by LJ Evans
You and Claire folded yourselves up together in the passenger seat, and I drove us toward the beach. It was when I didn’t take the turn to your old apartment that you realized what I was doing. You frowned at me, “Where are you going?” Even though you knew. I was taking you home.
“Take me back to the apartment, Seth!”
“That isn’t where you live.”
“I know that, but Claire and I are staying there tonight.”
“No.”
“You don’t have a say in this.”
“I’m the one driving.”
“Then pull the hell over, and I’ll drive.”
“No.”
“Seth!”
I didn’t respond. I just shifted gears and barreled down the road.
As we pulled up, Claire jumped out of the car door, “I’m gonna be sick.”
She threw up on the bushes by the garage. You looked at her a little stunned. I picked her up and carried her into the house. In the hall bath, you got her cleaned up, and then led her to the guest room.
You came out a few minutes later to get water and aspirin for her and then went back. I trailed after you, leaning on the doorframe as you ministered to your friend. When she’d taken the aspirin and passed out, you shut off the light, and I followed you again into the kitchen where you put the glass in the sink before turning to me with sad eyes.
“What was that, Seth? Why were you even there? Do you not trust me?”
It wasn’t you. I’ve told you that a million times. I don’t trust anyone else. But what I really didn’t tell you that night, what I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t, was that when I saw you cornered by that schmuck, with him holding on to you even as you struggled to get away, all I could see was my mom as she’d been cornered a million times by my dad. How, by the end, she was just taking the hit without even flinching. Like it was not only expected, but deserved. I wasn’t going to let you be my mom.
“Claire called.”
“What?” That got you.
“She asked me to come get you.”
“No way.”
You knew I didn’t lie, so I just stared at you in response.
“I had it under control.” You glared, but there was a wariness now in you, a little uncertainty.
“You didn’t.”
“I did.”
“We’ll have to agree to disagree.” I had my arms crossed against my chest. I wasn’t going to apologize. I wasn’t going to say sorry for not letting that shithead hit on you and not take no for an answer.
“You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t press charges,” you said, trying to keep your anger, even though it was fading as you doubted yourself. I didn’t want you to doubt yourself, but I also needed you to see I’d been there to protect you.
“He won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“He’ll be too ashamed.”
“Is this how you handle everything? With your fists?”
As soon as you said it, I hated myself because that was how my dad handled everything. With his fists. And his belt. And broken bottles. I didn’t want to be that man. I’d been fighting for so long to not be him. From the time I’d hit Cam and saw her land on the ground at my feet, I’d promised I wasn’t him, and yet here I was again, being reminded of just how damn much I was like him.
With Cam, I’d been an asshole teenager. Drunk. Scared. Pissed that I wasn’t getting what I wanted from life. From her. Pissed that she was leaving me because I’d felt her pull away since I’d pushed her off the cliff, and so I hit her. Sure. She hit me first, but that’s not an excuse. A true man doesn’t hit a woman. He doesn’t push her off a cliff to feel a thrill. I wasn’t a man then, and tonight, even though I wasn’t that drunk teenager, I wasn’t sure I was any more of a man now.
I turned, flinging the French doors open and taking off down the beach.
♫ ♫ ♫
When I came back a couple hours later, you were curled up on the couch, a blanket tugged around you. It tore at my heart to see you there instead of curled up in our bed. I lifted you up, and you murmured a protest.
“Shh,” I said as I brought you into our room and pulled you down onto our bed with me. I laid my head against your chest. I didn’t know how to find the words to tell you everything that was going on in my thick skull. The only thing I knew for sure was that I loved you, and you had said you loved me, and so I had to tell you the only way I knew how, with my lips and my hands on your body.
As I kissed your chest and neck, I felt you relax against me, and then you dragged your hand through my hair as if to reassure me that everything was okay. I lifted my head and covered your mouth with my own and dragged you into my world with a desire so deep that I knew I’d never find my way to shore again. You responded with the equal force that you always responded to me with, and I thought maybe we’d be okay.
But we weren’t, were we? I didn’t talk to you and you didn’t talk to me. You didn’t know that my reaction was more than just me being some testosterone-filled jackass with wounded pride. It was me fighting the battles that waged inside of me from my childhood—if you could call it a childhood. And that continued to slowly erode the sand we’d built our home on, because I couldn’t talk, so you couldn’t understand. But I can say the same about you. You hadn’t told me so many things either. We both battled our demons alone instead of together when we should have known, we were always better together.
PJ After Letter Seven
LIVIN’ IN SIN
“Sometimes it scares me,
I don’t know where to begin.
I don’t know where we fit in.”
-Bon Jovi
Pj is shaking as she puts this letter in with the others in the metal box with the twisted vines and hidden fairy that Seth gave her. It’s been a fitting place for his words. Inside the box he made. She hadn’t known any of the things he’d felt that night when he’d beat up Michael. How could she? His face was always a closed door. Even when he’d said he loved her. Even when she’d seen emotion in his eyes, his face had never given anything away.
Growing up the way he had, it must have been self-preservation. If you showed emotion, it got preyed upon. But his inability to tell her what was going on was almost as bad as the secrets she kept. It’s why his letters are helping even when she has no more secrets to share. Even when everything had come tumbling out.
♫ ♫ ♫
The morning after the bar fight, she’d woken up to his side of the bed empty again. She’d gotten used to that before she left. Waking up with him already gone. Moving in with him, she found out that he didn’t sleep very much. He was in the studio at strange hours, and he was up with the sunlight. Another habit from a childhood that encouraged him to be up and gone before his drug addict parents came out of their haze.
That morning, as most, she found him in the studio with the legs of her chair in his hand where he was covering them with notches that were like the scars she felt inside her body. She stared at his gorgeous, tortured self and felt an ache inside her.
He looked up as she stared, even though he had earbuds in and the air compressor running. He’d still felt her. She wasn’t sure how, except that, somehow, when they were in the same room together, there was a current to the air that wasn’t there when they were apart.
He pulled the headphones out and flicked the switch on the air compressor. The silence was deafening. She made her way across the floor to where he sat. She ran a hand over the legs of the chair.
“How can you see me so well and still not know that there will never be another man for me? That you are all there is now?” She said it quietly, without meeting his gaze.
“You said you loved me,” he responded without emotion in his voice, as if he was afraid to show it.
“Yes.”
He rubbed a calloused finger over her reddened cheeks. She hadn’t known he’d heard her when she’d said it to Michael. She
wasn’t exactly embarrassed. More like she wasn’t sure she was ready to say it to him. Which was its own kind of messed up.
“How can you love me and know that I love you and not know that I will never let another guy manhandle you?” he said equally quiet.
She looked up at him, at his protest that he loved her, and felt like she’d drown as she always did in the emotion of his blue irises.
“You love me?”
He smiled that rare smile. “You know I do.”
And she did. She’d known for a while, but it was different to hear him say it aloud. He pulled her onto his lap, and she laid her head on his shoulder. They just sat there, entwined, in the silence.
The moment was shattered by Claire’s haggard voice, “Anyone here?”
PJ ran a finger along his stubble-covered cheek before moving away. “In here, Claire!”
Claire found her way into the studio and winced at the bright light that poured through the picture windows. “Aargh! What you trying to do, blind me?”
“Come on. Let’s go get you some grease for that hangover.” PJ pulled her friend from the room, but she looked back at Seth, and he was still smiling.
He followed them into the kitchen and started to make them breakfast. After offering to help, and being refused, Claire and PJ went out to the deck, coffee in hands. The waves and the mist from the ocean surrounded them, soothing her in that way that she loved. She was still a little in awe of the fact that she was going to get to wake up to it every day.
“You’ve got a keeper in there,” Claire sighed with longing while she drank.
PJ put her cup down with a thud. Claire had never wanted anything serious with any boy. She’d also never wanted anything that PJ ever had.
“The great Claire wants to settle down with one guy? Since when?”
Claire grinned at her. “Who says settle down? Keeping him around has got to have a lot of benefits.” She waggled her eyebrows.
“You're awful.” PJ rested her head on the back of the chair.
“You know, though, I’d consider it if I had someone treating me like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I was the earth and the sky and the moon and everything in between. Like I was the reason he got up in the morning. Like I was Athena and Diana and all the goddesses. Like—”
“I get it,” PJ cut her off.
Silence for a moment. “Do you?”
She lifted her head to stare at her friend. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Claire sighed. “Don’t hate me.”
“But?”
“But I feel like…not that you don’t appreciate it, but more like you almost begrudge it. Like you look at what he does for you as some kind of task you have to bear.”
My anger flared and Claire saw it.
“I’m not saying it right,” she continued. “Look. This man. He’s crazy about you. With a capital letter C. And I think you’re just as crazy about him, but it’s like you won’t let it be enough. Like you’re watching from the outside in case it breaks.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t I?”
PJ just leaned her head back again. Claire’s words hitting home in so many ways. Some days she did feel like the break was right around the corner. Like last night when he’d shown up at the bar. But then other days she felt like there would never be an end to what they had. “I’m too tired to argue with you.”
“Because you know I’m right.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Because I’m right.”
Seth came out with breakfast on a tray. Claire was definitely right about one thing: he was good at taking care of her. She just wished she could make him feel as cared for in return.
“What’s Claire right about?” he asked.
“Nothing,” PJ and Claire both said, and Seth looked at them as if he wasn’t sure if he should press it or not.
Claire dug into the eggs. “You’re gonna make someone a really good wife one day.” He frowned, and she laughed more.
“Not funny,” PJ grumbled, but Claire continued to snigger at both of them.
Claire sighed after she’d inhaled her food. She pushed the plate away and looked up at them both.
“Hey, so, I’ve been thinking. You realize that Michael is your stalker, right?”
PJ froze, unable to look at Seth while she tried to send signals to Claire to stop before she said anything more. But it was too late. Seth had already heard.
“What?” His growl was deep and guttural.
“You haven’t told him?” Claire was surprised. And looking back, she should have been. How do you move in with someone and not tell them something as important as the fact that you’ve got someone sending you awful messages? PJ thought at the time that she’d just been in denial about it all, wanting it to go away with the least amount of pain.
She wasn’t stupid. She’d already been creeped out by Michael at the graduation party at the gym, and then again when he’d shown up at the bar and been so utterly not Michael. Demanding. Not taking no. Not letting her go. It had made her even more certain that he was the one sending the texts.
“Bella?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You called the cops. It’s not nothing,” Claire retorted.
PJ’s face revealed her answer. She hadn’t called the cops. She’d been too caught up in school, and Seth, and ignoring everything else in her life.
“Oh. My. God! Please tell me you called the cops!” Claire was suddenly as angry as Seth, and Seth was seething. She didn’t have to look at him to know that. It was radiating off of him in waves.
“I’ve been busy.”
“Jesus Christ!” Claire stormed.
“We don’t know it’s Michael,” PJ protested weakly because she did know.
“He followed you to the bar last night,” Claire said.
PJ risked looking at Seth. She could see he was trying to maintain control. He was gripping the arm of the chair, and his jaw was clenched so tight that she thought it would break apart. She wasn’t sure if he was angry at her or at Michael or at them both.
“Where’s your phone?” Claire demanded.
PJ just looked toward the house where it sat on the counter. Claire went inside and grabbed it. She unlocked it with PJ’s code and handed it to Seth.
He read the messages. And PJ’s stomach flipped into a million tiny knots because she knew she was wrong. She knew she should have told him. But she hadn’t. PJ watched as Seth’s hand clenched the phone as if it was someone’s neck. For the first time, she was really afraid. Because if Seth found out who was texting her, Michael or not, he’d kill him. He’d slaughter him with his bare hands. And then, Seth would be in jail for murder.
That thought stunned her. It terrified her in so many complicated ways. Because she loved this man and didn’t want him anywhere near a jail. And yet it was also terrifying that she could love him, move in with him, and know that he could easily murder someone and not regret it. Because if Seth murdered the stalker, he wouldn’t regret it. He’d think it was justified.
When he was done reading the messages, he didn’t speak. Instead, he got up and went inside.
“I can’t believe you!” Claire hissed.
“I was protecting him!” PJ hissed back.
“No, you weren’t. I’m not sure who you were protecting, but it wasn’t him.”
PJ felt her own anger spike.
“You had no right to tell him.”
“People who love you have a right to know when some serial killer is threatening you.”
That made her anger deflate again. Her emotions had been back and forth all morning like the tide.
When Seth came back, he still had PJ’s phone clenched tightly in his fist, but he also had his own phone at his ear.
“Yes, I’d like to make a formal report about someone stalki
ng my girlfriend.” His voice was deep with choked emotions that he was fighting to hide.
It broke PJ. She’d been such a moron. Tears sprung to her eyes.
“She’s here.” He handed PJ the phone. “They won’t take the report from me. It has to come from you.”
PJ took the phone and answered the woman’s questions. The lady on the other end said they’d send a police officer out to collect more information later that day.
When she hung up, both Claire and Seth were staring at her with eyes that were disappointed. And angry.
“I’m sorry,” PJ whispered.
Claire hugged her. “You don’t have to be ashamed. It isn’t your fault.”
That was what made Claire such a good friend. Because she’d realized exactly what PJ had been feeling. Shame. As if she’d encouraged this. Like she’d encouraged the boys who passed her around in high school. Like she’d wanted this. Like she deserved this.
They took Claire back to her car, picked up the Caterpillar, and went back to Seth’s. In all that time, Seth hardly said two words. He was always a man of few words, but this was his way of fighting. With silence. Except there were words being spoken, they were just being said with hands that squeezed the steering wheel and slammed doors.
When they got back to Seth’s, he went to the kitchen and started cooking. Dicing tomatoes and onions and putting them in a saucepan.
PJ followed him, her own irritation spiking again at his treatment.
“The silent treatment is kind of juvenile, don’t you think?”
He stopped, stared at her a moment, and then went back to dicing at a faster pace. “Taking your life in your hands is a tad bit more immature, don’t you think?”
“You’re overreacting.”
“No, you’re under-reacting.”
“It was just some dumb words from someone who thought he liked me. It seemed stupid to take it seriously.”
“He threatened you.”
“No, he threatened you.” PJ tried to tease him, but he didn’t once smirk.
“He deserves more than a broken nose,” Seth said as he took out his aggression on the vegetables.
PJ surrounded him with her arms, leaning her cheek against his back.