He cocked his head, his eyes calling out the fucking moronic mistake I’d made by deleting those messages. “You probably need to give my sister some time to calm down, too.”
“Shit… I didn’t mean for her to get hurt, Christopher,” I whispered over the pain that flared when I thought about her on the ground.
“Was it you who hurt her, Jared?” he asked, his voice twisting with contention. “Or did I? Or that asshole who showed up where he wasn’t welcome? Or how about his asshole friend who decided to jump in and make it an all-out brawl?” He raked an uneasy hand through his hair, looked at the wall. “And God, my sister doesn’t know when to sit things out. Always trying to break things up.”
I frowned. If it was anyone’s fault, it sure as hell was not Aly’s.
Christopher pegged me with his stare. “Tonight was fucked-up, but this isn’t all on your shoulders, so don’t go getting all emo on me, asshole.”
I scoffed and he laughed.
Christopher curled and uncurled his fist slowly. He flinched a little, obviously in pain. The skin on his knuckles was all shredded, flaming red.
“Just… lie low,” Christopher said seriously – a warning. “Let me go check on her and make sure the house is cleared out.”
Subdued voices came and went as the front door opened and closed, all of Megan and Aly’s friends flocking from what was supposed to be a good time for Megan. I climbed to my feet, paced some more, staring at myself in the mirror.
My eyes were too wide. Unfocused. Blood had begun to dry on the tiny cut at the corner of my bottom lip, and my eye was beginning to swell.
Damn it. I rubbed my palm over my mouth, trying to settle my rioting nerves.
I just needed to know she was really okay.
Bitter laughter climbed up my throat. Okay. What the fuck was okay? This bullshit I always got myself into?
That was most assuredly not fucking okay.
I forced myself to sit and give her the space she asked me for.
About ten minutes later, two knocks sounded at the door. Christopher poked his head in. He looked me up and down, judging my mood, before he edged inside. His voice was muted in a fierce whisper. “Aly’s fine… the burn wasn’t that bad. She’s pretty shook up, though. She said she really just wants to be alone, and Megan’s had way too much to drink for us to cut her loose, so I’m going to give her a ride home, then I’ll stop back by to check in.”
He gestured to the door. “Think you’d better give Aly some time to process this all. I can’t tell if she’s more pissed off about the texts or the fight.” His expression lightened. “You did what you thought was right tonight, Jared. Don’t go beating yourself up about it.” A smile cracked his face. Humor glinted in his eyes. “Besides, it looks like Gabe did plenty of that for one night.”
I stared up at him from where I sat on the lid of the toilet. Always such a punk. I forced a smile before I dropped my face in my hands. “Go on, Christopher. Take Megan home. We’ll be okay.”
Fucking okay.
Never was gonna be.
“Yeah, man, just give me a call if you need anything. I’ll be back by a while later.”
I nodded understanding, listened to him retreat. The soft sound of Christopher’s and Megan’s voices filtered into the bathroom before I heard the final click of the front door behind them.
With a heavy sigh, I stood, my hands fisted at my side as I pushed out into the hallway.
It was dark. Quiet. Too quiet.
My feet shuffled forward.
Embers glowed from the fire that had been built in the fireplace.
That fucking fireplace.
Bitterness crushed the joy of it within me.
Drawn, I inched toward it. Unsteadily, I pressed my hands up against the mantel, used it as support as I dropped my head and tried to catch my breath. Just for once, I wished I could be a different person.
But nothing was ever going to change. Knew it now.
I felt her searing presence behind me. Like shock waves.
I lifted my head. Regret flooded from me as I looked over at her, my arms still bracketed to the mantel.
At the edge of the room, she stood. Her arms were crossed protectively over her chest, hugging herself. A bandage was wrapped around her wrist, blocking out another piece of her skin that I had marred.
Another fucking sin.
I shuddered, my voice scratchy as I murmured over the pain, “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but tears slipped free.
I pushed away from the mantel, and turned to face her. Anxiety crawled beneath my skin, hate and fear and this sense of fading hope. Like the bleakest blackness was taking hold as I looked at the girl I’d only ever wanted to protect but just kept hurting.
“Aly, I’m sorry…” With the confession, my face dropped toward the floor. “It was stupid, erasing those messages.” I lifted my chin, imploring, “But I can’t lose you. I can’t stand the thought of another man touching you.”
Green eyes narrowed in pained disbelief, and she shook her head. “Do you really think there was any chance of that? Of me letting another man touch me? That Gabe texting me would have changed one single thing between us?”
She fisted a hand out in front of her, fighting through all the disappointment she felt for me.
Agitation ratcheted higher, twisting me tighter. I hated her looking at me that way.
In emphasis, her lids dropped closed. “Gabe is delusional, Jared.”
She blinked them open, her eyes swirling with all this doubt I didn’t know how to make sense of. “All of this is about us, Jared. About your fear. Don’t you see it? What you’re doing to us?”
My attention dropped to the bandage on her arm. Yeah, I fucking saw what I was doing to us. What I was doing to her.
She took a desperate step forward. I could see the bob of her throat, the hard swallow as she approached me. “Don’t you see what’s going to happen to us if you keep ignoring everything inside you?”
Dread barreled in. My heart started pounding so fucking hard I could feel it in my ears.
“You have to get help, Jared. Talk to someone. Find a way to face the demons inside of you.” It was no longer a request. I could feel it. It was an ultimatum sliding out of my girl’s mouth.
Aly shoved her fisted hand out in front of her and turned it over. She slowly unfurled her fingers. In her palm was a wadded-up piece of paper, small and yellow and square. Still it shouted out like some harbinger of war.
I blinked in confused distress, and took a step back as the dread increased.
“Take it,” she pled, inching forward.
And I didn’t fucking want to, but I was helpless to tell this girl no. With a shaky hand, I reached out to take the crumpled paper from her hand.
When I did, something like horror lashed across her face and settled in her eyes. “Please, know I didn’t want to do it this way, Jared. I never wanted to back you into a corner.” Misery twisted her face, and she clutched her chest. “I love you more than I could ever tell you. And I’m scared because I feel you slipping away. Every day it feels like another piece of you is stolen from me and one day I’m going to lose you. I can feel it, Jared. All the hurt you keep hidden inside is going to wreck you. Wreck us.”
Panic hammered at my chest. I smoothed out the paper, trying to comprehend what Aly had written on the sticky note, knowing whatever it was I definitely didn’t want to see.
And I was thinking of all these fucking terrifying scenarios. All of them led back to her writing her good-bye.
But no.
It was an address. In California.
Los Angeles.
Something vicious curled in my consciousness.
With it pinched between my fingers, I stared at her, my eyes narrowed as I searched her face, as I fought against the nausea that bound my stomach into knots and raced up my throat. It lodged right at that ball of unspent emotion, throbbed and pulsed and pled with the sorrow that could never be
shed.
“What is this?” I forced out.
Hesitation thickened her tongue. She wrung her hands and whispered, “It’s your father’s address.”
I felt as if I’d been punched. How many fights had I fought in my life? How many hits had I taken? I had no clue. The only thing I knew was this hurt was worse than any physical blow that had ever been inflicted.
“You looked up my father’s address?” I demanded through the betrayal.
I gripped my head. I didn’t want to believe it. How could she do this to me?
Aly stole forward. She stretched her fingers out toward me, fucking calling out to me like she did.
I backed away.
“Please don’t be mad. I never wanted to give it to you like this. I… I started looking for him a couple weeks ago. I was going to talk to you about it, Jared, encourage you to find him because you have to. You can’t move on and never look back when your soul is tied to the past. You need your family.”
Bullshit.
She was supposed to be my family.
I crumpled up the little piece of paper and hurled it toward the wall. It didn’t go far. It dropped fast and tumbled across the floor.
“What the fuck, Aly? You just go getting in my business?”
She blanched like I slapped her and staggered back. Confusion flitted all over her face. Her mouth trembled. “Your business?” Hurt saturated the words. “Anything that has something to do with you is my business.”
“Not that!” shot from my mouth. “I asked you to leave it the fuck alone.”
One fucking thing I’d asked from her.
One fucking thing.
I’d given her everything else.
“Why do you have to go digging up ghosts? It’s done, and there’s not one single thing I can do to change that.”
“Ghosts?” Disbelief flashed all over her face. “You think I’m digging up ghosts? Well, guess what, Jared.” Aly jabbed her finger toward the floor. “Those ghosts live right here. Haunting you… every move you make. And those ghosts are going to ruin us if you don’t turn around and acknowledge they’re there.” Her angry eyes softened. “You have to find peace with what happened to your mom, Jared.”
Peace?
Images burst behind my eyes. All that fucking blood and that scared smile, my mother’s voice a fading echo in my ear. That fucking dream that set me on fire every night, singeing as it seared, cutting me deeper and deeper.
It’ll be okay.
Red veiled my sight. I crammed my fists into my eyes.
I ruin everything I touch.
Anger surged, saturating every cell. Sickness clawed. I spun, and my fist connected with the wall to the side of the fireplace. Plaster and paint splintered, giving way beneath the rage that curdled my soul. Pain throbbed up my arm, and that sadistic satisfaction burned through my wicked spirit.
Aly screamed.
Ruin.
I cocked my arm back and rammed it again, tearing through the false security I’d erected around us, as if these walls could protect her from me.
Coals continued to smolder, the darkest red in the pit of the fireplace.
Burning to dust in that fucked-up shrine.
Enraged, I raked my hand through the row of pictures displayed on the mantel. Frames flew across the room and crashed to the ground. Glass shattered as another piece of me was destroyed.
It incited something inside of me.
I hated.
God, I hated.
Gritting my teeth, I dug my fingers into the edge of the carved wood that hung over the fireplace. That mantel. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I tore at it, like pebbles of vile blood excreted from my spirit.
It began to splinter and the seal broke free from the wall. I grunted as I tore it completely away, and I lifted it above my head and threw it against the stones, desperate to rid this house of anything that was my mother when it was supposed to belong to Aly.
Aly.
Blood seeped from my fingertips as I dug them behind the wood that had been mounted on each side of the hearth. The thin pieces of wood carved with the bouquet splintered. I frantically ripped and tore and rid this house of what never should have intruded into this place.
My mother was never supposed to be here.
In this place that was ours.
It was supposed to be for her.
Aleena.
Aly gasped. Wounded cries broke free. “Jared… don’t.” Fear saturated her tone.
I dropped the wood to the ground. Panting, I watched horror take her over. The girl I loved stared back at me as if she didn’t recognize who I was at all.
But this was the darkness. The part of me she was always trying to coax out into the light.
The part of me I hated with everything. The part that I would never escape no matter how badly I wanted to.
Because there was no peace.
Aly backed away. Wetness soaked her face. Pain twisted her expression into heartbreak.
“Aly,” I whispered, wishing there was some way to take it back, to bury it all back inside where it belonged. Hidden from her.
She set her hand protectively across her belly. She choked over the words, all this hurt pouring from her. “Is this how you want to live our lives? You putting holes through walls when I say something you don’t want to hear?” She took another two steps back. The corner of her mouth trembled. “Tearing our house apart because it hurts?” Aly bit back a sob. “I refuse to live my life like this, Jared, refuse to raise our baby this way.”
Hurt lanced through my nerves, splaying me wide. That place I always kept hidden magnified, the void bloated with the truth of who I really was.
I wanted to be better.
“I will love you forever, Jared. Nothing could ever touch that… and no one could ever touch me the way you have.” Pain tripped her voice. “But this?”
Hopeless, she looked around the room that I had just ruined.
Sabotaged.
Because I didn’t know anything else.
I would always be the same.
The wicked tainting the pure.
“Look at this place. At what you built. At what you created. Look at how beautiful it is.” She stumbled over the emphasis. “And look how easily you destroyed it.”
I destroy everything I touch.
I stepped toward her, wishing I could go back to this afternoon when I was kissing her and she was kissing me, when we were free. “Aly —”
An injured cry erupted from her throat and she held her hand up to stop me.
It stopped me short, left me standing in the middle of the war zone I’d created in our home, in the middle of the chaos that was ripped from the walls and scattered across the floor.
The chaos that raged through my heart and mind.
Because I knew we hadn’t been free. We’d never been.
I’d felt it building for weeks… building since the moment I came back, really.
My mother’s face flashed.
It’ll be okay.
And I knew it’d never be.
Aly’s eyes slammed shut, as if she couldn’t look at me. Fucking broken. “Please, go. If this is the way you want to live, then I need you to go.”
Swallowing, I dropped my head. Crushing pain seared through me. Slowly I approached her and set my hand on her face. My thumb brushed away her hot tears, and I kissed her cheek, feeling something die inside of me.
Because I loved her. I once believed it impossible.
But there was no denying it was real.
Just like there was no denying I would never be good enough for her.
Turns out Dickhead was right.
“I love you, sweet girl,” I murmured at her ear. Pulling back, I looked on her with the saddest smile, crushed by the torment staring back at me, torment begging me to stay, to be different from the person I was always gonna be.
Then I turned and walked out into the night.
TWENTY-ONE
Aleena
<
br /> Softly, the door clicked shut behind him, a complete contradiction to the violence that had claimed him minutes before.
Silence swallowed the room, a deafening stillness that screamed of all my fears.
Excruciating pain bore down on my chest. Squeezing. Suffocating. I couldn’t breathe.
Come to Me Softly Page 32