by Jessica Roe
It wasn't long before it was pulling me apart from the inside out.
I had no idea how to handle it, what I could do. He wouldn't talk to me, and if I tried to broach the subject he'd tell me there was nothing wrong, that I was acting crazy. He lied straight to my face, again and again.
For the very first time since that night in the woods when he'd come for me, I was terrified that I was going to lose Nathan.
Chapter 13
Ophelia
AFTER I GET home from the store, all of my focus and energy goes into taking care of Mom and making sure she has everything she needs to keep her comfortable, if nothing else. I tidy her room and cook dinner for her, Dad and Aunt Ellie, and then when she's fallen asleep I get a little OCD about cleaning the rest of the house. OCD seems to be my go to stress relief these days. Dad watches me go with a raised brow for a little while, but as always he says nothing. Eventually, without a word, he stands, picks up a duster and gets to work. We clean in comfortable silence for the next hour and half.
I do anything and everything I can to keep busy, but eventually there's nothing left for me to do, nothing left to keep my mind sufficiently occupied. After losing at least a hundred dollars to Aunt Ellie and Dad combined in a few harrowing rounds of poker, I leave them to it and move to the safety of my old room. Flopping down on my lumpy mattress, I bury my face to my pillow and let out a silent scream.
What have I done?
Only a minute or two passes by before my cell starts to buzz. Rolling over to the side of my bed, I fish it out from my purse and stand, my heart growing cold with fear when I see Seth's face flashing up at me from the small screen.
I almost ignore the call, guilt threatening to swallow me whole and consume me entirely, but Seth doesn't deserve to be treated that way. He doesn't deserve unanswered calls and avoidance and a fiancée who kisses other men like a total ho.
Oh God.
“There's my girl,” he coos softly when I finally man up and answer. A whole new wave of guilt hits me with the force of a truck at the sound of his voice. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed his voice.
After asking how things are going he begins a one sided conversation, updating me on all the stuff I'm missing out on at home. He tells me about the hospital and my regulars at Shark and Nellie's latest antics with a guy she met online. I barely hear a word of it. All I can focus on is what I did and what I've destroyed. This man right here. . . This man is the nicest, sweetest, most incredible guy on the face of the planet and he loves me. Me. He loves me more than anything. This perfect man is mine, and I'm. . . God, I'm an awful, terrible bitch who doesn't deserve him, not at all.
“Seth,” I blurt out suddenly, interrupting his flow mid-sentence. I have to tell him what I did. I have to tell him I kissed Nathan and I have to tell him right now so that I can beg his forgiveness.
“You okay, baby?” he asks, but clearly he didn't hear the urgency in my tone because he doesn't seem overly concerned. “Oh, wait! Hold on just a sec, I have to tell you something amazing. I saved a girl's life today at work! This little girl, only four years old. She'd been playing outdoors with her brothers and. . .”
My eyes close as he tells me of how he saved this young girl's life, and I just. . .I want to die at what a monster I am.
“. . .so it was touch and go for a while there, but she held on. She was such a little fighter, Ophelia. Exactly how I imagine our kids will be one day.”
I swallow down a lump in my throat. “Seth, that's amazing. I'm so, so proud of you.”
He's so happy, and he should be. He changed the fate of a child today and he deserves the high he's riding on. I. . .I can't tell him. I can't ruin this for him. Not today.
And there's the fact that I'm a coward. Yeah, that's about right.
The call only lasts another five minutes more before I'm lying and telling him Mom needs me. After I hang up I fall onto my bed, bringing my knees to my chest and resting my forehead against them. I want to curl up into a ball and disappear forever.
Guilt surrounds me like a thick layer, drowning me, suffocating me until I can barely breathe. It eats away, making me feel sick right down to my stomach.
I need my mom.
I force out a smile at Dad and Aunt Ellie as I pass them by in the living room, still playing poker, and pad upstairs. As always, Mom's tucked up in that big bed, looking small and sickly.
Every day she seems to get worse.
She's woken since I last came in to check on her. Her eyes are bloodshot and yellowing as she peers up at me without her usual smile. She's too exhausted even to smile.
It just. . .it hits me then. It hits me. “Mom,” I whimper, and her face crumples when she realizes that I know.
“Come,” she pleads in a whispery voice, too tired to lift her arms up to me like she normally would.
I slide into bed and lay next to her gently, careful not to touch her in any way just in case I break her. She so small, so fragile, and I'm terrified with one wrong move I could shatter her into a thousand pieces like I did with one of her fancy teacups the time I dropped it on the kitchen floor as a child. I'd been so afraid she'd be angry with me, that she'd shout, but instead she'd gathered me in her arms and assured me that it was just a thing. Broken things can be fixed, she'd told me, and if they can't, then we let them go.
I'm not ready to let my mom go.
“The treatment isn't working,” she finally admits quietly, her voice trembling. I'd known it, I think. Deep down I'd known it. I just hadn't wanted to admit it. But hearing it from her mouth is so much worse than thinking it inside my head. “I'm not getting better, honey. And I. . .I probably won't.”
Before I can stop it, a large tear falls from the corner of my eye. It rolls down my cheek and plops onto the pillow beneath my head, staining it with a little damp circle. But one tear is all I allow myself. I've let Mom comfort me enough; it's my turn now. So I keep it together, holding her in my arms for the next twenty minutes until she falls back into an exhausted slumber. Only then is it that I allow myself to fall apart and break down.
Slipping from her room, I move stealthily downstairs and out the back door. I lean back against the cold brick of the house, hyperventilating silently as hot tears stream down my face quicker than I can even swipe them away with angry hands. My cheeks grow cold as the freezing night air hits my damp skin, but I don't care. I welcome the pain.
Giving up on trying to stem the flow of tears, of trying to control my anguish, I let out a hiccup of a sob and call my brother. Again.
“Micha,” I beg into his answerphone. It doesn't even ring these days, like he's just turned his cell off completely. “Please come home. I need you! Why aren't you here? Mom doesn't have much time left. This is the last chance you'll ever have to be her son, Micha!” Another sob escapes me as I hang up. To be honest, at this point I don't even know if he's hearing my messages or just deleting them before he even has to listen.
I bring up Seth's number, because right now I need someone to comfort me and it should be him. I should want it to be him.
But I think I knew I wasn't going to call him before I even brought up his number.
There's not a part of me thinking clearly as I hurry back inside the house. I slip on my shoes and grab the keys to the rental. When Aunt Ellie calls after me I murmur something nonsensical at her while rushing from the house.
The tears, they keep on falling as I drive haphazardly out of Norson Lake, way over the speed limit. They stain my cheeks and swell my eyes. With my rumpled clothes and messy hair, I look anything but the put together Ophelia I normally am. Right now I'm more the wild Phee I used to be than I have been in years.
It probably hadn't been the best idea for Ivy to point out which house was Nathan's the other day as we drove past on our way to get drinks, but in her defense she probably hadn't anticipated me having some kind of mental breakdown and losing every bit of sense I've ever possessed. That's the only conclusion I can come to as for why
I'm here right now, outside of Nathan's house so late at night looking like I've just escaped an angry mob of which hunters.
The lights are off when I bang on the door, and suddenly it occurs to me to wonder if he's even alone. Ivy reluctantly told me a little of Nathan's epic track record with women since I left and I'd seen it the other day with my own eyes. For the first time I begin to second guess my rash decision in coming here.
What was I thinking?
But when Nathan opens the door he's wearing a pair of loose, striped blue pajama pants and a snug, white cotton t-shirt, and from the way his hair is all smooshed on one side I can tell I've just pulled him from bed. No way would he be in pajamas if he had company. I sag with relief.
His sleepy eyes widen in confusion when he sees me, that confusion quickly morphing into concern when he gets a look at the state I'm in. “Phee, what. . ?”
And then I break down, completely and totally, right there on Nathan Alders' doorstep in the middle of the night. My sobs come harder and my tears fall faster than ever.
Just like that, Nathan no longer requires an explanation, not right now. He knows exactly what I need. Pulling me into his arms, he holds me tight against his hard chest as I cry with such desperation that I can no longer stand by myself. We drop down to the ground, wrapped around one another.
Nathan's legs are bent in front and I sit on his thighs facing him, my legs wrapped around his waist.
I'm no longer the only one with tears casting lines down my cheeks. Our tears mingle together as we hold each other, so tight I'm not sure where I end and he begins. The first time our lips brush it's an accident. The second less so. And then we're kissing as our heartbreak takes a hold of us. Kissing desperately, needily, consumingly.
Kissing like we'll never, ever stop.
Chapter 14
Nathan
EVER SINCE SPENCER had died three years before, my father's impossibly high expectations had fallen on my shoulders. At least I'd finally understood why Mom and Dad had bothered having a second kid, because I was pretty sure the two of them didn't fuck for pleasure – not if their multiple affairs and general air of dislike for each other were anything to go by. No, they'd had a second kid as a spare, a backup. A 'just in case' kid, just in case anything ever happened to their first. Lucky fucking me.
But I actually was though. Lucky, I mean. Luckier than Spencer had ever been. Because unlike him, I had a solid support system surrounding me in Phee and my friends and their families and Gramps. They grounded me, kept me from losing my shit. I knew with certainty that I would never need to turn to drugs to ease my troubles, knew I had people in my life who wouldn't fucking let me even if I tried.
My father had come up with all these shiny new life goals for me now I was the only son left. Except. . .they weren't shiny and new, because they'd once been the same goals he'd had for Spencer, and the same goals he'd once had for himself. They were second hand goals. Hell, they were third hand goals. He wanted me to go to law school, to become a lawyer, join his firm, take the business over one day. Didn't overly give a shit that nothing about that was even close to what I wanted from life.
All I wanted, all I'd ever wanted, was to be a part of the art gallery my gramps owned. That was the family business I dreamed of taking over one day.
Gramps was the most awesome, coolest man I knew. I loved the guy to the end of the universe and back. He was the man I looked up to in place of my father. I could never quite figure out how it was possible the two of them were even related, how a man as cold and hard as my father had come from a man as warm and generous as Gramps.
My gramps and I, we'd always had a special bond. He'd instilled a great love of art in me from an early age, spent years teaching me everything he knew with so much pride. Art became my one true passion in life – until I met Phee, and then the two shared an equal place in my soul. Running that gallery, Gramps' gallery, was all I wanted to do, was all I dreamed of.
But saying no to my parents seemed an impossible option. I felt an overwhelming need to fill the void my brother had left behind, a need my father fed and encouraged. The weight of the world rested heavily on my shoulders. I hid it well though, masking it with the carefree nonchalance I'd learned to pull off so well.
Yet it wasn't always such a lie, that carefree nonchalance. When I was away from home, with Phee and my friends living a completely separate life than the one I led with my parents, carefree was exactly how I felt. It was just when I had to reluctantly drag myself back home that the weight began to pin me down again.
My main problem, I guess, was that I liked living an easy life, and obeying my parents was by far fucking easier than trying to make them understand that following in dear old Dad's footsteps wasn't what I wanted. Going along with their plans meant less grief for me and therefore my life was easier. They sure knew how to pile on the pressure, that was for fucking sure.
But things began to get harder as I approached my eighteenth birthday. My parents were constantly on my back about matching me up with one of the high society girls – the daughter of one of my father's business associates. It was just the kind of thing that happened in our world. We were matched advantageously, usually around the age of eighteen; a match that would somehow further the business in some way. We'd date through the rest of high school, through college, and then once we'd graduated we'd head straight into marriage.
As far as I was concerned, the whole thing was an old fashioned nightmare and I couldn't imagine anything worse. But Mom had been born into this world and Dad had chosen to marry into it. Their marriage hadn’t ever been about love, that much had always been obvious. They were miserable with each other and it leaked out from their every pore, reaching every corner, every nook and cranny of our home like poisonous smoke. They expected me to live like that too? What kind of parents wanted that for their child?
For the very first time I was no longer sure I could blindly follow my parents' wishes. Before, their demands had only affected me. But if I went through with this match I would lose Phee, and losing Phee wasn't something I could even begin to comprehend. It was just. . .unthinkable. Phee was my world. The very best thing in my entire life.
The whole situation screwed with my mind so badly I lost myself for a while. I grew distant from Phee, afraid that if I let her get too close I'd crack and tell her everything. I was afraid that if I told her, I'd lose her. But the way I was acting started to affect her too, and I knew that if I kept it up I was going to lose her anyway. That girl, she knew me just as well as I knew her. She knew there was something up with me, knew there was something I was hiding. I'd never hidden anything from her before. I was hurting her, and in turn that was hurting me. Every time I saw her I pretended not to notice the anguish in her eyes, but I saw it. I saw it and it destroyed me. Slowly and surely it destroyed me.
So eventually I gave in, I told her everything. We met up at our spot by the lake, just like we always did, and I came clean.
“I just. . .” I dragged my hands through my hair in frustration, ruffling it even more than usual. Sat next to me on the grass, Phee was silent, her legs tucked tightly up against her chest. Her silence frightened me – Phee was never silent. “I don't know what to do.”
She whipped her head around to stare at me, and the look of betrayal on her face just about killed me inside. “You don't know what to do?” she uttered quietly. “How. . .how can you not know what to do, Nathan?”
“It's difficult-”
“But it's not! It's not difficult at all. It's the easiest thing in the whole freaking world. You love me. Me. There's no way you should be dating some other girl just because your parents told you to, let alone contemplating the possibility of marrying her someday!”
It was so simple for her. Why didn't she get it? “Phee. . .” But I could find no words to explain myself.
She shook her head back and forth, her long hair rippling. God, I loved her hair. “If you love me half as much as you say you do,” sh
e said, tears filling her brown eyes. “then there's no way you'd be able to go through with it.”
Phee didn't understand the pressure I was under, the need I felt to fill Spencer's gap for my parents. “It's not that easy. If you'd just listen-”
“I'm listening,” she interrupted shakily, practically slapping her face as she rushed to remove the evidence of her tears. Phee didn't like people to see her cry; it made her feel weak. But she'd never minded being weak in front of me before, and it destroyed me that she did now. Phee rarely cried. She was too tough for that shit. “And all I'm hearing is that you aren't choosing me. It's. . .it's too much, Nathan. I can't be here right now.”
Before I could even try and say anything else, she was on her feet, darting away through the woods she knew so well. She could hide forever in those woods and no one would ever be able to find her. They were a part of her. For a moment I contemplated getting up and going after her, chasing her all the way back to her house and right to her father's terrifying feet if I had to, but I didn't. There was nothing else I could possibly say.
Nothing.
I KISS PHEE with everything I have, everything that's inside of me and so much more. I give her it all – wring myself out and squeeze it into her soul. I kiss through her sobs, swallowing the sounds in my passion. She needs me right now more than she ever has, and I'm happy to give her anything she needs. Anything.
It's a minute before I realize she's no longer the only one crying.
My tears fall for her pain, for our pain, for everything we've lost and everything she's about to lose and because, just as it's always been, her pain is my pain. That was the kind of love we shared; the kind of love we share. The kind that never goes away. This is the intensity of our connection.
