by Rachel Kane
Colby knew about Bonnie. He knew about Noah’s past. He knew everything. And was willing to use it, in just the way Noah had always feared it would be used. Dalton felt sick in his stomach at the idea that Colby had investigated Noah’s life like this…as a potential weapon to use against them.
“Okay,” Noah said, so quietly the words were almost lost.
“What?” asked Dalton.
“Okay. You win, Colby. I’m not going to force Dalton to make a choice between the life he has earned, and spending time with me.”
“Noah, don’t listen—” Dalton began.
“I don’t have to listen,” Noah said, in a voice as empty and hollow as this room. Empty, but retaining one last bit of dignity, a dignity he would cling to even when everything else was gone. “Because it’s the same thing I tell myself every single day. He’s right. I don’t belong in your world. I don’t know what to do with all the forks, all the spoons. I love the clothes, I love the glamor, but I don’t belong. I love you, but I don’t belong.”
“Get back here,” Dalton ordered, as Noah began to walk away from the table, taking nervous, tentative steps over the glass floor.
“Your dad is nearly dead,” said Noah, “and you’ll never see him again, if we’re together. Colby’s never going to stop trying to come between us. And I can’t bear to see you hurt. It’s not the money, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s…this. Everything you built, everything you worked for. I can’t ask you to give it up. Not for me. Not for…the son of a poor, white-trash waitress.”
Dalton paused to glare back at Colby, who had a look of darkest triumph on his face.
“You can’t give him want he wants,” Dalton said to Noah. “You can’t.”
Without warning, Noah suddenly grabbed Dalton, pulling himself tight against his chest, and for one brief moment, Dalton thought he’d changed his mind, come to his senses, he thought Noah was going to declare he’d stay, that they could be together.
“You gotta trust me on this,” Noah whispered, giving him a chaste kiss. “I’m not going to break up a family. I’m not going to be the reason you lose everything. I refuse to be a pawn in his game. I’ll miss you, Dalton. You’re the greatest guy I’ve ever met, and I’m going to go now, because I’ll be damned if I let your brother see me cry. Have a good life. You deserve it, you really do.”
The words stunned Dalton so hard that he could not move. He looked at the retreating Noah, then back at his brother. He watched as Noah boarded the elevator, as Noah didn’t look back when the elevator doors slid silently shut.
Dalton turned then. He wanted to strike out. Wanted to punch Colby right in that smug mouth. Wanted to throw his brother so hard against the glass that it cracked, sending him the eight hundred feet to the streets below.
“What…what did you do?”
26
Noah
Well, that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, Noah thought, exiting the Raines building and finding himself in the middle of downtown Atlanta with no way home.
He’d half-expected the security guards in the lobby to come get him, to drag him back upstairs, but no. Fortunately no one stopped him. That would’ve been humiliating. More humiliating. Just another embarrassment on top of the mountain of them he was feeling today.
I did the right thing, he tried to tell himself. There was a MARTA station nearby and he thought about grabbing a train to the airport. Maybe he could rent a car there and drive back down to Superbia Springs. He wondered how much that would cost. He wondered if he had the money for it on his credit card.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered. “What am I doing? I can’t afford that.” Could Liam or Judah come pick him up? How could he be stranded in his own hometown?
“This is so stupid!”
People looked around at him, and he blushed and looked straight down at the sidewalk.
Why wasn’t Dalton rushing out? Why wasn’t he saving him?
Because you told him not to, dummy. You told him you were making the choice for him.
Okay, but still. Maybe Colby and Dalton were having a huge fight right now. Throwing punches, putting each other in headlocks. Judah and Liam used to fight like that when they were young. Nothing ever got solved that way, they’d just end up out of breath, shirts all messed up, Mrs. C yelling at them to calm the hell down. It might not solve anything to have Dalton shove Colby down the elevator shaft, but it would make Noah feel better.
All of this—all of it—because Colby couldn’t handle Noah’s past.
To be fair, you couldn’t handle it either.
No, that wasn’t fair. Noah would’ve been able to handle it just fine, if it hadn’t been for the teasing, the bullying, the abuse, the…
He sighed. Sometimes you internalize things, right? Sometimes you believe the words other people use to attack you. And if you believe them yourself, you start hiding that part of yourself, protecting yourself from the attack.
Noah, Noah, he’s so poor—
No one starts life being deeply ashamed of their world. No one is born ashamed of their parents.
That takes work. A lot of ugly, self-destructive work.
—can’t afford a house no more!
All he had done, by not standing up for his past, was to make himself an easy target for men like Colby…and in doing so, he’d given Dalton nothing to fight with. What was Dalton supposed to do? Noah had walked out.
Here he was, imagining Dalton fighting Colby. Why hadn’t Noah fought? Why had he just given up?
I should go back up there. Just get right back on the elevator, ride to the top, and yell. Scream. Demand Dalton back.
Except that was so humiliating, he thought he might die.
Besides, it wouldn’t fix what was wrong.
Not what was really wrong.
For that, he was going to have to look inside himself.
And to do that?
Well, here he was in his hometown, after all…
It took some calls. When he stepped off the bus, he saw the white church, its paint beginning to peel from years of sun. Small, squat, not one of those spires rising above everything, the church had a sign outside that announced the soup kitchen was open.
He didn’t want to go in. He hadn’t been to one of these things since he was little. The memory was still too strong with him. Picking used tennis shoes out of the donation box. Bright red cheeks flushing with shame, as he stood in line for his dinner. His mother had never acted ashamed of it, had she? That had been the worst part, in a way, that she never seemed to understand why he felt bad about it. She never got it. But then, she wasn’t a kid. She didn’t have to face the bullies in the schoolyard. It was different being an adult.
Except of course it’s not different at all, he thought.
He would’ve given anything not to go into that church. If Dalton had pulled up in the limo, he would have hopped in and never given his past another thought. He would find a way to put it all behind him.
Glancing around told him no one was going to arrive to save him from this.
He was going to have to go in and find her.
The door creaked and hissed. He passed the same kind of bulletin board he’d passed a thousand times as a kid, notices for yard sales, NA and AA meetings, lost dogs. That’s me, a lost dog. Free to good home. He didn’t recognize any of the people he passed in the hall, and tried his best not to flinch away from them. They reminded him so much of home.
The kitchen was in the basement, and he took the steps down, his hand brushing against the rail. Maybe this was one of the churches he’d grown up coming to. He could swear he knew this rail, knew how it felt bumpy due to years and years of black paint applied and reapplied; his fingertips seemed to have a memory of their own.
It was busy, but not too busy. This wasn’t winter, when people would crowd inside for warmth, digging through the boxes for coats. Oh, how he had dreaded winter. Summer, too, when the kitchen would be sweltering, and the air felt like steam
.
People gave him second glances, looking at his suit, questioning what he was doing here. Lawyer? Preacher? Nah, not a preacher, not him, he could practically hear them think. But nobody else was wearing a suit. They made room for him, a little bubble of air around him, because he didn’t belong.
I didn’t belong here when I was little, and now, as an adult, I don’t belong out there either.
The only places he’d ever felt like he’d belonged were with the Coopers…and in Dalton’s arms.
Don’t think about that right now. Please. Please?
She wasn’t at the serving table. He looked at the women there, studying each one in turn, making sure he wasn’t missing anything. No, none of them were her. He stepped around the table. Nobody questioned him; there must be something about the suit that made them nervous. He glanced into the kitchen itself, at the women with their hair nets and aprons. She wasn’t back here, either.
A wasted trip. Two wasted trips, really, if you counted the visit to the Raines building.
What a fucking day.
Eventually he was going to have to call someone for help. He was going to have to explain what a miserable day he’d had, how he’d managed to lose a boyfriend and a mother, and the idea of explaining any of it just made his heart drop out of him, he didn’t have the energy for anything, anything at all. When he saw an open chair over by the wall, he took it, sitting, the metal creaking slightly under him, rust flakes falling from the bottom down to the floor, as though molecule by molecule, the chair was returning to dust. Same as me. Same as everything.
He wasn’t going to stoop to self-pity. Humiliation was bad enough, but feeling sorry for himself? No. He would never go that far. Things were bad, but he’d figure them out. On his own, the way he always had. By himself. Sure, it’d be hard to tell the Coopers that Superbia Springs was on its own, with no help from the Raines Foundation, and sure, it might mean moving right back here and getting some low-paying office job he hated, but—
“Noah? I swear to god, is that you?”
Her voice was as familiar as his own skin, and he looked up. He couldn’t help it, he didn’t want to smile, because he felt so bad, so abandoned and alone, but when he saw her face, saw the excitement in her eyes, he couldn’t help it, his own eyes welled up and he smiled. “Bonnie.”
Church coffee was just as bad as it ever was, but they had a quiet corner to themselves, drinking out of the tiny styrofoam cups. “I still can’t believe it,” Bonnie said. “I honestly thought I’d never see you again. Tina said she’d been down there, said you were as standoffish as ever.”
“I’ve been an idiot, Mama. A real idiot.”
“No, no. Well, maybe a little. But no boy of mine can be an idiot for long.”
The story came out of him so rapidly, he was scared he might leave out everything important. Dalton, the grant, the whirlwind romance, the problems with Colby, all leading up to today.
His mother looked shocked by the end of it. “If you don’t mind my saying so, and if God will forgive me for saying it in His house, that Colby Raines sounds like a real A-word.”
“Mama, no swears!”
They laughed. She was so different. Not just the language—lord knows she used to have a sailor’s tongue. It was something in her bearing. As though, somehow, she had finally found peace.
Which meant that he had missed out on even more of his own mother’s life story.
“I feel so guilty over everything,” he said. “I feel like I don’t belong anywhere.”
“Oh, baby, that’s nothing. That’s just other people talking. You know what I mean? You worry too much about other people—” she gestured, and seemed to encompass the whole world outside the church, outside this little basement, “—and pretty soon you try to be just like them. But who are they? Who is Colby Raines? Another rich man? There’s more of us than there are of him, I’ll tell you that right now, and we’re more different than him and his buddies are. There are more kinds of us than there are of him.”
“But he’s right. I don’t belong with Dalton.” He told her about the fancy apartment, about the restaurant, but the whole time, she just shook her head.
“All you’re telling me is, his brother doesn’t like you. So what? Why does everybody have to like you? You think everybody likes me? I could name one or two people in this room right now that don’t. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t like you. It matters who does. And it sounds like Dalton must really love you. And I know those Cooper boys do too, in their own way. Why can’t you belong with them?”
“It’s not that easy, Mama. I get what you’re saying, but our worlds are too different. I mean, look at me, I’m stuck. I don’t belong with him, I don’t belong here in this basement, I don’t really belong at Superbia Springs because I’m not family…”
“Sounds to me like you’re just arguing yourself out of living altogether. Now why would you do that, after all I did for you? All the time I spent trying to keep you fed and clothed, you think I worked that hard so you could sit there and mope about not being family? What do you think family is?”
He shook his head and looked down at his knees. “I wish I knew.”
But she wasn’t going to take that as an answer. She swatted his knee with her hand, made him look back up at her. “I know you’ve always been ashamed of me, and it has been a weight on my heart your entire life. Who wants their child to feel embarrassed by them? But I never tried to argue you out of it. You know why?”
“I don’t. You should’ve. You could box my ears, knock some sense into me.”
She laughed at that. “Yeah, I could’ve. Maybe. But it’s a matter of pride. I will never apologize for who I am, for my place in life. If I tried to tell you not to be ashamed of me, why, that would mean I felt like there was something to be ashamed of. I tried that with your daddy, you know. Begged him to see what I was worth. Plead with him not to be ashamed of me. He walked right out the door. And I swore to myself, never again. Then it happened again, and it broke my heart when I realized Daniel was making me ashamed of myself—when I realized he was turning me against my own son. If there was one thing I could give you—one thing—it would be that you never, ever have to apologize for yourself. Now, maybe that was wrong. Because you did just the opposite, you didn’t apologize, but you tried to hide it. But baby, you can’t hide who you are. All this—the clothes, the kitchen, the donations—it’s all just window dressing. None of it touches who people are in their hearts. Good people, bad people, money doesn’t change that any more than the lack of money does. Colby proves that, doesn’t he? All the money in the world, but on the inside he’s a dried-up old prune.”
Was it true? If so, it was hard to admit. He knew Colby was bad inside and out, as much as he knew Dalton was good. Yet his whole life had been spent idolizing glamor, money, fame.
It’s rough, coming to a place where you realize everything you’ve based your life on is a lie.
How do you even scrape all the lies away to find the truth after that?
And wasn’t it too late, anyway? He’d broken up with Dalton to save him. Colby was never going to stop scheming, as long as Noah was in the picture. In fact, all Noah could do was make Dalton’s life worse. As much as he loved Dalton, what was Noah supposed to do with that life? The life he’d thought he always wanted? Always keeping one eye on the door, waiting for someone to burst in and reveal his dreadful secret. It was that kind of waiting that had been with him his whole life, like holding your breath so you don’t make a sound, and the seconds tick on and on, and your lungs are starting to burn but you must not breathe.
Suffocating his whole life so he didn’t embarrass himself or Dalton.
That wasn’t a life.
Waiting for Colby to intrude, waiting for him to expose them.
Bonnie was staring at him, and he found he couldn’t look at her. Not out of shame, but out of guilt. How many times have I denied you even existed? But where else was there to look? The entire chur
ch basement accused him. All of this was something he had turned his back on as quickly as he could. He’d denied it all, in his quest to be…what? What had he been running to? What had he been running from?
That little circle over there, where the pastor was reading to the little kids in their tiny, rickety wooden chairs.
The serving tables, where a woman was busy scrubbing things down to get everything perfect for the next round of people.
Laughter, tension, anger, camaraderie, sorrow, friendship, heartbreak… There was nothing different going on in this room, than there was in the Raines building. Just people. These were all just people that he had been running away from. People who symbolized an idea, a reality, that he couldn’t cope with.
You better learn to cope, he said to himself, because this is where you come from. It might not be where you are right now, but it’s where you started, and running from it has not done you a bit of good.
“I think sometimes people get addicted to running away, the running itself,” he said to Bonnie, quietly. She nodded as though she knew exactly what he meant. “They get so deep into the idea that they have to get away, they stop caring where it was they were running to in the first place. Stop caring whether it’s a place worse than where they started. I’ve been lying for so long, Mama.”
She took his hands. “So stop. Just stop. Nobody’s going to make you come back here. Nobody’s going to make you wear second, third-hand clothes. You don’t have to be here, you just have to be from here. You’re never going to be a whole person if you give up your past. What do you have then? Half your life, hidden. Walking around like half a person. Baby, I wish I could’ve convinced you that it was okay to be who you were. I wish I could’ve stopped those bullies in your school. I wish I hadn’t been so busy trying to make a life for us, that I didn’t protect you from all the people that made you hate that life.”
“You did your best.”