Deeper Water_Once and Forever 3

by Lauren Stewart

  I didn't want to be here. I didn't want this to be happening. I didn't even want Carson to be near me. Because, suddenly, I wasn't sure people were meant to be together. Maybe it was psychologically impossible.

  “Bill, Jane,” I heard Carson yell and the door fly open and bang against the siding. “Start talking. Now!”

  What was there to talk about? People grew and changed and decided they didn’t like each other anymore. And there was no way to stop it from happening. An inevitability.

  “Lane! Lane! Damn it. Slow down.”

  “I just want to be alone for a little while,” I said without turning.

  “No, you don't. You want to hide and start thinking all sorts of unhealthy shit, and I'm not going to let you.”

  I didn’t stop. Or look back. I couldn’t.

  “I’ll tackle you if I have to, but I'd really rather not,” he said, easily catching up to me. “At least not until we get home, and I have a much better reason to. Don’t force me to do it, Lane. You know I will.”

  I shrugged his hand off my shoulder.

  “Come on, babe. Think of the neighborhood kids. Lots of permanent scarring would happen if I had you on the ground underneath me right now.”

  I knew how awful I looked as soon as I saw his expression. Pity maybe? I didn’t know… anything anymore.

  “Stop running away.” He spun in front of me and held both my shoulders. Then his hand moved to my face, my cheeks, gently wiping away my tears. “Why didn’t you let them explain?”

  “Because I don't need to hear why, after twenty-eight years of marriage, they're giving up.” Then I told him what I feared the most. “Why would it be different for anyone else, Carson?”

  “Don't do this, Lane.” His eyes intensified, his jaw clenched, his grip on my arms tightened. “Please don't do this.”

  “I'm not breaking up with you. I just… Would you ever give up on me, Carson?”

  “You? No, never. Do you have any idea what I went through to get you?”

  “Yeah, it was hell,” I teased. “All those innuendos and obvious hints? You poor thing.”

  “I know. And then I had to deal with your insane libido. Still do, actually.” His voice softened. “Believe me, that’s something I will never, ever give up.”

  “Your sacrifice is remarkable.” I wiped my eyes. “But what about the rest? Like when we fight? We’re going to fight, and we suck at it.”

  He stared at me for a minute, long enough for me to understand where his head was. He had the same faraway expression every time he thought about his father.

  “I’ve seen fights,” he said. “I’ve been in fights. But I’ve never known someone so completely that I could ignore anything they say.”

  “You consider that a good thing?”

  He nodded. “If you ever say something to be hurtful, then I’d know you’re hurting. You’re a beautiful person, babe, so when you’re not, I know something else is going on, something deeper. And, after some poor reaction time, I remember I know that and try to figure out what’s really going on.

  “That’s why I’ve never worried about us fighting. Yeah, it’ll happen. But ultimately, I know you don’t really want to hurt me. Just like I never want to hurt you. So as long as we don’t forget that, five minutes of yelling at each other now and then won’t change how much I love you.”

  “You’re a good man, Carson Bennett.”

  “Plus, I’ve mapped out a contingency plan for every possible reason you might want to get rid of me, and why I might wanna get rid of you. Your list of reasons is a lot longer. Mine only has one.”

  “What’s the one?”

  He hesitated, looking at the ground a few feet away. “If you ever get dumped in toxic waste and become a super-villain.” He stopped laughing when I smacked him in the chest. “Okay, truth?”

  “No, I want you to lie to me,” I grumbled.

  “If you ever come to your senses and realize how much better you are than I am. If you ever decide you would be happier without me. Then I would let you go. I’d be a miserable wreck, but I’d let you go if I knew it would make you happy.”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  “Then we don’t have to worry about it. Right?” He paused. “Now, I think you owe it to your parents to hear them out. They’re both good people who would never give up on you, right? So don’t give up on them.”

  I nodded slowly. “I’m still mad at you for not telling me.”

  “In my defense, I have very little experience caring about what families think or do, and we haven’t exactly had a lot of alone time to chat since I found out an hour ago. Plus, there’s a lot more to the story, but you need to hear it from them. Not from me. I’m just an innocent bystander in all this. An innocent, fantastic-looking bystander.”

  I wasn’t ready to open my mouth and smile yet, so my laugh went through my nose and tickled.

  “I won’t lie to you, babe.” He kissed my cheeks, smacked his lips together, and said, “Salty. Like the ocean your dad and I never actually made it onto. The fish is fraudulent.” He slipped the cuff of his shirt over his hand and gently wiped away the rest of my tears.

  “Fish can be fraudulent?” I asked quietly, still fighting off my smile. Going to a strip club was his default excuse for everything. He never went to work or meetings or the store to pick me up my favorite ice cream. I was just lucky they happened to carry mint chocolate swirl at the local nonexistent strip club.

  I might’ve bought the lie once or twice, but one, he’s a terrible liar, two, our neighborhood would never allow a strip club to operate there and three, in San Francisco, almost all the strippers are men.

  “You’re going to tell me you went to a strip club instead, aren’t you?”

  “Sure am. Where do you think we got the fish?”

  “Ugh.” Instead of smacking him, I burrowed my head into his chest and squeezed him as tightly as I could, wishing I could live right there forever and never have to move again.

  Unfortunately, a car would eventually come and kill us both if we didn’t get out of the middle of the street.

  “I’m not quite ready to talk to them yet.”

  “Then, come on.” He pulled me away from the house. “You can show me where you scraped your knee when you were ten, or the park where you and your friends used to get loaded late at night, or the woods you had to walk through on your way to school where lots of spooky shit happened. Assuming these suburbs are anything like the suburbs in almost every supernatural movie ever made.”

  “If you want to see the neighborhood’s haunted house”— I yanked him across the street by the hand—“it’s this way.”

  32

  Laney

  After about thirty minutes of ruining all the myths Carson had ever heard about the suburbs, we walked back to the house. Before we opened the door, I squeezed his hand and said, “Someday you’ll have to tell me what’s on my list of reasons to get rid of you.”

  “And remind you of all the reasons I’m not good enough for you? Not a chance. That’d be cheating. I have my fingers crossed you won’t figure it out for another fifty or sixty years.”

  My parents stood in the entryway, right next to each other, the same way they had the countless times I stayed out later than my curfew. But this time they didn’t look angry. They looked tired. Older. Sadder.

  I brushed by them and plopped myself down on the couch. “Fine. Let’s hear it.”

  No one said anything. No truth. No lies. Nothing.

  “Okay, then. I’ll start,” I snapped. “Since we’re all coming clean and everything. Carson and I also have something to tell you that you won’t like.”

  “You told me you didn’t knock her up,” my dad growled at Carson.

  “I didn’t, sir! At least…” He looked at me, the question in his eyes. “I didn’t, did I?”

  “No, I’m not pregnant. But we’re living together.” I left out in sin even though I knew that’s what they were thinking.

&nbs
p; “And…?” my mom asked.

  “And we’ve been living together for a while now. In one house. Without being married.”

  “We know, Laney.”

  “How?”

  “You and Hillary aren’t living together anymore,” she said, “and you never mentioned getting another roommate.”

  “I could’ve been living alone.”

  “When we call you in the morning, he’s there. When we call you at night, he’s there.”

  “You’re not mad? Or… disappointed?”

  My mom glanced at my dad, handing it over to him. Great. Here it came.

  “Of course I was unhappy about it. But we understand the world a bit better than you give us credit for, Laney.”

  I nodded curtly. I mean, I was very pleasantly surprised they weren’t freaking out about it. I’d been dreading this moment forever. But I was still mad at them for not telling me they were splitting up, so I couldn’t let them see my relief.

  And since that went so much better than expected, I figured I should come clean about the other thing I’d been holding back. “Carson’s rich. Like, really rich.” I opted not to use the word filthy because Carson had already shown them that side of himself. “Really, really rich.”

  In their eyes, rich had always been the equivalent of privileged, self-indulgent, non-charitable asshole. Exactly the kind of person they hated, if hate was something they did. But they couldn’t fool me—judging people was something they only pretended not to do. I’d seen their side glances to each other and their polite brushoffs whenever they saw someone flaunt their wealth.

  All this time I’d been afraid of their reaction to this news the most. Because of how wrong they’d be about Carson. That, even though he was filthy—rich and otherwise—he always seemed disconnected from it and never knew why anyone would flaunt it.

  But they didn’t react. They both just sat there, looking at me, as if they were still waiting for the ball to drop. But I’d already dropped the biggest balls there were—Carson’s.

  Shit. Thank goodness I didn’t say that out loud.

  “Well…?” I prompted, preparing for the head shaking and the disappointed sighs to start. Then the condemnation and prayers for him to become a better human being.

  “Well, what?” my mom asked.

  “Well, he’s rolling in money.”

  “Not literally,” he said calmly. “The bed I use for rolling around in money is back in San Francisco.”

  Instead of being horrified by the joke, my dad laughed. He actually laughed. Out loud. “Good for you, Carson.”

  “Good for him?” I echoed. “Seriously? If we’re all being honest now, be honest. Tell him how you feel about rich people.”

  “Hon, take a breath.”

  “I’m breathing just fine. Thanks, Dad.”

  “I don’t think they’re going to take the bait,” Carson whispered to me.

  “What does that mean?” I snapped.

  “It means,” he said, more loudly since they could hear him anyway, “you’re trying to pick a fight with people who aren’t interested in fighting you. Must be frustrating.”

  I ground my teeth together. “Why are you taking their side?”

  “There are no sides, babe. Everyone in this room loves you and wants you to be happy.” He tilted his head. “Except you, evidently.”

  I took a deep breath, not because my dad had suggested it, but to prepare myself for a biting response. To who? To Carson? No, of course not. To my parents? Whose only request was that I breathe?

  Crap! He was right. It was so maddening to be ready for a fight only to not have anyone to engage with. All that adrenaline wasted. Plus, the anxiety, fear, uncertainty, and shame leading up to it.

  I felt the heat that had begun as anger turn into embarrassment, blushing cheeks and everything. When Carson took my hand, I couldn’t figure out how he knew that was the moment I needed him to.

  “You’re okay with him being rich?”

  “Carson,” my dad said, shifting in his seat, “did you make the money selling drugs, scamming people, or anything unsavory?”

  “Not that anyone can prove, sir.”

  Both of them were smiling at him as if this was all a big joke.

  “I hate telling people this because it gives them the wrong idea about me,” Carson said calmly. “But I inherited a lot of money when my father died. After I got rid of it, I got even more of the stuff when his sister, my aunt, passed away.”

  I pulled my hand out of his so I could air quote something he’d said. “He ‘got rid of that’ by starting a foundation. What I left out was the name of the foundation. It’s the Bennett Foundation, and he started it with lots of his money.” I extended the word money to remind them how much they disliked talking about it.

  “We know that, too.”

  “You do?”

  “Laney, what kind of father wouldn’t check out the man his little girl is shacking up with? Of course I looked him up.”

  “And because you’re probably desperate to know,” my mom said to Carson, “we also found a few articles about your… more youthful pursuits.”

  “I was actually desperately trying not to think about that, Jane. But I understand. Still hoping you didn’t watch any of the videos that might be out there, but…?”

  “We didn’t.” I’d never seen my mom’s eyebrows so high, but my dad was still smiling. “We’re more concerned about the man you’ve become, how you treat our daughter, and that you don’t plan on acting like an idiot again in the future.”

  “I can honestly promise that I’m not planning on it.” Carson squinted, hopefully not wondering if there were any videos out there of the way he treated me. We’d only videotaped ourselves once, and there was only one copy, tucked deep in my computer in a recipe folder, labeled Spicy Sausage Fillher. It was Carson’s idea to add the h and leave out the space.

  “Early on in our relationship,” he said seriously, “I did something really stupid. I hurt her. I thought I could live without her, so I told her it was over. Thankfully, she’s a lot smarter than I am and had figured out how wrong I was. I’ll never make that mistake again.”

  Speaking of mistakes… “Did you cheat on Mom?”

  “No,” my dad said angrily, “of course not.”

  “Neither did I,” my mom said after a pause. It hadn’t even occurred to me she might. I’m not sure why. I guess I’m a sexist, after all. After being with as many cheaters as I had, it was the easiest answer—whether or not is was the correct answer.

  I looked at Carson, maybe with guilt in my eyes, or with fear.

  “We’re not all pricks, Lane.”

  I took a deep breath. “I know.” And I did. I knew Carson would never cheat. He might flirt or jokingly beg me to make out with another woman so he could watch, but he’d never hurt me like that.

  I faced my mom because there was a chance—a small one—I’d understand it better coming from her than from my dad. “Why are you spitting up?”

  Her mouth opened but no words came out. So, like always, my dad butted in.

  “We’re not.”

  33

  Laney

  All three of us snapped our heads in my dad’s direction.

  “We’re not?” my mom asked at the same time I asked, “Are you trying to make this more confusing for me?”

  My dad shook his head. “I said we were heading toward a split. But after talking through some things today, that’s not the direction I want us to go.” He looked at my mom. “I don’t know if we’ll make it, but I don’t want to give up without at least trying.

  “I've known you were unhappy for a long time, Jane. I was just afraid to ask why… because I didn’t want to hear it was my fault. Carson helped me figure out that as afraid as I was to hear your answer, it didn’t even compare to how afraid I am to lose you.”

  “I helped you figure all that out?” When everyone looked at him, Carson smirked and added, “Yeah, of course, I did. I do stuff li
ke that all the time.”

  I sat there on mute while my dad spoke. I’m not sure I’d ever heard him talk this much before, certainly not about his feelings. My mom listened with tears in her eyes and, as much as I wanted to hug her, to make her stop feeling, I didn’t. Because she needed this. Maybe even more than my dad did.

  She needed to hear what was in his heart, all the things he regretted not saying, all the times he’d been so afraid of losing her that he’d shut himself off and pretended everything was fine.

  My mom reached over and took his hand in hers without saying a word.

  My tears started falling soon after that. To know what I’d always thought was an ideal relationship had actually been broken.

  “Um…” Carson said quietly. “Lane, could I see you in the kitchen?”

  I knew I should’ve gotten up, left my parents to sort things out on their own, but what if something went wrong? Although it wasn’t as if I could keep them together just by sitting there staring at them.

  But Carson was insistent, and I got the message.

  “We’re going to leave you two to talk privately.”

  They didn’t even look up as I stood and let him lead me into the kitchen. As soon as we turned the corner, I smelled it.

  “Oh, crap! The fish.” I ran to the stove to turn the fan on high then went to open the window. Carson pulled the fire alarm off the ceiling before it started screaming.

  “I didn’t want to alarm anyone while you were all emoting.” Smoke billowed out of the oven when Carson opened it. He waved his hand in front of his face, grabbed a pot holder. “But I’m fairly sure blackened fish isn’t supposed to taste like charcoal.”

  “I can’t believe my mom forgot. She never forgets stuff like that.”

  “She has more important things to focus on right now.” Carson used a fork to lift the fish out of the pan and put them on a cutting board, then started scraping the charred skin away. “You okay?”