Caleb calmed down after a few minutes and Erin lay back down, her head on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” Caleb said again.
“It’s okay,” she says. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” he said, his voice harsh. He sat up, making Erin fall onto the mattress. “Erin, you need to get the fuck out of here. Now.”
Erin gave him a hard look and said, “Fine.”
She sprang out of bed and quickly threw her clothes back on.
Just as she was headed for the door, I said, “Erin, wait!”
She didn’t listen to me, slipping from the room and out into the night.
I gave Caleb a hard look, buried my face in my hands, and said, “Fuck.”
Erin
When I got back to my hotel room that night, I was fuming. I knew Caleb was in a bad place after his night terror, but there was no reason to take it out on me. After Braxton, that just wasn’t something I would put up with.
Besides, it was too close to the wedding to have to worry about asshole men who clearly didn’t want me around.
The rehearsal dinner was nearly upon us and I needed to help out with all the preparations. After already spending so much time away from my friends, I couldn’t let them down. I couldn’t let Greer down and needed to be there for her.
Greer and John went to breakfast together that morning, wanting to spend a little alone time together. They wouldn’t get much of it before the wedding. Sasha and I went down to the hotel restaurant to grab something to eat. I purposefully picked a table far away from anyone else, knowing that it was time to come clean to her.
“Wow, that is a lot,” she said when I’d finally finished talking. “No wonder you’ve been acting so weird lately.”
I was thankful she’d accepted everything just like Hanna had. I really did have incredible friends.
“I have not been acting weird,” I protested. She raised an eyebrow. “Okay,” I admitted, “I guess I’ve been acting weird. I just don’t know what to do about any of this. I like them, I really like them, but I’m scared things have become too fucked up and I don’t even know if they feel the same way.”
“Didn’t you just tell me that Jackson asked if you thought about you all being together?” she asked.
“Well, yes, but that was before last night. I don’t know if Caleb still feels that way, and I can’t be with Jackson if Caleb isn’t. He’s too loyal to his best friend. Besides, I’d never ask him to pick me over Caleb. That would be so selfish. And I don’t think he’d go for it anyway.”
“You just need to talk to them,” Sascha said like that was the simplest thing in the world.
“Ugh.”
A few minutes later, Hanna walked in, joining us at the table. She looked completely dazed. She must have come right from the Underground because her hair was thoroughly mussed, her clothes were rumpled, and her eye makeup was smeared.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Sascha joked.
Hanna laughed. “I feel like I’ve been dragged,” she admitted. She turned to me and said, “I have to thank you for introducing me to that last night. I have seen the light.”
* * *
I decided to stay away from the club that night. I wasn’t ready to see them, especially Caleb, after what happened. I deserved an apology. Jackson texted and called me, but I ignored him each time.
Besides, as Greer’s maid-of-honor, I had a lot going on at the moment.
The morning of the wedding was chaotic, but in a good way. I felt like a chicken with its head cut off, running around to make sure everything was going smoothly.
I was excited to see Greer’s cousin Terri in the hallway of the church and gave her a huge hug. We hadn’t seen each other in ages. She stood there with her husband Joe and her young daughter Hayley.
I had befriended Terri and her older brother Max when I went to visit her during the summers while we were in college. We’d all hit it off and remained friends.
I decided to take a little breather and chat with them for a minute.
“Is Max coming?” I asked.
“He couldn’t make it,” Terrie said sadly. “He got called into work this morning.” Max was a firefighter.
“Oh no!” I replied. “Is everything okay?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Terri said. “All I know is that the fire is pretty big.”
I hoped everyone was okay.
Talking for just another minute or two, I had to dash off, promising to catch up with them during the reception.
Finally, it was time.
The music started and we took turns walking down the aisle. When it was Greer’s turn, I smiled widely, so damned happy for my friend. Glancing over at John, I saw he had tears in his eyes, not caring who saw him cry. And why should he? This was the happiest day of his life and he’d been looking forward to marrying Greer for a long time.
Once Greer made it to the front of the church, I happened to look to the back and saw Jackson and Caleb slink in, taking a seat in the back pew. I felt my temper rise.
Were they for real? They had no business crashing the wedding.
I tried to ignore them for the rest of the ceremony and planned to tell them to go just as soon as I could.
But I didn’t get the chance to talk to them until the reception when Jackson cut in as I danced with Joe.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, giving him a stern look. “You shouldn’t have come.”
Thankfully, Jackson didn’t try to give me one of those smiles of his and looked serious for once. “We needed to see you,” he said. “You ignored my texts.”
“Then you should have taken the hint and given me some space.”
I didn’t talk to him again and when the song ended, Caleb cut it.
“Seriously?” I asked him.
Shame registered on his face. “I’m sorry that we crashed the wedding,” he said. “I’m also sorry for how I reacted the other night.”
I felt myself soften. Grabbing his hand, I led him out of the reception hall and to a quiet corner.
“Will you speak to me calmly now?” I asked pointedly.
“Yes.”
“Okay. The other night I was just trying to help and it hurt when you told me to ‘get the fuck out,’” I quoted.
He winced. “It was shitty of me. I was upset and reacted poorly.”
“Thank you for acknowledging that,” I said. Laying my hand on the side of his face, I asked, “Do you have nightmares often?”
He nodded. “At least a few times a week. I dream of back when I was in Afghanistan and all the awful shit I saw there. I dream of when I almost died.”
I probably shouldn’t have been, but I still felt stunned. It hurt to think Caleb had almost been taken out of this world.
“I’ve been in therapy for a long time, but it’s still hard to come to terms with everything.”
“That’s understandable,” I told him. “The other night, was that one of the worst nightmares you’ve had?”
Caleb shook his head. “No, that one was actually pretty mild. Sometimes, I wake after such terrible nightmares, I think about ending it all.”
Pain shot through my chest. I couldn’t deal with this, not again.
Tears filled my eyes, and I let them run down my cheeks.
“My dad took his life,” I said, choking on a sob. “I won’t see you do it too.”
Caleb looked stricken. “Erin,” he said, laying a hand on my shoulder.
“No,” I said firmly. “No. We can’t do this anymore. It’s done.”
It hurt so fucking much to walk away from Caleb, but I did. I had to.
Caleb
It felt like the world was ending. The ache was so much that I felt it in my body too. Fatigue filled my limbs, making it hurt to move.
I blew it. I ruined everything. I wasn’t able to keep it together and destroyed my one chance with Erin. Our one chance with Erin because, like the worthless waste of space I was, I ruined thi
ngs for Jackson too. I was a horrible friend.
Despite our short time together, everything was so much better with Erin in our lives. I started to feel like a person again, like I was whole or at least someday could be.
Jackson took it all in stride when I told him I’d ruined things with Erin as we drove away from the reception. How I’d told her about my night terrors and that sometimes I thought about dying by my own hand.
I’d never told Jackson that I was sometimes suicidal. He looked hurt, worried, but he hadn’t looked surprised. No doubt he wasn’t. He knew me better than my own parents, better than any other friends I’d had in the past.
He reassured me that none of it was my fault, that I hadn’t asked for PTSD. Somehow I would have felt better if he’d been furious, screamed at me, punched me. Jackson telling me it was okay, that we’d get by was too painful.
“Will you be alright?” he asked when we got to my place.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not going to do anything, okay? I swear.”
I could tell he wanted to believe me.
“I’m just going to clean my house, okay?”
Jackson knew I liked to clean whenever I felt dirty inside. My therapist told me it was part of my OCD and perfectly normal as long as I didn’t overdo it.
“Okay,” he relented. He gave me a hug, reassuring me it would all be okay, and then headed home.
Once inside, I headed straight for the cleaning products I kept under the sink, not even bothering to change out of my suit.
I started with the bathroom, scrubbing the toilet until the porcelain shined. Next came the shower. Every inch of grout on the shower wall got bleached and scoured with toothbrush. By the time I finished cleaning the sink, the walls, and the floor, I was tired. I moved on to the kitchen, making the faucet sparkle and clearing away every crumb and speck of dust.
It was just before dawn by the time I finished cleaning every room. I kept my place clean, so a complete scrub down of my house didn’t take as long as it would have other places.
I stripped down to my underwear and climbed under the covers, drifting off to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
As soon as I woke up, I snatched my phone from my nightstand, hoping against hope that Erin called. The only message I had was from Jackson, asking me to get ahold of him once I woke up. I told him I was awake and then opened the text thread I had with Erin.
My brain went on autopilot as I wrote her, begging her to reconsider, asking her to just talk to me. My thumb hovered over the send button. I closed my eyes and pressed it.
It was just past two in the afternoon, and I knew I needed to get up. Taking my boxers off, I headed for the shower, turning the water as hot as I could stand to help soothe my aching muscles. It helped a little, but it didn’t make my heart feel any better.
Once I was clean, I mechanically made a pot of coffee, drinking the entire thing. I sat in the living room with the lights off until it was time to get ready and go to the club for the night.
Jackson and I didn’t speak much while we worked at our desks. I saw that he looked at his phone, hoping for a message from Erin, just as much as I did.
The next night passed the same way. And the next, and the next. I felt completely numb inside and struggled to find joy in anything.
After a week, Jackson set me up with a woman who often frequented the Dungeon. I took her into one of the rooms and proceeded to do everything she asked me to, but my heart wasn’t in it. When I jerked myself off, cumming all over her face, it felt perfunctory.
I refused the other dates Jackson tried to set me up on after that, noticing that he hadn’t gone out with anyone himself. The Dungeon reminded me too much of Erin and I didn’t even want to go down there.
Eventually, it all got to be too much. An idea popped into my head and, refusing to second-guess it, I bought a plane ticket for home. New York City.
Without a word to anyone, I was gone.
Erin
The morning after the wedding, I packed up my things from the hotel and headed home. Greer and John were already off on their honeymoon in Hawaii, so just Hanna and Sascha remained in the suite. They saw how somber I was, randomly bursting into tears, but they didn’t say anything. They just hugged me and reassured me they were here for me when I was ready to talk.
I’d never appreciated them more.
On Monday, I went back to work and welcomed the distraction. From sun-up to sun-down, I was busy filing paperwork, researching cases for the senior partners, shadowing them, and doing everything else an associate did.
I was glad it didn’t give me much time to think about them. About Jackson and Caleb. I received several texts from Jackson and just one from Caleb, but I ignored them all.
Besides, I thought to myself, they’re both powerful wealthy men. They’ve definitely moved on to other women by now.
And that hurt to think about, but it also made me believe I’d get over them faster. Three days after I ended things, they stopped trying to get in touch, only confirming my suspicions.
It didn’t stop me from thinking about them though.
I just needed to put the Underground and Jackson and Caleb out of my mind. I needed to move on.
The second day I was back to work, one of my coworkers, another associate, told me he’d missed me while I was on vacation. We’d never talked much so I was a little surprised by his confession. He asked me if I wanted to grab dinner too.
It was so tempting to say yes, to throw myself back into dating to help make me forget the past few weeks, but I just wasn’t ready to.
I told my coworker I’d just broken up with someone and didn’t feel up to dating just yet. He was understanding, letting me know that if or when I was ready to and wanted to go out with him, he’d be there. I knew it would never happen, but it was a little flattering.
A few days later, Braxton showed up at my place, begging me to give us another chance. He said everything with Lydia had been a mistake and that it was me he truly loved. No doubt Lydia broke up with him when she realized what a joke he was. He probably hadn’t even told her he was in a relationship when he brought her to my apartment to have sex.
I felt incredible to slam the door in his face. It was the best I’d felt since before I cut Jackson and Caleb from my life.
However, the more time went by, the more I missed them. They showed up in my dreams, sometimes just Caleb, sometimes just Jackson, though both made an appearance more often than not. In my dreams, we would have mindblowing sex or simply be cuddling or out on the town. The very domestic dreams I had in which we were all together in my apartment were difficult. But the dreams that were more difficult were the ones I had of Caleb’s stricken face when I told him I couldn’t see them anymore.
Sometimes after I crawled into bed, I’d think back on that night when the three of us had sex together. I’d think about the way it felt, how incredible they made me feel as I pleasured both of them at the same time.
Up until Caleb’s nightmare, it was the best night of my life. Thinking about it always made me hot and I’d end up sliding my hands inside my panties or grabbing my vibrator from my nightstand, fucking myself with it while pretending it was Caleb or Jackson. It was a poor substitute for the real thing, but it was all I had.
Sascha grew tired of me being mopey and showed up at my apartment with ice cream one night. We stayed up late, downing tubs of Ben & Jerry’s while we watched horror movies on Netflix until we both fell asleep on the couch.
Sascha ended up getting the job that she applied for at Calliope Publishers. I’d just known she would.
“You will not believe how hot my new bosses are, Erin!” she’d squealed on the phone after her first day. “It was so hard to focus on orientation because I couldn’t stop staring at them whenever they walked into the room!”
We hung out a few more times, sometimes with Hanna, and they let me bitch about Caleb and Jackson to my heart’s content. I’d done the same for them over the ye
ars, commiserating with them. It’s just what friends did for each other.
A few weeks after Greer’s wedding, after I saw Jackson and Caleb for the last time, I was imagining the night I got to sleep between them for a few hours. They were both warm against me, their bodies solid. I had never felt more secure, safer than I’d ever felt in my entire life.
My phone began to vibrate on my nightstand and I grabbed it.
Jackson.
It had been ages since he last tried to call me. I was so convinced they’d already scrubbed me from their mind that I could hardly believe he was calling me now.
I almost declined his call, but something inside me told me to answer. That I needed to answer.
“Hello?” I said timidly into the phone. I couldn’t believe I’d answered. Why did I do that? Why did I want to get hurt again?
“Oh thank God!” Jackson sighed into the phone. “I was worried you wouldn’t answer again.”
Something about his voice was off. He didn’t sound like himself.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling dread wash over me.
“It’s Caleb,” he said, his voice urgent. “He’s been missing for over a week.”
My heart began to thud in my chest.
Missing? How on earth could he be missing?
“Where do you live?” I asked. “I’ll be right there.”
Caleb
I decided not to tell anyone I was in New York. Not my old friends, not my family. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was. My mother would tell me to be reasonable and go back to Las Vegas while my father would tell me to stop being so weak. I knew my friends wouldn’t understand. None of them had gone into the military and mostly worked in banking or medicine.
I just felt so lost and wanted to be left alone while I figured out what was wrong with me.
I knew my parents were staying at their house in the Hamptons for a while, so I decided to head to the apartment I grew up in on the Upper East Side.
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