Awake (Reflections Book 3)

by A. L. Woods

  That fixed stance didn’t falter even a little when they denied him bail. The sound of handcuffs clicking shut and the soft shuffle of his footfalls elicited a suffocated shriek from one row of the gallery directly behind where Dom and his court-appointed lawyer first stood. Following the sound, I picked out Man Bun—Terry—easily. Next to him sat an auburn-haired girl with a small frame who couldn’t have been older than eighteen, resting her head against his shoulder. I looked at her until she turned in her seat, her peat-moss eyes glowing with something violent and unhinged when she stared back at me. And then without warning, she held up her left hand and flipped me off.

  I almost cracked a smile. Almost.

  The glint of a stone on her ring finger didn’t escape my notice.

  Man Bun glanced at her and then followed her line of vision. If apathy was an art form, then Terry had mastered it. He nudged her with his shoulder, drawing her attention without so much as uttering a word. He made a curt nod of acknowledgement in my direction. The girl murmured something to him, her cherub features crumpling, but he didn’t indulge her with a response.

  A few rows behind me, my sisters and Dougie spectated, too. We didn’t speak, despite Dougie’s attempts to facilitate a conversation outside of the redbrick Greek Revival-style building that encapsulated that Taunton District Courthouse on Court Street once the hearing was over. He had tried to call for me to stop while he and my sisters stood under the wooden white portico of the edifice, fighting off the chill of winter.

  With hands stuffed in my pockets, I’d kept walking. I hadn’t wanted to talk; I wasn’t ready.

  Now, it looked like they weren’t giving me a choice in the matter as they were inside of my house.

  “I see you’re not above breaking and entering,” I grunted, kicking a rogue piece of splintered countertop to the corner of the bathroom, the skittering sound sending a chill through my body. I didn’t even care how they managed to get inside.

  “He speaks,” Livy intoned.

  Funny, someone else once said that about me, too.

  “We think this has gone on long enough,” Maria declared. “Trina says you’ve missed two weeks of work—”

  “Yeah, Trina says a lot of things, doesn’t she?” I shot back, turning to face my sisters. Maria looked as if she came from the office; she was wearing one of those expensive fitted power suits I always mocked her for. The storm gray did something to her features, making her dark eyes pop, and an even darker sheet of silky-smooth hair stand out against the hue of her golden skin and crisp white blouse.

  “I said I was sorry.” Trina’s voice quivered. She wrapped her arms around the oversized hoodie she wore. She was apparently over trying to dress for work like she was walking a runway. Good to know. “How many more times do I have to say it?”

  Until they could undo everything that transpired. “Your apology changes nothing for me,” I said, turning my back to them. “Get out.”

  “Why aren’t you at the site, then?” Trina pressed. In the weeks since the cops removed the yellow tape and the insurance company completed their own investigation, work had resumed on the site. We cleared the land of the debris and remains of the fire, and I’d been working in tandem with an architectural firm with the heritage committee in town to ensure that the new structure blended in seamlessly with the others in the neighborhood. “Is it me? Do you want me to quit?”

  Did I want her to quit? No, but I wanted to.

  And because of that, I hadn’t been showing up lately. It was uncharacteristic of me, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore, and it was too hard to perpetuate this concept that everything was fine when I couldn’t manage that for myself in my personal life. Something about watching your entire world literally burn in a matter of hours forced you to reevaluate the way you were living. Suddenly, doing things the way I always had didn’t feel as important to me.

  If anything, it felt like the perpetuation of yet another lie. I just didn’t know how to communicate that to the people who relied on me to have the answers, to do the right thing, to keep everything in line. It was a struggle to be in my house because I saw Raquel everywhere, but being anywhere near a construction site made it just as hard to breathe. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, or even who I wanted to be.

  But that wasn’t it.

  Acknowledging that to the four people who’d counted on me for so long felt like a feat too great for me to overcome. So, I returned to my roots and deflected.

  “As you can see,” I panted, using the handle of the sledgehammer to gesticulate around the bathroom, “I’m busy. Quit, don’t quit, you can do whatever the fuck you want.” I fitted the handle of the hammer back in my hand, leveling it over my head and swinging forward, cracking it against the side of the counter.

  In my peripheral vision, my sisters collectively flinched.

  “Sean,” Maria said flatly, pushing past Livy and Trina like she was owning her role as the ringleader in this clusterfuck of a mess. “Put the hammer down.”

  “Fuck off,” I snarled, wishing like hell I could take them all down with the strength of my glare alone. “All of you. Just. Fuck. Off.”

  “Sean, I’m literally begging you to forgive me,” Trina cried. “I really didn’t know. I didn’t mean to tell her. It just slipped out.”

  Her. No one dared utter her name anymore. I caught her honeyed eyes glossing over in the bathroom mirror, and my teeth gritted together. “Yeah, all kinds of things slip out with the three of you. So, do me a favor and slip out of my fucking life, now.”

  My words struck me hard under my ribcage, but I imagined it was nothing compared to what it did to them based on their shared looks of horror.

  None of them moved; they just stood there, transfixed.

  Was that what I wanted? My sisters out of my life? Was I okay with being completely and utterly alone? I wanted to be. I wanted to be left to my own devices, and to get swept up in the brute force of my rage and heartbreak. I wanted to hate them. I needed to hate them as much as I hated myself. I needed something to vest all that pent-up anger toward because I couldn’t hate the one person I wanted to.

  The one I regretfully still loved.

  My sisters were merely scapegoats. I needed them to dutifully play their roles so I could figure out what the fuck was going on in my heart and mind.

  Still, I remained indifferent. Releasing a conclusive snort, I moved to lift the hammer again but never got it past waist height. The three of them rushed at me, their collective weight slamming me forward into the wall. It was like being tackled by a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound quarterback, their physical interference preventing me from completing my self-pity play.

  I fought to shake them off, but it was no use. Their combined power brought me to my knees, and none of them cared about the rubble beneath us. Maria in her designer suit, Livy in a knit dress, Trina in work jeans. My legs succumbed to the pressure, knees buckling before me, ass slamming onto shards of tile that cracked under the pressure.

  Just like I did.

  The sob broke through me, my hands linking behind my neck, my head bent. None of them said a thing, but I heard their litany of sharp inhales. I never wanted for any of them to see me this way.

  Now, here we were.

  Trina’s rose garden perfume hit me as her head lowered to my bicep and arms framed my waist. “I’m so sorry.” My shoulders shook, my knees drawing closer to my chest until I could press my forehead against my thighs. Jesus Christ, why did this hurt so much?

  I had been alive before this woman, so why did it feel like she packed up my will to live with her inside of that battered Camry she had abandoned at the station?

  “We know you’re hurting, Sean, but you’re our brother,” Livy whispered, crouching in front of me. There was no performance in her eyes, no traces of her theatrics, just a sincerity that blanketed her round features. “When you hurt, we hurt, too.”

  The sentiment was nice, but it changed nothing for me.

  �
��You don’t get it,” I said with a grunt, releasing my hold on my neck to drive the heels of my palms into my eyes, the tears smearing into my lashes.

  “We get it,” Maria whispered, dropping her head on one of my shoulders. There was something soothing and familiar about her coconut-scented shampoo that filled my nostrils. “Do you think it’s not killing us that we did this?”

  “You didn’t do this; I did.” I sniffled, swallowing the lump in my throat. “I should have told her the truth, or better yet, not looked at all.” I regarded them all for the first time. Tears marred their respective faces, but no one moved to paw them away. They just let them fall.

  Even Maria who lifted her head with remorse glinting in her eyes. I looked up at the ceiling, chewing on the inside of my cheek. “And I can’t fix it. That’s the worst part.”

  ’Cause I’d broken my promise to her. I swore to her in this bathroom I would never hurt her, that I wouldn’t betray her like Cash had. She had been right when she said he and I weren’t that different. I hadn’t wanted to believe it back then, but the evidence spoke and saddled me.

  Regardless of my intentions, I had done it. Draping my hands in my lap, I leaned against the wall, staring at the chaos of the bathroom. It mirrored everything else in my life stupendously.

  “I replay it in my mind repeatedly. I thought it was supposed to get easier?” I asked, choking on a mirthless laugh. “I mean, this isn’t my first breakup, right? I almost got engaged to a woman I thought was having my kid, for fuck’s sake.”

  “But you didn’t love Francesca,” Trina edged.

  “Or any of the women who came before or after her,” Maria added.

  “Of course it’s going to feel worse,” Livy whispered. “There’s no timeline when you’re trying to get over someone.”

  Driving the heels of my hands into my eyes, I exhaled all the air from my lungs. “I’m too old for this shit.”

  “Says who?” Maria asked when I dropped the shield of my hands. “Sean, if there were things that I could do differently in my life…” she started, playing with a piece of cracked countertop in her hands, her thumb working back and forth over the grooves. “I wouldn’t have given up on the things that enhanced my happiness because of roadblocks that felt untraversable. You will come to a point where you may regret that you didn’t fight.”

  I regarded my sister for the first time in a long time. Who was she referring to in that moment?

  It didn’t matter. “I did fight, and she left anyway.” The stinging reminder ached inside of me, my lungs compressing tight inside my ribcage.

  Maria knitted her fingers together, her face taking on something serious. “Loving someone who’s been frequently let down comes with a unique set of rules. You can’t go into it the same way you would in other relationships.”

  Was that what I’d done? I thought I had been doing things differently.

  “We don’t always get a choice about who we fall in love with, or how long it takes to get over someone. Sometimes, it’s a prolonged process.”

  “When did you become an expert?” I asked my older sister. I’d never met a single guy she dated, if you could call it that. Sure, I learned about her conquests through the grapevine. In line at the Portuguese bakery, in the grocery store…even the odd time Ma could strong-arm me into going to Sunday morning missa with her at the Santo Christo Church, the congregators whispered about my sister, too.

  Thirty-one, single, married to her job and only interested in her rotation of boyfriends. Doesn’t even come home every week to see her widowed mother. A vergonha.

  But what was there to feel shame about?

  The real shame to me was that the Portuguese community was more invested in whispering about what other people were doing versus looking inward and dealing with the shit going on inside their own four walls.

  Besides, no one would consider the men in my older sister’s life to be “boyfriends.” Then again, Portuguese people were still too innately prudish when it came time to call a spade a spade—what Maria had were fuck buddies.

  I didn’t want to think about it, not by a long shot, but my older sister wasn’t, to my knowledge, asexual—she had needs, just like everyone else huddled in this cramped bathroom. Not that I cared to think about that.

  How she wanted to address them was her business. But it didn’t change the fact that if she was in love with someone, if she’d gotten hurt and suffered through it in silence, I’d break the dumbfuck’s legs clean from his body and proffer them to my sister on a silver platter.

  Maria’s face flushed; her eyes rife with regret that glossed the surface before she batted them back. She didn’t indulge me with a response, she just lowered her head back to rest against my shoulder.

  “I don’t want to be that person,” Livy interrupted, passing a glance between the three of us, drawing her bottom lip between her teeth. We looked at her with anticipation about what words of wisdom she was about to impart on us. “And this is all nice and I’m happy we’re talking, but…I’m fucking starving.”

  “Olivia,” Maria growled.

  Livy’s face crumpled like she was floundering. Trina broke first. Her laughter sounded tinny, her shoulders rocked against mine. She clapped a hand over her mouth to soften the laugh, but it was no use.

  “Not you, too.” Maria sighed.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just—” Trina squeaked, succumbing to her laughter.

  “I didn’t have time to eat this morning,” Livy whined. “My stomach is literally eating itself.” Apparently, she hadn’t learned how to use “literally” in the right context yet.

  “I picked you up at nine, what do you mean?” Maria asked through clenched teeth, but I picked up on her struggle to contain the laughter that was having a ripple effect amongst our sisters.

  “I was just getting up. I needed to choose between vanity and nutrition,” she stressed, her stomach choosing that exact moment to set off a growl.

  “So, you chose neither?” Trina asked, looking over our sister’s attire. It took a minute before it registered, and when it did, Livy whacked her with an open palm.

  “Bitch,” she growled, raising her hand to strike Trina again.

  “I’m kidding,” Trina said with a laugh, curling into herself, holding her hands out defensively to thwart Livy’s subsequent barrage of swats. “Don’t be such a drama queen.”

  Livy let out an indignant cry. “Oh, you little asshole.”

  “Would you two knock it off?” Maria heaved a sigh, climbed to her feet, hands finding her hips.

  Normal. This was all so normal.

  Livy and Trina fighting, Maria and I watching haphazardly from the sidelines, refereeing them. It almost made me think there was a chance I might recover from this. That eventually, there would be enough distractions in my life that I could fill the void of Raquel’s absence.

  Maybe.

  “Stop fighting and I’ll make something to eat,” I offered with a dry chuckle.

  Livy paused mid-strike, her eyes darting to me. “You will?”

  Trina shot to her feet, finding her window of opportunity. She rushed at Livy, pulling her into a headlock, mussing her neat locks and eliciting a derisive shriek from her.

  “Katrina, my fucking hair.” She clawed at the sleeve of Trina’s oversized hoodie, but her effort was futile.

  “It looked stupid anyway,” Trina said in a singsong manner. Livy struggled against her arm, but Trina just tightened her impenetrable hold. Livy was always the instigator, but Trina was more agile—she always found the upper hand.

  “That’s it,” I announced, rising to my feet, towering over all three of them. They watched through curious wide eyes. I shared a look with Livy and Maria, and slowly, without warning, a grin—the first real one I’d had in months—sprouted on my face. “Payback.”

  They didn’t require clarification of who I was referring to.

  “Now, that might be the best idea you’ve had in years, little brother.” Maria
chuckled, stepping in line with me.

  Trina’s eyes bugged. “What?” Her hold on Livy slipped just enough to allow Livy to push out of her grasp, windmilling away from our youngest sister. She straightened her knit dress, and with her nose held high in the air, she stepped to my left, sending Trina a look of hell.

  It was three against one now.

  “Guys, c’mon. This isn’t fair.” She held her hands out in front of her, the rim of the bathtub clipping the back of her legs. Trina stepped into the tub, and right into our spontaneous trap.

  The shower was on before Trina could even grasp what was going on. With nothing to tamper the pressure, cold water shot from the headless spout, pelting her head. Trina shrieked, her body buckling under the frigid water.

  When she tried to escape, Livy blocked her move with her arms outstretched. “We’re cleansing you of your sins.”

  “In that case,” Trina gasped, flailing her wet arms in front of her, “I stole your MCR hoodie and accidentally got bleach on it.”

  “You what?” Livy sucked back a breath, throwing a hand to her chest. Something sinister flickered across her face, and before any of us could have prepared for what was next, Livy was in the tub too, her biceps locked around Trina’s shoulders, her knuckles driving into the top of Trina’s head.

  “Don’t. Touch. My. Shit!” she screeched.

  Trina howled. “Ow, ow, ow!”

  All I could do was stand there and laugh.

  Laughter made me forget about the pain that still coursed through me like a relentless storm. Maria and I watched as the two of them squabbled and took turns getting the edge over one another. She didn’t speak when she reached for my hand tentatively, scissoring her fingers with mine.

  An unspoken understanding passed between us at that moment.

  And for now, that was enough for me to keep going.

  I’d put together a simple spread of fried Portuguese sausage, varying cheeses I had in the fridge, a bowl of olives, and bread I defrosted from the freezer on a cutting board that I’d staged. It wasn’t exactly gourmet, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot inside of a grocery store since…