Sift

by L. D. Davis

  Since Cade had shown up at her door expecting to find me earlier that morning, I realized I had to tell her what was going on, or at least some of it.

  “I told Cade I was heading south, but I didn’t say where or with whom. I guess he wanted to surprise me, and that’s how he ended up on your doorstep.”

  There were a few seconds of silence before she started on her questions again with confusion and trepidation in her voice.

  “Then where were you?”

  I took a breath and let it go. “With Connor, but…” My chest squeezed. “But that’s over.”

  “You was seeing both of them at the same time, and neither of them knew it?” McKenzie was aghast at the idea of it.

  I lost it for a heartbeat. “Kenzie, I think that’s quite obvious by now. I don’t have time to give you a rundown of my love life right now or to hear your judgments. I have to go talk to Cade.”

  “You can’t go talk to him!” she tried to shout in a whisper, probably so that she wouldn’t wake the baby. “You have to give him some time to cool down.”

  I dragged a hand across my mouth and held it there for a few seconds before letting it drop.

  “There won’t be no cooldown time this time,” I told her. “We need to have this out once and for all.”

  “How do you know he won’t snap and hurt you?”

  I didn’t know, but I didn’t tell her that. I lied instead. “It will be fine.”

  “I gotta bad feelin’ about this, Darla,” she said softly. I could hear the fear in her voice, and my sister wasn’t afraid of anything, save for leaving Augusta County. “I’m askin’ you not to go. Not now.”

  I stared out of my windshield, not really seeing the people that were coming in and out of the rest stop. I only saw the road in my eyes. I could still do it. Leave and never look back.

  “It will be fine,” I told McKenzie again.

  A few minutes later, I pulled back onto the highway and drove North toward Philly, toward Caden, with a feeling of impending calamity.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  There was an accident on I-95 in Wilmington that slowed my progress. The traffic in Philly was no better. The streets were clogged with tourists and others who lived in the area who came to celebrate Independence Day in one way or another. Cade lived closer to the biggest of the city’s celebrations on the Ben Franklin Parkway than I did, but fortunately, I was still able to find parking less than half a block from his house.

  Apprehension made my hands shake as I held my key near the lock. Before I could contemplate whether I wanted to really open that door, it opened. Cade stood on the other side glaring at me with steel in his blue eyes. We stared at each other for a few seconds, but then he took a few steps back. I pocketed my keys and hesitated before going in. I knew that as soon as I crossed that threshold, things would change irrevocably. I was going to hurt him with the truth, and he was going to hurt me in return. But it had to happen. I knew that. So, I stepped inside.

  As soon as the door closed behind me, he was in my face, crowding me against the door.

  “Where the fuck have you been and why did you lie?” he demanded.

  I felt a twinge of irritation, but I kept it in check, at least at first.

  “I didn’t lie to you, Cade. I just withheld certain information.”

  “A misrepresentation of the truth is still a lie, Darla! You allowed me to believe something that wasn’t true! Don’t say that shit to me. Don’t think that because you ‘withheld certain information’ that it doesn’t make you a lying bitch.”

  It was always like Newton’s third law with me and Cade. I push, he pushes back harder. He pushes, I push back harder. He shouts in my face, I shout louder. Action and reaction, and it goes around and around and around.

  “Fuck you!” I spat, and tried to push him away from me, but he barely moved a couple inches.

  “No, you haven’t fucked me lately, but it’s my guess that you’ve been fucking someone else.”

  There was violence in his eyes when I didn’t deny it, but he moved away from me, left me panting with rage and anxiety against the door.

  “So, tell me,” he said, as he began to pace the living room. “Tell me all of this fucking information that you withheld.”

  Some of my own anger went away. Fear replaced it. It wasn’t fear of Caden, but fear of what the information could do to him. Despite everything, I never wanted to hurt him in this way.

  I took a few more steps into the room, closer to where he paced. His eyes never left me.

  With my hands clasped tightly together and tucked beneath my chin, I told him what he already suspected, already knew.

  “I’ve been seeing someone else,” I said quietly. “We were just friends at first. I didn’t want nobody else, but…” I trailed off and bit my bottom lip.

  Cade stopped his pacing and faced me, his body rigid.

  “But what?” he said through a clenched jaw.

  I shook my head once, not wanting to say what had been on the tip of my tongue.

  “But what?” he roared. “You fucking did it, now fucking own up to it. Tell me you fucked your friend! Say it!”

  I shook my head again. Cade stalked toward me so fast that I barely had enough time to take one step back before he reached me. He grabbed my face with one hand, squeezing my cheeks with his fingers.

  “Say it!” he shouted, his breath hot on my face.

  I jerked away from him and shoved him away from me. Shouting back at him, I told him the words I hadn’t wanted to say. The words that would hurt him so much more than the ones he thought I meant. “I fell in love with him!”

  Caden jerked and staggered backward with wide eyes as if I had just shot him point blank. Hot tears slid down my face as I covered my mouth with both hands. My eyes were just as wide as his.

  His voice was soft and deadly. “You told me there was no one else.”

  I shook my head and dropped my hands. “There wasn’t. We—”

  “You said there was no one else!” he bellowed, his face turning a deep shade of red.

  “There wasn’t!” I insisted. “Not then. Not when you asked me. There was only you when you asked me that.”

  He looked doubtful, but asked, “When did it stop being just me, Darla? At one point did you start to fucking believe it was okay to look me in the face and tell me you loved me while you were falling for some other guy?”

  I shook my head and shrugged weakly. “I don’t know.”

  He moved threateningly toward me. “You don’t know? You don’t fucking know?”

  “I don’t know!” I shouted.

  He closed the distance until there were only inches between us.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said, his voice eerily steady. “I remember the moment I realized that I loved you. I will never be able to forget it. I may forget a lot of shit in between, but I will never forget that. It was the night you came to M.J.’s after closing with that cake. You had on a pair of old, beat-up blue jeans and a pink t-shirt. There was a light dusting of flour on your clothes—there was even a little bit of flour on your cheek that I’ll bet you didn’t know about until now. You told me that you didn’t need a city-boy asshole like me to feel validated. That was it—I swear I can never forget it. That instant. I was a fucking goner. My heart no longer belonged to me. It was yours. I loved you from that time on. And I know—I know. I fucking know you can still remember the moment you loved me, too.”

  Crying softly, I jerked my head in acknowledgment. “That same night. When you kissed me.”

  “See?” he whispered. “You don’t forget when you first knew you loved someone. So tell me, Dar. When the fuck did you realize you loved him?”

  Instinctually, I almost said that I’d only just realized it a few days ago, but that would have been a lie. If I dug deep for the truth, the truth I’d buried and hidden from myself, the answer would be obvious. The first time I’d realized I loved Connor, the emotion had sent me into an awful
panic, and I had fled his embrace, his bed. It was the morning I had left him a lame note and ran away as he’d slept.

  With that truth uncovered in my mind and heart, I had to admit something else. I had lied. I had lied to Cade’s face when I’d told him there was no one else. Even if it had been true in the physical sense, Connor had already been there, lodged inside my heart.

  “March,” I whispered faintly.

  Cade’s face froze. “What?” he asked softly as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

  I hesitated only for a heartbeat before answering, my words flying out of my mouth as quickly as possible. “He and I became friends in March when I went to Virginia for Kenzie’s baby shower. My last night there we…we slept together,” I said the words quickly, “And the next morning I panicked and ran out while he was still sleeping. We talked only once after that until May. When you asked me if there was anyone else, I said no because I wasn’t with him. I wasn’t even in contact with him. But now, just now when you asked me, I realized that there had been someone. There had been him. Because I already loved him.”

  I was a weeping mess by the time I finished. Cade stared at me as if he had never seen me before as he staggered backward until he bumped into the dining room table. Then he became so still and silent that he was like stone.

  “Cade,” I whispered his name. “What I felt for him never changed how I feel for you. I never stopped loving you.”

  Still, he said nothing for many long moments. I watched with pain exploding in my chest as his eyes filled with tears. Slowly, he turned his back on me and braced himself on the back of a chair. I watched his shoulders rise and fall with his uneven breaths for a few seconds.

  Then without warning, a bomb went off. Caden was the bomb.

  “Fuck!” he screamed, slamming his hands on the chair. “Fuck!”

  I stopped midway to him when he lifted the chair above his head. With great force, he brought it down on top of the table as he shouted the four letter cuss word again. A leg broke off the chair, and then another as he brought it down again. The slamming and cracking noises echoed in my bones as Caden broke the chair apart. When only the back part of it remained, he flung it across the room where it crashed into a lamp and framed photographs. All of it went to the floor in pieces.

  He lifted another chair and smashed it into a glass china cabinet. Glass shattered. Wood splintered. Dishes crashed to the floor. The next chair wasn’t intended for me, but the wall behind me, but it hit me on the shoulder as it flew by.

  “Fuck!” he said again, slamming his fist onto the table. He sounded as broken as the chair and cabinet behind him. Shattered. Splintered.

  He dropped to his knees on the floor. His shoulders shook as he wept. The sound, the sight, of my Caden kneeling on the floor crying. It broke my soul.

  Ignoring the growing pain in my shoulder, I went to him, barely able to see through my tears. Crouching before him in the rubble, I gingerly reached for him. Touched his hair. His face.

  “Cade,” I whispered.

  He slowly lifted his head and met my eyes. I saw his fury. His pain. And…oh…the violence.

  I don’t know how to turn this off. I don’t know how to turn off this bestial reaction to snarl and snap and trap you when I feel a threat— real or imagined, he had said not that long ago.

  Bestial. Savage. Brutal.

  There was no time for me to retreat. I cried out as he lunged for me and knocked me down onto my back. Air rushed from my lungs. Glass and wooden splinters pierced through my light summer clothes and into my skin. I even felt a few pieces that had made it through my hair to my scalp. His body was heavy on mine, pressing me harder into the sharp edges of broken furniture.

  He screamed in my face, like some kind of demon.

  “I did everything you wanted me to do! I let you go, gave you your fucking space! I tried so fucking hard to change who I am, to be the man that you fucking wanted me to be! Everything was about you! What you wanted! What you needed! And I did it all for you! I loved you with my whole fucking heart, but you—you treated me like your fucking dog! Making me heel at your command and lay down on the floor at your fucking feet, begging for your damn scraps! None of it, not one damn thing I did for you mattered because you were fucking and loving someone else!”

  I grappled with him, struggled to push him off of me.

  “Get off of me!” I screeched and tried to claw at his face, but he caught my hand. He squeezed it too hard as he slammed it down above my head into the pile of shit around us.

  I cried hard and loud as he caught my other flailing hand and pinned that, too.

  “You made me believe I had a chance!” he roared. “I would have given you anything! I would have given up anything!”

  “Get the fuck off of me!” I screamed, but he didn’t move. I was so small compared to him. So weak.

  Cade continued to roar at me, and tears began to fall from his eyes. Big, fat drops that fell on my face. “You were everything to me! Everything! You were all I fucking wanted, and I was nothing to you!”

  “This is why!” I shrieked at him. “This is why! This is why it was so easy for me to fall in love with someone else. Your. Love. Hurts! Your love hurts me! It tears me apart and breaks me down and holds me back. Your love hurts me, Caden!”

  He gawked at me. Stunned. As if he didn’t fucking already know.

  In his stunned state, his grip on my right hand loosened. I was able to yank it out of his grasp. Before he was aware that it was coming, I slammed the palm of my hand into the side of his face. Cade cussed as his head snapped to the side from the blow. In that same instant, I was already moving again, curling my fingers into a fist and taking another swing. The punch glanced off of his ear as he tried to dodge it in the last second. His weight had shifted to my left side when he tried to avoid my punch. I was able to lift my right leg at just the right angle, and my knee made contact with his groin.

  His face turned purple as he rolled off of me, grabbing his balls. I was on my feet in two seconds, stumbling over Cade and the disaster on the floor. I was crying so hard that I was choking on my sobs as I made my way to the front door.

  “Darla!” he bellowed my name.

  I dared a glance back and saw him struggling to get to his feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he called after me. “Darla! Don’t you fucking leave!”

  I tripped over a piece of broken chair and crashed into the door. I heard Caden behind me, trudging through the mess toward me.

  “Don’t fucking leave, Dar. Please!” he pleaded.

  For two seconds that felt like two hours, I hesitated. We were always like this, weren’t we? Caden and I always loved each other hard. So damn hard. We could fix it, couldn’t we? Fix us? We could get through this and…

  No, I told myself. No. No. No!

  I opened the door and stumbled outside despite Caden’s pleas. I hurried down the few stairs, and when my feet hit the sidewalk, I heard him at the door, but I didn’t stop, even as he continued to call my name.

  I ran to my truck, knowing that Caden was going to be a little bit slower than me at least until the pain in his genitals eased some. But only a little bit slower. I had just climbed inside and locked the door when he appeared at my window.

  “Darla,” he said my name tiredly. He rested his forehead against the window. There was blood on his forehead, and it smeared grotesquely on the glass. “Dar. I’m sorry. Please, Dar. I’m fucking sorry.”

  I said the same words I had said to him all those months ago, just loud enough for him to hear through the glass. “You’re always sorry. You’re always fucking sorry.”

  I turned the key and started the truck.

  “Dar, I’m not going to let you go this time,” he warned. “I’m not going to let you go.”

  I put the truck in drive. “I suggest you move if you don’t want to get run over,” I said without looking at him.

  Reluctantly, Cade backed away, just barely giving me the room t
o maneuver out of my spot. When I had driven a few yards, I looked in my rearview mirror just in time to see him disappearing into his house.

  I sobbed as I drove toward home, barely able to see the road ahead of me. I had endured too much. Too damn much for one day. For a lifetime. I had no idea what I was going to do next. No idea what I would say or do the next time I saw Cade or the next time I ran into Connor back home in Craigsville. I had no idea what the fuck I was going to do with my life.

  A little cowardly part of me, way back in the back of my head, just didn’t give a shit if life ended. If I didn’t have to care anymore.

  Traffic was heavy because of the holiday. I hadn’t gone too far from Cade’s when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw his car a few cars behind mine. I knew it was his and not someone else’s that looked like his. It was a feeling in my gut, and a couple minutes later when the other cars had either turned or changed lanes, my gut feeling was confirmed. Cade was behind me.

  “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga played from my phone that I had tossed onto the passenger’s seat. I glanced at it but didn’t answer. He called twice more before I finally picked it up.

  “Pull over,” Caden demanded when I answered.

  “No,” I said vehemently.

  In my rearview, Caden stepped on the gas and came damn close to smacking my bumper before he let me pull ahead a few feet again.

  “Pull the fuck over, Dar! You’re upset! You shouldn’t be driving like this. Pull over! If you want to go home, let me take you the fuck home.”

  “No!” I shouted.

  I ended the call and tossed the phone back onto the seat. Cade continued to call me. Continued to follow me. To chase me.

  I was distracted, for obvious reasons. I saw the green light ahead and then glanced in my rearview mirror again. My gaze stayed there a little too long as I muttered cuss words directed at Cade. I never even saw the SUV coming before it slammed into my truck.

  The noise and explosive pain of my left leg cracking were the last things I was aware of before darkness slammed down on me.

  I didn’t open my eyes again for nine days.