by S. E. Harmon
I bit my lip, thoroughly frustrated with myself. My mother and father had had a thirty-year marriage. They’d been through the worst and come out on the other side. Together. Why couldn’t I focus on that instead of his remarriage? My warped brain saw the new marriage as undoing all the years they’d been together.
How could you look at one woman for thirty years, hold her, hug her, kiss her, build a future with her…and then start over with someone else? Adam and his cheating certainly hadn’t helped. Not to mention the fact that he’d been all too willing to throw his new fiancée over to get back with me. Was nothing sacred anymore?
I knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. Didn’t know if I even could. I didn’t want to punish Jackson for the sins of ex-boyfriends past. I didn’t want to saddle him with all that. It just wouldn’t be fair. Now I had to think of a way to tell the best thing that ever happened to me that I was too damaged to believe in something as simple and basic as love.
His eyes searched my face for a long moment and then sighed. From the sound of that sigh, I didn’t have to. I tried anyway. “I told you from the beginning that I wasn’t looking for something serious.” I hit a tender spot on my lip and let it slide from the clench of my teeth reluctantly. I was biting the poor thing raw. I took a deep, steadying breath before speaking again. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re just scared,” he said, shaking his head.
“Scared of what?” My voice was sharper than I intended.
“Scared I could be your everything.”
When I lifted my eyes to his, they almost frightened me with the intensity. I couldn’t help but want to protect myself from that kind of heartache. I could never lose again if I never loved. It made no sense to my heart, but unfortunately for me, my brain was in control. And sometimes the brain told the heart to sit the fuck down.
“I meant what I said in the beginning, Jackson.” The words flew out before I could stop them. “This was never anything serious for me.”
The words hung in the air between us, harsh and sharp. When I finally managed to look in his direction…God…the look on his face was just…awful. He looked like I’d hit him in the stomach with a shovel.
I instinctively tried to backtrack. “I didn’t mean—”
He held up a hand. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
The wind whistled around us and I shivered a bit. “Please say something.”
It was a moment before he spoke again. “This has been…very informative. But we shouldn’t waste any more time.”
“We don’t have to call this quits,” I said, my voice a little desperate. My fingers tightened on the crinkly wrapper of my half-eaten funnel cake. “We could go back to the way we were.”
“I don’t think so.” His mouth twisted angrily. “You can find someone else if you need to fuck.”
Reducing what we’d shared to just fucking made my stomach twist. His voice was cold, and it wasn’t the voice of the man who’d held me on the beach. Who’d kissed me in the shower. Who’d taken me to the movies and eaten most of my Snocaps.
Tell him. The voice in my head urged me not to be such a fucking idiot. Tell him how you really feel. “I’m sorry,” I finally managed to say.
“Don’t be.” His voice was cool. “It’s good to know where I stand.”
Right now, I was standing in quicksand with an anvil tied to my ankles. We had both said all the things we needed to say, but I didn’t want it to end. Not like this. Not at all.
I looked at his stony profile. The ride that I usually thought was too short felt like it was never going to end. From the set of Jackson’s jaw, granite hard, he clearly felt the same way. And because we had offended the God of Love—Eros, you fickle bastard—the mechanisms of the wheel suddenly started to fail.
A grinding, whirring noise started that scared the daylights out of me, and our bucket swayed. We jerked up two more feet, so that we were at the very top of the revolution. The very fucking top. We tried to brace ourselves against the side as the ride shuddered to halt. There was a moment of terrified silence before there was a shout.
Ah. The always eloquent, timeless classic of “What the hell?” As if that was a cue, more voices started below and around us as everyone tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Except in our bucket. There was delicious, absolute silence. Obviously Jackson was now more than willing to watch me catapult to my death from a questionably constructed Ferris wheel.
A speaker crackled as the music died. A voice came on a scant second later. “Folks, we’re sorry about this, but it’s going to be a few minutes before we get going again. Everything is fine, so please stay calm. We’ll have you guys out in a jiff.”
Was it possible that a jiff was less than two seconds? Because being the object of Jackson’s stony gaze, seconds were suddenly measured in dog years. The ride lurched again and I fumbled the funnel cake, and it flew over the edge.
I peered over the edge in dismay as it disappeared into the brightly colored lights of the circus below. I sat back in my seat slowly. Fuck. This evening had certainly taught me a few things. When you buy funnel cake, eat the funnel cake. I rubbed my fingertips together, feeling sticky sugar residue there.
And never break up on a Ferris wheel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When you break up with someone, there should be a national holiday declared in your honor. Just so you can curl up in bed for a few weeks and get your shit together. Unfortunately, there were no such small mercies, and I had to drag myself into work on Monday. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Good God, would it never end?
But life went on. Some semblance of it, anyway. I did all those things that I was supposed to do to maintain status as a living human being—eating, drinking, sleeping. I did great things at work—I secured another contract with an Internet provider, and had two productive meetings with Torchwood. We agreed to set up several booths in fifteen of their locations on a trial basis, which was more than I’d thought they’d agree to. Being a lonely hermit made me a real go-getter.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
It should have all made me very, very happy. Instead of wanting to curl up in a ball and sleep until things were right again. Standing at the front desk with a customer was making me sincerely think about doing that.
I scratched my ear as the customer kept going on and on about his virus-riddled computer. He was now the poster child for why you don’t cheat on a computer whiz. His girlfriend had done quite a number on his laptop, and I was hard-pressed to feel sorry for him.
It wasn’t a bad fix. I already knew what the problem was and how it should be fixed. Unfortunately, common courtesy and good business sense demanded that I listen to another ten minutes of the customer telling me how he’d used four different programs to try to fix a problem that had nothing to do with pre-installed software.
Time away from Jackson was a wonderful teaching tool. Two weeks. Two weeks since our ruinous trip to the county fair, and I was finally starting to realize that he wasn’t going to budge on his terms. Apparently, he was doing just fine without me, while I…
I was floundering.
That was the only way I could possibly explain it.
I couldn’t remember a time in my life when it was so hard to complete everyday tasks, or focus on the things I used to find important. I participated in conversations, laughed robotically on cue, and in general, tried to do all the things I did when my soul wasn’t shriveling up like a wrinkled old raisin.
I certainly wasn’t fooling anyone who really knew me. Definitely not Julian, who had begun bringing me lunch and reminding me to eat. I wasn’t trying to starve myself or fall into depression. I just felt…unplugged. I could still function like Avery was still here and the lights were on upstairs, but I felt like I was drifting. Going through the motions.
I tried to recall what I could have ever done to deserve this. Off the top of my head? There was that time that I’d
broken my mother’s favorite Tiffany lamp and let my sister take the rap, mostly because my mother had firmly believed in corporal punishment. Or that time that I’d stolen my father’s car, the six or seven times I’d gotten away with and the one time I’d copped to. Or that time I’d been arguing with my brother and I’d thrown a plate at him. But Christ on a cracker, I had missed. Didn’t that buy me some good karma? Wasn’t it important that I hadn’t killed my brother with flying fine china? Probably not. Did it matter that he’d proceeded to stuff my head in the kitchen sink, and try to drown me in retaliation? Did it?
By the time I finally logged in the laptop and headed for my office, I was ready to call it a day. I checked my watch. How the fuck was it only noon?
There was a bump on my door, and I glanced up, unsure whether the noise was a knock or someone had just brushed past. “Come in?”
Julian pushed open my cracked door with his hip, his hands impossibly full. One hand cradled a cardboard box laden with Chinese food cartons close to his side. The other hand clutched two drinks, and he clenched a folder of stuffed with papers in his teeth. His clothes were dotted with damp spots and his shoes squeaked as he walked, and I wondered when it had begun to rain.
I had to smile as he dropped the folder on my desk like a trained dog and gave a little bark. “You’re wet,” I said, making room for the food on my desk.
“Just a little drizzling rain.” He dropped into a chair and began pulling out containers. “I figured it was a good time for a working lunch.”
I took one of the containers and a pair of chopsticks. When I lifted the lid and sniffed, the delicious scent of Lo Mein drifted past my nose. “I’ll take it.”
For the next half hour, we ate and worked with the ease of two people who’d worked together for a long time and knew one another very well. I tried to show proper interest in our business affairs, but my mind was clearly somewhere else. From the irritation building on Julian’s face, he was well aware.
He finally stopped mid-sentence and gave me a look.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re drumming your fingers on the desk, and it’s annoying as hell.” He raised an eyebrow. “You want to tell me what you’re so distracted about?”
“You want to talk about why you’re all up in my business?” I scowled. “And who drank my coffee creamer?”
“No, I…” He paused, like he was thinking. “Well, we did drink your coffee creamer—”
“Bastards—”
“But that’s not what I was talking about.”
“I’m fine,” I said, my fingers picking up the rhythm again on my desk. “Go ahead, I’m listening.”
He stared at me for a moment before reaching across my desk. He plucked the stress ball from its hiding place behind my stapler, and slapped it in my palm. I smiled sheepishly. As he went back to his report, I tossed it at the wall where it made a satisfying thwack.
I built up an easy rhythm. Thwack. Truthfully, I could care less about work. I tried thinking of a clever way to bring Jackson up and kept coming up empty. I wanted to know if he was all right. I wanted to know if he hated me, hated me for being such a coward. Thwack. I scowled. It was fine. I was fine. I didn’t need him, and I certainly didn’t care what he was up to. Thwack!
Julian caught the ball one-handed without looking, and continued reading from his paper. “Our contract with NetFall looks like it’ll be renewed for the next five years, so that’s—”
“How’s Jackson doing?”
Julian blinked at me. Part of me realized that he’d been in the middle of a sentence. Part of me didn’t really care. The polite thing to do would be to apologize and ask him to continue. I did nothing of the sort, waiting for him to answer the damn question. God knew I wasn’t getting anything from his carefully schooled expression.
“He’s fine.” Julian continued to flip through his stack of papers until he found the one he wanted. “This is the contract we signed with the Internet service. They want us to—”
“Is he still doing work at Legal Aid?” I winced as Julian gave me a squinty-eyed glare. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
He sighed hard enough to flutter the papers in his hand. “When are you going to call him?” When I didn’t answer, he swatted me with the papers. “That would probably be a lot more productive than ferreting out information from me, don’t you think?”
“I already tried,” I confessed quietly, staring at my desk. “He’s not answering my calls.”
“And you told him how you felt?”
“How can I do that when I don’t know how I feel?”
“Avery.” His eyes were equal parts sympathetic and exasperated. “Why don’t you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“That you’re in love with him.”
Hearing it out loud was like he’d punched me in the gut. In fact, I might have preferred an actual punch to the gut. “I…I don’t know what you’re—”
“AJ, if you’re going to make me start at ground zero, this is going to take a whole lot longer. Maybe longer than I have to live. My doctor said my bad cholesterol was pretty high.”
“It’s all that bacon,” I murmured.
“I do love my bacon,” he agreed, looking off for a moment in fond memory. “But you didn’t answer the question.”
Suddenly agitated for no discernable reason, I pushed out of my office chair, and began to pace. “I didn’t answer because it’s a stupid question. I mean…really, what is love?” I paused to point a warning finger at him. “And if you start singing Haddaway, that’s your ass.”
“It’s a damn good song,” he murmured. He got in one line of “oh baby don’t hurt me,” before I threatened him with bodily injury.
“My point still remains. Love isn’t easy, AJ, and it certainly isn’t all hearts and flowers and candy. Love is…” His brow creased as he struggled to think of the right words, and he finally threw his hands up in frustration. “I guess love is wanting to be there for someone no matter what. Calling that person when something happens, good or bad, because you want them to share all your moments.”
“Look here, Lord Byron—”
“Love is feeling like your world is ending because you don’t get to see that person anymore,” he continued on determinedly. I stalked over to the window, staring out at the busy street, because clearly Julian was going to have his say. “Love is hurting when that person is hurting, just because his pain is your pain, and his joy is your joy.”
“I know what love is,” I said testily.
“I’m not sure you do.”
I watched the couple outside as he held his jacket over her head, bending it as she got in the car. “It’s not a single, showy act, but a collection of little things that you do for one another every day. Love is getting wet in the rain because you want her to stay dry. Rubbing her feet while you’re watching TV. Making him breakfast in bed, just because. Going out of your way to buy his favorite coffee and delivering it to his office.” I touched the glass, cool against my fingertips, remembering. “When he makes you feel like everything you do is important, and you want to make him feel the same. When…”
I trailed off. Huh. Taking a step back, it was easy to see exactly what our relationship was. It had never been any of that friends-with-benefits crap I’d shoved down both our throats. Since the first time we’d shared snacks and swapped stories in the attic, some part of me had acknowledged that. I’d felt a frisson of something special there, glittering in the fading light of the dusky attic.
Our relationship was more than sex. We shared tangible things like meals and movies and walks in the park, sure. But somewhere during all of that mundaneness, we’d also shared things with one another we’d never told another soul. Memories. Hopes. Fears. Things that really mattered. There wasn’t anything I felt I couldn’t tell him. Well, except one thing. The most important thing.
I took in Julian’s smug reflection and the rest of my sentence caught in my throat. I straightened fr
om the window and turned. Blinked. Well, crap. I was glad I was near my desk, because my knees gave out a little, and I plopped into the seat.
Guessed I was in love, then. I swore. Real, true love. I swore again because it made me feel a little better. I glared at Julian, hereafter to be known as the bearer of horrible news. “Thanks. You’ve been helpful.”
“Hey, I just pitched the ball.” He beamed. “You’re the one who made the touchdown.”
“Remind me to add ESPN to your cable package.” I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. “But when you’re right, you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right,” he scoffed, as if any other outcome was impossible. “You’re in love, and you had someone in love with you. And you’ve now ruined it, so there’s that.”
“Kick people when they’re down much?”
“Avery, what the hell are you so afraid of?”
“I don’t know.” I bit my lip. “Maybe that it can’t possibly last. That someone like Jackson couldn’t love me. That if I really believed in it and gave him my everything, he’d wind up hurting me. Just like—”
His voice grew sharp. “Jackson is not Adam.”
Jackson was nothing like my ex. I would have never fallen for him if he was. “I know that,” I finally said.
“Then stop treating him like he is.” He eyeballed my pitiful state for a good minute before letting the air out through his teeth. “For God’s sake, the two of you are going to make me gray. Fix this.”
I hesitated before I agreed. I’d never lied to Julian and I didn’t intend to start. “I’ll try,” I finally said.
He frowned, clearly not pleased with my response, but let it go. “Until then, I have the perfect distraction.”
Ever hopeful, I asked, “Ice cream?”
“Another meeting.” He smiled.
“Another meeting? With Torchwood?” When he nodded, I groaned. “Please tell me that’s code for ‘Avery, darling, you’ve worked so hard, you should go home early as a reward.’”
Julian snorted. “No, that’s code for ‘Avery, darling, I hope you still have those Aldo heels in your bottom drawer. Now get your ass down to Torchwood.’ Julian needs a new leather messenger bag.”