by Jay McLean
Every single one.
Ruby Banks
My wife, my friend, the mother dear
In dreamless sleep repossess here
May those whose love to her was given
All meet and live with her in heaven
I try to cover my gasp, my tears falling with my blink as I look up at him. “Dylan,” I whisper, my breath as shaky as my hands.
“I wanted her to meet you,” he says, taking a seat on the dirt in front of the marker, “In case I don’t get this chance again.”
I sit down next to him and take his hand.
“It’s been so long since I’ve been here,” he tells me, shifting our positions so his arm’s around me and his other hand is on my leg. “My dad and Eric and I used to come here a bit when I was younger. I always felt out of place, you know? Because they knew her and could talk to her the way they would if she were alive. They could picture her, see her reactions to their words and I—I couldn’t do any of that. I couldn’t describe her to you, what she looked like when she smiled or the sound of her voice or the way she smelled.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugs. “My dad—he used to say, ‘It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.’ I guess you just reminded me of it when I saw your face earlier. I kind of knew, you know?” He finally faces me, his eyes as sad as my heart. “Is this it, Riley? Am I losing you?”
I sigh. “Losing me would mean that you had me to begin with.”
His lip curves on one side. “I had you, Riley. Even if it was for a second, I still had you.”
I look away, because the hope in his eyes is too detrimental to my soul. “I messed up, Dylan.”
“How bad?”
“I don’t even know where to start type bad.”
He blows out a breath so heavy I can feel his entire body shift beside me. “You’ve been keeping it a secret from me?”
“Yes.”
“So why is it so important you tell me? Because Jake knows about it?”
“No… because you deserve to know.”
“And what if I told you that I don’t want to know? That I hold a secret I don’t want to tell anyone. Especially you. And what if I told you that we could both keep them for eternity and it wouldn’t change a thing?”
I don’t hesitate. “I’d still tell you.”
“Why?”
I turn to him. “Because you were the one who asked me to.”
He doesn’t respond, just looks right at me. After a while, he looks away. “Heidi had an abortion while I was in basic training. It was my child. She didn’t tell me about it. She didn’t even tell me she was pregnant. Not until Vegas a few months ago. That’s why I left her for good.”
All air leaves my lungs. “Jesus. I’m sorry, Dylan.”
“We spoke to each other while I was in basic at Camp Lejeune and even when I deployed. She wrote me letters even after she broke up with me. She should’ve said something. And when she did, she tried to put it on me like it was my fault because I enlisted and left her. I didn’t leave her. I just enlisted. There wasn’t an either/or decision. We could’ve still made it work. The worst part is that she knew she was pregnant when I left. She didn’t even tell me then. She just let me go. She should’ve said something, you know? I should’ve had a say at least.”
I take a calming breath—one that gets caught by the lump in my throat. “That’s not your shame to carry, Dylan. It’s hers.”
“I think deep down I know that. But it doesn’t stop it from hurting. And it’s not even about her. She stopped being the reason I hurt the night I found out. I think it’s more about my decision to leave.” He faces me again. “You think it was selfish? For me to go?”
“For you to search out something more for yourself? Not at all.”
“But I didn’t tell her I enlisted until it was too late.”
“And you think it would’ve changed anything? You think that by you not going you would’ve been happy together, with or without a baby?”
He shrugs. “No. I wouldn’t have been happy. Not together anyway.”
“So now? When you look back on it all… what do you think?”
“It’s irrelevant.”
“Of course what you think is relevant.”
“No, Riley.” He shakes his head. “I mean, when I look back on it… none of it matters anymore. I thought it did. Then I met you. And now it’s irrelevant.” He pulls me closer to him. “And you—your secret. Is it relevant?”
I think about his question for a long time and I come up with nothing. A yes or no answer would be too simple. So instead, I give the complicated. “After Jeremy died, I lost it. Like, mentally lost it.”
“You were grieving.”
I shake my head. “No. It wasn’t just grief. It was everything.”
“Like what?” I look down on his hand on my leg and I get lost in the warmth of his touch and his voice when he says, “It’ll only change us if you let it.”
I heave in a breath and let it out in a whoosh, along with everything I’ve wanted to say but never had anyone to say it to. “He was so scared up on that cliff, Dylan. He was scared and I laughed at him. He told me he loved me. I never said it back. They were the last words he ever said to me and I never—” I break off on a sob.
“Riley…”
I sniff through the pain and find the courage to continue. “I still remember the moment it happened. The rocks when they landed on my shoulders and the impact of the water when we hit the lake. I remember the exact moment I knew something was wrong.” The pain is already unbearable, but I push through it. I have to. For both Dylan and Jeremy. “His grip on my hand tightened… he was supposed to jump. He didn’t jump. He fell. He fell all the way to the bottom and he didn’t come up. The medical reports say he hit his head on the edge of the cliff and was already unconscious when he hit the water.” I wipe my eyes across my forearm. “It only took a day for the rumors to start and another day for them to get back to me. Kids in our class were saying that it wasn’t an accident. That I pushed him. That I drowned him. I would never hurt him, Dylan. Never.”
“Fuck them, Riley.”
“Mom kept telling me that they were just bored and needed something else to focus on to take away from the pain of losing someone. And I just kept thinking, what about me? What about my pain? Then it escalated to the point where people began questioning why I didn’t call for help right away….”
Dylan’s eyes are wet when he rubs them across my bare shoulder. He sniffs once. Twice. His hands going behind my knees and lifting me onto him so he can hold me tighter. Closer.
“And I tried to talk to my mom about it. When the nightmares became too much, I tried to talk to her. I tried to talk to anyone who would listen but no one would. No one cared. And then the generic I’m sorrys mixed with accusations started coming through and I lost it. I was so mad, so angry, so lost. People stopped talking to me. Friends I thought would be there stopped being my friend because they were never really mine, they were his. His parents stopped talking to me. And the girls—they were the worst. The messages I’d get pushed me over the edge.”
“What messages?” he asks, a single finger wiping my tears away.
“The truth. That I was never worthy of him to begin with. That it was my fault his life was taken too soon. That he was such a promising kid and I ruined it all. I took it all away from him.”
“That’s not true, Riley.”
“And after a while, everything stopped. The messages, the fake sympathy, all of it just stopped. And when I couldn’t find it in myself to go off to college and start a new life that was supposed to be ours, my mom stopped caring too. She just got mad and impatient and she didn’t understand that I wasn’t ready. That I was still grieving. I could see it in the way she looked at me… she didn’t understand why I was still stuck there—in my hell—when the world was moving around me. I started to lock myself in my room. I didn’t eat. Didn’t shower. Didn’t
talk to anyone. And then one night she came into my room and said, ‘It’s time to move on,’ like it was that fucking easy. And I lost it, Dylan.” I break off on another sob. “It’s not like I planned on any of it. I hadn’t even started drinking then. I stole her car in the middle of the night. I just wanted to hurt her like her words had hurt me. And when her salon came into view, I stepped on the pedal and I drove up the curb and over the sidewalk and right through the front window. Just to fuck her, you know?”
“Riley…”
“But I didn’t stop, I couldn’t. I just kept driving, hitting wall after wall until there was nowhere else left to go and the car wouldn’t move and I just sat there with smoke around me and my mind gone and my heart dead in the bottom of the lake.”
Dylan clears his throat. “And then what happened?”
“Cops came. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Apparently I’d gone through five different businesses in my fit of rage. Jake’s dad’s law practice was one of them. That’s how he knows about it. I got arrested and charged with so many felonies, I can’t even name them. Mom hired a lawyer to try to get me out of it using temporary insanity as a defense, but it’s a small town. I ruined people’s businesses, their incomes, their livelihoods. It didn’t matter that I was still hurting. I caused more suffering than Jeremy’s death had caused me. It was like a witch-hunt, pitchforks and everything. They probably would’ve burned me at the stakes if they could. But not Jake’s dad. For some reason he felt for me and he helped my mom get rid of her hired lawyer and he offered her a deal. Pay off what the insurance doesn’t cover for the damage caused and six months of home-arrest. Ankle bracelet and everything. My mom took it. I was too fucked up to care. Mom lost all her clients. Then she had to sell the salon to pay everyone and I started to drink. After a while, I couldn’t stop drinking. And Mom didn’t stop supplying it. It was easier for her to deal with me in a sedated state of constant semi drunk than deal with watching my emotional pain.”
Dylan takes a huge breath, his chest heaving and pushing against my side. “Riley. What happened to you, the way people treated you… that’s their shame to carry. Not yours,” he says, repeating my words.
I face him, watching him blink back his own tears. “It took me a long time to work that out. A really long time. And when I did, I just got more pissed because they weren’t fucking there, Dylan. No one was. They weren’t there when I was sinking, drowning, trying to search for Jeremy. They weren’t there when I finally found his body, eyes open, laying cold and still under the water. They weren’t the ones who tasted the blood in their mouths… or woke up for weeks after… dreaming of that same blood-stained water drowning them and killing them. They didn’t feel the burn in their lungs when they screamed for help, their mouths and lungs filling and dying for air. I swam to the shore and screamed and screamed and nobody came. Nobody heard me. Nobody saved him. I was the one who dived back in, who kicked and kicked and used every single bit of strength I had to get him out. His eyes were still open, Dylan. His beautiful lifeless eyes were still there, but they were dead. And so was he. His head was on my lap, his blood on my hands, and I knew he was dead. I just cried and held him. I didn’t know what else to do. People came, people shouted, people cried. And the next thing I knew, I was being pulled away from him—the boy I love. They were taking him away from me. And the first thing they did was close his eyes.” I choke hard on the sob and finally release it, my breaths as weak as the rest of my body. “Those eyes were mine. They belong to me and they took them away from me.”
He kisses away my tears, his body warm against mine.
We breathe through the pain, apart but together, and we hold each other. We hold on to the only thing that makes sense in an otherwise messed-up world and we allow ourselves to hurt and to grieve and to love and to forgive. We watch the sun move across the sky, feel the wind envelop us. And we keep close the chaos we created and the truth that releases it.
We bleed our hearts, bare our souls, and in the end, we hold on to a once untouchable reality.
He pulls away, his hands cupping my face and his eyes searching mine. Then he smiles—a childish innocent smile his mother gets to witness. And somehow, some way, he finds a way to release my hurt. “That’s it? That’s all of it?” he asks.
“That’s it,” I tell him.
He kisses my lips. Just once. “You’re just a little broken, Riley Hudson. That’s all. Now you just have to let me be the glue that keeps you together.”
Twenty-Two
Riley
We drive home in the complete opposite setting to the drive there. I sit in the middle of the seat, his hand on my leg, the afternoon sun beating down on us while he tells me about the engine that’s been sitting in his garage since he was sixteen. Occasionally, he’ll ask if I’m sure I want to hear about it. I tell him he’s stupid and to keep going. Of course I want to hear about it. I write down what type it is so I can google it later and prove it to him. Then I tell him about seeing him the first time when I was twelve and he was in his driveway and how I went home and thought about kissing him. He eyes me sideways, a clear smirk on his lips, then he calls me a juvenile horn-bag and pushes me away. A second later, though, he pulls me back and apologizes. Then he adds that had he known I felt that way, he probably would have walked around shirtless a lot more. I remind him I was twelve. He reminds me of his bacon joke and uses it to prove that in his mind, he’s still twelve.
It’s perfect—better than any dream I’ve ever had.
He talks about his friends and what they got up to yesterday, his generally good mood switching for a moment when he tells me about what they did to his room.
I laugh. I can’t stop laughing. “I have to see it,” I tell him.
So when we pull into his garage, he opens my door, helps me to step out and holds my hand as he leads me through his house. The one and only time I’d been inside, I only really saw the hallway and the kitchen. He shows me through the rest of the house, which is basically just the living room. It’s nice. Neat. But definitely very male. The one thing that stands out are the pictures framed and hanging on the walls. So many pictures of Dylan, of his brother, of his mom and dad, and then of the three Banks Military Men. From babies, to kids, to teens to adults. There’s even a glass case in the living room with all the boy’s trophies and participation ribbons. Basketball for Dylan. Academics for Eric. I point to one of him standing next to his truck, Jake next to him, with the bed loaded. “What’s that?”
“That would be the day I left for UNC.”
“I bet your dad was proud.”
He smiles. “Honestly, I could’ve flunked out of high school and pressed metal over at the factory like he does and he’d still be proud.” He places his hands on my waist and kisses my shoulder. “Okay. My room. Promise not to laugh?”
“I can’t promise that. At all.”
He rolls his eyes but guides me, his hands staying where they are, through the living room, past the hallway, and to his closed door. “Ready?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be ready,” I joke.
He reaches across and turns the handle, then stops. “I just want to make it clear that this isn’t some kind of personal joke or anything. Never, and I mean ever have I mentioned anything about ponies or glitter or—”
“Just open the door,” I say through a laugh.
I try. Truly, I try not to laugh, but how can I not? It’s ridiculous. He gently pushes me inside, while I continue to cackle with laughter, my hands out, moving the streamers out of the way. He stands in front of me shaking his head. “It gets worse,” he tells me, grasping my shoulders and spinning me around to face his now closed door. “High School Musical?” I almost shout, turning to him. But before I can laugh, before I can breathe, his mouth is on mine, his hands gripping my waist, pushing me slowly until my back’s against the door. His tongue parts my lips and I welcome it. I welcome him and his entire body as he pushes up and into me, his leg between mine, his hands gripping my wr
ists and moving them above my head. He doesn’t stop kissing me, not for a second. When he needs air, he moves from my lips down to my neck and I gasp for breath, but he doesn’t give me long before his mouth covers mine again and I get lost. Completely lost. In this moment and in his kiss and in our mixed moans. He steps back, just enough to shift so his hips are between my legs and I can feel his excitement pressed against my stomach. He takes his hand off my wrists and uses the other to keep both my hands pinned against the door, trapped with his force. His free hand glides down my side, past the swell of my breast and my waist, ending on my bare thigh. He lifts my leg, forcing them both off the ground, using his body to pin me in place before his mouth is on my jaw, my neck, my collarbone, his tongue sliding across my skin.
Using his body, he shifts me higher until his hardness is exactly where I want it.
“Dylan…”
He responds by moaning into my skin, his hand pressing harder on my wrists.
I try to break from his hold. I want to touch him. I want to feel every single inch of his body but he’s too strong. Too overcome by lust.
His hips start thrusting, slow, smooth movements and I’m wet. So damn wet.
“Dylan…”
He covers my mouth again, his tongue soft and warm and relentless. He keeps thrusting, keeps pushing me closer and closer to—
“Dylan!” For a second I’m confused because I didn’t speak his name and it’s not my voice. “Dylan!” Bang bang bang. I get pushed forward by the force of the door opening.
Dylan curses and drops me to the floor while his hand slams against the door. “What, Eric?!”
I wipe my lips with the back of my hand, my eyes wide in panic.
On the other side of the door, Eric shouts, “I left some shit I need for work in there.”
Clearly reluctant, Dylan plants his hands on my waist, guiding me in front of him with his hard-on pressed against my back. He opens the door for his brother, whose eyes widen when he sees us.
