“The fuck?” I muttered as I made my way to the front door.
Whoever was standing on the other side refused to let up, continuing to beat the shit out of my front door like their life depended on it. I didn’t care if the damn apartment complex was burning to the ground around me. Whoever was standing at my door was about to pay for my bad mood.
“Knock it the fuck off!” I shouted as I jerked the door open to see a red faced, puffy-eyed Savannah standing before me. Just the sight of her brought back all the pain I’d tried to drink away the night before.
“Jeremy,” she whispered in a broken voice.
Her teeth were biting into her bottom lip, and I noticed her white-knuckled grip on the handles of her purse in front of her.
“What are you doing here?” was all I could manage to say.
Reaching up, she brushed away a tear from her right cheek. “I needed to talk to you. You wouldn’t answer any of my calls. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Typically, when a person doesn’t pick up the phone, that means they don’t want to talk to the person calling. Obviously, you didn’t get the hint.”
I hated myself for being so callous, but the pain was still there, and it was too fresh in my mind to spare her feelings. I just couldn’t control what came out of my mouth.
The sight of her shoulders shaking as she fought to hold back tears managed to break what little of my heart had been left intact after last night. I almost reached out to comfort her, but the memories from the night before caused my hand to pause in midair before it dropped back down to my side.
“Sorry,” I grumbled, not being able to fully help myself when it came to consoling Savannah. I didn’t know if it was possible to love and hate someone at the same time.
“Can we please just talk? Just for a minute, please.”
Letting out a loud sigh, I ran a hand through my already sleep-rumpled hair and stepped out of the way so she could come inside.
I couldn’t help but question how we’d gotten here. This girl, the love of my life, was standing in my living room, and her nervousness was practically palpable. And I could hardly bring myself to look at her.
I collapsed onto the couch and placed my head in my hands, waiting for her to talk, as she stood in front of me, fidgeting with her hands.
“What do you want to say?” I finally asked after she remained silent for too long.
She sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Jeremy,” she finally began after several more seconds. “I know that what I did was horrible, and I’ve regretted my decision every day for the past seven years.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. “But you have to know that I didn’t do it to hurt you. I love you more than anything, baby, I swear. I thought I was doing the right thing.”
I couldn’t listen to her anymore. Every word she spoke was like a knife to the heart. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”
Her head jerked back in surprise at the venom in my words.
“You don’t love me more than anything. You never have. I’ve always been second fucking place to your relationship with Emmy—”
She started shaking her head frantically as she interrupted, “That’s not true!”
“Yes it is!” I shouted. “Who did you think you were doing the right thing for, Savannah? Huh? Was it me or Emmy?” I didn’t give her a chance to respond before continuing to talk, “You knew having an abortion would mean the end of us, but you did it anyway. All you cared about was Emmy and how she would feel if she found out you were pregnant. Or how you didn’t want to be like your own fucked up mother. You didn’t give a shit about me or whether or not I wanted that baby. What I wanted didn’t even register in your decision. If it had, you’d have realized that I would have been with you every step of the way. I could have helped you. I never would have let you turn into your mother.”
Savannah hit her knees right in front of me just before grabbing at both of my hands. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. God, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “Emmy was the only real family I had.”
Those eight words hurt worse than anything. Snatching my hands from hers, I shot up from the couch and began pacing in an attempt to control my temper. It didn’t work.
“I WAS YOUR FAMILY!” The words forced themselves out, almost of their own will. “Why couldn’t you see that? I knew your relationship with your parents was all kinds of fucked up, and I busted my ass every damn day to try to be enough for you. But I never was, was I? No matter what I did or how much I loved you, you never looked at me like I was your family, did you?”
She couldn’t even answer me past the tears streaming down her face.
“I wanted so badly for you to see me, Savannah, really see me. You were a part of my family from the very beginning. I tried my hardest to make sure that you felt like you belonged there, but you refused to let me in. You always kept me at arm’s length.”
She just kept repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” over and over as she rocked back and forth on the floor with her hands covering her face as tears leaked through.
“Why couldn’t I be enough for you?” I whispered, finally letting my own tears break free.
“You were,” she whispered back. “I just didn’t realize it until it was too late.”
With that sentence, I knew there was no fixing what had been broken between us. I wanted to be what Savannah needed, but she was always going to doubt me.
I couldn’t live with that.
It took several minutes, but eventually we both managed to get our tears under control.
“We can’t come back from this, can we?” she asked.
“No,” was all I could manage to say past the crippling weight that was sitting on my chest.
I watched through tear-blurred vision as she stood from the floor and reached for her purse before walking toward me. I hated seeing her so broken. I wanted to fix her, to heal her pain, but I couldn’t. Since I was being honest with myself, I had to finally admit that I’d never been able to. She had never let me close enough to be what she needed. I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to bury the pain.
Standing on her tiptoes, she placed a hand on one cheek as she pressed a kiss to the other. “I hate myself for hurting you, Jeremy,” she said quietly. “I really do love you. I’m sorry I was too foolish to see what I had right in front of me all along. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life.”
I opened my eyes to the sound of the door closing and Savannah walking away from me again.
I wanted to punch whoever started that saying, Time heals all wounds. I knew it was true. I knew that eventually, it wouldn’t hurt so damn much, but that stupid ass saying did jack shit to ease a person’s pain when living in the moment. I couldn’t look beyond what I was feeling in the here and now. I couldn’t imagine not wallowing in the grief of losing the one person who meant the most to me, the one person I’d always taken for granted without even realizing it.
Hindsight was twenty-twenty. Yeah, that was just another saying that I hated at that moment. I was such an idiot. I deserved every ounce of pain that was coursing through my body.
I’d done this—no one else, only me.
But the one thing that hurt me the most was knowing that I’d caused Jeremy pain. I didn’t care about how much I was hurting, only that he was hurting too.
It had been three days since the end of Jeremy and me, and every day, the feeling that I’d lost the most crucial piece of myself grew worse and worse.
I hadn’t dragged myself out of bed since leaving his apartment. I’d called in sick to work and ignored my cell phone every time it rang. With my friends, solitude wasn’t usually something I got much of, so I was determined to bury myself in my own misery for as long as I could.
As if fate was listening to my thoughts at that very moment, someone began pounding on my front door. Fate was a stupid bitch, and I hated her.
I pulled the down comforter over my head and tried to ignore the knocking, hoping that whoever it was woul
d get the hint and go away. Of course, I wasn’t that lucky.
I heard the sounds of a key sliding into the lock and the turning of the deadbolt just seconds before Lizzy’s voice echoed through my house.
“Savannah Morgan, where the hell are you?” she shouted.
I have got to quit giving people keys to my fucking house.
I ignored her and burrowed deeper into my bed, willing a hole to open up and suck me in.
“I know you’re in here,” she called out.
I knew by her voice that she was getting closer and closer to the bedroom. My suffering in silence was about to come to an end.
“Dear God,” she said from the doorway to my bedroom. “How many pizzas have you eaten in the past few days?”
So I’d stuffed my face with mushrooms, black olives, and extra cheese from Joe’s Pizza every day. So what?
“Jesus, Savvy, what’s that smell?”
I pulled the comforter down just enough that my forehead and eyes were peeking out.
“Oh God, that smell is you!” Lizzy exclaimed as she made her way to the bed. “Your funk is burning my eyes from here.”
“Eat shit and die,” I mumbled as I pulled the covers back over my head.
She promptly grabbed hold of the bedding and ripped it off of me. “It smells like you’ve already done both of those. Get up. You’re getting in the shower—now. And I’m burning these sheets while you’re in there.”
I rolled to my side, giving Lizzy my back. “Go away. I’m not ready to join the land of the living just yet.”
I felt the mattress dip with her weight as she settled next to me.
“Savvy, honey, you need to get out of this bed. Everyone’s freaking out. You won’t answer your phone, and Jeremy’s been walking around, looking like shit. People know something is going on. Trevor had to drag Jer out of Colt’s the other night. Said he was wasted beyond belief.”
“I just can’t talk to anyone right now,” I whispered as fresh tears ran down.
“I know, honey, but you don’t have a choice. Emmy has had it with waiting for you to call. She’s heading over as soon as she gets off work.”
Damn it. That was the last thing I wanted to deal with. Admitting to her that Jeremy and I had broken up was going to be hard enough. Confessing why was going to kill me.
“Go and get in the shower before she gets here. Please.”
I looked at Lizzy and saw the concern in her eyes. Seeing that made the pain even worse.
“I ruined everything, Liz.”
“Oh, Savvy.”
She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me to her. I didn’t know how long the two of us sat there, hugging each other, but by the time we pulled apart, both of our eyes were red-rimmed from crying.
“Can you just call her and tell her to stop by another day?” I pleaded. “Please, Lizzy. I just can’t do this right now.”
She gave me a sad smile. “Okay, I’ll call her, but only if you swear to get out of this bed and take a shower. This isn’t healthy, Savannah.”
“I know.” I nodded. “I’m going.” I rolled off the bed and padded toward the bathroom.
“I’m gonna clean up a bit and throw your bedding in the washer. We’ll talk when you get out, okay?”
I looked over my shoulder and gave a small chin lift in acknowledgment. I planned on dragging the shower out as long as I possibly could. I had no desire to talk.
As time passed, I’d somehow managed to get myself to work every day, but I was a zombie the entire time I was there. Ben had tried to talk to me, to see if there was any way he could help, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open up to him about everything that had happened. I’d told him as politely as I could manage that I’d be fine, but for the time being, I just wanted to come to work and do my job. I could only fake so much, and acting like everything was fine and dandy wasn’t something I could pull off. So I would stay in my office and bury myself in my job, praying it would be enough to clear my head, if even just for a little while.
It didn’t work.
Lizzy’s call to Emmy had managed to buy me a few days of reprieve, but that was it. When I pulled into my driveway after work on Thursday, her car was sitting there, and my stomach plummeted. My time was up. I got out and made my way to the front door as slowly as possible, dread churning in my gut the entire time. Before I made it to the front porch, the door flew open and Emmy stood there with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Get the damn lead out, Morgan. We need to talk.”
I had no clue what to say, how to even start the conversation that we needed to have, so I just shuffled into my house like I was walking to my own execution. Something told me she wasn’t going to handle my confession any better than Jeremy had.
I headed straight into my kitchen and proceeded to uncork a bottle of red wine. I was going to need it. Emmy sat on a bar stool at the island, watching me intently the whole time. I lifted the bottle to her, silently asking if she wanted a glass for herself. She simply cocked an eyebrow at me and shook her head. I finished pouring myself a very large glass before finally looking up at her. The worried expression blanketing her face caused the tears to threaten to spill again.
“What’s going on?” Emmy finally asked when it became obvious I wasn’t going to start the conversation.
I cleared my throat uncomfortably and looked down into my wine glass. “Jeremy and I broke up,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, I gathered that. He’s been walking around looking like death warmed up and then run over, and you’ve basically disappeared. What the hell happened, Savvy?”
I tried to put it as delicately as possible. “I kept a secret from him for a really long time. I finally told him, and it was something he just couldn’t forgive.”
I glanced up quickly to see her brows wrinkle in confusion.
“What secret did you keep from him? I know everything about you, Savannah. There’s no way possible you could have done something so bad that he’d break up with you.”
I would have given anything for that to be the case.
“That’s not true,” I informed her.
“What’s not true?”
I squeezed my eyes closed against the burn of tears. “That you know everything about me.”
The sarcastic sound she made let me know she didn’t believe that for a second.
“Yeah, okay, Savvy. What deep, dark secret do you have that I don’t already know? We’ve been best friends practically our whole lives. We know everything about each other.”
“Emmy,” I said, trying to keep my voice from cracking too badly, “I had an abortion when I was nineteen. It was Jeremy’s, and I didn’t tell him before doing it. I kept it from him this whole time.”
Her eyes grew wide as she absorbed what I’d just said. “You…what? No, you didn’t. You didn’t,” she said, like she thought she could change the outcome if she kept insisting it wasn’t true. “You wouldn’t do something like that,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I did,” I choked out on a sob.
Emmy placed a hand over her mouth as her eyes welled up with tears, confirming my fear that she wouldn’t handle it well. Emmy was the least judgmental person I knew, but she was extremely sensitive to certain things after losing Ella. I couldn’t fault her for that. I’d been there, and I’d seen how it had nearly destroyed her. That was a large part of the reason why I’d convinced myself that I’d done the right thing. I’d been so sure that Emmy wouldn’t have been able to handle seeing me pregnant that I’d given no thought to future consequences.
“Why would you do that, Savannah?” she asked, her voice almost pleading that I take it back.
I dropped my chin to my chest and tried to breathe past the pain that had taken up residence in my chest. “We had no business having a baby! We were only nineteen, for Christ’s sake. And it’s not like I had the best role model growing up,” I replied sarcastically.
“You had just lost Ella,” I explai
ned. “I didn’t want to hurt you. You were having a hard enough time trying to deal with it. I didn’t want to make things worse.”
When I finally found the courage to look up at her, she was shaking her head in disbelief.
“You can’t be serious, Savannah. I’m your best friend,” she said, emphasizing the last two words. “How could you possibly think I would be anything but happy for you? Jesus!” She stood and began pacing the kitchen. “I can’t believe you never told me…after all these years. I can’t believe you did that to Jeremy!”
“I thought I was doing what was right,” I insisted, finally starting to let my anger at her judgment outweigh my guilt.
“How could you think that was right? You saw what that miscarriage did to me. How could you ever think that having an abortion would be something I’d be okay with?”
“I was hoping you’d never find out,” I stupidly admitted.
That caused her to let out a cruel, sarcastic laugh. “Oh, wow. Well, that came back to really bite you in the ass, didn’t it?”
“Emmy—”
“I can’t approve of what you did, Savannah. I don’t approve of it. I’ve always told you everything. I was supposed to be your best friend. How could you keep something like this from me? And for seven years. I don’t know what else to say. I thought you trusted me.”
“I do trust you, Emmy!”
“Obviously, you don’t.” With that, she turned and did something she’d never done before. She walked away from me.
The harshness in her words was completely foreign to me and cut down to the bone. She was the one person in my life who I always thought would stand beside me no matter what, whether the decisions I made were wrong or not. I never expected to see disapproval or disappointment on her face when she looked at me, but that was exactly what had been in her eyes as she stared me down.
Something in me shut down at that look. The smallest piece of happiness that I’d managed to hold on to when Jeremy walked away had shattered with that look. I hadn’t grown up with a loving family. Truthfully, they had barely tolerated me.
Rising from the Ashes Page 14