Romance Me (Boxed Set)

by Susan Hatler

  He shot a look down at Sadie, expecting to see horror on her face. Instead, he saw anger, raw fury as she glared at something unseen across the room.

  “What happened after that?” she asked, her jaw clenched tight.

  He let out a bitter laugh. “Well, Dad passed out, and a neighbor came over and drove me the emergency room.”

  “What about your mom, didn’t she come?”

  Her compassion touched him. Ethan kissed the top of her head. “She couldn’t, Sadie. There were germs in the neighbor’s car, and Mom couldn’t drive her own car. She hadn’t picked up the key in over a year. I think it was because she could never get the car to line up perfectly straight when she parked.”

  “Did anyone ever come to the hospital?”

  He pushed away from her then, went and stood by the window, looking down on the cobblestone street below. A pair of middle-aged tourists, cameras dangling from neck straps, quietly argued with one another. Arguments hadn’t happened at his house. His mom always remained silent during her husband’s rages, knowing that she triggered him, that she was responsible for the tension and fear permeating the house. She never stood up for herself. But until the day she died, she’d tried in the best way she could to protect Ethan and Lia from their father, usually at her own expense.

  She just hadn’t tried the right way.

  Ethan tipped his forehead against the cool glass, staring through the leaves at the couple, who had gone from raised voices to a tender hug in mere seconds. Normal. It looked like a normal, everyday disagreement, solved without whiskey, insults, or fists. He let out a sigh, attempting to release some of the pent-up anger inside.

  “No one showed up. I ended up getting major surgery to repair a sliced tendon without either of my parents there. My dad showed up a day later, drunk.”

  Sadie walked past him and opened the tall window. Placing her hands on the sill, she leaned forward, ringlets dangling around her face. He could see the anger still sketched in her face. He had told few people about the incident. Everyone else had responded with sorrow and pity, but not Sadie. She radiated fury.

  “You know, you didn’t deserve being brutalized like that. Neither did your mom.” Her jaw clenched once, then again.

  “Yes, but I can’t imagine being my dad, watching the woman he once loved sink further into her illness, watching her change so drastically.”

  At the sight of Sadie’s furrowing brow, he continued in a rush. “I’m not excusing him, Sadie. I’m just saying that it had to have been tough, and I guess the only way he knew how to deal with it was through the bottle.”

  Sadie twisted a bracelet around her wrist. “Your mom had something that she couldn’t control, and your father dealt with it like a weak man.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  Out of the silence that followed, Sadie quietly asked the question he’d always dreaded and had rarely answered. “How did your mother die?”

  Anger crashed into him, crushing him, wrapping him up and squeezing as if he were in a vice. Rage, and a pain that would never ebb pummeled his mind, his heart. He’d only been thirteen, just a child, really. No child should have to see what he’d seen.

  No child should have to read their own mother’s suicide note.

  “She killed herself. In her note, she said she did it because the OCD was ruining our family. She thought that by taking away her life, she’d be taking away the source of Dad’s anger. She thought he’d be a good dad after she left.”

  “But he wasn’t, was he,” Sadie stated. “He wasn’t a good father.”

  Ethan just shook his head.

  “So she lost her life and you lost your mom, all for nothing.”

  At that Ethan shot up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stormed off. He had to get away from Sadie, needed to remove himself from her anger at his father, her attempts to understand, her compassion for his mom. He didn’t want compassion for his mom—not for that last stupid decision she’d made. She’d left him, left Lia, and he’d had to bear the burden the rest of his life.

  Before he walked out the office door, he turned and shot Sadie a hard, cold look. “And Sadie, about OCD? It’s hereditary. I loved my mother. I hated her decision to kill herself, but I loved her anyway.” He clenched his hands into fists. “And I don’t blame her for her illness. But the OCD is why I won’t do relationships. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever risk subjecting anyone to the hell my family had to live through.”

  No way in hell.

  ***

  Ethan avoided Sadie the rest of the day. After leaving work, he returned to his rented one-bedroom cottage. He went for a long run, showered, then ate a steak and salad alone in the empty dining room. Finishing his meal, he leaned back in his chair, wondering why he dumped so much on Sadie earlier in the day. He’d spilled so many family secrets to her: his painful past, his mother’s illness, what could happen to him.

  He placed the dinner dishes in the sink, vowing to wash them in the morning, and poured himself two fingers of single-malt scotch. His father’s alcoholism had taught him the tough way to respect alcohol, not abuse it. He turned on the dim hall light and fished out a leather-bound album from a trunk in the entry closet. After fingering the covering for a while, he carefully opened it up. The black and white photographs of his mother Krista and father Joe on their wedding day showed a sweet and simple life. His mother’s long black hair, so much like his sister’s, was swept back in an elegant knot, partially hidden behind her veil. With her arm tucked neatly in the crook of Ethan’s father’s, she looked at the camera with a serene and glowing smile.

  “Not the smile I knew,” Ethan murmured. The smiles he remembered were forced and stilted—pasted on by a woman desperate to make her children believe all was well.

  But all had not been well in the Sawyer house.

  The psychiatrist had given his mother’s issues a name: OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, mixed with a severe anxiety disorder. Although the psychiatrist held out hope for a medical breakthrough, at the time, little besides exposure therapy was available to help. And his mother wouldn’t go to exposure therapy. She’d been held hostage by a disease she didn’t understand, and Ethan’s father had grown more frustrated, taking his frustration out on his wife and their children.

  Ethan swiped a hand over his face. He hadn’t been able to tell Sadie about the day his mother had died. About what he’d seen. He and Lia were supposed to spend the weekend away, camping with another family for Memorial Day weekend. He remembered how excited Lia had been while packing, competing with him for space for her sweatshirts and jeans in their shared ragged red duffle bag. They had both been thrilled to have three days away from their darkened house and even darker mood of their father.

  But Ethan had come down with a bug right before they were to leave. He remembered feeling achy all over, hot and cranky, his throat sore. Instead of heading out of town with the others, Ethan had walked back to his house.

  And walked straight into hell.

  He supposed his mother had planned to have him and Lia out of the house so their father would be the one to discover her lifeless body, floating in the bath, surrounded by a pool of red water. A note had been placed on the bathroom sink, leaning against a cup filled with wildflowers picked by Lia earlier in the day. His mother hadn’t written much, but the words she had chosen remained burned in Ethan’s memory, seared there as if they’d been branded: “I’m sorry I failed. You’ll be better off without me.”

  During a psychology course in college, Ethan discovered that OCD was hereditary. He decided then that he wouldn’t make the same mistake his mother had—getting married and having children. If there was a chance he’d become OCD, he wasn’t going to risk subjecting anyone else to the illness.

  Running a hand over his face and head, he spiked his hair in uneven chunks. Abruptly, he stood and tossed the photo album in the general direction of the closet. Swearing under his breath, he flicked off the lights and walked down the
hall to his bedroom.

  After shucking his shirt, he reached to turn off the small lamp on his nightstand. His hand froze as he noticed the photograph tilted jauntily next to the lamp. Sadie had given him the photo for his desk at work, but he’d enjoyed the memory so much he’d brought it home. It had been taken at the Courant’s pool, at the party thrown for him, Theo, and Jack after their high school graduation. The boys had been crowded in with their sisters, with everyone laughing and mugging for the camera.

  For the first time, Ethan noticed that Sadie, with her frizzy hair and braces, wasn’t looking at the photographer. Her chin was tilted up and her gaze was directly on him. Even behind her thick glasses, he saw the intent and awe in her expression.

  Sadie… Once again, like how it had a few days before, her name whispered inside his head, echoing and repeating. Permeating his mind. Refusing to leave.

  Overcome with a feeling he couldn’t understand, he dropped onto the bed. He turned off the dull light of the lamp, plunging the room into darkness. Staring at the shadowed ceiling, he shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.

  Sharing his painful past with Sadie, although difficult to remember, had somehow been easy. She instinctively had known not to pity him; rather, she’d reacted with a righteous anger at his father and a compassion for his mother Ethan himself had never felt. She saw his childhood differently than Ethan ever had. Somehow, Sadie’s different perspective gave Ethan a feeling of release.

  He just couldn’t figure out what his mind was releasing.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As summer drew to a close, Ethan watched the tree outside his office window at the theater change color over the course of a few weeks. The incessant heat and stale wind dried the leaves, turning them brown and brittle. Still, the breath of air coming through his office window, dry as it was, reminded him he was once again home.

  Visits with Lia happened almost daily—he could see the changes happening in his little sister. Like a bud on an apple tree, she had lain dormant for so long, and now had blossomed into something beautiful, fresh and alive. Moving back to Meadowview gave him the opportunity to be there for her, to provide protection if she ever needed it again.

  He smiled to himself. He’d already seen the results of his endeavors. The festival had already increased revenue, and season ticket sales for the winter productions were up twenty percent. With the festival’s success, it looked like he’d never have to move away from Lia again.

  His own project, the Youth Theater Academy, had gained national attention after he’d appeared on a national daytime talk show featuring programs for disadvantaged youth. The support for his academy by Sadie and her parent’s foundation made him even more determined to give his all to his new position. He knew how deep a hole Sadie had found herself in when the original director had quit. Being able to rescue her made him feel good, like he’d done something worthwhile, something more meaningful than acting or directing. He’d given Sadie the chance to prove herself to her ever-demanding parents, to show that she could be just as good as her perfect older brother.

  Not that Theo was perfect and Sadie had never been a failure—she’d just always felt like one, given the way her parents had treated her. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t see her the way he did—competent and capable. A born leader. And beautiful.

  Together, he and Sadie sat on the leather couch, the breeze of an overhead fan providing some relief from the incessant heat. Sadie stirred next to him, flipping pages of a script he’d handed her earlier. At some point, Sadie had changed positions and ended up with her bare feet in his lap. He loved looking at her toes, her nails painted in a light apricot, with a thin gold band around one of them. One of her pinky toes had a freckle, he noticed. An image of him licking her freckled toe jumped through his mind, reminding him of how much he still wanted her.

  She shifted, pulling her feet up underneath her. A few more minutes with her feet in his lap and her toes wouldn’t have been the only thing he’d be imagining licking. He shook his head, trying to toss off the image.

  It had taken him a while to get used to working alongside someone he’d slept with. Knowing how she’d had such a long-term crush gave him a sense of guilt sometimes, guilt for having taken her up on her offer for sex. But she never talked about what happened after the auction, never eluded to her crush. Mostly, he simply enjoyed the process of working with her.

  But sometimes, like today, he could be almost overwhelmed with desire. And sometimes, when he could find no escape from the thoughts of her filling his mind, he would worry that she was becoming an obsession, a fixation of his mind.

  “Ethan, this kid is awesome. Where did you find someone with such a gift for writing?”

  Sadie’s statement jarred him back to reality. He looked at the title of the script she was reading. “His teacher emailed me his work. This kid, Cameron, had been a gang-banger, but found his way back to high school and into a great drama program. He seems to have a lot of potential.”

  Sadie skimmed down the page, chewing on her pencil as her eyes flew across the text. “Potential? I’d say he’s already there. This script only needs mild tweaking to make it stage ready.” She held the pencil in her teeth as she twisted her curls up into a bun. A quick flip of her wrist and the pencil now secured her hair in place. Ethan thought she’d never looked cuter. Or sexier, with a pencil in her wild mop of hair, her jewelry-clad bare feet, and that freckled little toe.

  “I’d like to use it for next year’s Youth Theater Academy production. What do you think?” Ethan asked, now struggling to keep his mind in the conversation and off Sadie’s hot body.

  Sadie nodded. “Absolutely. The play will appeal to a younger crowd, but it will still draw in a more mature audience with its commentary on family dynamics. There are plenty of roles to go around, three set changes, and multiple lighting changes. The costumes are mostly just street clothes except for his nightmare scene—costuming will have a blast designing for some of the images in his nightmare.”

  Ethan leaned over Sadie’s shoulder, angling a position to see the play. He was pleased to note this position gave him a prime view of her cleavage, supported by a black lacy bra under her black silk blouse. Desire surged over him, an intense need to feel Sadie’s silky skin under his fingertips, her willowy body under his.

  He jammed his hand through his hair, working his attention away from his need for Sadie and to the script. “Check out how he describes why the allure of the gang was so intense for him. It’s on the next-to-the-last page.”

  Sadie flipped through pages to the passage Ethan highlighted, where the protagonist spoke to his father:

  Dad, the gang made me feel like I meant something. They saw me. Every time you looked at me I felt unseen. Not just that you were looking through me, or looking past me, but like your eyes were stopping short of where I was standing. I felt like you couldn’t even be bothered to look the extra few feet or even inches to see me. The gang saw me. They were right there, in my face, staring right into my eyes. I was somebody to them.

  Ethan watched as Sadie read her way through the section. He wondered if she’d see herself in Cameron’s words. Growing up with Theo, Ethan had spent plenty of time at the Courant’s house and had seen over and over the way Sadie’s parents had looked at her—as if she were invisible, as if they couldn’t quite see her. Mrs. Courant, the ice-queen of perfection, found fault daily with her scrawny, frizzy-haired tomboy daughter. Ethan remembered walking into the house once and seeing Mrs. Courant arguing with Sadie, a wad of cotton balls in her hands. Ethan felt disgust and anger toward Sadie’s mother when he realized she’d been trying to convince her thirteen-year-old to stuff her bra.

  With a start, Sadie tossed the script onto the table and stood up.

  “That hit a little too close to home,” she murmured.

  “Your parents?” he asked, certain of her reply.

  “Yep.” Her response was clipped and cold. “I grew up with Theo as
the model child—straight hair, straight teeth, straight A’s. The only A I ever got was in my cup size. I was more than a disappointment, I was an embarrassment.”

  “Not to anyone but them,” Ethan said quietly but firmly. “And maybe to yourself, but you were never an embarrassment or a disappointment to anyone else. Never.”

  Sadie walked over to him, patted him on the head. “You’re sweet, Ethan. But it’s true, I was an embarrassment. And thank God for you stepping in to fill the director position. I would have let down my parents once again if the festival had failed under my leadership.”

  “Sadie—” Ethan cut himself off. He felt the anger at Sadie’s parents begin to build and willed himself to remain calm. She hadn’t ever deserved to be treated with such distain. Not Sadie.

  “It’s fine, Ethan. I know what I am, and what I’m not.”

  Fuck that. “You need to see who I see,” he said harshly, “not who you think your parents see. You’re brilliant, an amazingly hard worker, determined, a wonderful friend, and absolutely beautiful. You always have been. It’s your parents’ fault that they couldn’t see who you really were, and who you really are. They missed out on knowing someone wonderful, and I feel sorry for them.”

  Ethan reached up for her hand. Lightly, he placed a kiss on the center of her palm. “Believe in yourself, Sadie. I know I do.”

  He watched as her eyes narrowed. It didn’t matter how much he told her he believed in her, he realized. The only way she’d ever believe her own worth is if the knowledge came from her.

  She pulled away. “It’s just not that easy, Ethan. It never will be that easy.”

  ***

  Sadie spent the rest of the day uncomfortable, uneasy, as if she didn’t quite fit in her own skin. Ethan had tapped into something deep within her. He’d found that painful wound caused in her childhood that had never healed. She supposed other kids disappointed their parents, that other girls weren’t as beautiful as their mothers would like, but she hated that it had happened to her. She’d always felt an outcast in her own family. A family filled with bright and shining people, the successes of the world. She never belonged—she was just average, and she’d certainly never shone.