What You Leave Behind

by Katoff, Jessica

  She picks up where his words leave off and says, “You can’t, what? Because, right now, all you can’t do is finish a sentence. Or, you know, maybe you can’t consider what would be best for Harper. There’s that, too.”

  “Gemma—”

  “No, I’m not going to let this go on. You’re beating yourself up and drowning in self-pity, and have you even stopped to think about what all this has done to her?” Austin looks away from her and she wants to grab him by his chin and position his stare so she can ream him good and proper. She sits on her hands and whispers, “Stop thinking of you and him and love and loss. Think about her. She lost him and then you came in and now he’s back and it’s been, what, a few months? Her poor heart.” Austin hangs his head and Gemma reaches over to smooth her hand over the back of it. “And I’m sure this sounds shady as fuck coming from me because, well, I love you, but we’re—we don’t matter. We don’t matter when Harper is involved. I’ve known that from the start.”

  “Gem—”

  “No, I’m not saying that because I’m bitter. I’m saying it because, if you love her, Austin, you’ll give her space, time—you’ll let her heal and figure out what she wants. It’s what you have to do.”

  “She’ll choose him.”

  “Maybe she will. And maybe she won’t.” Gemma watches his tears drip as her hand falls away. “But, if you’re so resolved to think that, why do you want to be with her anyway?”

  “Because I love her,” he croaks out. “I love her.”

  “Sometimes, love is about letting go.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Hilary tries not to make a sound as she readies herself for work, but the floors creak from wear and her boots knock heavily against the age-old planks, no matter how light her footfalls. She steps in time to the pounding in Harper’s head---step, step, step, thump, thump, thump. And she knows if Hilary’s boots are already on, then she’s late for work. She knows, but she can’t bring herself to open her eyes—the light of the morning is too thick, too blinding. She rolls over, coiling her body around her sheets, and tucks her head beneath her pillow, aching for the darkest, quietest spot she can find. Eventually, Hilary’s steps fade and she vaguely hears the moan of the front door’s hinges.

  Sleep takes her under once more.

  Part of Harper awakens in her slumber and she finds herself seated on the bar at Rhodes with Liam, with eyes so blue, cradled heavy in her arms. She drowns herself in the sea of his eyes, until she’s crying an ocean and swaying with the current. As a wave hits, she’s split in two, clear down the middle, and Liam falls from her grasp. Austin’s hands wrap around her from behind just before her halves float apart and he holds her together long enough for her to mend, but Liam is lost at sea, floating farther away by the second.

  She cries out for him—“Liam!”—but he floats on.

  “Let him go,” Austin whispers, mooring himself to an anchor.

  But Harper pries herself out of Austin’s grasp before the weight can hit the ocean floor, and the current carries her in the same direction as Liam. It’s easy, being carried along on the backs of the waves, and just to see how easy, she turns and tries to swim against the current toward Austin. Pinned in place, he becomes smaller and smaller as the tide takes her farther away, and soon her arms grow tired and she stops fighting. No matter how hard she swims, she moves in the other direction, so she lets the tide take her.

  When Liam catches her, the ocean dries up, and they find themselves on rocky gravel that resembles the banks of the Rogue River.

  “Where are we?” she asks, bending down to let a fistful of dirt fall from her grasp.

  “Before,” Liam says, getting onto one knee beside her.

  She stares into his eyes hard enough to see the waves crest and fall in his irises—Austin’s there, tied to the anchor of his pupil. When he blinks, the ocean disappears, and it’s just bright blue sincerity and eyes wide enough to contain his hope. In them, she sees herself reflected and she’s smiling.

  It’s the last thing she sees before she wakes.

  Harper rises with slow limbs and sore muscles. Everything is too bright, too loud, and every infinitesimal part of her feels pulled taut and stretched thin—mentally and physically. Her head hurts most of all—until, through the fog of her hangover, she remembers her heart. It pangs in her chest, pulses with the same rhythmic thud in her skull, and she sits on the edge of the bed with one hand on each aching part and her eyes full of tears.

  It's fitting she thinks—head and heart, and they’re both killing her. It all comes down to head and heart, and she doesn't know what hurts most anymore. Logically, Austin wins—he’s been her solid ground this whole time. But her chest aches as she remembers her dream, and she wishes she could fall back into it just to see what Liam would do next. One is the anchor and one is the tide and she doesn’t know whether holding on is letting go, or if it’s the other way around. She cries and cradles herself until all of it makes even less sense and everything hurts too badly for her to move.

  At sundown, she brews coffee with a blank stare, and eats cereal from the box. Her stomach churns with the taste, with the scent of fresh coffee, and she stares down at the way her hip bones poke out further than they used to, but not as far as they once did. She’s hungrier than she thought, and she’s smaller than she used to be, and she knows she’s let herself go—no matter how healed she believed herself to be, she’s still a wreck. She’s given too much of herself away, and hasn’t guarded what’s left of her with any care. She pours whole milk into her coffee and counts out two servings of cereal for good measure.

  Sated beyond the point of comfort, she slowly begins to tend to her other needs—anything trivial and time consuming to keep her mind occupied, so she doesn’t think of either of them, to keep her heart safe. She washes her hands and face at the kitchen sink, pulls fresh clothes from the dryer, turns on the porch light, and finds her purse in the foyer. She rifles through her bag, looking for pain relievers to stop her beating brain, but finds her phone instead. She stands there with it for a moment, fearful of looking at the screen—fearful of whether he has or hasn’t called.

  After a long and cleansing exhale, Harper illuminates the screen—he hasn’t.

  She unlocks the screen and the ten digits of the keypad stare up at her.

  She wants to call Austin and make sure he’s alright. She wants to pick a fight with him, then make up after. She wants to tell him she loves him, and she wants to mean it. But, she also wants to call Liam and thank him for being there for her. She wants to ask him if he really was there for her, or if the vodka conjured up his presence in her mind. She wants to tell him she doesn’t love him, and she wants to mean it. Mostly, she wants to know which one relates to the sharp cut of pain in her chest.

  The phone vibrates in her hand, startles her, and her stomach pitches when she sees Liam’s name on the screen. All the things she thought she wanted to say leave her, and she lets the phone ring through to voicemail. He calls back directly after the ringing stops and she knows it’s because he regrets not leaving a message—he used to do it all the time.

  This time, she answers.

  “Liam,” she says, soft and weary. “Hi.”

  “I didn’t think you’d answer,” he replies, and his tone is just as weak. “You didn’t go to work today.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know. I stopped by. Hilary said you didn’t come in.”

  “She didn’t threaten you or—”

  “No,” he laughs out, and she can almost see the wry smile he wears just by the sound of it. “She was polite.”

  The line grows silent then, and they both know why. They’re not friends—they don’t make small talk anymore. The silence is excruciating and awkward, and Harper convinces herself that this silence is the reason her palms are sweating, her heart is racing. It has nothing to do with the soft sound of Liam’s breathing on the line or how it resembles the way he sounded in the morning when they
would make love. No, it hasn’t a thing to do with that at all—she swears it.

  She tells herself these are ideas that Austin’s planted in her mind—doubts of his, not hers.

  “Is that why you called? To tell me that I didn’t go to work today?” Harper asks, cutting the silence. “I kind of know that already, you know.”

  “I called because I want to see you,” he gets out after a moment, and the words almost run together, but she hears them crisply. They cause her breath to catch in her throat, and she coughs around it. “I mean, I—I have your keys. Dylan gave them to me last night. Hilary forgot to take them.”

  “Why didn’t you just let Dylan keep them or give them to Hilary when you were at the shop? That would have made a lot more sense than taking them.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Um.” Harper doesn’t want to insult him, but she remembers her hip bones and all Liam’s done to her heart, and she whispers, “Well, that’d be best, considering—”

  “Considering you’ve lost all trust in me?” he cuts in.

  “Liam—”

  “I want to see you,” he says again, and there’s that thrum in her heart again. “That’s why I didn’t give them to Hilary, and Dylan—he thinks I went chasing after the two of you when you left last night to give them to you right then and there.”

  She wipes her hands on her sweatpants and bites her lip. She knows she’s asking for trouble if she agrees to see him, but she can feel the tide pulling her to him, and after a beat, she concedes, “You can bring them by.”

  “Now?”

  “Give me enough time to shower,” Harper tells him, but she tells herself it’s time to rethink her decision.

  “Twenty-three minutes,” Liam says wistfully. He once counted the amount of time she spent in the shower, after they’d had some silly argument in which he said it took her a half hour to shower and she claimed it only took ten minutes. It was years ago and the details are fuzzy, but he remembers the number—the gasp on the other end of the line tells him she remembers it, too. “I’ll see you then.”

  “The door’s unlocked. Wait downstairs when you get here,” she says before hanging up—just in case the doubts are really her own.

  Harper takes extra time and care in the shower, letting her muscles soak and her body calm. She makes sure to lather every aching part of her skin, and wishes she could clean her heart, clean away the pain. She scrubs hard over her ribs, as if it were possible to reach it, and her skin is bright red there by the time she hears the front door’s hinges over the soft rush of water. She nearly feels better until that moment—now she’s raw nerves and raw skin.

  Wrapped in a towel, with her hair dripping down her shoulders, she pulls open the bathroom door. When she doesn’t find Liam on the other side, she’s thankful for his obedience. In the hall between the bathroom and her bedroom, she pauses until she hears signs of life—the creak of a cabinet swinging open in the kitchen—and she calls out, “Liam?” to make sure it’s him and not Hilary.

  A clatter sounds in the kitchen—the break of glass on wood—and she rushes down the staircase with her towel clutched tightly to her, and rounds the corner to meet Austin’s wide eyes and the hard, thin line of his mouth.

  “Austin—”

  “What did you say?” he sputters as he nears her, his feet crunching over the broken pieces of a vase, over the stems and bulbs of white tulips. He shakes as he approaches, and when he gets close enough, she can see the beginnings of tears glint in the dim light of the room. Her blood runs cold at the sight of it and she reaches for him, but he backs away and more glass crunches beneath his steps. “Did you—”

  “Let me explain—” she whispers, because it’s all she can manage, the lump in her throat too big to speak around, and she reaches for him, again. He flinches as if burned, backs even further from her, and she stares at the hand he won’t let her take, one of the hands that put her back together. Those hands seem completely paramount to her survival now, and head or heart, anchor or tide, she knows she wants his hands. “Austin, it’s not—”

  “What? It’s not what I think? Is that what you’re going to say to me?” Austin’s tone is biting then, seething, and his stare is hard. She quivers beneath it, feels so low, even though she knows she’s done nothing wrong. It’s so accusatory though, so pained and pointed, that it makes her cry. “I came here to apologize, because that’s what real men fucking do when they’re wrong, and you’re in a fucking towel and saying that motherfucker’s name and it’s not what I think?”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Bullshit, Harper. I knew, and I tried so hard, and all I wanted was a chance, and I—how could you just—”

  “You should listen to her, Austin,” Liam’s voice cuts in, and Harper turns at the sound of it, startled. She is between them, again—she is always between them, always has been. Liam nears and Austin does too, and Harper’s head and heart throb and throb, and she thinks she may black out. “Because things aren’t always as they seem, are they? Or did I not see what I thought I saw last night?”

  “That wasn’t—”

  “Wasn’t what I thought, right? That’s what you’re going to say?” Liam’s voice is so calm and Austin’s breathing is so hard, that Harper doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how it’s all come to this. Yesterday, she was kissing Austin’s mouth and Liam was a distant memory. “Well, neither is this.”

  “Like I can believe you?” Austin spits, his voice escalating.

  “You can believe her.”

  “What happened last night?” Harper asks weakly, cutting through their exchange. Her stare is trapped on the floor, on the shrinking space between Austin’s boots and Liam’s sneakers as their argument takes them nearer to each other, but at the sound of her voice, they still. Silence falls over the room. Liam won’t tell her because he knows he’s caused her enough pain, and this isn’t his pain to give. Austin can’t bring himself to tell her either, because of what he’s just accused her of. No one speaks and the silence grows around and through all of the misunderstandings and unspoken explanations. After a while, she whispers, “Get out,” because she doesn’t have anything left to say. “Both of you—just get out.”

  Liam says nothing and turns to leave, places her keys on the table in the foyer as he goes.

  Austin remains, his mouth and feet as still as the silence, and Harper can’t look at him. He can’t see her through his tears anyway. They both stand there, unmoving and crying, and they both know—they know that it’s over, and neither of them has to say it, neither of them can. They can feel it with an overwhelming finality. His feet break more glass as he moves away, as he leaves, and she looks at the shattered pieces as if they’re the kin of her broken heart.

  He whispers, “I’m sorry,” but the creak of the door’s hinges covers his already wasted words.

  Liam watches as his breath turns to smoke in the dim wash of moonlight and he waits. He doesn’t know why he feels compelled to, but he does. It’s there in his body, a slight shiver up his spine as he turns to leave, and he feels it, feels weighted and tied to the moment, this place and the people in it. He paces the length of the driveway, his legs full of frenetic energy, and his eyes disobey him every once in a while, drop their gaze to the oil stain as his feet pass it. He is torn in so many directions, but firm in where and who he has brought himself to be, and he waits. The front door opens and Austin is a mess—tears stain his cheeks in thick lines and his nose is red, nostrils flaring, his lower lip trembling.

  Once, not too long ago, Austin was Liam’s best friend, and this is why he waits.

  “Austin—”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Austin spits and brusquely barrels his shoulder against Liam’s, hard enough for Liam to lose his footing. Austin keeps walking—waiting for no man, especially not Liam—and mutters, “Self-serving piece of shit.”

  “You’re right,” Liam states, his words clear and thick, loud, as he gets to his feet. Austin keeps moving, still
headed for his truck at the end of the drive, and Liam steps in double-time to catch him. He nearly has his door open once Liam reaches him. “Did you hear me?” he asks, grabbing Austin’s shoulder. “You’re right. You’re fucking right. I’m a gigantic self-serving piece of shit, and anything else you can think to call me. You’re right.”

  “Not now. You don’t want to test me right now,” Austin seethes. He shakes his shoulder roughly, tries to pull away from his grasp, but Liam holds firm. “Fucking let go, Barnes.”

  “No.” Austin rounds on him then, but Liam expects it and his hands grab Austin’s wrists and the side of the truck behind him almost acts as an accomplice, doing the rest of the work and holding Austin in place. He struggles a moment and almost bests Liam, but then submits—he’s too drained to fight. “You done?” Liam asks, his tone even—not mocking or hurtful, not with an ounce of flourish or grandstanding. Austin nods, his eyes closed and fists unfurled, and Liam releases him. “Come on. I’m buying you a beer.”

  “You think it’s just going to go back to that? Really?” He’s loud and his voice cracks and breaks. “You’re completely fucked in the head.”

  “I am,” Liam replies, shame and degradation accented in the two small, quiet words. “I am everything you think I am, and nothing at all.”