Part of me was relieved. But another part of me was bitter. I’d thought he would fight for me—but he just let me go.
Stop it, Sarah, I thought. You don’t want him to fight for you. You want to leave this all behind. To get on with your life as best you can. Maybe no one besides Hannah has to know…
The idea of lying had once disgusted me. Now, though—now that I’d committed another, perhaps graver sin—it seemed as viable an option as any. I could return home from Rumspringa and never speak again of my time with Reid. Not to my parents. Not to my future husband. Not to anyone.
Or I could seek solace another way. I could give up on the idea of marriage and a family altogether. Perhaps it was the pain, the guilt, and the shame talking—so fresh still, these wounds—but the notion of ever trusting a man with my heart again made me nauseous.
And it wasn’t just that. I knew, in some deep, dark place I didn’t want to acknowledge, that I would never feel anything as intense as what I’d felt when I was with Reid. I’d never desire another man in the same way ever again. I’d never extract that much pleasure from performing my wifely duties, or even just lying next to him in bed. Reid had ruined me for anyone else in more ways than one, and I hated him for it with a fury that was almost blinding.
Hannah and I drove in silence until we reached the highway. That was when we came back in range of the local radio station and she turned it on, bombarding me with a myriad of sounds I did not want. A snap of my wrist turned it off again; she looked at me hard, but didn’t immediately say anything.
When she did, I wished to God she hadn’t.
“Did you use the condom I gave you, at least?”
My stomach turned so hard I thought I was going to vomit. I rolled down the window, letting the cool air slap my face. It was enough to hold back the bile, but just barely. Closing my eyes, I took deep breaths through my nose. The car exhaust and baked asphalt scents weren’t terribly helpful, but they were distracting, at least.
Hannah gave me a few minutes before she prompted, “Well?”
The muscle in my jaw twitched. I hadn’t realized until that moment that I’d been grinding my teeth.
“No,” I said through them. “We did not.”
Hannah groaned. “Goddammit, Sarah…”
“He promised me he was ‘clean’”, I protested, although I was only about ninety percent sure what that meant. “And he withdrew.” My pulse was pounding in my head, almost loud enough to block out all the other noises that were still so foreign to me. “It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Well, you only have, like, an eighty-something percent chance of being right,” she muttered. Out of my periphery, I could see her shaking her head. “Okay, you’re not going back for another few weeks, at least. Not until we know if…”
Hannah trailed off, and in place of her voice, a headache arose right between my eyes. Now, on top of everything else, she wanted me to worry about the possibility of being with child? Wasn’t my deflowering enough? Weren’t the lies, the deception, the heartbreak, and the betrayal more than enough? And why wasn’t she just as angry as I was about this whole bet business? Is this just a normal occurrence here?
“Sister,” I whispered in our native tongue, “could you do me a favor and please shut up?”
“English while I’m driving, please,” she replied. “I can only focus on so many things at once.”
“Everything is English with you!” I cried, ignoring her request. This was the language that felt most comfortable for me right now, and I was going to put my comfort first for once. “Your world, your faith, your family, your morals—you traded them all for the English! What about them is so special to you, Hannah? What is it that appeals to you? The vices? The sin? How can you call this fresh hell home?”
“That’s not all there is to it,” Hannah began, but I cut her off with a shrill, almost hysterical, bout of laughter.
“No? Are you sure about that, sister? Because everywhere I turn, it’s all I see.” I shook my head at her in both disbelief and disgust. “Look at you. You’re in so deep you don’t even realize you’re wading through filth anymore. You can’t smell the polluted air. You don’t feel shame at the vast gulf between your throat and your neckline. You sully your reputation and your bed with English men as it suits you, letting them steal pieces of your soul in exchange for fleeting pleasure.”
Hannah’s eyes darkened. “Careful, Sarah,” she said, her words morphing into our village’s brand of Dutch. “It sounds like you’re calling me a whore.”
“I’m not,” I sneered at her. “I’m calling you a slut. You obviously don’t get paid for it, judging by your apartment—”
I shrieked as Hannah slammed on the brakes, yanked the wheel, and pulled us over onto the shoulder of the road. My bones vibrated as our tires skidded on the pavement’s raised texture, the one that made it sound like we’d hit a goose whenever we rolled over it. We came to a stop so abrupt the seatbelt left a red mark across my neck. I turned to Hannah, eyes wide, as she put us in park.
“What are you doing?!”
“Look,” she growled, “I get it. Okay, Sarah? I do. The time you spent with Reid didn’t go as planned. He wasn’t the man you thought he was. You did something you regret. And that sucks. But your grief doesn’t give you the right to make everybody else’s life a living hell. You don’t get to blame me for what he did, and you sure as hell don’t get to judge me because I’m comfortable with who I am and what I want. I don’t deserve it.”
“Don’t you?” I choked out, tears welling in my eyes anew. “You’re the one who pushed me to be with him, Hannah! You’re the one who not only told me everything was going to be okay, but that I could trust him—that he was a good man. You put a condom in my hands and speechified about how I shouldn’t be afraid to use it! You’re the one who pushed me and Beth toward these boys in the bar, and you’re the one who has been pushing us into their arms ever since. Why, Hannah? Why is it so important to you that we abandon our identities like you did? Why do we have to become you—is it so you won’t feel so alone? So you’ll have someone to share the misery of your choices with?”
“The only choice that ever made me miserable was staying in the village for as long as I did,” she shot back. She was clenching the steering wheel so hard her knuckle bones seemed ready to burst through her skin. “You want me to mourn the loss of a place where I had no free will and no voice? Fuck you, Sarah. I’m not doing that. Not even for you.”
“Fuck you, too!” I shouted, and Hannah’s eyes widened. Never in my life had I ever uttered a foul word like that, yet in my rage, it slipped from my tongue so easily. “If you were so unhappy being with us, why did you send for me and Beth? Are you punishing us? Is this some kind of sick joke to you?”
My outburst seemed to have tempered some of my sister’s anger. Slumping back in her seat, she softly answered, “No. No, Sarah, it’s not like that at all.”
“Then what is it like?” I demanded, too consumed with pain and regret to let it go. “Why did you do this to me, Hannah? Why did you set me up to lose my soul?”
One of Hannah’s hands slid from the steering wheel. She looked away from me, out the window, her jaw set tight. The vein in her neck pulsed hard and I waited, shuddering at the roar of every car that sped past us. My throat hurt from trying so hard not to cry and my vision blurred. When I blinked, I lost the fight—two tears escaped down my cheeks, racing toward the corners of my mouth.
Would Reid have kissed them away? I wondered. Instantly, I regretted it. The tears came easier now, along with a sob wrenched from the very depths of my heart. I could not contain the rising tide of hopelessness inside of me. Covering my face with my hands, I splattered my palms with wet grief.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said at last. When we were children, she would have reached out to touch me, would have bundled me in her arms and held me in her lap, stroking my hair beneath my bonnet. She would have kissed my forehead and hushed me, soothin
g me with a tender lullaby or a story full of rabbits and idyllic meadows. I wanted her to do that now, even though we had outgrown such illusions. I wanted her to lie to me and tell me it would all be okay as I buried my face in the warm curve of my sister’s shoulder.
She didn’t do any of those things. She couldn’t. I had put distance between us, said things that I was sure would cover us both in thorns for years to come, so that neither of us could touch the other without getting pricked. Without drawing blood.
Now I not only mourned the mistakes I’d made with Reid, but those I’d made with Hannah, too. I had been so unfair, yet I could not find the words to make it right again. They all just seemed… too small.
Minutes passed before I heard her flip her turn signal and take the Toyota out of park. I did not look up when we pulled back onto the highway, or for the rest of the drive back to her apartment, for that matter. Once my tears had begun in earnest, it proved impossible to get them to stop. I sobbed and hitched and trembled for miles, wishing that I had it in me to scream, to let out the poison my feelings for Reid had become—to purge his memory from my mind with the power of my lamentations.
In time, though, they subsided. I met this with both relief and a cruel sense of disappointment. I knew my torment wasn’t over, that in time, I would be in this dark place again, overwhelmed and helpless in the face of what I’d done. What I’d lost. Selfishly, I wished this was the end of it—that these tears would be the only ones I’d shed for Reid Brody. That the pain would pass in the span of a shuddering breath; that I’d forget him just as easily.
But I wouldn’t. And the worst part was that some fragment of me didn’t want to. Some small portion of me, removed from all the rest, couldn’t help recalling not his betrayal, but the lazy tilt of his smile. The sensation of his fingers tracing down my ribs to my waist. His mouth, hot and consuming, on mine. The effortless bulge of his muscles when he lifted me into his embrace and carried me up the stairs to the bedroom where I’d been his, and he’d been mine. Even the flash of murder in his eyes when that man had wound his arm around me at the carnival, our first date, and Reid had been there to ensure no harm came to me. The possessive way he’d put me behind him, a human shield, prepared to defend me from whatever danger lay ahead.
And once I’d started entertaining these bittersweet memories, I could not forget them or push them into the recesses of my mind where they belonged. Reid was gone now; there was no point in reliving that magical moment on the Ferris wheel, when the stars seemed so close and he was even closer. No point in recalling the soft texture of the stuffed penguin he’d won me that day. Whatever we’d had that made those memories so brutally alluring, it was broken now. There was no turning back; all that was left was a bleak and uncertain future.
At least, for me. I was sure that he’d land on his feet, one way or another. After all, he was no stranger in a strange land. The rules of this game were ones he might as well have written himself. And on top of that, he was a man. No one ever judged them harshly for their sins. That was a woman’s burden.
It wasn’t until Hannah parked for a second time that I was able to bring myself to lift my gaze and rejoin her in the land of the living. We’d made it back to her apartment complex, but we weren’t parked in front of her unit. Instead, we occupied a space near the common area. And in front of me, Reid’s brothers, Ash and Wyatt, stood around a barbeque grill, laughing and talking with Beth, perched on one of the picnic tables.
“Oh, God,” I whispered. Beside me, Hannah winced.
“Sorry. I didn’t know this was going to happen. You and Reid, I mean.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “If you want, you can go inside. You don’t have to be out here with us.”
I was too busy staring at Beth to answer. Her face was lit up so bright; every time she looked at Wyatt, her eyes sparkled like crystals in the sun. I could feel her joy emanating from her all the way over here. I knew that feeling well—until just recently, I’d been awash in it myself.
“Did you know there was a bet?” I asked Hannah.
For a while, she didn’t answer me. When she did, it broke my heart. “No, not exactly. But Sarah, it’s not what you think—”
I closed my eyes. How on earth could she defend these guys, after what they’d done to me? To us? “Does Beth know?”
Another long pause from Hannah. I already knew the answer, though.
Of course Beth was still in the dark. How couldn’t she be? She looked so happy. If she knew…
I unbuckled my seatbelt and opened my door. I heard Hannah scrambling behind me. “Sarah, wait!”
“No. Someone has to tell her. She deserves that.” And I slammed the door, hurrying to Beth across the grass before Hannah could stop me.
“Hey, Sarah,” Ash said, his expression a mix between pity and polite concern. “You okay?”
I didn’t answer him. But if looks could kill, Ash Brody would have been a corpse.
“Sarah?” Beth said as I approached. She looked uncomfortable, uncertain—maybe it was the murderous look on my face. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” I said, taking her by the arm. “Everything is wrong. Come with me. We need to talk.”
Wyatt looked like he was going to object. He shot a glance at Ash, but Ash responded with an even stare. In the end he didn’t move, and I dragged Beth away from them and into the nearby wooded area—one could hardly call it a proper forest or woods—where we could have some modicum of privacy.
“You had a fight with Reid?” she asked me, kicking some brambles out of our path. “That’s what Hannah said…”
I just barely kept the worst of my malice out of my voice. “Oh? And what else did Hannah say?” I paced, shattering the remains of dead leaves underfoot. “Did she tell you what we fought about? Or what he did to me?”
Beth stared at me. Her gaze flickered from warm to cold in an instant. “No. Don’t tell me he hurt you, Sarah. If he did, I’ll…”
“Not like that,” I interrupted her, then watched her hands relax out of fists again. It struck me as funny, how she wanted to protect me when I was here to protect her. Or so I’d thought. But now that we were face to face, it didn’t seem as cut and dry as all that. Now that I’d seen how happy she was, I understood that telling her the truth would mean taking that all away. That made things considerably more difficult.
Ignorance is bliss was a tenet our people lived by. It was the basis for our entire belief system. If you didn’t know about what modern society had to offer—if you didn’t acknowledge or immerse yourself in it—you could eke out a much happier life. But if you indulged yourself just once, you ran the risk of wanting more. Of destroying the framework of simplicity you’d built. What you’d once perceived as fulfilling, you might then perceive as not enough. Where you’d once believed you had all you needed, you might start to think you’d been going without.
That was a slippery slope. And it occurred to me now that this new information I was so ready to bestow upon Beth would change everything. It would open her eyes to a facet of Wyatt, and herself, and the world, that she’d never known existed. As naïve as I was, Beth was our eternal optimist. Would that change, if she knew the crimes these boys had committed? If she knew what their intentions were at the start?
Reid’s defensive reasoning echoed in my mind—everything he’d said about how it might have started off as a bet, but then he’d developed real feelings for me. If that were true—and I wasn’t completely ready to believe it was, but if—then what if Wyatt had grown to feel the same way? What if Reid really had called it off, and Ash and Wyatt were here because they wanted to be, not because they wanted to win?
My head spun and I sat down against the base of a tree. What was a lie and what was the truth? What was wrong and what was right? I couldn’t tell anymore.
My moral compass spun helplessly. I had no idea what to do.
“Sarah?” Beth said, crouching down in front of me. “Sister, what is it? You look so…” Her
blue eyes crinkled at the corners, shadowed beneath her furrowed brow. “…sad.”
I looked up at my youngest sister, blessed with such empathy, such intuition, such insight into the human condition—the spirit and the heart, and even the mind. I wanted to ask her if she still saw a soul in me. If I was still the sister she remembered. If she was still willing to call me that, after how badly compromised I’d become.
The way she looked at me made me feel whole, despite everything else. If she could do that for me, I could do this for her. I could give her the truth. She deserved it. Not the pain or the misery, but to know when she was being taken advantage of. Where she stood.
She deserved that kind of power.
“I have to tell you something about Wyatt,” I said, my voice hushed, my words lapsing into our native tongue. “Something about all the Brodys that you’re not going to like…”
But before I could, a third voice interrupted us. “Yes, Sarah Miller—tell us all about what you and the Brody Bunch have been up to.”
I leapt to my feet. Coming out of the woods behind us were four men, all of them tall and powerful, all of them glaring darkly at me and Beth. My stomach clenched—I recognized one of them.
It was the man who’d grabbed me at the carnival.
21
Reid
I was all packed up and ready to go. It hadn’t taken me long, really—there wasn’t a whole lot I’d needed at the cabin. Certainly not too many clothes, since I’d planned to spend much of my time naked. With Sarah.
But that had all gone horribly wrong.
There was no reason I should still be there, standing in the upstairs bedroom, my bag on my shoulder and my hands stuffed into the pockets of my jeans. Yet there I was, staring at the bed Sarah and I had shared, fitted with new, clean sheets. All trace of our lovemaking completely erased.
PRIDE: A Bad Boy and Amish Girl Romance (The Brody Bunch#1) Page 15