“What the fuck, Dane?”
Nix stood, glaring at me with his hand pressed to his lip. He pulled his hand back and cursed when he saw the blood on his fingertips.
“Have you lost your fucking mind? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I continued to just stand there, glaring at him, not trusting my mind and my mouth to form the words that were necessary to let him know exactly what his gloating texts had cost me.
I exhaled, opening and closing my right fist as I forced my arms to stay by my side. I was itching to take another swing. I was dying to lay him flat and keep hitting until my pain stopped. I would have enough to answer for with that split lip.
I saw him eyeball my hand, shake his head as he headed for the kitchen. Instead of grabbing a bag of frozen peas or something to hold against his lip, he grabbed two beer bottles and popped them open.
“I don’t know who pissed in your cornflakes, cocksucker, but why don’t you take a long drink from this and let me know what the fuck is wrong.”
I glared at the beer, and then swiped my hand out to grab it from him. He flinched when my hand shot out.
Good.
He held the iced bottle against his lip, hissing when the cold touched the spot where I took out Mari on him.
I tried to swallow my beer, but for some reason it had turned to sludge in my mouth. I looked at the bottle in astonishment. It said Sam Adams. I took another sip… sewage.
Fuck me. The situation was worse than I thought. My heartbreak was ruining my favorite beer.
I exhaled and slumped into a chair.
“Ith it thafe for me to approth, or thould I get a can of mathe to protect mythelf?”
Nix eyeballed me warily, his speech already effected by his swollen lip.
I must have hit him harder than I thought, because I got the distinct impression that his tongue was swelling
Fuck.
There was going to be no hiding that from mom. The panic of the hurricane force that was that my mom dampened my rage significantly.
“Naw, you’re safe. Sorry, dude.”
“Fuck.”
I looked up and saw that he was staring at his fingertips, which were stained with red blood. He glared at me and held up his hand so that I could fully understand the damage I had done.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You never coldcock someone in the face. Not cool.”
I tossed him my phone, gently. Nope, I didn’t aim for his head at all. The text messages from that morning when Mari walked out on us were open.
Hey, Bro – I’m thinking you’ll be hearing from that hot little number of yours, I sent her a letter that we’ll be exterminating her apartment, and dealing with ‘mold’ and stuff. You can thank me later.
???
LOL, dude. I’m sure you haven’t gotten around to telling her that you are now the guy running McCallum, so she won’t put two and two together. Thank me later. Right now, put the phone down and get ready to get back in the saddle. Your epic and ball-shriveling dry spell is about to end. You’re welcome.
He read through the messages, as a smile grew on his face, which was quickly followed by a look of confusion.
“So, what gives? Are you pissed because she didn’t come over and put out? I don’t get it.”
He held out the phone to me, just seeing an exchanged that appeared to be between him and I, and not comprehending that he had single handedly ruined what could have been the best thing that ever happened to me.
I hurled a balled-up piece of paper at him, the note I found awaiting me when I went into the kitchen.
I will always love you, but I don’t think I’m strong enough to be in love with you, now that I know I can’t trust you.
I can’t stay, wondering how long it will be until we break again.
So I’m gone.
Oh, by the way, your brother sent you a few interesting texts. Congrats on the new job.
His eyes widened when he read the last line, and he looked up at me with a hint of fear and understanding.
“Oh, fuck, dude.”
“That’s putting mildly, asshat. You ruined everything. Your little high school prank ruined every fucking thing.”
He raised an eyebrow at me and lobbed the paper back at me.
“So, you’re saying you have absolutely no fault here? No ownership at all?”
“Dude, I’m not the one who decided he had to run a victory lap after pulling a stupid stunt like this.”
“No, you’re not. But you are the fucktard who thought it was a great idea to withhold information from a chick that had self-proclaimed trust issues. Really important information, like the fact that your dad was her landlord. Something you should have disclosed up front when she nearly sprung a cow from her uterus when she thought you were here landlord. So, I’ll ask the question again. You have no fault here?”
“Fuck you.”
Yup. Mature as hell. But, he was right. I brought this on myself. I knew better than to go cry on my baby sister, Cheyanne’s, shoulder, because she told me straight up that this would happen.
“Okay, so you are admitting it. Listen, I’m sorry. Sorry if I had any part in Mari walking away. Again.”
“Thanks, man. And sorry about your pretty face.”
He shrugged and smirked at me.
“No worries, I mean, you hit like a girl and now you’re going to have to deal with mom.”
I flipped him off while I drank from my bottle.
“Was she any good? Like in the sack? Was it worth it?”
He looked out the window as he asked those questions. Normally, I would have been willing to put an identical split in the other side of his face, but something about the tone and the fact that he looked like he wasn’t even in the room with me anymore stopped my overreaction.
“It was everything.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
Fuck if I knew. I couldn’t keep chasing her down, could I? She’d already let me know she was probably able to forgive me, but was unwilling to ride the roller coaster that we’d become.
“I don’t know.”
Chapter Six
Mari
“Amara, it’s lovely to see you again. It’s been a while, how are you doing?”
I looked across the coffee table at Janice, the therapist I’d seen on and off for more than a few years. I tried not to smirk or throw any hostility her way, but when the sarcasm wants to come out and play, there was nothing stopping it.
“If I was doing ‘well’ I wouldn’t be here, now, would I?”
I cringed at the sharpness of my tone, instantly upset at myself for taking out my messed-up head on the woman who I knew could help straighten everything out.
“No, you probably wouldn’t be. Let’s chat. What brings you here this time?”
As always, her voice was calm and soothing. Although, part of me didn’t want soothing. I wanted someone to be as irate, and angry, and confused, and devastated as I was. I wanted her to be up and pacing the floor. I wanted her to throw something across the room and feel a perverse sense of pleasure and satisfaction as it shattered into a million pieces.
“I fell hard, and my entire existence is bruised.”
I wasn’t sure where those words came from, because I hadn’t intended to speak them. I hadn’t meant to start with the deep, I’d intended to start with the dark.
“Okay, tell me what that means.”
Always with her damned questions. I could be a shrink. I know I could, all I would have to do is ask some poor fuck up of a human being inane questions like ‘and how did that make you feel’ and I’d get paid.
“It means, I lost my shit. Okay, let me back up. I haven’t seen you since I started dating that rat bastard douche canoe, Jared. Well, we were an ‘us’ for about two years, and all was well until I found out that he’d been enrolling in some extracurricular activities outside of the relationship. Namely, pounding his pathetic excuse for a dick into a nasty-ass hoe-bag
who probably carried the world’s supply of STD germs in her cavernous cooch.”
A this point I was trying to get a bit of a reaction out of her, in the most juvenile of ways. I was more than a little disappointed when I barely got a lift of an eyebrow over the word ‘cooch’, and that was it.
“Well, I’m sure that was a trigger.”
I snorted.
“Yeah, you could call it that. I spent the next year screwing anything not nailed down to the ground. I was chasing some stupid high, and got to the point where I couldn’t feel anything. I was bent over shit and taking it hard and fast and felt… nothing. I scared my friend, Kay, to the point where she staged an intervention and kicked me to the curb, saying she figured if I kept it up she would be called down to the morgue to identify my battered body. So, I stopped spreading for strangers.”
“I’m glad to hear that. Not only because it’s unsafe in today’s world, but also because it was clearly caused by mental and emotional distress and was not actually addressing the underlying issues. But can we go back to how this started. You fell hard, for one of the men you used?”
I felt my entire body deflate.
“There was no way that was ever going to happen. They were chosen for the fact that they could not damage my heart. I fell for someone I never saw coming. He weaseled his way into my soul, and somehow managed to become like air to me.”
“So, you traded one dependency for another?”
I frowned at her. I hadn’t thought of my quick attachment to Dane as a dependency and wasn’t overly impressed that was how she saw it.
“I don’t see it that way.”
I answered slowly, because I wanted to make sure she didn’t see my response as being overly defensive.
“Go on, then.”
I sat back a little, conjuring up Dane’s easy smile into my mind, and finding myself relaxing into that image.
Fuck, maybe I had become somewhat dependent on him.
“Dane. How do I even begin to describe him? I wasn’t looking for any type of relationship. As a matter of fact, I was pretty certain I was avoiding relationships and men. And then Dane happened, and all he wanted from me was to be a friend. Like, I’d just had ridiculous amounts of anonymous activities with guys, men I couldn’t remember a week later, and this guy whose smile caused my brain to act paralyzed just wanted me to hang out and be his friend. He noticed the stupidest, most random things about me. He paid attention when I talked, and showed me with actions rather than words that he actually cared about me.”
“What sort of things?”
“Well, like, one night we were watching a movie at his place… actually, it was our first non-date that was a fucking disaster. Anyway, I was eating the red Swedish fish out of his candy bowl. Only the red ones, because red Swedish fish are life. No big deal, right? Except, weeks later we were watching Star Wars or Star Trek or something like that, and he kept handing me the red fish. Like, he ate the nasty orange and green ones and gave me all the red ones.”
I looked at her expectantly, wanting her to understand the importance of this.
She just looked back at me, silently encouraging me to explain the reason that the Swedish Fish were so important.
“Ugh.”
I threw my hands up in frustration as I slammed myself backwards in the chair. I pictured the moment in my mind, the memories still fresh and the wounds still as raw as if they had happened just moments ago.
“Every night since I met you, I have laid naked in this bed, my hand fisted around my cock, wondering what you would taste like. I finally had decided that you would taste like Swedish Fish, for the number of those fucking things you consume. I was wrong. You are sweet, that’s for fucking sure, but you taste like heaven, a million times better than anything in this world that I’ve ever sampled before. And now that I’ve had a taste, I will never be able to get enough.”
Dane’s voice drifted through my head, causing my pulse to race and my skin to flush. I couldn’t look my therapist in the eyes as I squeezed my thighs together, shifting a little bit to both alleviate and encourage the ache that was growing between them.
Janice sat quietly, observing everything but saying nothing. It had always been unnerving the way she did that, and had I not done really well with her before, I’d probably throat punch her for being so creepy quiet. But, this time an eyebrow lifted slightly, and the corner of her lip raised up in the smallest smirk.
“What is the significance of these Swedish Fish, Amara? Clearly, there is a lot of meaning to you, judging by your vocal and physical reactions.”
“Like I said before, it meant that he paid attention to me. To me. Like no one had ever done before. Small, stupid details about me mattered to him, but instead of making it into a huge production that he’d done something nice for me, in an effort to get brownie points or a blow job, he just did it.”
I saw her shake her head slightly, looking moderately amused at my brash language.
“Uh, sorry about the word blowjob.”
She held up her hand at me.
“I assure you, that is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, I have heard that terminology.”
Have you ever met someone you just wanted to goad into saying ‘fuck’? I felt that way about Janice. Like, I had a feeling that girlfriend could hang in the right situation. Possibly even drink me under a table. But she was so freaking professional inside this room, it was impossible.
“So, he paid attention to the small details, and that made you fall in love with him?”
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so good. Naw, it wasn’t just the fish. It was just how he was. I think he really had a good idea about being friends first.”
My voice trailed off as I started to get a little introspective again. He really had thought out the whole friendship thing well. I wondered if we could still be friends, like, in the long run.
“I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly. You enjoyed his friendship, his company, and the small ways he showed you that he cared. You appreciated that he took the time to not only listen to you and what you said; but also hear you and notice the nuances of your actions. Am I correct so far?”
I mulled over what she’d said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right, all of it.”
“Why is it, then, that you are here with me, spending the majority of our time today discussing everything that was great about him, when you two are apparently not together, and that separation somehow led you back to me?”
Ouch. Way to hit the nail on the fucking head.
“He lied to me.”
“And?”
“No, he lied to me. Withheld important information that he knew would matter to me. He withheld it on purpose and continued on as if nothing was wrong. How the hell am I supposed to trust someone who lied to me?”
I wanted her to give me all the answers. I wanted her to turn the key and say the magic words that made everything all better.
“Amara, people will lie to you. People will hurt you. People will do things, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, that will make you feel as if the world has just been torn in two. Your parents, they lied to you at some point in your life, and yet you still love and trust them. Your best friend, Kaylie, she probably has lied to you at some point and despite that, you still would trust her with your life. Yet a man, one that you have described as all but walking on water, he lies, and you run. Not everyone is a predator, and we need to get you to a place where you don’t require saint-like behavior from members of the opposite sex in order to be in a relationship.”
I started to speak but stopped myself, because the sting of the truth that she spoke knocked the air out of my lungs.
She looked above my head at the clock on the wall behind me and gave me a slightly sad half smile.
“I’m afraid that our time is up for today, I’d like to see you again, at least once a week. Just consider it like a tune-up, okay? Marcie out front wil
l help get that on the schedule. I am glad to see you back, Amara, I have faith that we will work through this together.”
I felt oddly comforted by this, because I just wanted to fix my brokenness so that I could move on.
Chapter Seven
Jamison
“Jamie, is that you?”
I had to take a double take, because the shrunken creature that lay in the white bed was a stark contrast to the monster that filled my nightmares.
“Mother.”
That was all I had to give. I could barely call her a ‘mother’, but I was born to her evil, so it was the correct title.
A nearly skeletal hand that had a slight shake to it reached towards me, its apparently frailty belying strength that it held. Honestly, if I hadn’t been told that she’d thrown a full bedpan at some poor, under-paid orderly, I would get sucked into this image that she portrayed and let my defenses down a little.
She let her arm drop beside her in the bed with a thud once she realized that I was refusing to take her bait. Her eye narrowed with unconcealed hate as she glared upon her only child.
This. This was the mother I’d known and come to loathe in my life. The monster hidden behind the façade, threatening to pounce and tear all that was good about the world away from me. However, she’d already successfully removed all of that from my life years ago, so she could do no further damage despite her best efforts.
“I see that you finally deemed me worthy of your time, son of mine.”
I let out a sharp bark of laughter.
“Son? You haven’t referred to me as much more than ‘devil spawn’ for decades, mother. Why all the emotional sentiment all of a sudden? I’d assume you were on your deathbed, but I’m pretty sure that Satan would prefer to remain a bachelor for as long as inhumanly possible.”
“You are the most ungrateful piece of shit I’ve ever had the misfortune to know. I wish that I’d aborted you when I had the chance.”
Until We Fall (Trust Duet Book 2) Page 3