Underside of Courage (Beautifully Disturbed Series Book 2)

by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  “What you mean is it’ll drag Kip down.”

  She knows I’m right, and I know she knows because sadness fills her eyes. Why would sadness fill her eyes if she weren’t warning me from her son?

  “That’s a fear,” she answers honestly. “But now I’m talking about you. My son loves you. He told me, but he didn’t have to. I know the look of love, which is how he looks at you, but it’s also the way you look at him.”

  What?

  “I—”

  “Don’t bother to deny it.” she cuts me off. “Give my son the little things, and let him give them in return. Concentrate on that. The big things, we’ll deal with as they come.”

  What is there to even say in return? Whatever I might have come up with doesn’t matter. Not when she releases my hand to pat my shoulder. And leaves me standing in her kitchen alone.

  The rest of the day goes by in a blur. From the moment Kip joins me in the kitchen, by now with half his family up and him wearing nothing but a pair of pajama bottoms, he holds me from behind with his strong arms wrapped tightly around me, chin resting on my shoulder. As his family talks, laughing and joking over one another, he pecks little kisses now and again where my neck and shoulder meet.

  I close my eyes every time I feel his lips touch the skin there, bracing for the hurtful words from someone and hoping like hell no one can see how each one of those kisses, little as they are, light me on fire. If they’ve noticed, no one’s said a thing. And like last night, not one hurtful word has been spoken. Not one disgusted grunt. Not one turned up nose.

  After a breakfast of eating his mother’s homemade sausage gravy and biscuits standing around the island in the kitchen, we move to showers. I had Kip shower first and when I step out of the bathroom having just finished mine, he’s leaving the bedroom we share tugging down the cuffs on a dress shirt. And I swear to the universe I’ve never seen the man look so sexy as he does in that black suit. He’s never worn a suit around me before and he owns it. Tailored, single-breasted. Underneath the jacket, a white shirt with ultra-thin red pin striping and a red tie. His hair he’s styled in that sexy, purposely messy way he does. And when he looks up from tugging the cuffs, he catches me staring.

  Anyone, man or woman, with a set of working eyes, hell, one working eye, would be staring.

  The corner of his angelic, full lips tips up on his angelic face suggesting his very un-angelic thoughts. Doesn’t happen often, but he’s stunned me immobile. My jaw slack. How could such a man even exist, and how is it possible for him to be looking at me the way he’s looking at me now?

  Not just lust, with Kip, never just lust. There has never been a time since that first night we spent holding each other that he hasn’t looked at me with more than lust in his eyes, and I don’t know what to do with it. He’s going to figure it out one of these days. He just is. Then where will I be?

  Clearing my throat to buy me some time to clear my head, I finally break my stare away. “I’ll only be a minute.” It still comes out rough.

  Kip steps aside as I hurry past him, but grabs ahold of my biceps before I can step inside the room. He spins me, capturing my jaw with a cupped hand and drops a gentle kiss on me. Not the morning pecks in the kitchen. A real kiss, a make a statement kiss. The kind of kiss I don’t deserve.

  Finally he releases me to dress and after about twenty-five minutes, I rejoin the group in the kitchen. I’m not in a suit like Kip and the other men of his family, but a pair of black dress slacks, royal blue button down, black tie and shoes, rolling the cuffs up to below the elbow.

  It doesn’t matter that I’m not in a suit though, not with the way he looks at me like, not like I’m the only man in the world. Because he’d have no choice if I was the only man in the world. No, he looks at me like his choice of me is a given because the promise of me, of us, had been formed so long ago it almost wasn’t a choice.

  The blur continues through us arriving at the church, big cathedral, probably one of the most beautiful buildings architecturally I’ve ever seen. Giant plates of stained glass telling Bible stories, deep wooden pews ornately carved. The whole place smells of Murphy Oil Soap. I’ve never attended a christening before. We weren’t a religious family growing up, so we really weren’t Catholic.

  But I can’t deny how proud I feel when my angelic Kip gets called up to the front to stand next to his sister Regina, or Gina as the family calls her. They’re making him godfather. He sets his other goddaughter, his niece Tessa, who has been sitting on his lap since we arrived, on the seat next to his to walk up and take his spot. He may not be religious anymore, but anyone can see by the expression he wears, the sheer joy shining through those gorgeous hazel eyes, what the moment means to him.

  After the ceremony ends the whole of us move to our cars. Kip drives us to a banquet hall where his entire family and that of the baby daddy converge.

  They eat and drink, talk and laugh, generally genuinely making merry. And not once do they push me to the fringe. Not only that Kip stays at my side, making sure I’m taken care of, but that the family wouldn’t let it happen.

  Kip should come home for the summer.

  These wonderful people have the wrong idea about me. Today just cements it. My family wouldn’t open their home, their arms to Kip, because they wouldn’t open their home, their arms to me, the man they should. I’m extraneous in the Pratt family and the outright devil to the Hayes’s. So how can I in good conscience take from Kip, not a good man, the best man, when I’ll never be able to give it back?

  Angelic. Kip’s angelic.

  And me, I am the devil. My selfish ways, if I’d have just let him go, Andrew would still be alive.

  Angels and devils don’t mix. Kip is the kind of man who deserves to receive the same treatment given to me by these good people.

  I can’t keep up the charade anymore.

  Not for me, for him.

  There’s a great life, a beautiful life waiting for him. A life he’ll never achieve if he keeps his star hitched to the likes of me. His angelic star burning so bright up in the heavens for the world to see.

  I talk. I smile. No sense ruining the rest of the day for probably the best man I’ll ever know in my life.

  God, he’s beautiful.

  So when he excuses us to go back to his family’s house early, intent clear with the way he runs his finger up my arm, I don’t argue. One last night.

  Kip holds my hand all the way back to the house. He holds it resting on his muscular thigh. Muscles I can feel through his suit pants.

  We walk as we’d regularly walk up to the door, but the minute the door closes, his lips hit mine, pushing me back against the wood.

  A hard, heavy kiss—the feel of it hitting me square in the gut. In my dick too, but mostly my heart. Because I know tonight will be the last time we ever get to be together.

  “Bed,” Kip rasps out. His deep voice sounds thick with the same desire I feel being kissed by him the way he kisses me now.

  The rich word resonates inside me because it’s the last word he speaks. Because his lips don’t leave any part of my body as we walk, me walking backward toward his childhood bed.

  His lips trace a line down my jaw, down my neck, back up the other side of my jaw only hitting my lips again once he slams the bedroom door closed behind us.

  Damn.

  He feels so good.

  ***

  I keep quiet on the drive home, of course, so does Kip. Reflective. After the huge farewell breakfast his mother made for us, all the hugs and back pats by men with downturned lips (his dad, brothers and brothers-in-law), cheek kisses by sniffling women (his older sisters and sisters-in-law), and full on kisses by outright crying women (his mother and Kayna), we had a late start. Almost eleven o’clock by the time we hit the road.

  Chapter 25

  Kip

  Col spent most of the drive home concentrating on driving. At first, it seemed like normal road-weary exhaustive weekend type of quiet. I tried to engage
him in conversation a few times getting basically one word responses each of those times. So I sat and thought on it, the weekend, my family, the way he let me make love to him last night, the way he responded to me almost as if he were saying goodbye.

  The closer we got to home, the more the quiet got to me and the more I realized that’s exactly what last night was for him. A goodbye. Goodbye?

  Dammit Collin.

  I can’t keep spinning on his merry-go-round. He wants me. He doesn’t want me. We’re together. We’re not together.

  I thought I could.

  I thought it was like Jake said, I’d rather spend every day dealing with his shit than spend a day without him. But I realize now I can’t. Self-preservation if nothing else. As much as it hurts me to do it, if he wants goodbye—shit—I have to give it to him. For my own sanity.

  “Drop me on campus.” The first words I speak to him in over an hour.

  He looks at me, shaking his head as if I’d brought him out of a trance. “Sorry. Um… what?”

  “Drop me on campus. My car is there. I’ll need it.”

  “You mad?” he has the nerve to ask me.

  Am I mad? Fuck yeah I’m mad. Fuming mad. Everything we’ve been through already. I’ve tried to keep us an us for so long now and for what? Not sure if I’m madder at him for refusing to see past his bullshit he’s concocted in his head to really see all we’ve got going, or myself for falling so hard for a man with his reputation and thinking there would be, could be any other outcome.

  “Just drop me at my car, and I’ll see you back at your place.”

  Collin, he flinches when I say “your place”. But as the flinch wears away, there’s a look of acceptance to follow. He knows I know. He knows I know.

  Being cold, students don’t usually hang outside on campus but being afternoon, especially on a Sunday, it’s ominously quiet. Almost as if the campus can sense the sucking black hole my life has become and is staying as far away from the suction as possible. To let me be consumed by the blackness all on my own.

  Two left turns, and he rolls up in the parking lot next to my car, the only one around. The breakthroughs we’d made, he held my hand in a Stake-n-Shake. He met my family. They welcomed him in with arms as open as arms could get.

  I can’t break down here, and I know I’m going to break down here if I don’t get the hell away from him now. “Pop the trunk,” I order.

  “Kip,” he says back in that placating tone of his, the one I’ve heard him use on Elle or Bri or even Errol. The tone I used to think was cute until just having it aimed at me. Now I just want to scream at the top of my lungs where he can shove his placating tone because I’m the last person in the world who deserves it.

  But I do not engage, instead without speaking to him again, or even looking his way, I climb out of his car and round to the back trunk waiting. He only makes me wait a few seconds before the sound of the latch unlatching hits the air and the trunk pops so I can pull my bag. And I probably slam the trunk closed harder than I need to, but my heart is breaking. How could he expect me to act any differently?

  Once inside the driver’s side of my car, shivering my butt off while it takes forever to warm up, only then do I glance up to see him still sitting, in his warm car, I might add, waiting for me to drive.

  With windows clear enough to drive, I shift into drive, shooting Col a nod before easing out of the parking lot. He follows close behind me while I make the ten minute drive back to his place. I turn into the spot directly in front of his apartment, the one either he or Benton would usually park in. He parks in the spot just one over. I won’t take that long, Benton will have his spot back by the time he makes it home from wherever he and Elle are at today.

  One last time to follow Col. Up the shoveled walk to the apartment door and wait, not touching him, not talking to him while he unlocks it. He walks in first holding the door open for me. I scooch by still opting for the not touching although in the limited space provided, my chest barely brushes against his.

  Shit.

  If that doesn’t make ending us harder. To touch him in anyway makes me need to touch him in every way. And it makes that need strong, so strong. The strongest.

  Shit.

  Fine.

  Collin.

  Kip.

  Over.

  So I mentally gird myself from the heartbreak by girding my expression. Get in, collect my things and get out. What I have to do. What I do do, leaving him standing at the door, I walk back to his bedroom. He follows about five steps behind me. Why does he have to follow? Our breakup would be so much easier if he didn’t follow.

  “Kip… ” Now his tone isn’t placating, but sad. He lost the right to be sad. He lost that right.

  “What Col?” I stop and whip around to face him. The stress induced eye spasms start spasming in my left eye. Whatever he sees in me, anger. Hurt. His face pales, but too late. Too late Col. You ruined this. You ruined us. Well he needs to hurt same as me. “You wanna fuck?”

  He flinches.

  My verbal bullet hit true.

  “One for the road, maybe? Come on baby, let’s go. Fuck me. Because that’s who I am, right? Collin Pratt’s pathetic fuck buddy who keeps trying for more but is too stupid to realize there is no more. That this is all I can expect from you, because I’ll never be him.” My hands fly out into the air in front of me to punctuate the words. I’ll never be him.

  “Kip, you don’t know.” His hands don’t move. No emotion. Nothing for me. No love. No friendship. No worry that we’re over.

  God, I am a chump.

  “Shut up, Col. Not your turn to talk. You wasted months of my life talking. I put up with everything for us. I turned down a great job opportunity for us. But you know what I just realized? There never really was an us.”

  His mouth pops open from the word-punch I’d dealt. Super. Finally some emotion.

  “I was the only one in this relationship.”

  The dam finally breaks. “Stop it, Kip! Just stop. What do you want from me?”

  It’s too late. “Nothing. I don’t want a damn thing from you anymore.” And I can’t contain the humorless laugh at my own expense, because I certainly feel like the joke. “The most fucked up part, it’s not really about him. He’s your crutch. You’re a coward, Collin. I can’t compete with a dead guy, and you know it. That’s why you use him.”

  He shoves at me, then turning his back to me grabs handfuls of hair, running his palms down over his eyes. “I said stop it,” he shouts again.

  “You hate yourself so much that you resent me. And not for what I initially thought. Not because I accept myself—that would be too psychology one-oh-one for you. You resent me for loving you.” I screech at him, in his space, in his beautiful face.

  Those looks belie the depth of the man standing in front of me. He has it in him. I know it. Maybe I’m a chump, but I know I’ve seen his depth. How can one person be so full of self-loathing?

  “So how about that angry fuck—for old time sake? Then you can go back to whoring while I try to pick up the pieces of my life.”

  There it is. That blow struck true.

  The pain flashes in his eyes, briefly yet there. He turns his back to me and walks out leaving me to gather up the life I tried to force on him. Even if he was the one who asked me to stay.

  Our eyes catch, lock, as I walk from the hallway into the living room where he stood just moments before looking lost, where I’m still lost, wheeling my suitcase behind me. All he gets is that look. If I speak, I’ll break. All he gets is that look.

  Then I’m gone.

  I think the sky looks grayer outside now in just the twenty minutes I’d been inside putting an exclamation point on my relationship, ending the only life I’ve wanted since Jake broke my heart. It’ll probably snow.

  My roommates, the two that are home, seem surprised to see me when I walk inside the loft ten minutes later. Five to get home, five more sitting inside my car wondering what the hell I
’m going to do now.

  We’d never really been friends. I found them through an ad on Craigslist. They needed a roommate who paid his/her portion of the rent on time and with real cash money. Not checks which bounced month after month. I needed a room in a strange city.

  Aside from sharing a space, I never took the time to get to know any one of them any deeper than surface level. An action I’m probably about to regret.

  All my friends are tied up with Collin, and they were his first.

  Well now, I guess that’s not true. I always have Hart and Britney. Not that I’m close with either of them. We probably won’t be discussing my breakup any time soon, but if we can win the points spread for class, we’ll be headed for New York City, and the TGMT summer internship. I wouldn’t have to deal with any reminders of Collin in NYC.

  My heartbreak must be flashing like a neon sign, as I’m greeted by the women’s sympathetic, knowing, sad smiles.

  Since they clearly understand, and have most likely been where I am now, I hope there’s no hard feelings as I pass them for my loft. Head nods are as much of an effort as I can give to either of them while I force my feet to move, to carry me through the open space, to get back to the narrow wrought iron staircase spiraling upwards. My suitcase thunks, hitting each stair behind me until I’ve reached the platform in my loft room.

  There it is, the bed.

  The things I did to him in that bed.

  It takes too much effort to undress, so I toe off each shoe and collapse fully dressed, pulling the pillow over my face to block out the natural light casting a bright grayness throughout the space. I give myself a few minutes to lay here wallowing.

  When the few minutes give are up, I reach in my pocket to pull out my cell phone, then I dial my boss Marlon. He needs to switch my schedule so I don’t take any shifts with Collin. It’s not his business, but what I can tell him, do tell him, is that if he can’t keep Col and me apart, then I’ll have to give notice.