by Jenna Mills
My eyes stung.
His name.
Josh.
“So I let you sleep,” he said in odd harmony with the soft New Age music drifting from the speakers. “I let you sleep while I showered, thinking maybe you would wake up while I was gone. But you didn’t. Instead, when I came back, you were crying.”
“I wasn’t—” I started to protest, but when I lifted a hand to my face, my fingertips found the warm, damp evidence of his words.
“And I see you now,” he said as I worked the stiffness from my legs, “not my strong, fearless Emily, but a shell of who you’re meant to be.”
I fought his words, fought the ugly picture they painted.
“And you don’t deserve that.” Watching me, he stood and crossed the thick Persian rug—barefoot, I noticed. “You don’t deserve what that boy did to you. You know that, don’t you?”
With each step, the massive room shrunk around us, the walls edging closer, closer. Somewhere inside, a voice whispered for me to get up, to reach for my phone and wristlet and head for the door, to open it and step outside, where I could breathe.
But something altogether different—fascination maybe, curiosity, the dangerous seeds planted by Lexi—held me motionless as he sat so close our thighs brushed.
“You deserve to be happy.” His voice was low but not a whisper, sandpaper rough but, oddly, smooth. “You deserve someone who treats you like their world…who recognizes how special you are.”
It was the haunting wail of a single flute, I told myself, that made my heart squeeze.
That was all.
But emotion, brutally scraped away for the past several weeks, burned against the back of my throat.
“I always knew he wasn’t good enough for you,” Coach Grimes said, and then his hands were there, lifting my foot like he’d done so many times before, after practices and races, and starting to rub. Slowly. Gently. “I was always afraid he would break your heart.” Methodically. “But I never imagined he would break you.”
I stiffened. “I’m not broken.”
He kept rubbing, using the strength of his fingertips to send waves of insane bliss swirling through me.
“I remember the first time someone broke my heart,” he said, and for a second there, though he sat next to me, I would’ve sworn he slipped somewhere far away and long ago. “Her name was Courtney.”
Coach Grimes was thirty, maybe. Definitely no older. He was barely out of college when I first met him and Jillian. At the time they’d seemed so old—the difference between twelve and twenty-four is that of child and adult. But eighteen and thirty…adult and adult.
“What happened?” I asked. He was normally a reserved man, rarely had I heard him open up about anything, not even his concerns about Josh.
“I was nineteen. She was seventeen. I’d been waiting two years for her to graduate high school. We dated the whole time. I was her first…” His eyes darkened. “And I wanted to be her last.”
My heart squeezed again, but for a very different reason, and for a cruel moment, I was in another room with another fireplace, this one burning. Clothes on the floor. Promises glowing in a pair of piercing blue eyes…
“But she had other ideas. She broke up with me that summer and went to school in North Carolina.”
I let out a slow, deep sigh. “Sometimes forever is scary…especially when you’re young.”
That’s what Josh’s mother had told me, when she tried to explain his lies, the deceit.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with age,” Coach Grimes said. “Anyone can get scared by forever. Sometimes it’s better to not think about tomorrow, or what comes next. To just be. To just enjoy each moment for what it is.”
Despite the haunting violin, silence poured between us. I wanted to say something, but nothing profound came to me. I wasn’t really aware of closing my eyes, wasn’t aware of anything but the feel of his big hands rubbing my feet—until he spoke again.
“Jillian’s not coming home this weekend.”
My eyes snapped open.
“At least, not for longer than to pick up the girls.”
They were easy, common words, but an odd awareness whispered through me. “Are they going somewhere?”
“To her house,” he said, and suddenly the pieces—his sadness, how long it had been since I’d actually seen his wife—slipped together.
“Her house?” I repeated numbly.
The movement of his hands—a coach’s hands, I’d been telling myself, not a man’s—stilled. “She moved out three months ago.”
Shock blindsided me. They’d always seemed like the golden couple. “But…I don’t understand.”
His breath roughened. “Like you said, forever can be a long time.”
And then I realized even more, the whole conversation—about being hurt, broken…about forever—wasn’t simply an observation on his part. It was real, what he was living.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, suddenly flustered, because his hands were still on me, and shadows still danced, and the room still felt small—just him and me.
But it was a different him and me now, a him and me with no one standing between us. From one breath to the next, everything had changed, walls, barriers that had always been stark and solid between us, crumbled. And without warning, the way he looked at me made me feel not like a child or a student, but something more, something much more special, and for a dangerous second, I let myself imagine what could happen if he touched me somewhere other than my leg. There was no Josh and no Jillian, no rules about what was right, and what was wrong.
Lexi was right—it wasn’t the first time my thoughts had wandered...there.
But that wasn’t me. I didn’t know how to do that, to be that person, to recklessly give myself to a moment with no regard to the moments that would come later—after—no matter how tempting the fantasy. Fantasies were only that—naughty dreams you indulged, but never actually lived.
“I-I should go.” I hated the thick catch in my voice. Even more, I hated the way my heart pounded, and possibility whispered.
Why not? Why not?
Coach Grimes’s hand tightened around my foot, his thumb sliding slowly. “You don’t have to.”
My breath jammed in my throat. Confusion and denial and possibility wound tight. “Yeah,” I whispered, wondering. What if…But, over the drumbeat of my own heart, I made myself pull away and stand. “I do.”
I tried to be casual. I tried to act like this was any other night, like nothing had just happened—changed. Like my whole world wasn’t tilting. Like we both didn’t know what was happening. But every step, every breath, pounded.
He stood as I gathered my things. Wordlessly he followed me to the door. I could feel him, feel him behind me, watching. Touching, holding, without even lifting a hand. I could feel the warmth of his breath. But I didn’t let myself turn. Instead I reached for the door.
He got there first. I watched his strong fingers close around the dark bronze handle—but he made no move to eliminate that final barrier between me and…whatever came next.
“It won’t always be this way. You know that, don’t you?”
The hoarse words slipped like a feather along the back of my neck.
“Someday you’ll want to feel again.”
I closed my eyes.
“Someday you’ll be ready to live again, to drown in a moment just to see how it feels.”
Oh. God.
He stepped closer. “We both will.”
The urge to turn around was so strong—and so wrong. Forbidden. I swallowed hard, and the door opened, bringing with it the sharp cool breath of midnight.
“I’m always here,” he said quietly, “if you need me.”
My eyes stung. Confused, unsure, shaken, I made myself do what I knew was right, even if temptation swirled like a dangerous drug. I walked. I walked into the night. The darkness. The cold. I walked across the porch and toward the circular drive. I walked as I knew he wa
tched. I walked to my car and climbed in without looking back.
Only after I started to drive, only after I turned the corner, did I see the single flower tucked beneath my windshield wipers.
Chapter 5
YOU WAKE UP every morning of your life. It’s routine. Sometimes you’re still tired, sometimes you’re ready for a new day. Sometimes you wake up fast, sometimes it’s more of a gradual awareness, the slow surfacing from some deep, dark place. But your first sensation is always one of familiarity.
When I woke up in the hospital, I didn’t hurt. Everything was soft and warm, and my first sensation was of being safe. I remember the feel of blankets—and his hand holding mine. Holding tight. I remember opening my eyes and seeing him, like I’d done so many other times. I remember starting to smile—and then it was like a flash flood, our eyes meeting and the grim look in his, how bloodshot they were, how tired. He whispered my name, but I heard only the angry shout from—
I didn’t know when. I had no sense of time or place, only a sudden explosion of memories, flashing like a kaleidoscope through my mind: the night club, the girl, his apartment, the box, the pictures, the card, his angry twisted face, the overwhelming stab of betrayal, running, shouting, the car, the road, the night, the screech of tires—
And with the memory came the cold, the horrible empty stab inside me, and then my mom was there, and a nurse with her, an older woman with silver hair and severe features, and then he was gone.
Sometime later, after I slept some more, my little sister went to each floral arrangement and read me the card. There were flowers from my aunts and uncles, the school, several neighbors and my mom’s boss…from Coach Grimes.
And then there were the lilies, snow white and beautiful in a vase of red crystal, but no card. We asked the nurses, but no one knew where they came from. They’d simply arrived with my name typed on the small envelope.
And even as I stopped my car in the middle of the road, I knew. Before I stepped into the darkness, the cold. Before I reached for the windshield, before my fingers slipped against the soft white petals, I knew.
The flower was the same, the exact same as the flowers in the hospital. Once again there was no card. This time there was no label, either. No envelope. But there didn’t need to be.
I knew.
I knew who put the flower on my windshield.
And I knew why I’d awakened earlier, just as I knew who’d given me the flowers in the hospital, the same pure white I’d received the past two years for my birthday, when my grandmother died, the first time we made love, the weekend he moved to Ft. Collins, and every other time he wanted me to know that he was thinking of me. That I wasn’t alone.
That he was with me, even when he wasn’t.
Alone there in the cold, dark night, I grabbed the beautiful pristine lily and dropped it to the ground, directly in front of my tire. Mechanically I got back into the car and gunned the engine, crushing those delicate petals.
I refused to look back. But I shook. All the way home. Shook with disgust, with anger, with a sense of being violated. He’d been there. He’d gotten out of his car and walked around. Maybe he’d approached the house. Maybe he’d looked inside while I slept. Maybe that’s why I dreamed of him.
Had he texted me then, while I lay on the sofa? Had he been watching me through the window?
Throwing open the car door, I lunged into the cool night air, this time gulping in big, harsh breaths, so as not to throw up.
I told myself not to text him back. I told myself to leave it alone, leave him alone, let it go. That responding at all only acknowledged that he existed.
But no matter how true all that was, I couldn’t stop myself from yanking my phone from my purse and stabbing out four words.
YOU’RE DEAD TO ME.
“He won’t leave me alone.”
I sat with my legs crossed, my arms wrapped around my middle, wishing I’d grabbed a cup of coffee on the way to my appointment. Even more, wishing I’d cancelled. I’d barely slept at all.
“And that bothers you,” Dr. Rivers observed, watching me from across the small seating area. His office seemed so much larger and calmer than it did during Group when Zoe and Lexi battled to out-drama each other. Actually, I was pretty sure Zoe didn’t do it on purpose. Getting assaulted and almost killed in your own bed had to mess you up. It was Lexi who couldn’t stand to be outdone.
“Why is that?” Dr. Rivers asked. “Why does it bother you that Josh won’t leave you alone?”
I stared at him. It was a simple question. The answer was simple, too—or at least it should have been.
“Because every time I see him,” I whispered, “it all comes back.”
Dr. Rivers lifted a finger to the side of his face, watching me in that clinical, analytical way of his, the way that signaled it remained my turn to talk.
“It’s like tearing a bandage off,” I tried to explain. “And the scab comes with it and then you’re bleeding again, and it’s like starting all over…”
“Starting all over with what? What’s under the bandage?”
My throat tightened. My eyes burned.
“You say it a lot, Emily. But you never say what it is.”
I thought about dodging the question, about lying. Instead the truth slipped out. “The memory of that night.” And I needed it to go away. “It’s like a movie in my mind, and it just keeps playing, over and over and over.” Louder each time.
His eyes met mine. His expression gentled. “Then change the channel.”
If only it were that easy. “I’m trying.”
“Are you?” he asked, reaching for the black coffee cup from the table to his right. Watching me, he took a slow sip. “Are you sure?”
I was. But everything had been so much better when Josh was still in Ft. Collins, and I could pretend he no longer existed.
Dr. Rivers put the mug down, leaning forward to rest his elbows against his knees. “Maybe instead of forgetting how you felt that night, you need to remember. You need to let yourself feel it, so you remember you never want to feel that way again.”
I stared at him. He stared back.
“I can sit here and toss out cliché after cliché, Emily. You’re the lead actress in your own life, the captain of your own ship, the author of your own story—but they’re only true if you’re ready to take control. If you’re ready to move on—when you’re ready to move on—Josh can’t stop you. Either he’s part of your past, or he’s part of your now. You control that—not him.”
“But when he shows up—”
“Look the other way. It’s really not that hard.”
The tightness wound deeper, squeezing so tightly I did exactly what he said—I looked away, to the Flatirons rising starkly beautiful against the soft blue morning sky.
“If it is hard, maybe you need to ask yourself why.”
My gaze snapped back to his. He sat there so serenely, calm, collected, all perfectly together in one unwavering piece, while the pieces of my life rolled like a bag of marbles turned upside down at the top of Pikes Peak.
“It’s human nature 101,” he said, suddenly, oddly professorial. “You accept what you think you deserve.”
That got me.
“Is that what you think you deserve? The pain—the emptiness?” He hesitated, letting the question echo in the heavy silence. “To hurt?”
“No.” My voice sounded small, strangled. After clearing my throat, I tried again. “No,” I whispered as a memory played through me, a memory from the night before.
Someday you’ll be ready to live again, to drown in a moment, just to see how it feels.
“I know the concussion has been hard on you,” Dr. Rivers added, quieter this time. Gentler. “That you feel like everything in your life has changed, maybe even that you’ve lost control, but you’re stronger than you realize.”
He kept on—I could hear him, his voice, his words—but it was no longer him that I saw.
“You have to
let go. You have to quit looking back. You’ll never get anywhere new or different, if you’re always looking behind you.”
I saw the flower the second I turned toward the table. I’d been at work all of three minutes, still equal parts exhilarated and wobbly after a five mile run. Everyone said it was too much, too fast.
Maybe that’s why it felt so good.
I hated being told what I couldn’t do.
I stood behind the counter, with a line snaking beyond the gift display and out the door, but for a moment, there was only the flower, wilted, petals broken but still beautiful, rising up from a large, white paper cup in the center of a table near the window.
A lily.
Exactly like the night before.
And the hospital.
“Yo, Freckles. You in there?”
It took a second for Zoe’s voice to register. The afternoon sun cast a hazy glare across the shop, but no matter how hard I blinked, the lily remained.
“Where did that come from?” I asked her, making myself look away.
Standing next to me, Zoe reached for a carton of milk and poured it in the steamer. “What…oh,” she said, following my gaze. “The flower?”
“Yeah.”
“Found it on the floor.” Seamlessly, she started another drink while finishing the latte. “It was kinda crushed, but I thought it was too pretty to throw away.”
Something cold and slimy slipped through me.
“Hey, don’t look now but Cheryl’s coming over.”
Cheryl was the owner.
“You might want to pretend you’re doing something.”
She’d been so nice to me, hiring me despite the accident and cutting me all kinds of slack, even offering to recommend me to her sister in Santa Fe. If she noticed I’d been on my feet for more than two hours straight, or that I was pressing my fingers to my temple or bracing against the counter, she insisted I take a break. But the line was too long for me to just be standing there.
Looking up, I pasted on my best life-is-great smile and opened the second register. The last thing I wanted was for her to reconsider her offer to recommend me to her sister.
