by W Winters
I’m just as careful with my reply. “I know I fucked up. I shouldn’t have let you see me like that--”
“Why?” she cuts me off. “Why wait there for me to see? You had to know I would.”
And just like that, she’s slipping away again.
I can’t fucking breathe. This damn shirt feels like a noose around my neck; I clutch at it, unbuttoning my collar.
“I need you right now.” The words fall from me and I’m not even aware that they have until she threads her fingers between mine and squeezes.
“You can tell me,” she whispers.
How do I tell her the truth: I killed a man who hurt a woman I barely knew and it doesn’t feel like it was enough? How do I tell her I can’t get what happened years ago out of my head and the sight from that night will never leave me? How do I share that burden with anyone?
Let alone with her, a woman I can’t lose? I’m barely conscious of it myself.
“Jase, I deserve to know.”
My gaze drifts from hers and finds Seth’s in the rearview mirror.
“I don’t have answers right now.”
“That’s becoming a theme for you, isn’t it?” she bites back, pulling her warm hand away from mine. Leaning forward she places her hand on the leather seat in front of her. “Seth, please take me home.”
There’s no room for negotiation in my tone. “You’re coming home with me.”
“The hell I am--”
“You belong with me!” The scream tears from me before I can stop it. Chaos erupts from hating the blur of failure around me and the uncertainty.
I feel insane. The stress of everything that’s happened is driving me mad and I’m losing the only person who can keep me grounded. I can’t look her in the eyes, knowing how badly I’ve failed her but she makes me, her fingers brushing the underside of my jaw until my gaze lifts to hers.
“I didn’t say that I wasn’t still with you. I didn’t say I don’t belong to you.” She pauses, halting her words and seemingly questioning her last statement.
I won’t allow it. She can’t question that. Above all else, she needs to believe with every fiber in her that she belongs to me.
My fingers splay through her hair as I kiss her. With authority and demanding she feel what I can’t say. She meets every swift stroke of my tongue with her own demands.
Reveling in it, I remind her of what we have.
This won’t come around again. I can feel it in my bones. What we have is something we can’t let go of. I’ve never been surer of anything in my life as I am of this.
It takes her a moment to push me away, with both hands on my chest. It’s a weak gesture, but I give it to her and love how breathless I’ve left her.
Barely breathing, she alternates her stare between my lips and my eyes before nipping my lower lip.
The small action makes me feel like everything will be okay. I’m all too aware that’s exactly what it’s intended to do.
“Come home with me.” It’s not a command; I’m practically begging her.
She doesn’t say no, but she doesn’t say yes either. “You scare me. This,” she says and gestures between the two of us, “scares me.”
“Do you think it doesn’t scare me too? That fear doesn’t have a grip on me sometimes?”
“I didn’t ask for this,” she answers and when she does, her voice cracks, the emotion seeping in.
“I didn’t either, but I’m not afraid to make known what I want. I won’t let fear do that to me.”
“I’m not saying this isn’t what I want. I’m saying I need to breathe for a minute. You need to take me home.”
It’s then that I realize the car has stopped at the fork that determines which way we’ll go.
“Take me home.” Bethany whispers the statement like it’s a plea. Seth waits for my order and when I nod, the car goes right, heading toward her house.
“I’m giving you space, Bethany. But it’s temporary.”
She doesn’t let me off so easily. “Are you willing to tell me whose blood was on my shirt?”
I shake my head, but offer her a question in its place. “Are you willing to seriously consider my offer?”
“Offer?” The fact that she’s forgotten so easily hurts more than I’ll ever admit.
“Marry me.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Say yes.” Neither of us budge, neither of us give anything more than the gentle touch of our fingers meeting on the leather seats.
“When I marry someone, it will be because I never want to be away from them. Not because I involved myself with someone who doesn’t trust me, who keeps secrets from me. Someone I know I shouldn’t be with and who’s giving me every reason to run.”
I can’t come up with an answer. I have nothing. Words never fail me like this.
“Everyone’s entitled to a moment. But if you’re going to keep it to yourself, prepare to be by yourself.”
All I can give her is a singular truth as the car slows to a stop in front of her house. “I won’t be by myself for long, Bethany.”
“You will if you don’t figure out how to answer my questions, Jase. I’m not in the habit of helping those who don’t want to help themselves.”
Bethany
The Coverless Book
Twentieth Chapter
Jake’s perspective
“She’s a healer. She’ll help you get better.”
“I’m fine, Jake,” Emmy pleads with me. I know she’s scared to be in the woods searching out a woman some call a witch, but I won’t let her die.
Staring at the dried herbs that hang from a line outside the leather tent, Emmy hesitates. “It’s nearly twice a week,” I tell her and my fingers slip through hers. She’s lost weight and she looks so much paler than she did nearly a month ago when we ran away.
“The farmer’s sister is nice, they’re all nice, but she’s not helping you.”
We’ve been staying in a small cabin on the back of a farm in exchange for labor. It would be perfect this way… if Emmy didn’t get sick and spit up blood so often.
“Please. Do it for me.”
Her eyes are what draw me to her. She can’t hide a single thought or feeling. They all flicker and brighten within her gaze. Her lips part just slightly but before she can kiss me or I can kiss her, a feminine voice calls out to our right, “Are you ready?”
Emmy immediately grabs me and hides just behind my left side. She doesn’t take her eyes from the woman though. Shrouded in a black cloak, it’s harder to see her among the shrubbery, but as she unveils her hood and walks toward the fire, the light shows her to be nothing more than human.
“Jake…” Emmy protests.
“For me,” I remind her, squeezing her hand after prying it from my hip and following the woman under the various tanned hides that protect her potions and remedies.
“I know what ails you, but tell me what you think, my dear?” The healer doesn’t look at me; she doesn’t speak to me at all. Emmy’s quiet, assessing at first, but quickly she speaks up.
I only watch the two of them taking a place in the corner, quietly praying to whatever gods may be listening, to help Emmy. I can’t lose her.
“When I’m with him, I’m invincible.”
The healer’s smile wanes as she places her hand just above Emmy’s but quickly takes it away, snatching a bag of something dried… flowers maybe? “Take these,” she says as she hands the bag to Emmy. “You like soup, don’t you?” The chill of the night spreads under the tent, the wind rustling everything inside. “It’ll take the pain away.”
“When I’m with him, I’m invincible.”
I keep dragging my eyes back to that underlined line. She’s changed. Emmy’s changed. When did she need Jake to be invincible? And more importantly, why did he let that happen?
I have to remind myself that it’s fiction. With that thought, I put down the book and force myself to face my own reality. I’m sure as hell not invincible.
Not with Jase Cross and not without him either.
Laura’s never going to believe me.
It’s funny how I keep thinking about telling her what happened as if it’s the worst hurdle to overcome at this point.
Telling your friend you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars they loaned to you… or gave to you, whichever... the thought of telling her that makes me feel sick to my stomach.
I have to rub my eyes as I get up off the sofa, The Coverless Book sitting right in front of me, opened and waiting on the coffee table. I couldn’t close my eyes last night without seeing Officer Walsh, the blood on the floor, or Jase’s intense gaze and the demons beneath that darkness.
Rest didn’t come for me last night, no matter how badly I prayed for it.
Beep, beep, beep. Gathering my mug of hot-for-the-third-time coffee, I promise myself I’ll remember to drink it this time as I test the temperature and find it acceptable to drink.
The last time I burned the tip of my tongue.
My cell phone stares back at me. The book stares back at me. The door calls to me to go back to Jase.
And yet all I can do is sit back on my sofa, stretching in the worn groove and staring across the room at a photo of my sister in her high school graduation cap with her arm wrapped around a younger, happier version of me.
Life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.
She was never supposed to go down that path and leave me here all alone.
“I still hate you for leaving me,” I speak into the empty room even though I don’t believe my own words. “But damn do I miss you.” Those words are different. Those I believe with everything in me.
I wish I could tell her about Jase and the shit I’ve gotten myself into.
If only I had my sister back.
There are multiple stages of grief. I had at least three courses that told me all the stages in detail. I had to take all three to work at the center. If you’re going to work with patients who are struggling with loss, and a lot of our patients are, you have to know the stages inside and out.
Acceptance comes after depression. It’s the final stage and I’ve heard people tell me that they can feel it when it happens.
I used to think it was like a weight off their shoulders, but a woman told me once it was more like the weight just shifted somewhere else. Somewhere deeper inside of you, in that place where the void will always be.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
Acceptance.
The five stages in all their glory. I’ve read plenty about them and at the time I associated each one with how I felt when my mother died, but maybe every death is different. Because this feels nothing like what I felt with her.
There are so many reasons to explain the differences. But one thing I can’t make sense of is how I feel, with complete certainty, that I’ve accepted Jenny’s death too soon. A month since she’s been missing, weeks since her death.
I’m not ready to accept I’ll never see her again, but I have. How fair is that?
“Do you hate me for it?” I ask the smiling, teenage version of my sister, with her red cap in her hand. “Can you forgive me for accepting you’re gone forever so soon?”
Wiping harshly under my eyes, I let the exasperated air leave me in a sharp exhale. “And now I’m going crazy, talking to no one.” I swallow and sniff away the evidence of my slight breakdown before confessing. “Not the person you were in the end, but the real you. Could the real you forgive me?”
As if answering or interrupting me, or maybe hating my confession – I’m not sure which – the old floor creaks. It does that when the seasons change. When the weather moves from bitter cold to warm. The old wood stretches and creaks in the early mornings.
Still, I can’t breathe for the longest time, feeling like someone’s with me.
Any sense of safety has vanished.
I wish Jase were here. It’s my first thought.
Even when he hides from me, I still wish he were here. I’m choosing to stay away and yet, I wish he were here. How ironic is that?
The back and forth is maddening. Be with him, simply because I want to. Or hold my ground because he can’t give me what I’ve given him. Truth and honesty in their rawest form. He makes me feel lower than him, weaker and abandoned. It’s hard to turn a blind eye to that simply because I want his protection and his touch.
It hurts more knowing I went through my darkest times naked in his bed. Bared to him, not hiding this weakness that took me over. He couldn’t even tell me what happened that landed my pathetic ass in jail.
Without a second thought, I snatch my phone off the table and dial a number. Not the one I’ve been thinking about. It’s not the conversation I’ve been having in my head and obsessing about for the last hour.
No. I’m calling someone to get my life back. My life. My rules. My decisions. My happiness.
The phone rings one more time in my ear before I hear a familiar voice.
“There’s only one thing I’ve ever had control over in my entire life, and it’s been taken away from me.”
“Jesus Christ, Bethany. Could you be any more dramatic?” My boss sounds exasperated, annoyed even and that only pisses me off further.
Leaning forward on the couch, I settle my heels into the deep carpet and prepare to say and do anything necessary to get my job back.
“I need this, Aiden,” I say and hate that my throat goes dry. “I can’t sit around thinking about every little detail anymore.”
“Did you take a vacation?” he asks me.
“No.”
“You need to get out of town and relax.” The way he says ‘relax’ feels like a slap in the face. Is that what people do when they’re on leave for bereavement?
“I don’t want to relax; I just want to get back to normalcy.”
“You need to adapt and change. That takes a new perspective.”
Adapt and change. It’s what we tell our patients when they’re struggling. When they no longer fit in with whatever life they had before. When they can’t cope.
“Knock it off,” I say, and my voice is hard. “I’m doing fine. Better than fine,” I lie. It sounds like the truth though. “I need to feel like me, though. You know me, Aiden. You know work is my life.”
“Go take a vacation and I’ll think about it while you’re soaking in the sun.”
“I can’t.” I didn’t realize how much I needed to go back to work until the feeling of loss settles into my chest like cement.
“Well, you can’t come back.”
“Why the hell not? Why can’t I go back to what was?”
“Why can’t things go back? Do you hear yourself, Bethany?”
“Stop it,” I say and the request sounds like a plea. “I’m not your patient.”
“Your leave is mandatory. You aren’t welcome back until the leave is over.”
“My patients are my life.”
“That’s the problem. They shouldn’t be. You need something more.”
“I don’t want something more.” The cement settles in deeper, drying and climbing up to the back of my mouth. It keeps more lies from trickling out.
“I’m looking out for you. Go find it.” The click at the other end of the line makes me fall back onto the sofa, not as angry as I wish I was.
Fuck Aiden. I’ll be back at work soon. I just have to survive until then. I hope I remember this moment for those long nights when I can’t wait for my shift to end.
Swallowing thickly, I consider what he said.
I need something else.
Something more.
A memory forms an answer to the question: what is my “something more?”
Marry me.
My palm feels sweaty as I grip the phone tighter, then let it fall to the cushion next to me.
Marry me. His voice says it differently in my head. Different from the memory where he told me to do so because then I wouldn’t have to te
stify against him.
I can’t see straight or think straight. I’m caught in the whirlwind that is Jase Cross.
Knock, knock, knock.
Startled by the first knock, feeling as if I’ve been spared by the second, I stop my thoughts in their track. Someone at the front door saves me from my hurried thoughts, but the moment I stand to go to the door, I hesitate.
I shouldn’t be scared to answer the door. I shouldn’t feel the claws of fear wrapping around my ankles and making me second-guess taking another step.
I will not live in fear. The singular thought propels me further, but it doesn’t stop me from grabbing the baseball bat I put in the corner of the foyer last night. The smooth wood slips in my palm until I grip it tighter and then quietly peek through the peephole.
Thump. Thump.
My heart stops racing the second I let out a breath, then put the baseball bat back to unlock the door and pull it open. “What the fuck is wrong with me,” I mutter to myself.
“Mrs. Walker,” I say and then shut the door only an inch more as the harsh wind blows in. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
The older woman purses her thin lips in a way that lets me know she’s uncomfortable. She has the same look every time she stands to speak at the HOA meetings. Which she’s done every time I’ve been there. I glance behind her to check my lawn, but the grass hasn’t even started to grow yet.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
Her hazel eyes reach past me, glancing inside my house and I close the door that much more until it’s open just enough for my frame, and nothing more.
“Is your grandson doing all right?” I ask her, reminding her about the last time we spoke. When she needed help and I came to her aid. Technically to her grandson’s aid, who’d been struggling with his parents’ divorce and needed someone to talk to.
“I was wondering if you were all right?” she clips back.
“Me?”
“There’s been some activity… some men around your house lately.” Her eyes narrow at me, assessing and I’m not sure what she’ll find. I close the door behind me to step outside on the porch.