“And the other?”
“The other option was for me to tell you, and us not get back together.”
“You had that little faith in me, huh?”
“No. I had faith in you. I knew you’d be there for me, for the baby. I knew you’d never turn your back on us. But I didn’t deserve for you to be there for me. If there was no baby in the picture, I mean.”
“You assumed I didn’t understand you were scared? That you didn’t see what happened to your mom and had become terrified it could trickle down to you?”
“A part of me knew. I have no excuse. I could say it was pregnancy hormones, having so much happen at once, or just plain stupidity.”
“I’m clinging to that last one,” he says but smirks, and I relax. Marginally.
“Yes. Let me put it out there. I know I was the largest form of idiot for breaking up with you in the first place.”
“Go on,” he says, presenting me with both hands like he’s ready to hear more of my self-criticism.
I roll my eyes. Ha. Ha. Ha. Hilarious.
He smiles and leans back, ankle crossed over his knee. “I don’t want to fight with you. And I really don’t want to continue holding onto this anger. I know you. There’s more to this story so please, put me out of my misery already and tell me the rest.”
“After Mom pulled me out of my funk, she and Andy sat me down and reminded me I couldn’t treat my body the way I was. The boys, even they got in on it. They were worried, saw I was self-destructing. They pretty much had an intervention. Anyway, remember that week? You had left with Cole. You’d gone to Andy’s cabin. I’m pretty sure our parents had a hand in that.”
“Yeah, Cole saw that I needed to get away from Liberty and pretty much didn’t give me any other choice but to join him. Dad called Andy and asked if we could go hide out at his cabin for a while.”
“I pulled up my big girl britches, realized this was a blessing. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, obviously. I spent the next few days gathering my thoughts, trying to take better care of myself. Not wanting to run to the cabin and interrupt your time, I stayed home, decided I would tell you as soon as you were home. But then, life had other plans.” I wipe a stray tear. “I woke up one morning and had horrible cramps. I knew something was wrong, but since I’d never been pregnant before, I also had no idea what exactly was happening. Then I went to the bathroom and there was blood. And the cramps kept getting worse, the blood heavier. Even not having experienced it before, I knew I’d lost the baby. Mom took me to the doctor anyway, had them test my blood. My HCG levels were still up, but they said that was normal until my body…”
“HCG? And, what? Your body what?”
“HCG is the hormone detected in pregnancy. And until my body absorbed the fetus.”
The look on his face says how horrified he is by the sound of it. I was, too. “What? It does that?”
“Apparently.”
He stands up, paces around the room. “I don’t understand.”
“Me either. According to my doctor, many of the miscarriages that happen can’t be explained. Of course, I didn’t hear what they were saying. I only heard I lost our baby. The baby that you and I had created together. It might not have been planned, but we loved each other, even though I had broken up with you, and I knew we’d somehow make it work. My emotions, they were all over the place. I hadn’t been taking care of myself. I let my health suffer—”
“For a few weeks, Bri. I hardly see that being a reason anything could have happened.”
“Yeah, well, my headspace wasn’t necessarily in the right place to see that reasoning. My mom and Andy, though, they were great.”
He stops a few feet away from me, hands on his hips. Rocky lifts his head and watches as his master fights a battle within himself.
“I need you to know something. Everything you’re telling me, I’m grateful for. I want to know all the details. I need to know. But the more I hear, the angrier I am I wasn’t there. You didn’t trust me enough to let me take care of you, to be there with you.”
“Grady, nothing you could have done would have changed the outcome.”
“You don’t know that,” he says angrily.
Ah. Another layer is peeled. Grady isn’t just angry I failed to let him know about the miscarriage. Actually, I would dare to bet that’s only a small part of it. Grady’s a fixer. He’s a person who’s there for everyone around him; he’s always in control. There’s a reason he was given the job to lead an entire team of college students on the football field. Because he’s capable of it.
This is something he can’t fix.
Couldn’t have fixed.
And that not only drives him crazy, it pisses him off.
I stand and slowly make my way to where he’s standing next to a fireplace. I reach out my hands and grip his in mine. “It happened. If you were with me, the only thing that would have changed is you would have had to experience the same sort of heartache.”
“I’m experiencing it now,” he tells me, eyes shining.
My throat feels like it’s closing up, seeing his sadness, his heartache splayed right out there in front of me.
“I know. And I hate it for you.”
“What else?”
I resist the urge to drop his hands and turn away. Instead I take a deep breath and steel myself for what’s to come.
“That bad?”
See, this is the problem with talking with the person who still owns part of your soul. They see right through you.
Now I do drop his hands.
“I mentioned before I spiraled out of control. Well, that was nothing. As you know, I switched schools, moved to Peoria.”
“I can’t believe you left Southern Michigan. It was your dream school, Bri. What were you thinking?”
I know he was pissed when I officially transferred to a different college. From what my mom told me, he pounded on their door and demanded to know where I was. She held strong, even though it about killed her to do so. “I wasn’t. Not really. My past mistakes, decisions, I have to live with them for the rest of my life. Good and bad, they’re mine and I own them. Not many I’m proud of, but I can’t keep thinking in the past.”
“So tell me, then. I can’t keep thinking in the past, either. And quite honestly, you’re scaring me.”
I sit back down on the couch, this time closer to Rocky so I can pet him as I talk. “The first year was bad. I was depressed, deeply so. The only thing that kept me going was Hazel. My mom totally used her to her benefit, reminding me she would be looking up to me and I needed to keep it together. Academically, I was doing great. It was where I focused all my time. I didn’t go out with friends, didn’t even really make any to go out with. I studied, and that was it. Well, and keeping up with… well, let’s just say my love for SMS didn’t fade because I was living in Illinois.”
He takes a seat again, this time on the coffee table in front of me.
“I came home for the summer. I was offered an internship in Peoria and was going to accept it, but Andy and the boys came and visited me one weekend, and they weren’t pleased with what they saw. Mom had to stay home because Hazel was sick, so it was just me and them. Andy took one look at me, sent the boys to the hall and told me I had only one option, and that was to come home for the summer and let them help me get better. I spent the entire summer at the cabin.”
“So that’s why no one could go use the cabin that summer? How did I not know you were around?”
I twist the cap off my water, take a few drinks before recapping it and setting it on the couch beside me. “Probably because I only came home once. I was so ashamed and had become a shell of myself,” I tell him and shrug one shoulder. I don’t need to go into details of what I looked like, how much weight I’d lost.
“But you’re okay now, right?” he asks, his eyes running a trail over my body.
“I am. Now. But, it wasn’t an easy road. The summer helped, and my family was supportive. But something ha
ppened right before I left for school in the fall and, well, it messed with my head.”
“Which was?”
“I saw a picture. It was stupid, and I overreacted. But… well, Dawson,” I ignore the way his eyes widen but can’t escape the fact I see his fists clench at the name. “He was the one who showed me a picture of you with Kennedy. The one day I came to Liberty, I bumped into him on the sidewalk by Dreamin’ Beans. I don’t know exactly how Dawson knew Kennedy, but he must have followed her on Instagram somewhere along the way because she posted a picture of the two of you together… and was kind enough to show it to me.”
He scrunches his eyebrows. “We were never together. At least, not for long. We tried, but it was never right.”
“Well, the pictures he showed me were certainly… cozy. Either way, I had no right. I broke up with you and lost that. It wasn’t fair of me to be upset over you being with someone else. But it didn’t change the fact that it definitely drove me nuts. Dawson picked up on it. Pounced. Let me know you were moving on, you had been for a while. Fed me full of bullshit I was stupid enough to believe.”
“You let that fuckwit Dawson get into your head?”
“I did. I was in a low place. It’s not a good excuse, because we all know what a dillhole he is. He wouldn’t walk away or leave me alone no matter how much I fought with him about it. In the end, though, it’s on me. He may have been the one who showed me the picture, but I was the one who jumped to conclusions. I left for Illinois the next morning.”
He watches me closely, trying to figure out what it is that I’m not telling him. Rather than making him drag it out of me, I come out with it on my own.
“I relapsed. All the weight I’d gained back was just that much more I lost. It started with not having an appetite. Not eating enough calories. When the hunger pains weren’t enough to dull the ache, I started exercising more than before. I would go for runs at all hours of the day.”
“Night, too?” he asks, and I know he’s thinking how unsafe that was.
“Yeah. I didn’t care much about myself at the time. But soon it started to numb the pain of seeing you with another girl. A girl who was the opposite of me in every way. She was beautiful, tall, blonde, and here I was, this short, frumpy, dark-haired nobody who broke your heart because she was scared and an idiot. Every time I looked in the mirror, all I saw was everything I wasn’t, and everything she was.”
“She was never everything,” he murmurs.
I reach over and scratch Rocky’s ears again and he lifts his head, moving it so he’s laying nestled up against me. It’s like he knows I need his comfort right now. He’s the cuddliest big dog. I’m pretty sure he thinks of himself as a lap dog the way he’s acting.
“By the grace of God, I managed to still pass some of my classes. I’m not sure how, considering I couldn’t concentrate on anything the professor was saying when I did care enough to grace the classroom with my presence. I found a part time job working retail that would keep me in Peoria for the summer, so I didn’t have to go home. Mom and Andy knew something was up, but I think they were afraid if they continued to push too hard, I’d back away even more than I already was. This time it was Jack who saved me.”
“Jack? As in Uncle James’s son?”
I feel the sting of tears and itch my nose. My chin trembles and I bite my lip, desperately trying to keep from crying. It’s no use.
Jack means the world to me.
“Yeah. He had a long weekend break and came over to surprise me.”
“Let me get this straight. My cousin left culinary school and decided to surprise you?”
“Sort of, yes. Turns out the families were in cahoots to get me back home. They thought maybe if that happened, you and I would somehow get back together,” I say, nervous laughter bubbling up from my chest. I wave my hand in front of my face because I’m anxious and awkward and don’t know what else to do with my hands at the moment. “It was part of the plan I found out much later. He was the carrot they were going to dangle in front of the race horse, so to speak.”
“They sent the nice one in first,” he says in understanding.
“Yes, and no. Jack offered. Carly was going to come but Jack insisted.” His expression gives nothing away and since he’s not saying anything, I take that as my cue to continue. “The last time I’d been home or saw the family was Christmas and it was easy to hide my body under baggy clothes.”
“When was it when Jack came to your place?”
“June,” I admit.
“Wait. It’d been six months since anyone had seen you? How did that happen?”
“I was pretty good at making excuses. And still very ashamed. Maybe more so then. I knew how I looked. Not only was I losing too much weight, but I was ugly, too.”
“I doubt that,” he mutters under his breath, but I hear it. And damn it all if those silly words don’t blossom a full-blown hope tree in my chest.
“He saved my life,” I whisper, knowing the worst is yet to come of my confessions.
His eyes widen. “Explain.”
I fiddle with the hem of my shirt, avoidance at its best.
“Bri,” he says quietly. “I need to know what caused you to think it was okay to spend six years avoiding me and making sure everyone we love didn’t tell me a single thing about you.”
Lips pressed together again, my head bobs up and down. “This is really hard for me to admit, but you need to understand something before I tell you the rest. I was sick, Grady. I was clinically depressed and anorexic. When I first started losing weight, it was because I was depressed, disappointed in myself for the decisions I’d made. Then it blossomed into this feeling of control. My weight was the only thing I could get a handle on, even though it was out of hand. It probably doesn’t make any sense to you, but in my mind, I wouldn’t have lost you to someone completely opposite of me if I was thin.” He opens his mouth and points, surely about to accuse me of that being total bullshit, but I hold up a hand and forge on. I can continue to say I get it, I was the one who left him, and he can say the same, but we’ve already done that dance. It’s time to move on. “My self-esteem was basically gone. I thought so little of myself,” I whisper.
I’m lucky Jack showed up on my doorstep that day.
Humiliation had filled me for abandoning my family. My mom was, and still is, my best friend. Andy, the boys, my baby sister, they didn’t deserve the way I turned my back on them. Not when they did nothing but love me and show me they would be there for me. Grady’s family, too.
The disease itself is what pulled me under, allowed the shame to feed off the lies my own body was telling me that I wasn’t worthy of a love I had once had. I believed the lies he told me.
“Bri,” he murmurs. “This is what kept you from me for six years? From your family? Your friends?”
“You won’t understand.”
“I’d like to try. You didn’t give me a choice before. I would like the chance now.”
“Jack, he uh, came at the right time. He didn’t bother knocking, either.”
“Why?”
“Because the noises he heard on the other side of the door made him make the decision to come in.”
His eyes are stormy and voice low when he says, “And what, exactly, was happening on the other side of the door to make him come in without knocking?”
“He heard something break followed immediately by pretty harsh male shouting. Instinct told him something wasn’t right. He saved my life,” I say again.
Grady
I stand up, pace around the room. Someone was hurting her. I want to yank my own hair out. I want to punch something. A wall, maybe this fuckwad’s face in, for not getting out of my own prideful state and kicking down her door years ago. For helping her to realize that there is no one better than her. There never has been. Never will be.
I stop, turn and face her. “How long?”
Her head drops as she stares at her lap. “It started right after spring break.�
��
“What?” I ask, my voice cracking a little bit. I feel the tears building at the thought of what she’s about to tell me. I don’t want to hear any of this.
She nods. “I met Trent a few weeks before Halloween. I was still struggling with my weight, but he showed me that I was still… desirable. He didn’t push for us to become serious, wanted to be friends. It was, well, nice.”
I close my eyes, lean over the mantel above the fireplace. My hands grip the edge of the wood so hard my knuckles turn white. I now understand the hurt my friendship with Kennedy caused her, or is still causing her. Justified or not, I think we’ll both be protective over that side of our lives. Friendship with a member of the opposite sex was what led to my first love. Hearing she was friends with someone else like that, it hurts, whether he became an abusive asshole or not.
Turning back around, I cross my arms across my chest. Voice gruff, I say, “I need to know the rest.”
“When I got home from winter break, he and I got together for dinner. He told me that the time we spent apart showed him he wanted more. Asked me if I’d consider going on a date with him. I said no at first, but he was persistent. And honestly, it felt good to be pursued. He complimented me all the time. Told me I was beautiful, never made me feel like my ever-thinning frame was a bad thing. I look back now and realize it for what it was. Part of his manipulation. He seemed to get off on me being so skinny that he could see the veins in my arms, count the ribs in my chest.”
The image that flashes in my mind makes me physically ill. “What changed?”
“He became jealous. Simple as that,” she scoffs like it’s no big deal. “He saw me talking to a classmate. Ironically enough, it was a guy who was concerned about me. Saw that I was shrinking before everyone’s eyes. Told me his twin sister was anorexic and he was pretty blunt with me about the fact that he knew I was as well. He told me he was there for me if I ever needed to talk, that his sister would be willing to talk to me also. His concern was genuine and quite frankly, warranted. Trent walked up just as Aaron was giving me a hug, passing me a piece of paper with his number on it.
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