by Levine, Nina
“I remember,” I said, wishing like fuck I didn’t. Wishing I could take all that shit back and make better choices for me and Birdie.
She nodded before glancing down. The roar of silence threatened to consume me, to swallow me whole while we were suspended in that moment of before. The moment before she finally told me what had blown us apart all those years ago.
Looking back up at me, she said, “I didn’t want to lose you to that war.” Her voice cracked and she tried to swallow her emotions, but it was impossible. The floodgates were wide open now; our emotions were hurtling full force at us. “I told you over and over that I didn’t want you to go back. Every single time you came home, I told you.” She abruptly stopped and exhaled a shaky breath. “You have to understand how desperate I felt, Winter. To save you. To save us.” Her eyes madly searched mine, looking for understanding. But how could I give her that when I didn’t know what for yet?
“Birdie,” I forced out, wanting anything but to ask my next question, “What did you do?”
“I made a choice for us without giving you the opportunity to have a say. Even though we always swore to be completely honest with each other, and even though I knew how you felt about women who went down the path of getting pregnant intentionally to keep a man”—she paused one last time, again begging me silently to understand—“and even though we’d discussed the timing for future attempts at having a child, so that you could be around to support me through it if there were complications again, I went off the pill with the intention of falling pregnant. I wanted to force your hand. I wanted you to choose us over the military.”
Her confession was a bullet to my heart. It forced its way in, crushing and burning and destroying. I was unprepared for it. I had no bulletproof vest when it came to Birdie.
I let go of her hand as my brain connected dots. “You had another ectopic pregnancy?”
“Yes.” It was barely a whisper and yet it reverberated with ear-splitting noise.
“And you lost your other tube.”
She nodded, but gave me no more words as she watched me with tears tracking down her cheeks.
A year into our relationship, she’d fallen pregnant accidentally. Both of us wanted children, so it had been a blessing. However, it had been an ectopic pregnancy and she’d lost a fallopian tube. The doctor had warned us there was a chance she could have another ectopic pregnancy after that one, with the possibility of losing her other fallopian tube, so we’d agreed to put off having children until I could take time off and be home with her in case of any complications.
The main reason I wanted us to wait, though, was so I didn’t miss out on one minute of her pregnancy. As far as I was concerned, those nine months were far too precious to not be home for. I wanted to be there every step of the way for my woman and my child. My father had ingrained that sense of responsibility in me.
“Fuck.” The word tore from my soul. The sense of loss wasn’t just about the loss of her ability to have children; it was about so much more than that. Some wouldn’t even comprehend what this was about, but Birdie did. It was why she now looked at me like she feared my reaction.
I lived by a code, honesty its pinnacle. I walked away from people who didn’t return the honesty I gave them. Birdie knew this, and so she knew that right now my gut and heart were in free fall.
I didn’t know what to do with this information. Not a place I was used to being. Between my upbringing and military training, decisiveness had been drilled into me as a standard response to any situation. I took information in and quickly processed it before making a clear and firm choice. But not this time. Fuck, this time my heart was getting in the way of my brain.
I loved Birdie. With everything in me, I fucking loved her. I had done so almost from the day I met her, and all the way through to now. Even during my darkest days in the five years she hadn’t been mine, I had loved her. I hadn’t thought there was anything she could do that would change that. But fuck, life had a way of knocking you clear to your knees when you least expected it.
“Say something, Winter,” Birdie pleaded, her eyes filled with the same level of anxiousness as her voice. “Tell me you’re done, tell me you want me to go, tell me you hate me. Just say something!”
As I stood there staring at her with thoughts wrapping their way around my heart, choking the fuck out of me, I wondered if we’d finally found something that would kill us. We’d already been through so much together; when did it all become too much? I was a fighter. That was me—heart, body, and soul. I didn’t fucking give up on things or people that were important to me. And Birdie was the most important person in my life, so I wasn’t about to give up on her. But would my love and my fight be enough? Because right now, I felt pretty fucking annihilated. I felt like an exhausted soldier crawling through the mud, riddled with bullets, desperately seeking shelter from the enemy, not sure if I was about to take my last breath.
“Winter.” Max’s voice cut through my thoughts. “You good to go? I’ve gotta get back home to take Jesse to a party, so I don’t have a lot of time.”
With my eyes firmly on Birdie, I answered him, “Yeah, gimme a minute.”
“You go,” Birdie said. “I’ll book a flight home and get out of here while you’re gone.” Resignation blasted from her voice. She’d already given up, but fuck if I’d allow that.
“No,” I said, the force in my tone causing her eyes to widen. “You’re staying right the fuck here so we can discuss this more when I get back.”
When she didn’t respond to that, I said, “I’m not done, Birdie.”
She wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Why? You should be. What I did was unforgivable.”
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” My anger roared to life. “That you even have to ask me why I’m not done… that fucking kills me.” I jabbed my finger at her. “Don’t fucking go anywhere while I’m gone. I swear to fucking God I’ll come for you if you do, and it won’t be pretty if I have to.”
I stalked out of the room without waiting for her response. Far too fucking many emotions crowded me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like I needed to rip my skin off and let these emotions the fuck out. But more than anything, for the first time in my life, I needed to be as far from Birdie as I could get.
20
Winter
* * *
Focusing on the words coming out of Max’s mouth was near impossible. Birdie’s confession made sure of that. I’d spent the last twenty minutes trying like fuck to listen to him and put her out of my mind, but that was never going to happen. At the best of times, Birdie was hard to shift from my thoughts; at the worst of times, thoughts of her were unrelenting.
“Have you heard a word I’ve said, Matt?” Max asked, his biting tone forcing my attention to him. “Or have I just wasted all this time sitting here sharing my shit with you?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face. “Fuck, sorry.”
His eyes narrowed at me. “What’s going on with you? Something’s off.”
I nodded and exhaled a long breath. “Yeah, Birdie and I have some stuff to deal with, but we’re not here to discuss that. You and I need to—”
He drank the last of his coffee and pushed his mug away. “Maybe you need to go deal with that so you’ve got a clear head for this.” His voice was hard. Harder than I’d ever heard from him.
“Let’s just keep focused on the will.”
“Let’s fucking not.”
If it had been any day other than today—the day Birdie had thrown a grenade into the middle of our relationship—I would have cheered Max’s anger on. I would have encouraged it because of what it signified. But today, my own inner turmoil got in the way of that, and I responded to his anger with my own.
“What the fuck?” I demanded. “Why the fuck are you coming at me? I’m not the one causing you grief, brother.”
“Yeah, you are. You’ve stirred everything up between Mel and me—”
“Shit that needed t
o be stirred, Max.”
“Not this fucking week it didn’t.” He pushed his back against the chair again, crossed his arms angrily, and shook his head while muttering, “Not when our father just fucking died. I don’t have it in me to deal with all of this at once. And if you’d been listening, you’d fucking know that.”
Max wasn’t one to swear like this. And he was right; I hadn’t been listening. Not well enough to know what he was talking about now.
In an effort to calm him down, I said, “Okay, so I wasn’t paying attention. I heard something about your debt and that being the main problem between you two. What debt do you have?”
His anger didn’t disappear, but he did rein it in enough to continue the conversation. “Mel has a shopping addiction, hence the car and the lounge and the TV amongst a whole heap of other crap we don’t need. It’s been getting worse over the last six months, and as much as I try to help her figure it out and put a stop to it, nothing I say or do helps. If anything, it just makes everything worse between us.”
“That’s why she’s been desperate for me to agree to sell Mum’s house.”
He nodded. “Yeah.” Glancing down, he stalled for a beat before meeting my gaze again. “There’s more.” He hesitated for another moment in which he looked anything but comfortable with this conversation. “Fuck, Matt, she’s been talking with a guy online for a few months.”
My brows pulled in. “What, as in cheating on you?”
“No. Yes.” He unfolded his arms and blew out a harsh breath. “Fuck, I don’t know what you’d call it. All I know is she’s not happy with me and she’s been messaging this guy on Facebook, staying up half the fucking night talking to him while I’ve been busting my balls trying to pay off her fucking credit cards. She’s not sleeping with him, but it sure as hell feels like she’s cheating on me.”
My dislike of Melissa roared to life, punching through every cell of my body. The shit she’d caused for my family, especially between Max and me, all came rushing back. “Fuck, brother, I’d fucking call that cheating. And I’d walk the fuck away from her if I were you.”
“Says the guy who’s back with the woman who destroyed him years ago and who’s still having issues with that same woman.” A mask of bitterness fell over his face. “If it were Birdie who’d done this to you, would you walk away? Because I fucking doubt it.” He stabbed his finger in the air at me. “So don’t sit there and judge my marriage and tell me you’d do something we both know you wouldn’t.”
“I’m not judging you, but I’ve never hidden the fact I’m not a fan of Melissa. I hate what she’s done to us. To our family. And yeah, there’s a lot I’d put up with from Birdie, but if she ever treated me the way Melissa treats you, I would put my fucking foot down and refuse to stand for it.”
“And you call that not judging? You’re a hypocrite and this is a conversation I should have known we could never have.” He shoved his chair back and stood. “I thought for once you might be able to come down off your high horse and just let me talk. Let me share my problems without trying to tell me how to run my life. Turns out I was wrong.”
Any other day, I’d have done my damnedest to give him what he needed, but not today. Today, I was riddled with too many emotions to see straight. “So, what, you’re just going to accept whatever she does? Let her continue treating you like shit?”
The daggers he sent my way let me know it would take a lot for us to come back from this mess of a conversation. “I don’t believe in divorce, Matt. I don’t fucking subscribe to the idea that marriage is something we can just walk away from when shit isn’t going our way.”
“You know I don’t either, but fuck, I also don’t believe in being walked all over and treated the way you have been.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his eyes churning with a volatile mix of anger and resentment. “I’m fighting like fuck to keep my marriage and my life from falling apart. When you have kids, you’ll understand that a whole lot better. If you can’t support me, don’t bother even being in my life. I’m done with trying to live up to your expectations.”
My chest squeezed with pain as I watched him walk away. How the fuck had we come to this? My brother and I had been through a lot of difficult times in our life, but this was a whole new level of difficult. He’d never once spoken to me the way he just had, and he’d never told me to step out of his life if I couldn’t support his choices. How the hell could I do that, though, if I didn’t believe his wife was a woman worth fighting for?
I had no starting point for how to navigate our way out of this corner we’d backed ourselves into.
Fuck.
I stalked out of the café and walked down the mall towards the river, trying like fuck to rid my mind and body of everything I was feeling. The last time I recalled being this tightly wound was when Birdie left me years ago. This was different, though. Then, I hadn’t known exactly why I felt the way I did. She hadn’t given me a reason I could latch onto. This time, she had, and the level of anger I felt over it was unlike any I’d ever experienced. Add to that this stuff going on with Max, and I was in new fucking territory.
I was wired.
I wanted to fucking punch something. Anything.
I’d told Birdie to wait for me. That I’d return so we could continue our conversation. I couldn’t do that. Not in this state. Not with my skin crawling with this kind of energy. So instead of going back to her, I found a pub. Possibly a worse idea, but fuck, at this point, it was the best option I had, because fighting this out with Birdie while I was like this could destroy us.
21
Birdie
* * *
Winter had been gone all day.
I checked my watch for what felt like the thousandth time.
5:18 p.m.
I wasn’t sure whether to be concerned or not. This was unlike him. When Winter said he’d do something, he did it. I couldn’t recall a time when he hadn’t. Not even when we’d fought in the past. And we’d had some god-awful fights. But he had never gone off grid like this.
I’d tried to call him a few times and sent a text, but his phone was either switched off or dead. I figured it was switched off. I didn’t blame him. But at the same time, I was going crazy with worry and doubt.
Winter had said he wasn’t done, but then he’d looked at me like he never had before. Like he wanted to be anywhere but with me. And now that he’d had hours to think about everything I’d told him, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d changed his mind.
My phone rang and I snatched it up, desperately hoping it was him while also dreading it. I feared the words from his mouth, “I’m not coming back,” but I needed to hear his voice.
“Have you heard from him yet?” Cleo.
“No. Nothing. Not a text, not a call. I’ve really screwed this up, Cleo.” My unsteady voice and anxiety annoyed even me. You caused this, Birdie. Now you have to pay the price.
“Well, yeah, you screwed shit up a long time ago, but this isn’t something we didn’t know.” I loved my best friend’s blunt honesty. Really. “But you’ve done the right thing now by telling him. You need to stay strong, babe, and have faith in your man. Winter loves you in a way I don’t see often; I think he’ll forgive you.”
“I’m not so sure.” I’d been a fool years ago when I’d thought I could solve our problems by getting pregnant. All I’d ended up doing was ruining us and causing the man I loved a whole lot of hurt, which was the last thing I ever wanted to do.
“Birdie,” Cleo started, but I didn’t hear anything after that because the door to the hotel room opened and Winter entered.
With my heart racing, I said quietly, “I have to go,” and ended the call. I dropped the phone on the bed and moved to him without realising I’d taken the steps. “What happened to your face?”
His jaw clenched. “I had a disagreement with someone.” His tone was clipped and I knew that was all the information I would get as to why his face was bruised and swollen.
Taking a step back, I offered, “I’ll call down to see if they have an ice pack.”
“I don’t need one.” Again, clipped. And I caught a whiff of whisky.
My heart dived into my stomach.
“Winter, you do—”
“I don’t.” He walked to the bed, sat, and removed his boots.
I watched him silently while my tummy cramped, my heart gasped for air, and my mind tangled with a million thoughts that all clamoured to be spoken.
When he’d taken his boots off, he looked up at me. He didn’t say a word, completely throwing me off while his eyes bored into mine.
My breaths came faster. Shallower.
The seconds ticked by.
My head roared with anxiety.
What is he thinking?
I tried to wait for him, but when my nerves had me like they did, words always tumbled from my mouth all over the damn place.
“Winter—”
That was all I got out this time, though, because as soon as his name left my lips, he stood and said, “I need a shower.”
The sound of the bathroom door closing, not with a slam but with definite force, drew all my insecurities to the surface. It had been a long time since I’d handed my heart over to anyone and given them the ability to rip it from my chest and shatter it. But that’s exactly what Winter had given me, too, and I’d hacked his from his chest and shredded it. That killed me more than anything.
I could take his anger.
I could take his silence.
I could take whatever words he hurled at me.
But I struggled to live with myself over his pain.
I spent the ten minutes he was in the shower talking myself off the ledge of leaving. A part of me still believed Winter was better off without me. If I wasn’t in the picture, he could find someone else to love and have a family with. However, his response to what I’d done had left me with some small hope that we could somehow fix this.
