by Jamie Canosa
“No. Don’t stop, Angel. Let it out. Whatever this is . . . it’s been building up in you for a long time. You have to let it out. I can take it. Give it to me.”
“No.” This was all wrong. This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. “I can’t—”
“You can! Angel, please.” Desperation made Caulder cling to my arm. “It’s killing me, seeing you like this. This isn’t you. Something’s wrong. Something’s been wrong. I kept waiting, hoping you’d tell me on your own, but I can’t stand it anymore. Please, Jade, talk to me. I swear to you, I can take it. Let me take it.”
“I can’t.” The pressure in my chest grew to unbearable proportions. It felt ready to explode and the harder I tried to fight it, the tighter it got. “I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”
A sob so hard it buckled my knees tore from me and I would have hit the ground if Caulder hadn’t been right there to catch me. He lowered me gently to the gravel drive and I buried my face in my hands as he knelt in front of me. Tears cut scalding paths down my cheeks, pooling in my palms.
I tried so hard to be strong. To give back a little of what had been given to me. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t strong. I was weak. I couldn’t help anybody. I couldn’t even help myself.
“Jade, please.” He was begging. Caulder Parks was on his knees, begging me. “Just talk to me. I’m here. I’m right here.” Warm fingers threaded through my hair and hooked around the back of my bent neck. “Let me in.”
“I can’t do it.” I couldn’t keep lying to him. I couldn’t keep pretending things were alright when they weren’t. “I can’t do it, anymore.”
“Can’t do what?” His fingers tightened around the back of my neck, forcing my head up with his gentle strength. “Angel, look at me.”
He left me little choice, but I wished I hadn’t the moment our eyes connected. His face mirrored everything I felt inside. Pain, fear, torment. It was too much. Too raw. Too exposed. Too vulnerable.
Him.
Me.
Both of us.
Together.
All I did was cry, but it was the most honest thing I’d done in a long time.
My eyes slid shut and my head dipped toward the ground. I would tell him the truth. I had to. But I couldn’t bear to look him in the eye as I exposed everything I’d been fighting so hard to keep hidden. “It’s my mother. She’s drinking again.”
The hand around my neck squeezed for a moment and released me.
“How long?” His voice sounded even, but I could sense how much it cost him to keep it that way.
“Since Michael showed up.”
A long silence stretched between us—long enough that I couldn’t stop myself from taking a peek. Maybe he’d abandoned me. I wouldn’t blame him. I’d been lying to him about everything for a long time.
Caulder stared down at me, his features so hard they looked carved from stone. He was furious.
“I’m so sorry. I know I lied to you and—”
“Stop. Just . . . stop.”
I shut up. I wouldn’t want to hear anything more from my mouth, either, if I were him. Caulder shut his eyes and took a couple deep breaths. When he opened them again, some of the stone had melted away.
He shook his head and brushed a stray lock of hair from his forehead. “I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not you that I’m angry with, okay?”
“But . . . I lied to you.”
“You were doing the best you could. What you thought was right.” Caulder sighed, his entirely body seeming to deflate, taking a good portion of that aggravation with it. “But I want to know the truth now. All of it. No more lies, Jade. No more secrets.”
I gave him what he wanted. The unfiltered truth. I talked. And I cried. I told him every last gory detail. He never let go of me. Not once. He never said a word. He just listened to me get it all off my chest. When I finished, the pressure had eased. It wasn’t gone, but I no longer felt on the verge of exploding. I could breathe again.
Caulder’s hand was knotted in my hair, pinning my head against his solid chest. The strong, rhythmic thumping of his heart soothed my frayed nerves.
When he spoke, I felt the words rumble through him. “Did you call her sponsor?”
“I did the first time, but—”
“Wait.” Shit. Maybe I hadn’t told him everything. “This isn’t the first time she’s fallen off the wagon?”
“It was hard at first. She had a couple slip-ups.” I had no idea why I was defending her. “I called her sponsor the first time, but when she got back on track, she was so embarrassed it took her a long time to go back to the meetings. She asked me if it happened again to give her a chance to get things together on her own. And the second time, she did. She got herself sober. And she was really proud of herself. I was, too, but . . .”
“Then, Michael happened.” It wasn’t a guess.
“Yeah. Then, Michael happened. She didn’t fall off the wagon, this time, Cal. She was shoved off.” Anger curled my hands into fists around Caulder’s cotton hoodie.
“And her sponsor?”
“I called. She came over, had words with Michael . . . and asked me to lose her number.”
Caulder’s chest expanded beneath my cheek and stayed that way. “Useless—”
“It’s not her fault. She’s in recovery, too. Michael’s more than anyone bargained for.”
His chest deflated and fell back into a steady, if somewhat rapid, rhythm. “I’m going over there. I’ll—”
“No.” Forcing myself away from the comforting warmth of his body, I sat upright and twisted to face him. Still seated in his lap, our noses practically touched. “Cal, you can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because . . . Please, Cal. It’ll only make things worse.” I didn’t even want to imagine how that would pan out. Best case scenario, Caulder ‘talked’ Michael into hitting the road and Mom drank herself into an early grave over it. And worst case was . . . well, worse. “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep living two separate lives. That one and this one. I can’t keep pretending to be something I’m not. Something I’ll never be.”
“What, Jade? What will you never be?”
I had to answer him. I had to because I was past the lying and the hiding. Because I’d just promised no more secrets. But when I did my voice was so quiet I barely heard it myself. “Good enough.”
“Oh, Angel.” His arms wrapped tighter and his chin dipped down over my head, shielding me. “You’re breaking my heart.”
We sat like that, wrapped up in each other, for I don’t know how long. My head lulled against his chest. The pounding rhythm of my heart slowed to match the steady one beating in my ear, his embrace warding off the bitter wind.
I never went back inside. I couldn’t. When I’d finally gathered the strength it took to stand again, I made Caulder let me go home despite his protests. I’d intended to put a quick, clean end to that part of my life. Instead, I’d only succeeded in making a bigger mess of it.
Ten
I blinked at my windshield, waiting for the ringing in my ears to stop. My face throbbed to the pounding of my heart and I blinked again. In my rearview mirror, I could see a car wafting white smoke from beneath its crumpled hood. I was angled sideways across the street, a light post standing less than two feet from the hood of my car.
How did I get there?
The entire front driver’s side was crushed in. Luckily they’d missed my door. The truck. The big white truck. It sat on the shoulder of the side street, the passenger side dinged and dented.
Slowly, the events of the past few minutes came filtering back in graphic detail. Pulling up to the stoplight. The car shaking, sputtering, and falling silent. Trying to get the engine to turn over before the light changed. The green light. The man in the truck across from me, waiting to make a left. My car refusing to budge. Waving him on as I continued to struggle. The impact from behind, sending me careening right into his oncoming path. The hi
gh pitched squeal of brakes. The smell of burning rubber. The crunch of metal. Tinkling of glass over concrete.
“Hey! You alright?” A man in khakis and a button-down shirt pounded on my window.
Was I alright? I took a quick mental inventory. Fingers, toes, ankles, wrists, arms, legs, neck, back. Everything seemed to be in working order.
“Yeah.” I shook my head, realizing he couldn’t hear my whispered response and nodded to him, reaching carefully to unbuckle my seat belt.
“What the hell were you doing just sitting in the middle of the road like that?” The man driving the car that struck me from behind appeared to be fine, shouting and waving his hands around so frantically my sluggish brain was having trouble keeping up as I climbed out of my car.
“I . . . My car wouldn’t start.”
“Well what the hell are you driving that thing on public roads for? It’s a friggin’ menace to society.”
“Everyone okay?” The guy from the truck came jogging up in jeans and some kind of pale green uniform shirt. He glanced at the irate man and frowned, shifting his attention to me. “You alright? I hit you kind of hard.”
“I’m fine.” At least I thought I was fine. Little by little, aches and pains were beginning to register, but nothing serious, so far. “I’m sorry about your truck. I didn’t mean to—”
“He hit you.” He jerked his head toward the man in khakis, who was now busy ranting away on his cellphone.
“Only because my car died in the middle of the street.”
“Still . . . he should have been paying more attention. I shouldn’t have turned in front of you like that. We’re all at fault here. Don’t worry about it, kid. I called the police. They should be here any minute to take statements. The insurance companies can handle it from there.”
“Okay.” He was being awfully nice about the whole thing. “Thanks.”
He nodded and reached into his pocket. “Do you have a phone? Is there someone you can call? It doesn’t look like your car’s going anywhere but onto the back of a tow truck.”
I glanced at my POC and felt my shoulders sink. The entire rear of the thing looked like an accordion and the front tire was bent almost completely parallel to the ground.
“I’ve got one.” Tugging out my cell, I checked to make sure it was undamaged and dialed before I could chicken out.
I wandered out of the street and onto the grass, listening to it ring.
“What’s up, Angel?”
I sighed. I was about to eat a whole lot of crow, and it tasted a lot like copper and rust. Or maybe that was the blood still oozing from my split lip. “If you promise not to say anything . . . I’ll let you fix my car.”
There was a long pause. Long enough that I checked my phone to make sure we hadn’t been disconnected. And then, “Where are you?”
I rattled off the street corner and listen to Caulder tell me he was on his way.
By the time he arrived, there was an ambulance and two police cars on the scene. They’d listened to and jotted down my version of events, and left me sitting on the curb for a paramedic to fuss over while they talked with the others involved.
“This cut shouldn’t require stitches, but—”
“I’m fine. Really.”
The woman with short curly hair snapped off her latex gloves and stuffed them in her pocket. “Just to be safe, you should let us take you to the hospital to be—”
“No. Thank you, but I’d rather not.” I wasn’t about to add another bill to the stack I already couldn’t afford just to have someone in a white coat tell me what I already knew.
“Jade?” My luck being what it was, Caulder joined us, squatting in front of me just as she handed me a clipboard of paperwork.
“I need you to sign there, stating that you refuse medical care.” She pointed to a line at the bottom of the page as I lifted the pen.
“You’re refusing medical care?” Caulder brushed the pen away from the line before I could scrawl my name. “Why?”
“Because I don’t need it. I’m fine, Cal.”
His eyes narrowed on my face, going straight to the small butterfly bandages covering the gash on my cheek.
“Is that true?” He turned to look at the paramedic who was busy gathering her supplies. “Is she okay?”
The short woman stopped repacking her bag long enough to glance my way and shrugged. “Professionally speaking, it’s always worth getting checked out just to be sure. But off the record, she seems fine. A little banged up, but otherwise alright. I’m not concerned letting her sign the paperwork.”
Finally. Someone on my side.
He didn’t look happy about it, but Caulder removed his hand from the page and I signed, handing the clipboard back the woman before either of them could change their minds. We waited in silence as she double checked the paperwork and heaved her heavy bag off to the waiting ambulance where the man in the khakis was being examined by another man in uniform.
I watched him fuss and rub his neck before turning my attention back to Cal. He was staring pale faced at my wreck of a car.
“It looks worse than it is.” I was no mechanic. I had no clue if that was true or not. I could only hope that it was because it looked terrible. Certainly worse than it had felt. Everything had happened so fast, I couldn’t believe so much damage had been done.
Caulder held perfectly still, only his eyes sliding to me. “It looks like you got lucky. A couple more feet and you could have been seriously injured, Jade. You could have been killed.”
There was no denying it. The evidence was sitting right in front of us. If that truck had hit my door instead of the side of the hood, I could have been trapped or crushed in there. A violent shudder wracked my body and Caulder sighed.
“You’re okay. That’s what matters.” His fingers slipped through my hair and he cringed as he extracted a chunk of broken glass. “We’re going to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
His gaze slid from my wild hair down to my battered mouth. And then he kissed me. Without a word. Without any warning whatsoever. He leaned over and kissed me. Nothing romantic about it, just his two lips briefly touching mine, the way a mother might kiss her child’s boo-boo better. But it sent my brain spiraling off the coasts of holy shit and what the hell?
“Come on.” He stood and I was thoroughly unconvinced I was capable of doing the same when he offered me his hand as though reality hadn’t just taken a backseat for a moment as the entire planet tilted on its axis.
Sliding into his low passenger seat, I bit back a groan. My legs and back ached something fierce.
Caulder dropped in beside me and, a moment later, the car roared to life. “Let’s get you home.”
Before he could move it out of park, my hand gripped the shifter. “I’m not going home. I have to go to work. I’m already late.”
“Angel.” His hand settled over mine. “You were just in a car accident. You’re not going to work.”
“Yes, I am. I’m fine, Cal.”
A standoff ensued for long minutes where we sat silently staring at each other, idling on the side of the road. Caulder broke first. He released my hand, signaling that he wasn’t going to fight me and instead brushed some stray hairs that had escaped my ponytail from my forehead.
“If this is about money—”
“Don’t.” Leech. “Cal, please don’t offer me your money. I don’t want it.”
He gritted his teeth. “We have more than enough. It kills me to watch you struggle when there’s something I can do about it.”
He’ll start seeing you for what you really are.
“There is something you can do about it. You can give me a ride to work.”
Caulder’s shoulders slumped and he frowned at me. “Where to?”
We rolled into the lot of The Brewery five tense minutes later, during which not another word was exchanged. I knew he was frustrated with me and I hated that I’d upset him. When he put it in park, I leaned over the conso
le and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
I had no idea what possessed me to do that, but I didn’t want to stick around and see his reaction. Hauling open the door, I scrambled across the slippery lot as fast as I could without falling on my ass.
***
The chime above the door sounded as I plowed through, shaking off the cold air that followed me inside.
“You’re la—” Simon glanced up from refilling an urn and his eyes narrowed on me. “What happened to you?”
“Got in an accident on the way here.” I reached for one of the aprons hanging behind the counter and looped it over my head.
My hands were occupied tying a bow at my back when Simon approached and tipped my head up with a single finger beneath my chin. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” Brushing off his concern and his touch, I headed to the sink to wash up for my shift.
“You don’t have to be here. It’s pretty dead tonight. I can handle it. I’ll tell Stewart—”
“Stewart hates me.”
“Stewart hates everyone.”
“Regardless, I’m working tonight.”
Another chime announced the arrival of a customer just as I finished rearranging my hair and scrubbing my hands raw.
I turned to find Caulder examining the menu board. “Can I get a large black?”
When I just continued to stare at him like he’d grown a third head, Simon jumped in. “Sure thing, man.”
“What are you doing here?”
Caulder stared back at me like I should already know the answer to that, giving me a moment to figure it out for myself. When I didn’t, he sighed. “I drove you here, Angel. How exactly were you planning on getting home?”
I blinked at him. I really hadn’t thought that far in advance. Then my eyes went to the clock on the wall. “I’ve got another three hours left to my shift, Cal. What are you going to do, just sit around drinking coffee that whole time?”
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The look on his face alone made it perfectly clear that that’s precisely what he intended to do. And there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him.