The Fragile Line: Part Three (The Fine Line #4)

by Alicia Kobishop

  Ava turned away from the camera and extended her hand. “It’s time to show them the truth, baby. C’mere.”

  A man’s hand took hers, and a moment later, he was beside her, leaning down so that the viewers could see him. In a white t-shirt and jeans, it was easy to see that he had a build like Matt’s. Maybe that’s why people were so easy to make assumptions about Matt and Ava. However, he was lacking Matt’s tattoos, had lighter, longer hair, and at least an extra 10 years.

  “Hey guys,” he said with a small wave. Turning away from the camera, he kissed Ava’s cheek, then buried his face in her neck, making her smile as she reached toward the camera and ended the video.

  Matt and I stared at his phone for a moment, then each other.

  “Wasn’t that—” I started.

  “M-Hmm,” he answered with a slight nod. “Clay Beckett. The son of American Muscle’s biggest competitor. Clay’s dad, Fletcher, was Dalton Davis’ old partner. When Dalton decided to do the show, Fletcher wanted nothing to do with it. He left to start his own shop and took most of Dalton’s staff with him and a bunch of his clients, too. Dalton has never been able to forgive him. Clay works for his dad just like Ava works for hers. Ava thought their relationship would be a conflict of interest.”

  “Sounds like their families accept it, though.”

  “Yeah. They’re all good people. They love their kids. It might be hard to hear now, but they’ll get over it.”

  CHAPTER Fourteen

  ~Chloe~

  The house was dark when I came home from my shift at the restaurant—except for the dim track lighting underneath the kitchen cabinets. Carrie started leaving them on for me when I woke her and Piper up one night after tripping over my own feet in the dark. It was close to midnight by now which meant that they had most likely been sleeping for hours.

  I set my keys quietly on the table, next to our current junk mail collection, and opened the pantry door to get a snack before bed. I pulled out a bag of tortilla chips and jalapeño cheese dip and sat at the kitchen table, cringing at the loud crackling of the bag as I opened it. As I took a chip and dipped it in cheese, I heard a bedroom door open from down the hall. A moment later, Carrie entered the kitchen.

  “Shit, did I wake you?” I whispered.

  “Nah,” she lazily walked to the table and took a chip out of the bag. “I just got done binge-watching the Gilmore Girls revival. I had no idea how much I’ve missed Lorelei and Rory’s fast, furious, pop culture one-liner references until now. Seriously. I was hooked at ‘GOOP’.”

  A pang of sadness hit me as the memory of my sister and I watching that show together every week came to the forefront of my mind.

  “I’m so sorry,” Carrie said in mid-chew, noticing my reaction. Reaching for my arm to give her support she added, “That was really insensitive of me. I should’ve asked…how’s your friend doing?”

  It took me a moment to realize who she was talking about. “Oh! You mean Logan? He woke up.” I smiled. “He’s expected to have a full recovery.”

  “Really? That’s incredible, Chloe, I’m so happy to hear that! So…you just hate the Gilmore Girls then?”

  I laughed, “No way, I love that show, too.”

  I kept grinning as I pushed the thoughts of my sister away and thought about the events of today instead, my smile getting wider with each image of Matt that flashed through my mind. His eyes. His smile. The way he looked at me when I made him laugh. The dirty things he said when he fucked me. And the way he memorized my soul when we made love…

  “Okay,” Carrie said. “Now you look like you just got back from the happy-farm. What aren’t you telling me.”

  “What’s the happy farm?”

  “Never mind! The suspense is killing me. What’s going on?”

  “I saw Matt today,” I finally confessed.

  She gasped, “No! He was here!? And you’re…happy? Which means…you worked things out with him?” Another gasp, then she went to the cupboards to pull out a bottle of wine and two glasses. After pouring the white liquid, she sat down at the table again and took her glass in her hand. “Tell. Me. Everything.”

  ~~~

  Carrie and I talked for an hour before finally deciding to call it a night.

  “Everything is falling into place, Chloe.” she stood from her chair, placing her hand on my shoulder, a mixture of longing and optimism in her eyes. “I’m so happy for you. You deserve to be happy.”

  “You deserve happiness, too, Care.” I replied.

  “I’m happy,” she assured with a genuine smile. “I’ve got my daughter. A good home. Amazing friends. Look, I know what you’re thinking. I’m always going to miss Nolan, but I’m finally at a point where I feel grateful for the short time I got to spend with him. And I know he’s watching over us,” she pressed her lips together in a tight smile, quiet tears welling in her eyes. “I’m happy because I know that’s what he’d want for me. Just like it’s what your parents would want for you.”

  I nodded, in full understanding and agreement.

  “Goodnight, Chloe,” she said.

  “Night, Care.”

  As she headed down the hall to her bedroom, I began to clean up, taking the chip bag off the junk mail pile, doing a double-take at what was lying underneath it. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. Without taking my eyes off the hand-written envelope, I slowly rolled up the top of the plastic bag to close it, and set it aside.

  When I moved in with Carrie, I had updated my address with everyone I could think of, mostly bill collectors, to make sure my monthly statements would come to the right place. I still received mail forwarded from my apartment frequently, so it didn’t surprise me that this envelope had a yellow forwarding sticker placed on it by the post office. What did surprise me, however, was the return address in the upper left corner.

  It was the address of the house I grew up in. The place I called home for eighteen years. And printed above the street address, was the name Brynn McCarthy.

  My sister.

  Time moved in slow motion as I picked up the envelope and slowly ripped the paper to open it. I took the folded paper out, vaguely noticing something solid and hard still in the envelope, but too fascinated with the letter to be concerned with it. I unfolded the multiple pages that had been hand-written by my sister, and became immersed in her confession within the first line:

  Dear Chloe,

  I don’t know how to start this letter except to say that I’m sorry. I know that’s not enough. It will never be enough. Because I did something that can’t be forgiven. My only hope is that you’ll read this letter in its entirety so that you may be able to understand why it happened.

  Let me start by saying it’s over with Ryan. When I saw you at the restaurant, the guilt I have been carrying, trying desperately to smother, finally became too much to bear.

  In the beginning, I foolishly thought the love between Ryan and I would guide me through the shame and set me free of it. I even told myself that my actions were justified. I told myself that I deserved happiness, too, and that the only way I would get it was through Ryan. But I was hugely mistaken. The guilt nibbled away at me more and more every day until I had nothing left to give to him, or our relationship, let alone myself. But despite the guilt, I still gave Ryan my all, and tried like hell to make it work.

  Just like I tried to be a good mother to you.

  What I have come to understand, however, is that no matter how hard you try to negate it, the concrete reality of any given situation can never be concealed. Nor can it be denied.

  The reality is…you truly had Ryan first. You had a real, honest relationship with him first. He may have even been your first love.

  I hope you will let me tell you about my first love. Please keep reading, Chloe. You are completely justified in not wanting to hear anything from me, and I would understand if you want to throw this letter away, or burn it without reading another line of it, but even though I am in no way making excu
ses, the reasoning behind my actions may shed some light on why everything with Ryan happened the way it did.

  You may think my first love was the boy I met in college. And, at the time, I thought he was. Spencer and I had things in common. We studied the same subjects. We had interesting, thought provoking conversations. I lost my virginity to him. We had a mutual respect and I’d even go so far as to say he was one of my best friends. Breaking up with him absolutely devastated me. Yet, even though we were so-called “perfect” for each other, and even though I didn’t know it at the time, there was always something missing with him…

  You never knew this, but when you were sixteen, I had a little bit of a mental breakdown (to put it mildly). I had been trying to fill Mom’s shoes by acting as your mother figure for four years by that point. After breaking up with Spencer, three years earlier, I made a conscious decision that I owed it to you, and to Mom and Dad, to make you my number one priority.

  I wanted to be there for you when they couldn’t. I love you, Chlo, and wanted you to have everything I had growing up with supportive parents. It deeply hurt my heart to know that you wouldn’t get to experience their love and guidance during your most formative years like I did. You know—those dreaded teenage years.

  I felt an undeniable responsibility to you. And at the time, I thought that meant giving up my own life. After Spencer, I decided that there would be no room for love. No room for friends. No dreams. No goals. At least not YET. Not until you were older because those things would distract my ultimate purpose of giving you the life you deserved. You became it for me, Chloe. You were the only driving force in my life.

  Please trust me when I say that’s the way I wanted it and I have absolutely no regrets. Because I gained so much not only from the closeness we shared (after all, you are MY only family, too!), but also from seeing you thrive in a hopeless situation that would absolutely crush most people and knowing that I may have had a small part in making that possible.

  You went on a weekend trip with Clarissa and her parents for her sixteenth birthday. It was the first time you and I had been separated overnight since Mom and Dad died. It was rough on me, Chloe. The realization that without you, I had nothing, hit me so hard. Alone in the house I became uncomfortably anxious. Fidgety. And I had to get out.

  I needed a release. An escape from my reality. I suddenly wanted to be a regular twenty-two year old for just one night. So I decided to let loose for that one night, and I’d convinced myself that when you came home, I would go back to normal.

  I called some old friends to go out and have some fun. Maybe go out for drinks and dancing, or just catch up. But nobody was free. I should’ve known better than to call anyone up at the last minute and expect them to drop everything in their lives for me when I hadn’t invested in their friendships for years. It was ridiculous of me to think I still had any real friends.

  I remembered, as a teen, how good it felt when bored or lonely, to get lost in the alternative realities of fiction. I needed to get out, so I drove to an indie bookstore and picked out a few books. Since the thought of going back to read them in an empty house unnerved me, to say the least, I decided to make use of the coffee shop next door to the bookstore.

  After ordering my coffee, I realized that the only place to sit down was on a loveseat next to a gorgeous guy who had textbooks and papers sprawled out all over the seat. The closer I scanned the crowded seating area, the more I realized that the people in it were college aged and stressed, and then it dawned on me that it happened to be the heart of mid-term season, and the bookstore I had come to happened to be in the heart of the university district.

  It was nostalgic, Chloe. It reminded me of a time in my life where the only care in the world I had was mid-terms. A time where, even though I was experiencing independence for the first time, I knew deep down that if my world crumbled, Mom and Dad still had my back.

  That world was now forever gone.

  I pondered the irony of how mid-terms, something that at the time seemed to be the most important thing for my future, had now become so trivial. I envied the students in the coffee shop who clearly placed so much meaning on it.

  I more-than-envied them. I wanted to BE them. It saddened me to know that I’d have to settle for just being AROUND them. If mom and dad hadn’t died, I would’ve been finishing up my last year of college.

  I cleared my throat and asked the guy on the loveseat if he would mind moving his things so I could have a place to sit. He did it politely. I took a seat and started reading one of my books.

  About twelve pages into it I started to feel his eyes on me. In my peripheral vision, I noticed him glance from one side of the shop to the other, then land his stare back on me.

  Then, he spoke. And I’ll never forget his first words to me, or the beautiful tenor of his voice when he said, “It’s a little odd, don’t you think?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, or even if he was talking to me, until I carefully looked up from my pages and met his striking blue eyes. And suddenly, I didn’t care what he said. All I cared about was how intriguing his warm expression was.

  “Huh?” I asked, my heart suddenly palpitating from this beautiful man’s attention.

  “You know—the fact that you can be so calm at a time like this. It’s a little odd.”

  “What do you mean? Are you calling me weird?”

  He shrugged, “Well, yeah, I guess I am. Most people in here are stressed out and cramming for mid-terms while you’re,” he flipped my book to see the cover, “reading romance.”

  My jaw dropped and I quickly tucked my book inside my coat as I replied, “Better to be odd than rude…Don’t YOU think?”

  Thoroughly embarrassed, but not wanting to let him know it, I gave him an eye roll and stood to leave.

  But he took hold of my wrist, stopping me, and said, “Wait. I’m sorry. That came out all wrong. It was charming in my head and it came out sounding conceited. The thing is—uh—you’re beautiful. And I’d hate myself if I didn’t try talking to you.”

  I looked down at the wrist he grasped and he quickly let it go, realizing that the forceful nature of the restraint probably wasn’t gaining him any points. The thing was, it had been years since a man touched me. And I loved how it felt.

  “Please. Stay,” he said, packing his books, “You don’t have to leave because of me. I’ll go.”

  “No. It’s okay,” I assured him, cautiously sitting back down. And then I smiled and said something so uncharacteristically flirtatious that I had no clue where it even came from. “I’ll forgive you. But only if you promise to make it up to me.”

  His eyes subtly lit up at the remark and we suddenly became a couple of grinning fools. He extended his hand and told me his name. And what did I do? Without hesitation, I gave him the name of the character in the book I was reading. Erica.

  I knew nothing would come of my interaction with him because I had already promised myself that when you came home, there would be no time to dedicate toward building other relationships. Furthermore, I didn’t want to be ME that night. I wanted to escape my life for a brief minute or two. Not that my life was bad. Overwhelming, yes. Bad, no. So I lied about my name.

  But then we got to talking. And the more we talked, the more connected I felt to him. I didn’t tell him about you, or Mom and Dad, but we talked about everything else under the sun. I even helped him study.

  I loved the way that as the night went on, his curious gazes turned into a combination of admiration and lust. I loved that he got my sense of humor. I loved the adorable way he inched himself closer to me until finally, we were so close that our bodies touched.

  And when he kissed me for the first time, I thought I had actually died because I had never been kissed like that before. The reaction my body had to him scared me so much, Chlo. Because even though I had only just met him, he was making me feel things I had never felt before. And the thought that it would be over soon terrified me.

>   So I held on to it—I selfishly savored it—as long as I could. When the coffee shop closed, he invited me back to his dorm, and I went. His roommate was gone for the weekend and the thought of being alone with him captivated me to a point where I couldn’t think clearly. I didn’t WANT to think clearly. I just wanted to FEEL something. Other than stress. Other than responsibility. I just wanted to feel FREE! And he made me feel liberated.

  There was no awkwardness between us. No uncomfortable moments. That night was the most magical night of my entire life. And it wasn’t just the sex. We connected on such an intimate level both physically and emotionally that it made me contemplate the choices I had made in my life up until that point. Should I have dropped out of college? Should I have given up my friends? Should I have kept pretending to be a mother-figure to you when I knew absolutely nothing about how to be one?

  But in the end, as I laid in his bed while the sun rose, casting a glowing orange light on the walls of his dorm room, I watched him sleep and fought back tears, cherishing our last moments, committing his meticulous face to memory, and mourning another awful loss—the loss of him—the loss of the possibility of being his—the loss of the final remnants of myself—because I remembered that I had made the right decision.

  I had done the right thing—the only thing I COULD do. And I would continue to do it. Because I would have never been able to live with myself if you were sent to a home of strangers, Chloe, with no guarantee that they would be good to you. And I couldn’t expect anyone else to get close enough to me, to feel bound to my responsibilities. Especially not him.

  Besides, he was four years younger than me, a college freshman, experiencing independence for the first time ever. He needed freedom. And I was a twenty-two-year-old woman, responsible for a teenager, something others my age had absolutely no concept of. My life consisted of parent-teacher conferences and modeling what it means to be a responsible adult. Our life priorities could not have been more opposite. If I had stayed with him, it would’ve tied him down. Would’ve made him resent me.