Exquisitely Broken (A Sin City Tale Book 1)

by M. Jay Granberry

  “I stopped thinking about us a long time ago.” Sin lets out a sad laugh. “It was the only way I was able to move on with my life.”

  “But have you really moved on? From where I’m standing it feels like we’re right back where we started. A new beginning, if you will.” I close the distance between our lips, my mouth slanting over hers. There’s a moment of hesitation before she melts under my touch.

  She tastes sweeter than she has a right to, and her mouth is so warm. Her tongue is beyond talented, dancing over mine in a deliberate caress. Her long fingers grip the bare skin of my waist, while she takes from my mouth like woman long denied water in a barren desert.

  I fist my hand in her hair while the other hand finds the edge her T-shirt delving underneath to find warm flawless skin. Kissing Sin is more than two mouths meeting. It’s a sharing of the soul. It’s when she’s most open. Even though she denies it.

  Sin’s hands trembled as she pulls me closer. Satisfied moans pour from her mouth as she frantically returns my kiss.

  I pull my head back, but we continue to clutch each other. My eyes open just enough to see her sooty lashes resting above her cheek. Her eyes flicker open and she looks at me the same way I’m sure I’m looking at her—a confusing mix of love and lust.

  “What are you doing to me?” she asks quietly, pulling her gaze from my lips.

  “The same thing you’re doing to me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t have a name for it, Sin, but I’d like to find out. Wouldn’t you?”

  I lick my lips and fight the urge to step back over the threshold. I take a deep breath. “We don’t need all the answers right now. We have an entire year to figure it out.”

  The dazed look lifts from her eyes and a smirk turns the corners of her mouth. “I forgot how persistent you could be.”

  “Yeah.” I draw the pad of my thumb on her bottom lip. “But only when it comes to you.”

  Four Years Ago

  Jake

  “The number you have dialed is not in service, please check the number and dial again.”

  It’s been seventy-two hours. No word. No communication. I don’t know who’s watching our house, but every day when I come home from the office, more of her stuff is gone. I know she’s been here because I can still smell the faint scent of the almond shampoo that she uses. She’s fading from my life. It’s understandable and breaking my fucking heart, but I get it.

  I walk down the hall toward our bedroom, and I wonder what’s missing this time? I never realized how intertwined all our things were until hers started to disappear. I look around the house taking inventory, trying to notice the small things that are different.

  So far there is nothing out of the ordinary. The tension that’s sitting like a rock in my gut starts to ease. I feel like we’re finally on the other side of this thing. She’ll come home at some point. It’s not like she can avoid me forever. Couples have fights. People work through infidelity all the time. I know I messed up. I messed up bad.

  Now I just want to get past it, fix it, fix us, but who am I kidding? I don’t even know where to start. But I have to try. I’m not giving up.

  And then I notice the house keys sitting on top of a folded piece of paper on the kitchen counter. That rock in my gut comes back, but this time it is boulder size. I palm both the keys and the note and continue toward our bedroom. All the pictures that used to line the hall have been taken down. She left the only one that captures us. Our intimacy. Our closeness. It’s an artistic black and white of us after she won a local contest to be the opening act for a much more significant band. Her smile is huge, our fingers are threaded together, I’m leaning down to her, and she’s on tiptoe reaching for me. The photographer snapped the shot right before I kissed her.

  The AC kicks on and that weird suction rolls through the house, slamming doors. I force myself to keep moving toward the bedroom. I don’t know what’s waiting around the next corner. Call it a gut feeling or maybe instinct but whatever’s coming next is going to rip me down to the fucking marrow of my bones.

  The door to the spare room, where Sin stores her ridiculous collection of guitars and other instruments, catches on something and bounces back wide open. Empty pegs line the walls where guitars use to hang. The missing keyboard stands left deep indents on the carpet. The only thing left in the room is the classic Fender I bought her for her last birthday.

  I place my hand over the ache in the center of my chest. Trying to hold the broken pieces of my heart together from the outside. What started as a dull ache is now a radiant, all-consuming pain. The small room appears massive without the instruments lining the walls or the cushions piled on the floor. Her absence is like a tumor eating me from the inside out. The longer she’s gone, the more it festers and grows until it consumes me. At the same time, this house feels small, almost stifling without her. That’s the way it feels when she’s on tour, and now that she’s moved out, it’s more than small.

  It’s lifeless.

  I glanced around what had been our home. There is no indication she ever lived here and only one lone picture to testify to our relationship.

  I unfold the paper in my hand and quickly read her words.

  “I treated you with the respect that you have not earned, and you do not deserve. I have loved every piece of you with everything in me. Today a part of me died. And when you miss me, because you will miss me, remember I didn’t walk away, you kicked me out the fucking door.”

  There it is. The moment I’ve been waiting for over the last couple of years. She’s gone. There are no take backs. No big blowups or confrontations. Sin disappeared from my life the same way she came in, suddenly and with heartbreaking clarity.

  For the thirtieth time in the last hour, I dial Sin’s number. For the thirtieth time, I get a disconnect message. I lower the phone from my ear and stare blankly at the screen. This is crazy. I thought sooner or later Sin and I would have it out, and on that day of judgment, I’d be found lacking because I cheated. But of all the possible scenarios, I never considered she’d freeze me out.

  I know where she’s been staying. I’d have to be an idiot not to know. She’s with Adam. Until I walked into an empty house, I believed, maybe stupidly, she’d be back. She had to get all her stuff, right? But I didn’t bank on her making it a stealthy covert mission to do it. At the very least I thought she’d say something, anything. I thought she’d yell and cuss, and we’d have it out but, in the end, we’d still be us and still be together.

  But Sin is done. She’s not coming back. If our empty house didn’t solidify that fact, the dear Jake letter damn well did.

  Adam and Sin are closer than I’ve ever been comfortable with, and now I have to tuck tail, go to his house, or at the very least ask for his help. He knows Sin as well as I do, if not better, so if she isn’t there, which I know she will be, he’ll know exactly where to find her.

  I’ve been prowling through the house for the last several minutes vacillating between extreme anger at how she left and who she’s with, to shame for being the poster child for fuckboys everywhere and getting caught in the worst possible position. Then I go to missing her and wanting nothing more than to see her. Knowing she’s in the city, but not home with me burns, and then the anger comes again. The ugly cycle’s giving me emotional whiplash. I just need a sign, a clue how to fix what I broke. Something that will give me with a way out, but I can’t find the silver lining. There’s nothing to look forward to.

  The hardest thing about this whole situation is that it was all me. I did it to myself and now I have to sit in the eye of the storm and accept responsibility. I may not be comfortable with how close she’s to Adam, but are they bumping uglies on tour? Fuck, I don’t know but based on the pictures, it’s a good possibility. It’s always been in the back of my mind. Always. But she’s so adamant. So probably not.

  I’m grasping at straws, trying to rationalize my fucked up self and I can’t. There is no way
to rationalize this. All I can say is that I missed her. I missed her, and I was angry she was gone. Jealous she was out there chasing her dreams while I sacrificed mine for a family legacy that didn’t mean shit anywhere except casino floors and sketchy backrooms.

  My feet move toward the door before my brain can catch up. I’m on autopilot when I get in my car. The drive to Adam’s house only takes fifteen minutes, the sun is barely dipping behind the western ridge of the mountains when I pull up outside. All the blinds are open. It is the first real glimpse I’ve had of Sin in days, three long days. I look at my reddened eyes in the review mirror.

  Get out of the fucking car, Jake. Get out of this car and get your girl.

  But fuck if I know what to say or do. Saying I’m sorry is not enough and saying I love you is even worse. I get out of the car and cut across the yards desert landscaping toward the front door. From where I’m standing, I have a perfect view of Sin. Without the makeup or stage clothes, she looks more like the girl I met in college. Her coarse, dark hair is piled in a bun on top of her head, glasses perched on her nose, and her creamy brown skin so smooth and perfect I curl my fingers into a fist to fight the urge to touch her. Reluctantly I turn away from the window.

  I ring the doorbell and try to calm my racing heart. I hear footsteps approach the door, and I’m pretty sure someone just looked at me through the peephole. I start to pace the small piece of concrete in front of the door, agitation making my steps short.

  She’s going to leave me out here.

  Heavier footsteps approach the door, and instead of my soft curvy girlfriend answering and falling adoringly into my arms, I’m greeted by a pissed Adam. He’s as pale as Sin is dark. His blond hair and bright blue eyes—her perfect counterpart.

  She’s going to leave me out here. I don’t even get a fuck you or a go to hell or a chance to say I’m sorry. She’s is seriously going to leave me out here and that fissure in my heart that started when I stepped in our home and saw all her things gone, it burst wide open and panic and desperation pour out.

  “Look, I just want to talk to her. That’s it. I just need to.” I look over his shoulder and shout, “Sin. Sinclair, please!” I yell through the open door. I take a step forward, and his hand meets solidly with my chest.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  I hit his arm with enough force that he stumbles back. “Man, it seriously is not the time.”

  He steps over the threshold, closing the door securely behind him. “It is long past the time.” His calm demeanor amps me up even more, making me want to bum-rush him to remove this barrier between Sin and me.

  “Look, this has nothing to do with you,” I say, balling up fist and grinding my molars and just barely holding on to a modicum of restraint.

  “It’s got everything to do with me when she shows up at my house, asking for a place to stay because she walked in on you fucking her friend.”

  This fucking guy with the mouth and the greater than thou attitude. Yes, he knew Sin first, but somethings are between a man and his woman. Sometimes the best friend needs to take a back seat and slow his row, know his place, “Look, Adam—”

  “No, you look. I’ve stood on the sidelines for years and watched her bend herself like a pretzel, turning down gigs that could have catapulted her career, staying in Vegas when every independent distribution label in L.A. has begged us to move there. She did all that to try to keep you happy. I’ve had to listen to her talk about all your petty insecurities, the whole men and women can’t be friends thing. The why are you on tour and away from home thing, the stalking the fucking social media pages like a fuckboy looking for evidence of indiscretions and, bro, if even half of the shit she told me is true, you’re a bigger bitch than I thought.”

  Did the dude sporting a man bun seriously just call me a bitch? I might be a lot of things, but a bitch is nowhere in me. I roll my eyes to the darkening sky and start counting. I’m almost to five before he steps into my personal space to drop more pearls of wisdom.

  “I’ve watched her minimize herself to make you comfortable with who she’s destined to be. I’ve listened to her hope and pray and wish for you to step up, be a man, or at the very least, her fucking man. And she showed up here shattered. Let you talk to her? Fuck you.”

  His words are eating through my conscience like acid because he’s right. But fuck right. My anger is beyond rational at this point. I throw a punch that connects with the side of his face. The sound of my knuckles colliding with skin is satisfying. God, it feels good to hit his pretty boy face after all this time. He’s never known his place. Always coming at me with the mean mugging and shitty comments. And I’d place good money on the fact he’s always in Sin’s ear talking shit. All the emotion that I’ve held in for the last three days erupts. The swiftness of my attack may have caught Adam off guard, but then he hits me back, faster than I can block and harder than I expect.

  The door opens wider behind him, and we both fall at Sin’s feet. Sin is only five feet tall, but from my position on the floor she looks taller, and hurt, and broken. In that blink of an eye, we’re back where we started.

  “Sin, please.” My voice breaks.

  Adam stands, his presence a glowering figure at her back.

  “Thank you, friend, but I got it from here.” She’s talking to Adam, but her eyes never leave mine. Those midnight pools that generally sparkle are dull and puffy. Her nose is bright with a shine that only comes from blowing your nose with frequency. She’s clutching a piece of tissue in her hand. Pain twists her features like a warped mask, and even her pain is its own kind of beauty.

  Adam slips inside the door but not before giving her a one-armed hug and I hear his rough voice say, “Stay strong, Sin. This asshole isn’t worth your tears.” Throwing me the evil eye, he says, “And he never was.” I watch intently as his back retreats deeper into the house.

  “Get up, Jake.” I’m surprised when she offers me a hand. Our fingers intertwine, and for the first time in days, I feel the frayed edges of my world begin to knit back together. I get to my feet, and she immediately drops my hand as if the contact burned.

  “What do you want, Jake?” Her arms wrap tight around her middle like she’s trying to hold herself together.

  I’m finally face-to-face with Sin and I’ve got… nothing. My brain is blank. Every practiced speech and contrite apology are gone. My eyes are glued to hers and fuck me, I can’t think of one word. After holding my gaze for a little less than a breath, her eyes glaze over with tears, and her teeth sink into her bottom lip to stop the trembling.

  She takes a step back over the threshold, doorknob in her hand, preparing to close the door in my face.

  “Hold on.” I press a palm against the door, keeping it cracked, to wedge myself between the opening. I close the space between us. The need to feel her, smell her, be in her space, and have her in mine propelling me forward. My hand slides around the back of her neck pulling her toward me. She stumbles into my arms and trips over her own feet, but like every other time we’ve touched, it’s right.

  Finally, the pressure in my chest lets up, and I breathe easy. I rest my forehead against hers and whisper against her lips, “I still want you, Sin. Only you.” I close my eyes against the accusations in hers. This close, her breath is co-mingled with mine, and I can smell the faint scent of almond from her shampoo.

  “Come back home,” I beg. My lips move over hers, but she doesn’t kiss me back. “I need you. I need us.” I breathe out on a plea.

  This time when I seek her lips, she yields but it’s not with sweet abandon. It’s stiff and tinged with regret. This kiss is heartbreak played out with the brush of lips and the slide of tongues.

  And it hurts.

  Our lips pull apart and I let out a shuddered breath as my heart finally rips completely apart. Instinctively I tighten my arms around her, trying to keep her close, but she pulls back. The air slips between us as easy as a knife through butter. I know what’s comi
ng. Good-bye. She going to put the final nail in the proverbial coffin. I watch her mouth move but I can’t comprehend the words.

  “I don’t know what’s worse, the idea that you think I’m foolish enough to believe you, or the fact you think I’m stupid enough to take you back.”

  Don’t say the words. Don’t say we’re done. I scream in my head, but the words get stuck behind the lump of emotion in my throat.

  “I get it, Jake, I really do, but loving you is tearing me apart. I can’t pretend like it didn’t happen, and I can’t come home. I’m done… okay?”

  No. It’s not okay. None of this is okay. This would be a good time for that apology. Say anything. Don’t let her go. My mind is screaming but I remain mute. My voice refusing to give purchase to my thoughts.

  “You win. Your family wins. We should have listened to everyone six years ago and saved ourselves from this moment they all somehow predicted. In some ways I guess it was always going to end this way. Girls like me don’t end up with boys like you—” Tears stream down her face, cutting off the flow of words.

  I cup her cheek and swipe her tears with my thumb and words tumble out of my mouth, spurred by desperation. “I’m sorry. I just want us to be okay. Just tell me how to make us right again.” I place chaste kisses on her lips, cheeks, eyes—any place that I can reach. “Just tell me what to do, Sin. I just want us. I’ll fix it. I swear I will,” I whisper

  Her eyes flutter shut, and a tremor moves through her entire body. She takes one deep breath, and when she opens her eyes, I see it.

  Those beautiful brown eyes I use to drown in have shut down. Sin is folding herself away, going somewhere I can’t follow.

  She takes a small step back, and cold air rushes into the space her warm body just occupied,

  “This is the easy part. We were always good when it came to good-bye.” Without another word, she steps back into the house.