by Loretta Lost
He looks at me in surprise. “Yes.” Reaching for the hemline of his shirt, he pulls it up over his head, but winces at the pain of moving his shoulder that way. I reach out to help him, tugging the shirt up over his back and over his muscled arms. I can’t help staring at his golden-brown torso in awe for a second, before reaching down to help him remove his pants.
When he steps into the shower and turns to close the door behind him, I see the crescent moon and star tattoo on his good shoulder, and I reach out to trace it with my fingertips. Familiar ink etched on familiar skin. Memories come rushing back so hard it steals my ability to breathe. For perhaps the first time since I arrived here, the reality of what’s happening is beginning to sink in. Cole is here. I’m here with Cole.
I guess I thought I’d never see him again.
All those years ago, I screwed up. I walked out on him, when he really didn’t deserve that. He’d always been there for me. I just couldn’t deal with all the real emotions, and how serious things were getting between us. I was completely, insanely, head over heels in love with him, and afraid of losing him every single day. Afraid of something happening to screw it all up, because my whole life, things have only ever gotten all screwed up for me.
So I screwed it all up myself, trying to preemptively avoid getting hurt.
And I ended up hurting both of us anyway.
When Cole turns to face me, there is so much tiredness and pain in his dark eyes that it’s difficult to bear. The young boy I knew all those years ago was so full of strength and energy that nothing could ever slow him down, intimidate him, or wear him out. I know he’s been through a lot lately, but it’s still shocking to see the toll that life has taken on him. He’s definitely gotten older. There are streaks of grey in his hair, and he’s only 29. I guess I just always thought that my Cole was made of steel. He was always taking care of me, and being so larger-than-life that I never realized that he was just a vulnerable young boy under all that charisma and bravado.
He kept all his issues buried deep, so no one else would have to worry. He protected us all.
I wish I had protected him a little better. Swallowing down a lump of regret, I reach up to touch the scar on his cheek.
“Are you sure that you can let your stitches get wet?” I ask him. “Isn’t it better to let yourself heal a little longer and avoid water?”
“Maybe,” he says softly, reaching out to trace the rivulets of water falling down my stomach. “But I just want to be close to you. I’m a little afraid that one day I’ll wake up, and you’ll be gone. I’ve been trying not to sleep since you got here, so that I can stop you from leaving if you try. But just in case you manage to outsmart or outmaneuver me—which you always do—I want to spend every waking moment with you, while I can. I’m sorry, I know this is pathetic. But I can’t bear the thought of you being in a different room, even just to shower. I was just pacing back and forth out there, wondering if there was some way you could escape, even though I know this room has no exits.”
“Cole,” I say softly, stepping close to him and resting my cheek against his chest. I feel his arms go around my back, possessively holding me against him. “I understand. That’s how I felt my whole life, about everyone I ever cared about. If my mother could just toss me aside, then why would anyone else want to keep me? I just... I’m sorry. It’s just something I’ve always done. Running away.”
“But I thought you knew I would never leave you,” he says, letting his fingers get tangled up in my wet hair. “I tried so hard to show you that I would always be there.”
There is a long silence in the shower, punctuated only by the noise of water falling gently on our bodies. Tears begin sliding from my eyes, and I try to hold my breath. It feels like there is a balloon in my chest, filled with daggers, and if I don’t let some of the air out, it’s going to explode all over my insides and destroy me.
“I was pregnant,” I whisper hoarsely, trying to hold my shoulders very still so that he can’t tell that I’m crying. I wrap my arms around his middle and cling to him tightly, letting the water wash away my tears and secrets. “I’m so sorry. I was afraid.”
Feeling his body stiffen in my arms, I hold my breath. I am terrified. I have visions of him dragging me by the hair and tossing me out of his trailer completely naked, and locking me outside to burn in the sun. I imagine him refusing to speak to me again. Pulling away slightly, hesitantly, to look at his face, I flinch when he clamps his hands around my shoulders.
“What did you do?” he asks angrily, his fingers digging into my shoulders. “What did you do? God, Scar! You said it was a false alarm in your letter. You said you were just late, due to the stress of deciding whether to take that job at the CIA. What the hell did you do?”
I shake my head, hating the look on his face. “Don’t worry. I didn’t—”
“Scar! Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?” He lowers his head and takes a few deep, ragged breaths, as though his lungs are failing. I can feel his whole body trembling with rage. There is water from the shower dripping off his hair, obscuring his face, and for a moment, I am certain he’s going to hurt me. “Did you have the baby?” he asks in a whisper, sounding completely brokenhearted. “We told each other everything. How could you keep this a secret? Please god, tell me that you didn’t have an abortion. Please tell me you didn’t give it up. Please tell me… just tell me…”
“No,” I say softly, feeling my knees grow unsteady. I pull away from him, leaning my forehead against the shower wall for support. “I wasn’t well, Cole. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. I just stayed in my motel room all day, crying and vomiting. I lost the baby, pretty early on. Before I took the job. I only took the job because I couldn’t go back to you after that. I was… afraid it would happen again. I was afraid, because I love you, and I can’t control myself around you, and I just want you so much, all the time, even now...”
He places a kiss on the back of my shoulder as his arms wrap around me, just beneath my breasts. “You should have told me. I would have taken care of you, kept you healthy. I would have gotten you help, if you needed it. We always knew these things would be challenging for us. I just needed to be there with you, Scar. How could you exclude me like that? I was your best friend. I am your best friend. I understand if you wanted to run away, but why couldn’t you just take me with you?”
“I didn’t know what you really wanted,” I confess softly. “After so many years of just being friends, just being brother and sister, I didn’t know if you even wanted to be with me. I asked you a couple times, remember? I asked you for more. Cole, be with me. Cole, just be my boyfriend. Be my husband. Dude, we’re already married, what the fuck. Just make it real. And you kept putting it off. Maybe after we graduate. Maybe when things are more stable. Maybe someday, when we’re older. Maybe, maybe, maybe.”
“We were so young, Scar. I was scared, too.”
“I needed you,” I tell him tearfully, “in every way! Do you know how I felt? Do you have any idea how I felt?” I pause, trying to catch my breath, and lift my hand up to touch the necklace. “When I read your stupid letter, and I saw that you really wanted to be with me? I thought you were dead. Actually dead. And I thought we’d wasted all that time.”
“God, Scar,” he says, pressing his face into the back of my shoulder. “I was a fucking idiot. I was terrified of hurting you. I was terrified of us. I just wanted to do the right thing, so badly. I wanted to do right by you, so that we’d never be apart. And I made you leave anyway.”
His arms are wrapped around my ribs so tightly that it’s difficult to breathe. My diaphragm can’t expand. But I don’t need air; I only need him. I need him close to me, pressed against my body like this. I need him to understand me. “Cole, I just thought you saw me as a friend, or a sister. I really did. I tried really hard to seduce you sometimes, you know? To make you see me differently.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. You didn’t have to try, Scar.”
“But
I did. You only had sex with me if there was alcohol involved, and you apologized the next day profusely like you’d made some huge mistake, and you didn’t really mean it. Do you know how that tore me apart? I just wanted to be yours. For real.”
“Jesus, Scar. We slept beside each other almost every night. We were so close...”
“And that only made it harder. It was almost perfect, but you were just holding back. You were everything to me, except the one thing I needed you to be. And I tried so hard to make you change your mind…” I pause, shutting my eyes tightly. “This doesn’t excuse what I did—leaving you. I was the biggest bitch on earth to you, Cole. I hate myself every day for what I did. But I didn’t run away from Cole, my friend, or Cole, my brother. I kept writing him letters. I just ran away from Cole, my half-assed lover. But maybe… maybe if I had known all the shit you said in that letter, maybe I wouldn’t have ran away when I found out I was pregnant. Maybe I would have known that things were going to be okay. I would have known that you were going to be there, the way I needed you to be. As my man. As my husband. I just always felt like I needed you more than you could give. I needed you more than you wanted to give. But if I had seen that letter, and known you felt the same, all those years—I would have just said today. Today is the day that we need to be ready, Cole. Please let’s grow up and be adults now. And love each other.”
“Scar,” he says, releasing me and stepping away.
Without his warmth, I’m suddenly cold, and I turn around to look at his face. The hurt written on his features is too much to bear, and I look down at my feet.
“Are you saying,” he asks slowly, “that if I hadn’t been such a fucking idiot, maybe we could have been happy together now? As a family? Maybe with an adorable little four-year old daughter running around?”
I feel like I’ve had the air knocked out of me. The shower begins to spin in my vision. I see that little girl, and all the hopes and dreams I push down so hard, and never let myself believe. I see myself in that girl. I see my own childhood, when I was four, and no one loved me. But I know her life would have been different. She would have been always smiling, always the happiest little girl in the world, because Cole was her daddy. And of course he would have taken care of her, because he always took care of me. She would have been happy. She would have been loved. She would have never gone to bed hungry, not for a single night.
We were millionaires, after all.
I lost that little girl. I stole her from us. Grasping one of the various shower nozzles for support, I struggle to stand. I struggle to breathe.
“Just tell me,” I say to Cole hoarsely. “That you didn’t mean any of the words in the letter. Tell me that you changed your mind since then. You grew to just think of me as a sister now.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” He looks at me with wide eyes, shaking his head slowly. “Scarlett, I don’t remember exactly what I wrote. But I’ve been slowly dying without you for years. Let me be perfectly honest: I have changed my mind. Because the fifteen-year-old piece of shit who wrote that letter didn’t love you a fraction of the amount that I have grown to obsessively, compulsively, neurotically love you over the years. Do you even realize that I just faked my own death and gave away my entire fortune because I thought you were marrying some other jackass? It was basically a fucking temper tantrum! And it worked, because you’re here with me—not with him. So I’m happy. And part of me is glad that you were upset when you thought I was dead, because you deserved to suffer! I’m vengeful—and I want you to feel the pain that I felt when you left me. So maybe I pretended to die just so you would see how it feels.”
“Cole,” I plead, crying and shaking my head. “Stop. Just stop.”
“And you want to know the very worst part?” he asks me, stepping closer. “Here we are, standing together, naked in a shower. You are so sunburnt that you look like a fucking cherry tomato, but you’re still the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been with anyone else since we got married, Scar. I lied when I said that it was all pretend. I was pretending it was pretend. I wanted you every minute of every day, and I had to shut it off, because I feared that passion so much. Hell, I want you right now. Can’t you tell how much I want you? Couldn’t you always tell? And you just told me how you lost our baby—and kept it a secret. Do you have any idea how much that breaks my heart? Not just because that was my baby, but I hate the fact that you had to go through that alone. What if I lost you, Scar? I should have been there. You never have to be alone in this lifetime, as long as I’m breathing. Thank god you know better than to trust a death certificate. Now, I’m rambling on like a fucking idiot.”
He takes a deep breath. “Really, all I want to do is grab you and kiss you and say it’s going to be okay. But I want to say even more than that, because I’m a fucking disgusting man. Do you know how hard I have to try to act civilized and restrain myself around you? I just want to tell you that we’ll try again. Right now in this damn shower, I’ll make love to you until you can’t walk. I’ll make you pregnant again, you better believe it, and this time we’ll do it right. We’ll have that little girl—or boy, I guess it’s okay if it’s a boy—and just be really fucking happy like we were supposed to be from the start. I’ll show you, Scar. I can be your lover, and your man, and your husband, and not hold back. Not hold anything back.” He hits a button on the shower interface that makes a bunch of the nozzles stop spraying and retreat into the walls. He advances on me, pinning me up against the shower wall, and pressing his hardness against my body as he puts his lips against my ear. “I’ll fuck your brains out, Scarlett. I’ll fuck you so hard you scream loud enough for this whole desert to hear you. Would you like that? Because I just don’t care anymore. What do we have to lose? We already lost each other. We lost the baby. I lost my fucking job. We lost everything. So let’s make it better. Let’s make a new baby, right here, right now. I dare you. I dare you to do this with me.”
I shake my head, unable to respond. Tears won’t stop falling from my eyes, and my dehydration headache is returning. It’s too late. We really have lost everything. We’re both too late. He is nudging my thighs apart with his knees and pressing against me a little too aggressively. I find myself sobbing, because he doesn’t feel like my Cole right now. He feels crazed, and understandably so after the news I’ve just given him. What have I done to this man I love? I’ve destroyed him. Why have I said any of these things? Why did I have to talk so much?
“Scar,” he says, putting his fingers under my chin to lift my face. “What do you say? Are you ready? Let’s make a baby. But if it’s a boy, we have to try again to have another kid, because I really want a little girl so that I can show her Frozen and take her out for ice cream.”
I can’t take this anymore. I push him away with all my strength as I begin to sob so violently that I can no longer stand up. My knees crumple and my back slides down the wall of the shower until my butt lands on the tiles. I let my body sag to the side as the sobs shake my chest, and I gasp for air and breathe in water from the shower that is pouring down my face. I cough on the water as it fills my throat.
Or maybe I’m just drowning in my own tears.
Cole is immediately at my side, crouching over me and whispering soothing words. He places kisses all over my face and tries to coax me back to him. I can feel myself slipping away, deeper and deeper inside myself. I push his hands away weakly. I can’t cope with this. I don’t want to cope with this. It hurts. It hurts so much that it rips my insides apart, and it hurts far more than the miscarriage did. I remember the pain like it was yesterday, but I also remember the pain magically shutting off.
I need that now. I need to shut it all off.
I remember the memories. The memories of the things I had forgotten, and how as soon as I began to remember, my mind would shut it all down. I can shut it all down, with the flip of a switch.
I can save me from me. I just have to give her permission.
I’ve been fi
ghting her back for so long. But I need her now.
I had forgotten how much I need her.
I need her to help me survive this man, and these memories.
Chapter Ten
“Scar? Scar, look at me. Come back to me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please.” I cup her cheek and tilt her head up so I can look in her pale blue eyes. But her head is limp, and her eyes are empty. Shit, what have I done? What did I say? “Scar,” I say hoarsely, shaking her shoulders gently. “I’m sorry. I was just angry. I’m just… it’s so emotional, being close to you again. I feel like a fucking stupid fifteen-year-old boy. Please don’t be scared. Don’t go away.”
But it’s too late. She’s not responding to me. She has totally shut down. I exhale in defeat, moving to sit beside her in the shower stall. The floors are hard and unpleasant to sit on, so I reach to my side and struggle to lift her onto my lap. It kills my shoulder, but I clench my teeth together to brace myself against the pain. Cradling her in my arms, I let her head fall against my neck, and I know that I’m holding her for my own comfort more than hers.
“I never realized how much holding back hurt you,” I tell her, stroking her hair. “I was trying to avoid hurting you by keeping my distance, you know? It was just the only strategy I could think of, to cement having us in each other’s lives. I was just trying to do right by you, and not take advantage. But I never seem to do the right thing.” I swallow. “Scar, I’m so sorry for all that stuff I just said. The baby stuff. I know I probably sounded like a monster. I know what you’ve been through, and I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you.”
Rocking her gently, I place a lingering kiss on the top of her head. “I’m so sorry. I mean, it wasn’t a lie—I do want us to have a baby. But not right this minute. I was just trying to do the opposite of what I’ve always done, saying ‘maybe someday,’ by saying ‘right now’ instead. I wanted you to know that I’m capable of change. But you also know that I’m not a spontaneous person, and I was just being ridiculous and insane. I mean, I just faked my own death—how the hell am I going to raise a kid? Where are we going to live? Here? I just gave away all my money. Okay, some of it was to you. But… I’m not father material anymore. Maybe I was six days ago. But I’ve screwed everything up now, haven’t I? I would need to get a decent fake identity, like you did. What job will I do? I loved my job. I loved my company. Maybe we can live in a small town, where no one knows us.”