by A. S. Teague
Every time my foot hits the ground, the anger in my belly spreads. I’d wasted the last five days consumed with sadness when I should have been pissed off.
All those times we’d shared, the secrets I’d confided in him, the declarations of love and reassurances that we were in it together were lies. I’d told him things that I hadn’t ever shared with anyone. I’d seen through his reputation, overlooked his past, and convinced myself that he wasn’t who he pretended to be. He was wounded, tortured, because of his childhood, his terrible mother and dead father. I’d told myself that it was because of those circumstances that he could be an asshole sometimes, that he would push me away. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was just a jerk. That’s what it feels like now, now that he knows the facts but refuses to believe them.
The further I run, the more my mind spirals out of control, my despair being replaced by disgust.
This break-up is for the best. I’m almost convinced of it. It may not seem like it now, but with every mile I run I convince myself that I’ll figure it out.
And furthermore, this town doesn’t belong to him. I’m just as entitled to it as anyone else. I’d been avoiding the places that remind me of him, and why? Because I’m afraid that it would make me miss him more? Well, screw him! He doesn’t deserve my heartache. He isn’t worthy of my anguish.
As I continue to press on, pushing myself harder than I have in years, my legs begin to burn and my lungs scream for oxygen. The harder I run, the better I begin to feel. I’m not going to sit around and dwell on it anymore.
People break up every day.
First loves ended all the time.
No one died from a broken heart.
No, they got up and kept fucking going.
And that was exactly what I was going to do. I was going to keep moving and go on with my life.
The trail I’m on loops back on itself before dumping me out on one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen.
There are palm trees everywhere, the woods pushing right up to the sand. Erosion has changed the landscape over the years, and as I slow down to a walk, I take it all in.
It’s evident that hurricanes have blown through here many times. There are fallen trees littering the shoreline, the wind and water having stripped them of their bark, the trunks smooth and white. I walk among them, admiring their beauty, enjoying the peace.
I will be these trees.
The trees still standing, tall and proud in the face of the most extreme weather. That’s what I will be. I can weather this storm; I can remain strong, rooted in place, refusing to fall.
But, if I do fall, if the weight of the storm is too much for me, I will still be beautiful. I will still have value and worth.
I want to stay and relax among the trees, the water lapping the shore, but the sun is beginning to set, the state park set to close, so I make my way back to where my car is parked. My muscles ache, but my mind is clear for the first time in weeks.
I smile, happy to have come to this place, finding peace that I thought would be impossible for me.
I’m almost back to the parking lot, still strolling along the water, my gaze focused on the water, when I hear my name. The smile that I’m sporting vanishes as I recognize the voice.
I hesitate, and then turn toward the person that’s walking toward me, and my heart begins to pound.
What are the odds?
“Bronn,” I murmur, my voice cracking.
Slowing down, I finally come to a stop, Bronn just a few feet in front of me. The hurt that I’d managed to chase away during my run returns ten-fold.
How foolish I was to think that I could just take a quick run and the pain would disappear. I should have known I would run into him at some point, should have prepared myself for how I would feel when that happened. But I didn’t, and now here I was, standing in front of the man responsible for my heartache, trying not to let him see how much his presence affected me.
“Grace,” he says again, his voice low. Despite my best efforts, I can’t stop myself from looking him over, my gaze roaming his body.
He’s wearing his standard attire, the cotton of his shirt stretching across his broad chest. I try not to remember the way it feels to rest my cheek over his heart. My mind betrays me though, and I can’t help but remembering the way it would soothe me and lull me to sleep.
I try to avoid his face, afraid that one look into his eyes will be my undoing, but he says my name again and my gaze flies to his against my will. “What are you doing here?” I snap, attitude the only defense I know.
One corner of his mouth tips up. “I was about to ask you the same thing.” He scans me from top to toe. “But it’s obvious you’re out for a run.”
I clear my throat, crossing my arms over my chest. “Yeah, well, I couldn’t run in my neighborhood, could I?”
His eyebrows bunch. “Why not?”
“You took that from me,” I murmur, cutting my eyes away to look at the waves crashing along the shore. There are storm clouds in the distance and I find it fitting, considering there’s a storm that’s headed for my damn heart the moment I can get away from Bronn.
All that bullshit that I’d spewed to myself on my run has vanished. I’m not going to be able to just move on like our relationship never happened. All it took was thirty seconds in his presence for my heart to begin to crumble all over again.
He shoves his hands into his jeans pockets and rocks back on his heels. “Took it from you?”
The casual way he stands before me, as though he hasn’t just obliterated my heart, pisses me off. Why is it that I have no effect on him? Am I the only one that cared about our relationship?
I sigh, and uncrossing my arms, wave him off. “Never mind.” I look beyond him, my car just a few steps away. “I’ve gotta go.”
I push past him, giving him a wide berth to ensure that I don’t bump him, but he grabs my arm, halting my progress.
“Grace, wait. I’m glad I ran into you, I need to talk to you.” His hand lingers on my bicep, the touch sending a thrill down my spine.
His face is solemn, his eyes studying me intensely. He’s still incredibly handsome, his blue eyes pinning me with a stare, but it seems like he’s aged in the last week. He looks tired, that familiar sadness back in his eyes.
Good.
Maybe it was petty, but I was glad that he was hurting.
I shake him off and step away. I don’t want to talk to him, don’t care what he has to say. “You had your chance to talk to me.” I shrug. “But that time’s past now, and I’ve got somewhere to be.”
It’s not true, the only place I’m headed is home to take a shower. And now that I’ve run into Bronnson, to drown my sorrows in a pint of cookie dough ice cream and reruns of Friends.
“Are you going back to Columbia?” he asks, not taking no for an answer.
I should ignore him, it’s none of his business where I’m headed. But my mouth betrays me. “No, I’m back here now.”
He nods. “Were you staying at your Nana’s house?”
“No. Her house sold.”
“Oh, so where were you staying then?” he persists.
I don’t know why it matters, why he’s even asking me these questions, but I answer him nonetheless. “I was staying with Riley.”
His eyes darken. Movement catches my eye and I drop my gaze to see that his hand is balled into a fist. I lift an eyebrow, tilting my head to the side.
“You were staying with Riley?” His voice is almost a growl, the sudden jealousy surprising me.
“Yeah. So what?” I retort, incredulous that we’re even having this conversation.
“I don’t like you spending the night in another man’s house.”
My mouth falls open, a bubble of laughter escaping. “Are you kidding me?”
I can’t believe he thinks that he has any right in telling me where I can or can’t sleep at night. Furthermore, I don’t care.
“You don’t have a say in that anymor
e, now do you? Or have you forgotten that you broke up with me?” My heart pounds, the blood rushing in my ears.
Bronn takes a step forward, crowding into my personal space. “I need to talk to you.” He again reaches for me, this time his hand landing on my hip, his fingers flexing.
I press my lips together, an effort to hold my emotions at bay, and shake my head.
“Grace,” his voice low, he drops his forehead to mine, “don’t make me beg.”
I can’t take any more. His touch, the way my name sounds coming from his lips, the nearness of his face to mine. It’s all too much, and all at once the wave of emotion that I’d been fighting so hard to hold off crashes down.
I wrap my fingers around his wrist and yank his hand away from me, stepping back in the process. “I don’t want you to beg!” My voice cracks. “I just want you to leave me alone. You made it clear that there was no way we were going to be together, so please, just let me get over you and move on with my life.”
I don’t give him a chance to say anything more. Turning, I jog away from him and to my car, wasting no time cranking it up and pulling out of the parking lot.
I make the mistake of looking in the rearview mirror. Bronn stands in the place I left him, his head hung low, hands on his head. My heart squeezes at the sight of his despair, but I don’t tap the brakes.
Forcing myself to look away, I focus on the road in front of me and continue driving, vowing that I won’t look back again.
Grace refusing to talk to me stung. I couldn’t move from the spot I was standing in for a full five minutes after she ran away from me. My entire fucking life, and I’d never had a woman run away from me. It would figure that the first time it happened was the time that I needed her to stay more than ever before.
When I finally managed to uproot myself, I made my way to my old truck and climbed inside. The sense of peace that I used to feel when climbing into Bessie didn’t come, and hadn’t ever since I learned that the man I’d worshipped wasn’t the superhero I always imagined he was.
After my talk with Joe a few days ago, I’d gone off in search of Uncle Tony. It’d been a long time since I’d seen him, and I wasn’t even sure where to start looking. Dani didn’t know where he might be living any more than I did, and I refused to tell her why I was wanting to talk with him. I didn’t want to stir things up with her before I knew for sure that the pot was needing to be stirred.
I hadn’t been able to find Tony though, and every day that passed without talking to Grace was becoming more and more unbearable.
I’d thought that I would feel better as time went on, that I would feel confident in my decision to end things with her. But each night that I laid in my bed alone, the more I realized that I was a fucking fool. I shouldn’t have let her go.
Grace was the first good thing to happen to me.
I’d always had Dani, and I loved her. She was my sister, my closest friend, the only person that had ever truly cared about me. But it wasn’t the same as the relationship that Grace and I had.
We were meant to be together, something that I didn’t know until this very moment. Watching Grace run away from me, as though I were a leper and she was afraid she would get the plague, had gutted me. When she’d peeled out of the parking lot it, had been all I could do to keep from falling apart.
I didn’t care about who her father was anymore. I’d find a way to get past that. But first, I had to get her to listen to me. And that was going to prove harder than I thought, because, it was obvious that I had hurt her. Hurt her so bad that I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to make up for it.
But fuck if I wasn’t going to try.
The door to the bar swings open, the early morning sunlight filtering through, causing me to squint to see who’s walking in.
“Bar’s closed,” I call out, checking the clock over my shoulder. It’s barely eight in the morning, too early for even the regulars to start wandering in. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, trying to figure out how I was going to get through to Grace, to get her to stay and talk to me. My eyes burned, and my head pounded from lack of sleep. I’d given up on getting any rest and come to the bar to catch up on paperwork.
“Heard you’ve been looking for me,” the familiar voice calls out, letting the door slam behind him.
I squint harder, my eyes still not adjusting to the change in lighting. Finally, his face comes into view and my stomach drops.
Uncle Tony.
I come around the end of the bar and meet him in the middle of the room, our footsteps echoing. Sticking my hand out, he grasps it and we shake before he uses his leverage to pull me in for a bear hug.
“Been a long time, boy,” he rumbles, beating me on the back with his free hand. “How ya been?”
His cologne invades my senses, bringing a flood of memories back with it. It wasn’t very often that I saw him, my mother not liking the fact that Dad would take me around his wife and Dani. But anytime I did, Uncle Tony would smile, give me a clap on the back, and then do his damndest to entertain me. It never took much, he was a funny, likeable guy.
“I’ve been better, Uncle Tony,” I tell him honestly.
He releases his grip on me and I motion for him to follow me. He takes a seat at the bar and I go around, grabbing a couple glasses.
“Kinda early for a beer. You want a soda?” I ask, filling my glass up. He nods so I fill a glass for him and slide it across to him. He picks it up and takes a long swallow.
“Tell me what’s been going on with you,” he commands, his deep voice upbeat.
I don’t know where to begin, and really, I’m not interested in playing catch up on all the years it’s been since we last spoke. But I want him to be honest with me, and if I launch into any sort of interrogation, he’ll shut down faster than a bar after last call.
I grab my glass and come back around to the opposite side of the bar, settling onto a stool next to him.
Running a hand through my hair, I let out a sigh. “Where to start,” I murmur, and he chuckles.
“That much goin’ on, huh?” he asks, patting me on the arm.
I nod. “I met a woman.”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Just one?” He laughs loudly, the sound bouncing off the walls. “Come on, you’re Jimmy Williams’s son. You gotta have more than one lady.”
I force myself to laugh along with him, even though the assessment does nothing more than make my blood boil. I may be the son of a philanderer, but that’s not the kind of man I am, or have ever been. I saw the trail of tears my father left behind each time he’d come around to my mother and then leave again to go home to his real family. There may be no love lost between my mother and I, but even I knew that you didn’t treat a woman that way. No matter what kind of person she may be.
Besides, Grace was more than enough woman for me. I didn’t want anyone but her.
I shake my head, still faking a smile. “Yeah, she’s the only one for me, man. Except I fucked around and lost her.” Saying it out loud hurts, but I forge on. “More like pushed her away ‘cause I’m a dumbass.”
He nods, rubbing the whiskers on his face. “So you need some love advice? And you thought you’d look up your old Uncle Tony?” He’s skeptical, his bloodshot eyes pinning me with a stare.
I lift a shoulder. “Nah. You asked how I’d been. Thought I’d start there.”
His chin lifts. “Alright. So, why you out looking for me?”
He isn’t nearly as jolly as he was when he walked in the door. He knows something’s up, that I wasn’t just looking to reconnect with my long lost “uncle.” I was hoping to ease into it, to gain more trust, but things never seem to go the way I want them to.
“I need to ask you some questions about Dad.”
He blinks, slapping a palm on the bar. “Ah, there it is. Knew you weren’t just looking to catch up.”
My shoulders tense, I squeeze the back of my neck. “Yeah, sorry. Listen, I need to know something.”
&
nbsp; I pause, trying to figure out the best way to approach the subject. When he doesn’t say anything, just continues to bore holes into my eyes with his, I go for it.
“Was Dad a bookie? A loan shark?”
I give him credit; his face never changes as he lies to my face. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Bronnson.”
I smirk. “Come on, man, don’t lie.” I may not have been able to get in touch with him over the last few days, but I’d talked to plenty of people that remembered when Jimmy and Tony would “help” people out, give them a little bit of money to tie them over ‘til payday.
It’s taking a lot of effort to keep my composure, but I know that if I lose my shit now, I’ll never get the answers I need.
“Your father owned a gas station,” he tells me again, his face solemn. “May God rest his soul. Terrible thing that happened to your dad, you know. Gunned down in his own business.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. The image of my father lying dead behind the counter flashing in my head, and I swallow the bile that creeps up the back of my throat. Tony misinterprets my reaction and places a hand over mine. My lids fly open and I pin him with a stare of my own. “Yeah, bet it was hard for you to watch, being his best friend and all.”
His eyes go wide and he snatches his hand from mine. His voice low, he insists, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Even though he’s doing a pretty good job keeping his cool, he can’t keep the beads of sweat from popping up on his forehead, so I keep talking.
“You know, it was something I had forgotten about that day. Seemed so inconsequential at the time.” I push to my feet and begin to pace as I recount the memory of that day. “Dani and I had been riding our bikes that day. It was hot as hell, I remember. We got thirsty. Dani decided we were gonna go sweet talk Dad into a couple of drinks, some candy. So we took off to the gas station.” I stop and look at Tony, who’s watching me closely, his face unreadable. I’d almost believe that he was telling the truth, except that he keeps wiping his palms on his pants and mopping at his brow with a cocktail napkin.