad we aren’t eating it.”
“Me, too.”
Instinctively, I threw open the refrigerator door to determine if there was anything that I could put together to salvage her attempt at providing a home cooked meal. Her kitchen was only marginally better stocked than my own. My hand was on the handle of a gallon of milk, prepared to move it out of the way to investigate what was behind it, when I felt Blake’s presence enter the room. I froze, my head still inside the fridge.
“Hey, sunshine,” Matthew said, confirming my intuition.
“Hey, dork,” she greeted, her musical voice filling the room.
She hadn’t noticed me yet, and I wasn’t keen on drawing attention to myself. As they hugged – I didn’t witness it, only assumed it because that’s just what they did when they saw each other – I contemplated crawling inside the mostly empty fridge and hiding. I was pretty small; if I kicked off my tall shoes and got creative, perhaps there was a way that I could make it possible.
“So I take it you had a good night last night?” she continued, still completely oblivious to my being there. Her tone reminded me of how Regina had sounded this morning when I’d left my house with Matthew in tow. She wanted details.
“You could say that,” Matthew hedged. I could almost hear him turning red. I wondered if it was commonplace for the siblings to trade stories of their conquests. If it was, I thanked him silently for not doing so while I was within hearing distance.
With a sigh, I closed the refrigerator door. There was only so much cover that the appliance could provide and besides, my bare shoulders were getting cold. With the floor plan of the kitchen, if she would have turned her head slightly she would have seen me right away, but she hadn’t. I had just been lucky thus far to go unnoticed.
As if nothing was out of the ordinary, I walked right past the two of them and perched on my usual stool at the breakfast bar. On the outside I might have looked calm and collected, but inside I was shaking.
“Your dinner’s burnt,” I told her, stupidly pointing to the dish on the counter while mentally slapping myself.
Matthew snorted. Blake stood in silent disbelief for a moment and I stared right back. She was as beautiful as ever, the feminine equal to her brother. Her blond hair fell in smooth tendrils over her shoulders, a tiny piece of it towards the front dyed an ocean blue that matched the color of her eyes. Her tall, athletic frame was clothed in a gauzy floral tank top and a pair of black capris. She was barefoot and my eyes were drawn to her polished toes, painted a bright shade of pink. As was
typical for her, she was a cross between a porcelain doll and a model, provided either one of those two could get away with rocking a nose ring.
Many things flashed through her blue eyes in a very short amount of time. It was like she was processing the whole entire five months since we’d last seen each other in a split second. A look of understanding washed over her features, and I knew that she knew I was the one that Matthew had spent the night with.
“It’s about damn time,” she said at last, crossing the distance between us to engulf me in my own hug.
When she pulled away, her eyes were damp and she wiped at them as discreetly as possible. She had always been like me, never one to cry. Or at least I had been like that. All of the tumult I’d experienced recently had changed that for me, and I wondered if I would ever go back to being stoic. I wondered if my leaving had changed her, too.
“What happened to your head?” she asked, obviously referring to my scar.
My hand flew self-consciously to my forehead even as heat entered my cheeks. So much for Gracie’s reassurance that nobody would notice; everyone had. Perhaps I should have gotten stitches.
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t make a good functioning alcoholic,” I quipped.
She settled onto the bar stool beside me, rubbing her hands together expectantly like she couldn’t believe I was really there. Matthew sat down on her opposite side and it reminded me of old times. Times when I hadn’t disappeared on both of them, times when I hadn’t been sleeping with her brother.
“You’re not mad?” I asked quietly.
Her eyebrow raised. “About what?”
Even I wasn’t sure what I meant. There were so many transgressions I could have been talking about. So many reasons for her to not want me here.
“Any of it.”
She bit her lip and I could almost see the wheels spinning in her head as she contemplated how to answer. If she told me no, I knew she’d be lying. If she said yes, she’d risk hurting my feelings.
“I’m not sure that mad would be the correct word for what I am,” she mused finally.
“Fair enough.”
An awkward silence fell between us. Blake eyed the contents of what would have been dinner warily in an attempt to look busy. I stared at my hands. It wasn’t going as badly as I’d feared, but that wasn’t saying much. At least I’d gotten a hug, but once she’d composed herself, I felt her reluctance to move the reconciliation along further.
Matthew broke the tension in the room by announcing that he would go grab us a pizza; he’d order it on the way there. He rose from his stool and I started to stand to join him, but he placed his hand on my shoulder and firmly pushed me back down. I shot him daggers with my eyes, but he just shook his head. Without another word, he walked away. The front door closed gently behind him. He had left me stranded here, in effect staging the ninja intervention that I had so desperately wanted to avoid.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, not knowing what else to say.
“You hurt him,” she said quietly. “Just like you hurt me.”
Her accusations stung, even though I knew they were true.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, “what else was I supposed to do?”
“You could have tried talking to me instead of just disappearing in the middle of the night.”
“And what could I have said, Blake, that would have made things better? What would have been a better way to approach it? To tell you how much in love with your brother that I was? To admit to you that I had gone over to his house and kissed him only to have him reject me?”
“He was the one that kissed you. What makes you think that he rejected you when he was the one that initiated it?”
Frustrated, I slammed my fist against the granite countertop. “That’s not what happened. That’s his version of the story, created to protect me. I see that did a whole lot of good. It only ended up making me look more like a bitch than I really am.”
“Fine, then. What really happened that night?”
“That’s pretty much it. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I had this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that if I said yes to Eric’s proposal that I would be settling. I guess I thought that if I could get Matthew to confirm that he had feelings for me that I wouldn’t be crazy. So we talked for a little while, and it wasn’t any help. If anything, Matthew tried to push me away. Then I got desperate and I grabbed him and kissed him. That was when I knew I wasn’t making things up.”
Blake sat silently on the bar stool, taking it all in. Her expression was blank; it was impossible for me to tell what she was thinking.
“In that span of time when Matthew and I were kissing,” I forged on, “so much became clear for me. Eric could never give me that kind of passion, that intensity, that fairy tale ending that I wanted. Sure he could give me safety, predictability. He could buy me pretty much anything I wanted within reason, but he would never love me the way I wanted him to. Ours would always be an empty relationship.”
“So you decided to break up with Eric then? I still don’t get it.”
“I decided that I was hopelessly in love with your brother then. That all the signs, all the signals that I had been ignoring since the very beginning had always been there, trying to tell me something. That when he kissed me back, which he did, it felt like I was floating on top of the world, like I was finally home.”
I paused, my voice breaking on the last word as I remembered what had come next.
“Then he pushed me away in earnest this time and told me we couldn’t do that. That we were being stupid, that we would end up regretting what we had done. I was beyond embarrassed. So I ran.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I was home that night; I saw you come in. God, Lauren, I even came up after you but you had locked your door.”
“I couldn’t come between you. I couldn’t ask you to choose sides any more than I could expect you to remain impartial. And I couldn’t live here, knowing that he would be over all of the time. Don’t you see? Even if I had run down to Indianapolis that night and told Eric it was over, it wouldn’t have fixed things here. Because Matthew didn’t want me and I couldn’t be reminded of that every single day of my life.”
Blake sighed. “But you were anyway, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “But I didn’t have to see him. And that much helped, I guess.”
“And you couldn’t have told me this then? You couldn’t have explained yourself before you left?”
It was my turn to bite my lip. “I didn’t think you would care. Or I was afraid that you would. I’m not sure which one would have been worse.”
“Of course I would care. You were my friend, not just my roommate. And you discounted that by leaving a check on the counter before you left, like all I would ever have cared about was the money you thought you owed me.”
“You would have picked him over me any day of the week. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have. You who gave me the lectures about not hurting him. You who told me not to start something I couldn’t finish. I didn’t take your advice, but I was the one who got hurt. I didn’t need your sympathy, or for you to say ‘I told you so’.”
She smiled sadly. “So you’d rather I’d believe a lie, that you and Eric were still together, rather than knowing the truth?”
“If it was that truth, then yes.”
“Oh, Lauren.” She closed her eyes.
I looked sheepishly down at my hands, my fingers twisting nervously in my lap.
“How bad was it?” I whispered.
Her eyes fluttered open and I saw her struggling yet again to come up with the appropriate answer.
“Please tell me.”
She sighed heavily. “I’ve never seen him like that before. It was like he had completely shut down from the world. I knew he wasn’t telling me everything; I prayed that he was telling Chris. I hoped that Chris would be able to help him. I hoped that if things got bad enough, he’d find a way to clue me in.”
“I think he d
id tell Chris some things. He pretty much told me that Chris doesn’t think very highly of me anymore, if he ever did.”
Blake’s eyes hardened. “Chris doesn’t think highly of anyone except for Matthew.”
“But you still love him anyway.”
I knew I had overstepped my boundaries the moment the words had exited my lips. I hadn’t meant to offend her; I didn’t even know where that line of thinking had come from. Yet, as she mulled it over in her head, I could see that my sentiment wasn’t far from the truth.
“This isn’t about me and Chris,” she said calmly, “and you don’t get to psychoanalyze me. There are things that you don’t know – that nobody knows – and it’s not the same.”
“Fine. Just forget I said anything.”
“I was at a loss to even know what to say to him,” she continued, “and we share almost everything, so I’ve never had that happen before. I just kept calling, texting, coming over, making sure that he was still functioning. He just shut me out and nothing I said changed things.”
“I never meant to hurt him like that,” I admitted, “that’s why I left in the first place. I didn’t want him to see what his rejection had done to me. I didn’t want him to feel guilty. I didn’t want him to walk on eggshells around me. I didn’t want to be the butt of some joke.”
“The first few weeks were the hardest. After that, I think we both just tried to pretend that nothing happened. But it was always present, you know?”
I snorted. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Letting you go was the hardest thing he’d ever done. It completely shattered him.”
I remembered back to the night that Eric had shown up on Blake’s doorstep during Matthew’s birthday party. How he had professed his love to me and proposed in one well orchestrated motion. How I had witnessed something die inside Matthew as he had turned to usher Blake out of the room to allow us our privacy. The damage had already been done; Eric had won the battle. At that point, Matthew had given up any notion of fighting for me. As composed as he had been on the outside the following night, he had been broken inside. And I had failed to see it; I had failed him.
Shattered Page 14