But if Benny and Helen were to get a divorce, Yuriel would side with Benny without question. It was just the way things went. When a couple split, the friends got split, too, and Yuriel had been Benny's friend long before they even knew Helen existed.
"'m sorry, man," Yuriel said, figuring he had to say something.
Benny shrugged, acting as if it wasn't bothering him, but Yuriel knew him too well and could see the pain in his eyes that he was in. "Nothing lasts forever," he said.
Jessie returned with their drinks and took their lunch orders – cheeseburgers for both of them – before they were left alone again.
"What are you reading?" Benny asked, changing the subject, reaching over and taking one of the books from the stack. He only glanced at the title before looking up at Yuriel again with a cocked eyebrow in a silent question.
Yuriel shrugged. "Just want to understand it, I guess," he said.
"And you can't ask her?" Benny asked.
Yuriel shook his head. No, he couldn't ask Alison. He knew she would probably tell him if he did but he didn't want her to have to think about it. She had to think about it every day – writing every morsel of food she put into her mouth down in her journal, keeping track so she could know she was getting enough throughout the day – and when she was him, he didn't want her to think about it. He just wanted her to be Alison. Pretty Alison with her soft smiles and happy laughter and her sweet songs. When she was with him, he didn't want her to have to think about scales or weight or how everyone either avoided her or treated her like she was some damn China doll, ready to break at any second.
But he did have questions. He couldn't help it. There was so much about her eating disorder that he just didn't get. It had given her a need to have everything neat and clean around her and she seemed to always be cold, even in ninety-degree heat, and he couldn't help it anymore. He was curious and he wanted to at least understand a little bit because to him, starving yourself and going hungry when you didn't have to was completely beyond his understanding. When he was a kid and had gone to bed at night with pains in his stomach so severe, he had almost wanted to cry, he would have given anything for the chance to eat three meals a day. When he was a kid – and still now, he guessed – food had been everything to him.
It was Monday and he had gone to the library, asking Mary Jane for help on finding him some books to read, and he was already trying to figure out how to hide them from Alison in their tiny trailer. He didn't want her to know he was reading things like this in case she took it the wrong way and got hurt or insulted.
And now, just a couple of chapters into the first one, a part of him was regretting getting these books. Anorexia was a mental disease and as the author dove into the psychology behind one starving themselves, Yuriel just thought of Alison, younger and being in the same mindset enough to do this to herself and he couldn't imagine the Alison he knew now doing this to herself. It just didn't add up in his head.
"Here we are, guys," Jessie announced, carrying there tray of food. "Benny. Cheeseburger. Nothing on it. Yuriel, cheeseburger. Lettuce, tomato and pickle. No onion," she said as she set each plate down in front of them.
"Thanks, Jessie," Benny smiled at her and Jessie smiled in return before her eyes moved over to Yuriel but he was pouring ketchup over his fries and not looking at her or even paying attention.
"Let me know if you guys need anything else," she said with one more smile before turning and walking away.
Benny smirked, looking to Yuriel. "She knows you living with your girlfriend?"
Yuriel shrugged, not even twitching at the use of the word girlfriend towards Alison. They hadn't talked about it but if she wasn't that then what the hell was she? She loved him and they lived together and he was pretty damn fond of her. They didn't have to have a conversation to decide they were in a relationship together. They already knew that. It was pretty damn obvious they were.
"Small town. 'm sure she knows," Yuriel said, picking up the burger with both hands.
"Where is Alison today?" Benny asked.
"Went to the farm. Guess one of the sheep is ready to give birth and her popsand sister needed her help," Yuriel answered before taking a large bite of the burger.
He looked to the stack of books for a moment. Just having them around, it made him uncomfortable but he didn't want to return them. He wanted to keep reading and learning because even after living with Alison for a couple of months, he still had no clue about any of this and unfortunately, it was a part of who Alison was and he wanted to know all there was to know about her. He knew, eventually, he would have to tell her some more things about himself but he wasn't ready for that yet and Alison wasn't pushing him to tell her anything. They were both moving at the same slow speed and he was relieved they were on the same page without a discussion.
He looked back to Benny. "So, what are you gonna do?" He asked. "'bout Helen?"
Benny sighed and avoided the question for a moment as he took a sip of his coffee. "Guess we could always go to therapy or something if we decide to work it out. I don't know if I want to work it out though. It's hard to imagine. Being inside of my wife when I know I haven't been the only man in there since our wedding."
Yuriel inwardly cringed. He didn't really want to think about the inside of Helen. Ever.
He let out a grunt and took another bite of his burger. "You know who the guy is?"
Benny shook his head. "No. And I don't know if I really want to know either. Either I know the guy and I'd want to kill him or I don't know him and I'd still want to kill him." He dunked a French fry in some ketchup and brought it to his mouth. "So what are you and Alison going to do?" He asked with a sly grin.
"'bout what?" Yuriel couldn't help but frown.
Benny snickered. "You making a commitment to her?"
"We live together and she knows I'm not doin' anythin' else with anyone else," Yuriel kept frowning. "And I know she's not doin' anythin' either."
Benny's smile faded a little and he looked at Yuriel with a serious stare. "That's good, Yuriel. I'm happy for you. At least one of us isn't completely failing when it comes to women," he said.
"You didn' fail anythin'," Yuriel said quietly. "It's Helen that's sleepin' around."
"Yeah…" Benny nodded his head slowly. "Courts usually give custody to the mom."
"So, you're filin'?" Yuriel looked at him as Benny sighed heavily.
"I think so. I don't really want to work on something that's she already checked out of," he said and Yuriel nodded, getting that. "I still love her though. That's what's really shitty about the whole thing. I still love her and she obviously doesn't love me." He smirked bitterly and shook his head at himself before taking another sip of coffee.
Yuriel was quiet, taking another bite of burger. He had absolutely no idea what to say. Benny was his best friend and was always there to listen to Benny when he needed to talk but he never knew what to say in return. Especially about things like this. What the hell did he know about love and relationships? He was closer to forty than thirty and found himself with a woman in a relationship for the first time in his life. He had no idea what he was doing most days and had taken the habit of just following Alison's lead and picking things up from her.
Yuriel took a sip of his Coke. "If you want, I can give Carlos a call. We can go to a strip club or somethin'. Distract you for a while."
He had said it as a joke though he knew that even though Carlos was married and happy with Annie, he took strip clubs very seriously and if one was mentioned, he never saw it as a joke. And he had been to his fair share of strip clubs in his life – always with Carlos dragging him – but he hardly paid attention to any of the girls, usually just sitting at the bar and drinking as Carlos nearly got them kicked out.
Benny snickered at that and even though he shook his head, he said, "Yeah. Sounds good," he said and Yuriel gave a single head nod.
He may have been new to this whole relationship thing but he did know that if he
was going to a strip club, he would definitely have to tell Alison.
…
He had stowed the books into the bag on the side of his bike for the time being and after going to the house and after Lawrence telling him that Alison was in the barn, he headed in that direction. She was sitting in some hay, a newborn baby lamb in her arms, and she was holding a bottle of warm milk, letting the lamb suckle from it.
"Hey," Alison smiled at him as he approached but he noticed the sadness in her eyes.
"Wha's wrong?" He asked, lowering himself into the hay beside her.
"The mama rejected him for some reason," Alison said and looked down to the lamb, smiling faintly as she did so. "I told daddy I'll be the one to take care of him."
Yuriel didn't know what to say so he just sat quietly and watched Alison as she fed the lamb, singing a soft song to the animal, something about never being able to take something away from a person. He didn't know. He hardly ever knew any of the songs she sang. He just knew that he really liked it when she sang. Alison Silver had the prettiest voice he had ever heard.
"If you want, I can build somethin' for 'im at the trailer," Yuriel offered and Alison instantly stopped singing, her head whipping over to look at him. He shrugged his shoulders. "A pen or somethin'. Little shed for 'im to live in."
Alison looked at him for a moment and then she broke into the softest smile he had ever seen. "Just when I think I can't love you any more than I already do," she told him in a soft voice that made the tips of his ears turn red. She leaned in then and he met her lips halfway, the kiss soft and brief but it made his lips tingle as always.
She looked back down to the baby lamb and began singing again and Yuriel couldn't help but stare at her, thinking of what he had read in the book that morning. Stuff about loss of bone mass and low white-blood cell counts that left her more open to infections and sickness than most people.
But the most life-threatening damage is usually the havoc wreaked on the heart. As the body loses muscle mass, it loses heart muscle at a preferential rate - so the heart gets smaller and weaker.
He heard those words in his brain as he had read them and committed them to memory as soon as he did. He wished he had the ability to look into Alison's chest right now so he could see her heart; see that it was beating and it wasn't going to stop anytime soon. It had scared the shit out of him as soon as he had read that paragraph. Some singer, Karen Carpenter, had died because she had anorexia and her heart had grown too weak and had just stopped working.
Was that going to happen to Alison? Was he just going to wake up one day and look at her next to him and find out that her heart had stopped sometime during the night without him realizing that? One day, would she just die and there would be no way to stop it? He had gone so much of his life without her but now that she was here, he didn't know what he would do if she suddenly wasn't anymore.
"Hey," she suddenly nudged him gently with her elbow and looked at him with a smile. "You're frowning. What's wrong?"
"Nothin'." He automatically shook his head. "Jus' thinkin'. I've never had a pet before."
Alison smiled brightly at that. "I like how that sounds," she said and looked down to the lamb. "Our pet. Our little lamb," she said, laughter in her voice. "But that's not why you're frowning," she looked back to him and he wondered how she had gotten so damn good at reading him.
"No," he said but there was no way he was going to tell her what was actually on his mind. He might as well tell her what he had to. "Benny's thinkin' of gettin' a divorce," he said and Alison's eyes widened. "Helen's been sleepin' around. Benny doesn' think they have anything they can save."
"Oh my goodness," she said in a hushed tone. "I had no idea."
He shrugged. "Not like they're taking out an advertisement. I had lunch with him today. He made up his mind about it there. I told him me and Carlos could take him to a strip club to get his mind off things. Seemed to like the sound of that."
He looked at Alison, studying her face, trying to figure out what she thought about that. She was looking at him and he swore that her eyes were actually twinkling.
"'m not gonna do anything… if you're worried about it," he said in a low voice.
She instantly shook her head. "I'd never worry about that. And I'm not worried about anything. I'm just trying to imagine you in a strip club," she said.
He felt his lips twitch a little and he shrugged. "Not my favorite place in the world."
"You're a good friend," she said.
"So are you sayin' I can go?" He asked.
"Don't do that," she said. "I don't want it to be like that between us. Thank you for telling me what you're doing but you don't have to ask for my permission."
"I don't?" He asked and he knew he sounded completely clueless but he couldn't help it. When it came to this – having a girlfriend – he was beyond clueless.
"Nope." Alison laughed a little. "You're a grown man and there's no reason why I shouldn't trust you. And if it really bothered me, I would just say fine and let you figure it out on your own. It's what girls do."
He couldn't help but roll his eyes, plucking a piece of hay. "Girls are nuts."
"Yeah." She laughed again. "But you love me anyway," she said and there was still a lightness in her voice, obviously having no idea what she had just said.
But Yuriel knew. He caught it instantly and he looked at her, at her smile and her pretty twinkling eyes, and he felt nothing inside of him that screamed to argue.
She finished feeding the lamb and she gently pulled the bottle away, murmuring to the him that he was such a good lamb and she already loved him so much.
"Yeah," he heard himself murmuring in agreement.
This whole time, he had thought that he didn't love her; that he didn't even know how to love but he looked at her and realized he had never felt anything before like what he felt for her and maybe that was love. Maybe he was in love with Alison Silver and maybe he had been in love with her this whole time.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.
She missed Vicky.
She had two journals – one to keep track of her eating and the other where she wrote about her days – and every night, as she laid in the bed and wrote in each journal, she read back over her words and realized that she hadn't written Vicky's name in weeks. She went to the farm nearly every other day to see daddy and she and Vicky would see one another but they really didn't speak to one another. Vicky was angry at her for living with Yuriel and Alison didn't really know what to say to her anymore because anything she said just was never good enough.
But she really missed Vicky. She couldn't help it. She had always looked to her older sister as her best friend and she didn't know anything happening in Vicky's life anymore. Daddy had mentioned that she had been dating someone for a few weeks now – and for Vicky, a few weeks was already a record – but Alison didn't ask about it because she didn't even know how to talk to Vicky anymore. Would it ever be as it once was? Probably not. Because even if Vicky was to ever accept the fact that Alison was getting better, she would probably forever treat her like glass. And Alison just couldn't breathe around that.
With Yuriel out with his brother and Benny, she had the trailer to herself for the night. She changed into her pajamas – which somewhere along the way had become a pair of underwear and one of Yuriel's flannel shirts. She had taken one down from the closet one particularly chilly night and had slid it on and when Yuriel had seen her in it, he hadn't said anything. He had just swallowed and she could see the tips of his ears turning red. That was one thing with Yuriel that she loved. He didn't only make her feel beautiful but he made her feel desirable, too.
She fixed herself a can of chicken noodle soup and once she ate and washed all of her dishes, setting them in the rack on the counter to dry, she then went to her keyboard in the living room. Space in the trailer was tight but they had done some arranging and the keyboard now rested against the wall of the front of the trailer and Yuriel had found her a s
tool at a used furniture store. She sat on that stool now and turning the switch on, she looked at the sheets in front of her.
She was trying to write her own songs again. She hadn't done that in so long, not being in the right mindset at all to do that, but she was beginning to feel that familiar flow of energy humming through her brain to the tips of her fingers. She definitely felt a bit rusty doing this again after going such a long time without but she was just happy to even have the inclination to try again.
She hummed to herself as she played a few bars and then stopped to write those notes down with her pencil before play them again, adding a few more. Father Gabriel had asked her that Sunday after service if she was willing to join the church choir again and Alison had hesitated before telling him that she would think about. She had always loved to sing and perform and she had loved being in the choir but she didn't know if she was ready to put herself back up there again. She wouldn't be alone but she didn't know if she would be comfortable standing in front of the congregation, having them all looking at her. They looked enough when she was just sitting in a pew with her daddy and brother.
Around eight-thirty, she turned the keyboard off and made sure the front door was locked and left a lamp on for Yuriel before heading into the bedroom. She grabbed her journals and propped the pillows up, slipping between the cool sheets and leaning back, resting her journals on her thighs. She first wrote down what she had for dinner. One can of chicken noodle soup and one glass of water. It wouldn't look like a lot to another person but to her, it was the perfect amount. Her stomach was still small and she was feeding it the right amount to fill it up.
She set that journal aside and then opened her other one, beginning to write about her day. About work being a usual day except Martin had bought pizza for everyone for lunch and they had all sat around the office, eating and Axel telling stories and getting Zach to laugh so hard, soda flew from his nose. Meyer had come back, too, meowing at the back door and she watched as Yuriel gave him a piece of pizza crust. After work, she went to the farm for a little bit to visit her family and to see the lamb. She still hadn't named him but she had told daddy that she and Yuriel would be taking him home once he was old enough and Lawrence had beamed at that.
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