by Nicky Shanks
She giggles and Heather whimpers. “I love you too. Now, go sit down.”
Oliver glares at me and does what she asks.
I am going to faint. That used to be me…I used to be the one who would do anything she asked of me. You just do that for someone like Julie, no questions asked.
“Actually, Heather…” Julie’s voice breaks back into my head. “He really hasn’t eaten anything decent in a few days. Would it be too much trouble—”
“No trouble!” Heather squeaks and lets go of my hand. I admit, it pisses me off that she’s so quick to jump to Oliver’s aid, but I understand so I let it go. Heather flitters over to the sofa and hands Oliver my remote.
My remote.
I almost explode when she looks at me. I clear my throat and open my arms to Julie, watching Heather’s annoyed gaze. Okay, so now we are playing the jealousy game as well as the get-your-ex-back game.
This is going against all the rules of getting what you want.
I gesture an invite to Julie to walk up the stairs and I lock eyes with Oliver. I can feel his hate for me from twenty feet away. All I can do is smile at him without the girls seeing me and I follow Julie as closely as I can up the flight of stairs knowing that he’s seething about it. When we enter the room with all the boxes, I shut the door behind us and she doesn’t notice or act like she fears me anymore at all.
I never wanted her to fear me in the first place.
She starts rummaging through some boxes and places an empty one on a nearby table. She fills it with small knickknacks and other various objects. I wait for her to go through a few boxes before trying to fill the silence. “So…” I sit down next to where she stands. “He looks like shit.” The look of horror on her face sends shivers down my body.
“He nearly died, Brandon.” Her scoff sends me into a frenzy. “You’d look like shit too.”
She opens another box and buries her thoughts into it. I have something that I need to tell her, but I don’t know how she’ll react, so I leave her to her walk down memory lane for a while, just watching her. The curves of her hips define more as she bends over, and I blush from wanting her so fucking bad.
I wish it would stop.
She’s going to find my secret in these boxes.
There isn’t much I can to do waste any more time, so I join her in opening boxes and sifting through them, holding up several things for her to approve or disapprove. We share photos with each other and talk about the past—the good past—and how many good times we shared.
“Oh, remember this? This is from that summer we stayed in that log cabin on the beach in Florida.” She shows me a glossy photo and we laugh at the funny faces we’re making in it. “Oh, and you got so sunburnt that we had to stay an extra few days for you to heal.” She holds her hands over her mouth, laughing hysterically.
“Yeah, you weren’t the one with a thousand fires on your ass.” I smile and take the picture from her. Our fingers touch and she doesn’t notice, making my good mood vanish quickly. “We had a lot of good times, Jules.”
It’s now or never.
I have to try before using my secret weapon.
“We can have an entire lifetime of good times if you come back.”
Julie cocks her head, her gaze searching mine for an answer. “Wait, you wanted to get me up here without Oliver to do this?” Her voice shakes violently, vibrating the air around our bodies. “What is wrong with you? You have Heather downstairs, what about her?”
“Okay, okay,” I growl at her. “Keep it down before Saint Jackson breaks his other leg trying to run up the stairs and save you from nothing.” I stand up to walk across the room and sit back down far, far away from her to save a little face. “It’s no secret I’m still in love with you, Julie. Heather can even see it, and that’s why she offered to stay with Oliver downstairs—so I can do whatever it takes to get you back.” Her face crumples when she thinks about Oliver alone with Heather downstairs, and her gaze goes to the closed door. “Don’t worry, she won’t touch him. I have her wrapped around my finger…remember what that’s like?”
Julie makes a gagging sound, shaking her head. “You’re as disgusting as the day I left. I’m going to just take these few boxes and go. I don’t know what I was thinking coming up here alone with you. Everything you and I had was a lie.” I see a white piece of paper sticking out of a box when she passes me. I quickly snatch it before she leaves the room and I wave it in the air as she turns to face me with disgust on her face.
Complete disgust.
“You and Heather deserve each other.” She tries to handle the two boxes in her arms with grace. “You are both messed up, and you mess other people up in your self-pity process.” Her eyes follow the document that I’m still waving in the air. “What is that? Why are you waving that around like a flag?” She puts her boxes down and grabs the paper from me. I watch the color drain from her face as she reads through it. “This isn’t real…I would have remembered something this big.” She continues to read, and her knees buckle enough for her to hold onto the now open doorframe. “When did this happen? Is this real?”
Panic.
There’s panic in her voice.
This isn’t going well.
And it doesn’t make me feel good, either.
I know I can run downstairs with the paper and show it to Heather and Oliver, but Heather wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. Oliver would be furious. I smile and see Julie’s eyes scanning the paper with so much hope that it isn’t real that it’s upsetting.
She sees my smirk. “Oliver knows all of the things you forced me to do when we were together; he isn’t going to like this.” Her nose crinkles like she smells something sour and the darkness in her voice scares me a little. “If you think this means anything, you’re wrong. I don’t believe this is even real. It’s a scare tactic to get me to stay.”
I didn’t even think of that.
I act offended, even though she’s right. “Oh, please. You remember this and you know it. It’s sad that I have to even show you this for you to remember.”
“Why are you just now showing me this if it’s real?”
I shrug. “I kept it hidden until I needed it.”
“I didn’t do this!” Her hiss fills the room and shakes my body. She snorts and pockets the paper for safekeeping. “You can do what you want, but Oliver will never believe you over me. He loves me more than he hates you.” She starts to bite her fingernails—she does this when she knows she’s backed against a wall.
“Well, let’s find out.” I start to glide past her, but she stops me.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I hear the voice that I created for her: that certain mixture of fear and hopeless pain that she perfected years ago. “Haven’t I had enough from you? What will it take for you to just stop torturing me? All I ever did was love you, and you threw me out like garbage…and I try to move on and be happy with someone who has healed every single burn you’ve given me, and for what? When will you just let me go so I can be happy? Why can’t you just be happy with Heather?”
I want to wipe the tears away that are running down her cheeks.
But it’s not my place anymore.
I can see that clearly now.
It took another round of me breaking her down to realize that.
“I won’t tell him about it, Jules.” I swallow the lump in my throat. “You can trust me, I won’t tell him. You’re right, I need to try and be happy with Heather. I’ve been obsessing over what we had for far too long…I’m only fooling myself.”
She searches my eyes for the lie.
There’s no lie.
She’s right and there’s nothing I can do about it.
I’ve lost her forever.
Nothing I do is going to make her love me more than Oliver now, after he’s swooped in and saved her from her horrible life.
The life I created for her and then destroyed.
She shakes her head at me and then picks up the boxes again, but I take them f
rom her arms. She lets me help her, but it’s not without reluctance. “Hey, Julie?” She puts her fingers to her lips to let me know to lower my voice. “How do you know you didn’t love me and that you do love him?”
“I did love you—don’t think that I never did. There was a time when all I loved was you, but you ruined it. We could have been happy forever if you didn’t destroy everything. And here we are…strangers again.”
Ouch.
My chest hurts.
She feels bad, but I don’t bother calling her out on it. “There are lots of different ways that I know I’m in love with Oliver and not you anymore. Life with Oliver has its drama, of course, but nothing like our drama. I can see a healthy future with him, and I feel good about it, but with you I felt…trapped. I lived in a dark place for a long time. I’m not saying we didn’t have good days, but you crushed me into a million pieces like it was a sport.”
I let her come down on me because I deserve it. I’m pretty fucking much a piece of scum on her shoe.
“Just promise me you won’t treat Heather like that. You two actually—in a messed-up sort of way—need each other.”
She turns to lead me back down the stairs but looks at me once more, as if this is the last time she’s ever going to see me.
“Don’t get in the way of your own happiness. Set some rules for yourself and follow them. You’re a good guy—you just need to find the right person that can handle you, and it wasn’t me. Do everything the complete opposite and you should be okay.” She gives me a small smile, but I know it doesn’t belong to me anymore.
She belongs to Oliver.
She takes the boxes from me and I don’t continue following her downstairs. I hear Oliver ask her a question and after a few long minutes, the front door opens and closes…I can feel her grace leave the house.
She’s gone for good now.
Footsteps bleed into my ears and Heather peeks her head around the corner of the open doorway. She looks around the room and frowns. “She didn’t take much.”
I shake my head and try to hold back the tears. “Throw it all away.”
She comes over and hugs me. My arms tighten around her thin waist. “I’m sorry you didn’t get what you wanted,” she whispers into my ear. “I didn’t either, but I didn’t even try.” I smile and let her kiss my cheek. “But I’m still here, you know that, right? She’s gone, but I’m still here.”
My smile grows bigger. “Yes, you are.”
Julie is so fucking right…like always.
Heather and I are going to be happy. Time to start making some rules for myself and actually following them.
“I think it’s time you move into my bedroom and we act like we’re in a real relationship.” I feel her conviction but her arms ease when she pulls away and looks up into my eyes. “Unless you want to stay in that purple monstrosity of a room.”
She giggles. “I hate the color purple.”
I laugh loudly and pull her back into my body. “I hate the color purple too. But…” I breathe in her citrus perfume and hold her close. “But I think I might like you a little.”
And this time…
I’m not lying.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Oliver
“Well that took longer than I thought,” I say as Julie comes down the stairs and glares at Heather as she passes her. I see the paleness of her face and my stomach drops. “Are you okay? What happened up there?”
She doesn’t answer me as she takes my hand and helps me to my feet. She leads me out the front door while mumbling a “thank you” to Heather for feeding me. She shuts the door behind us, two boxes balanced awkwardly in her hands.
“That woman can’t even boil water—she fed me a peanut butter sandwich and tried to give me a glass of whiskey. What is wrong with you? Why are we running away? I can still kick his ass like this, you know.” I keep talking until we’re buckled into the rental car and she pulls out of the driveway. “You better start talking or I’m going back there with Casey later to straighten it out.”
The anger washes away from her, but her voice is weak. “It was just too many memories, that’s all. It took me on an emotional rollercoaster, and I realize that I don’t need anything else from that place. Those memories aren’t with you, so I don’t want them.” She smiles at me. The darkness settles in the sky around us, but there’s still enough light for me to see the lies spread across her lips. But I don’t want to press it and make her shut down on me.
We don’t talk about Brandon for two full days after that.
Two glorious, love-filled days.
I know I stumbled upon my love for Julie; it definitely wasn’t expected. I even tried to ignore it at first, but that destroyed me even more. I wait for her to return home with some of her things from Randy’s house…he agreed to let her come over and pack her things before her classes start tomorrow. I offered to just replace it all, but she wouldn’t hear it. She told me what her brother said to her when I was in the hospital and I wanted to go with her, but she didn’t want me to cause a scene.
I would have caused a huge fucking scene. No one talks to her like that.
No one.
I pay the security guard to help her bring in her things, and once they bring the last of the load inside and he leaves, we laugh together at the lack of space. “Don’t unpack anything just yet—we’re moving into the new house after I get stronger.”
Her eyebrows rise. “You’ve decided this without speaking to me?”
Oh, shit.
“We can move whenever you want. I just thought you’d want to settle in before your classes start.”
Her chews on her lip. “I still have some thinking to do about that.”
After organizing the boxes in the dining room so she can retrieve things as she needs them, I smell something delicious fill the apartment and my stomach growls at me.
“Have I ever told you how much I love when fall changes into winter?” I hear her come from the kitchen and open a window in the living room, breathing in the crisp October air. “It’s hard to be in a bad mood from now until New Year’s Eve.”
I sit back on the sofa and take her in. Her small, curvy body leans out of the window, still breathing the cold air into her lungs. It’s hard not to fall in love with her all over again every single day we spend together. There’s something magical about her that makes you want to believe in yourself and believe in her; it makes all of life’s little random moments make sense.
“Hey, stop bending over in front of me like that or I’m going to explode. You know we can’t have sex for five more weeks.” I smile and pat the sofa next to me. Her eyes lower in a sexy glare. “Actually, five weeks and four days, if you want to make it more depressing.”
She sits next to me and pats my leg. “You’ll make it, I promise.”
“I’m going to literally want to have sex for like three days straight when this is all over,” I joke, covering her hand with mine. “You drive me absolutely fucking crazy. You’re sexy as hell and you expect me to actually wait?”
She kisses my cheek and I quickly turn my head to catch her lips with mine. She doesn’t pull away—something she’s been doing for a few days because she thinks she’s going to hurt me or something—and I can only hope that she’s starting to cave and give into her love for me too.
I can only hope.
She’s hiding something, though, I can feel it.
“Hey, bring that last journal with you.” I nod toward the kitchen. “We can eat and read some of it, if you want.”
The fire in her eyes catches me. She knows that it’s hard for me to listen to anything in these fucking journals, but for her, I’ll try to face my fears. It’s actually not as scary as I thought it would be with her next to me, reading the dirty—and harsh—truth of how I came about. If anything, it’s giving me peace of mind that she sees my mother for the monster she is.
We go into the kitchen and settle onto the bar stools; I dig into the most deliciou
s spaghetti I’ve ever tasted in my life. Everything Julie has ever made for me has been incredible; it comforts me to know that my life is going to finally consist of big, delicious Thanksgiving meals with a family scattered around the long dinner table.
I blush even though she can’t possibly know that I’m thinking about.
“Let’s read.” I clear my throat. “While I eat more of this.” She shakes her head, takes my plate, and refills it with a new steamy pile of food before sitting back down next to me like nothing just happened. After taking a few bites of her own food and smiling at me, she opens the book and starts to read to me.
January 11th, 1998
So much has happened. Veronica hasn’t been back since she left Oliver alone. Although, I’ve been able to stay home with him these past few weeks…my father is chomping at the bit to get me back out there so I can help him make money. I’ve talked to Mrs. Atchley, and she’s agreed to watch over Oliver whenever I’m gone. It didn’t take much for her to say yes—she loves Oliver almost as much as I do.
He’s growing so fast, it’s incredible. He’s tall and built like me, an “all-American boy,” as my father would say. “Sports are in his future” is something else he would also say. I just want Oliver to be happy and do whatever he wants with his life. I want him to have a healthy outlook on love, despite what his mother has done. I know he’ll remember her as a monster, and there’s nothing I can do about that now.
If Veronica comes crawling back…I have to be strong and not let her in.
I shovel more food into my mouth and Julie giggles. “Are you even listening?”
I nod. “I’m listening; it’s my story, after all.”
“I’m just proud of you for sitting through these.” My eyes fix on her tongue as it licks the corner of her mouth where a spot of stray sauce had stuck. “I’m almost jealous that my parents didn’t keep journals of my life…maybe it would’ve made us closer or something.”
I don’t know what to say to her when she talks about her parents. I know they’re sleazy people who used her instead of nurturing her—and at least I had my father and Mrs. Atchley to do that for me—but once she moved here to Rockford and left her old self behind…I hardly want to be the one to bring back those memories.