At Any Moment (Gaming The System Book 3)

by Brenna Aubrey

  “I’m afraid to touch you.”

  That hung in the air, thickening it with tension. My mouth opened to reply but nothing came out.

  He shook his head and eventually continued. “I can’t go through that again. I can’t watch you go through that again. Every time I touch you—every time I want you, I’m scared shitless that I’m going to put another baby in you and it’s all going to happen again.”

  “It doesn’t have to happen again. We’ll be careful…”

  “We need help. You need help. Professional help.”

  I sat back on my haunches and looked at him. “I’m not—”

  “You said you didn’t deserve to live. You need help that I can’t give you.”

  “Will that make a difference?” I asked in a tiny voice. “Will it even begin to eliminate the baggage we are carrying?”

  He looked away and shrugged. And that shrug did more to me than any of his words previously had done. My gut sank. I felt like I was suffocating. Adam had lost hope. He no longer believed that we could be fixed.

  This realization shook me harder than anything because, since the beginning, he had always believed in us. Long before I had ever thought it possible, he’d believed. He’d pursued this relationship because he’d known we were right for each other. He’d known what he wanted. He’d always been so sure of us.

  But, apparently, not anymore.

  “You’ve lost hope…” I said quietly.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I just feel empty right now. We’re human. We can only take so much. And we’ve had more than our fair share.”

  “You said that life isn’t fair. That we don’t get to have everything. But does that mean we don’t get to have anything—that we’ve gone through all that together not to deserve to be happy together?”

  He shrugged, shaking his head.

  I wanted to cry again. I felt lost, cut adrift. My hand wandered to the compass around my neck, my fist closing around it. We’d lost our way. We were drifting aimlessly.

  I watched him and he didn’t move, his hands fisted in the sand, leaning back on stiff arms, staring out over the black water. The water lapped against the shore. I could hear the song of frogs coming down from the wetlands. People were talking out on their patios on the other side of the Back Bay. But between us? Dead silence.

  Void. Emptiness.

  “Adam. I still believe in us,” I whispered. It hurt to put that out there with no idea of how he’d react but the silence between us had hurt worse.

  After a long silence he said, “I wish I could say the same. More than anything I wish it.”

  Grief seized me then but I didn’t cry. I’d traveled past that stage into a desolate wasteland that was beyond tears. It was dry, empty and lonely, this wasteland. It was a place of my own making and I had no idea how to find my way out. I fingered the compass.

  “More than anything, I wish that I had the words to tell you how I feel… about you, about this,” I said.

  “But you don’t. And that’s the problem. Because I don’t have those words either.”

  Space and time seemed torn and shredded between us. Ripped. An impassible barrier. My throat constricted. “What should we do?”

  He turned to me, watched me. “I don’t know. I have to think. You have to think. I’m tired and it’s late and we should sleep.”

  I knew damn well I wasn’t going to sleep. I’d be up all night worrying about it, running the past few hours through my mind over and over again—running the past months through my mind whether I wanted to or not.

  Why did love hurt so much?

  Without another word I stood up and watched him get up and brush sand off his pants. Slowly, together but apart, we walked back to the house. He paused to let me enter first and I glanced up into his eyes. Not mirrors. Not shutters. They were pools of black emptiness, suffering, hurt.

  I’d done that to him. I fought for another breath, moved through the door up the stairs and into my room without stopping. We never spoke another word to each other. Not even good night.

  When I closed my door and flipped off the lights, in the blackness, my back up against the wall, I slid down to sit on the ground and for hours, long after I had any feeling left in my legs and butt, I sat and stared. And thought.

  And felt. And ached.

  And then went numb.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Adam

  I was up all night. I didn’t even try to sleep. Part of it was spent pacing in my office, another part on my laptop in bed—despite Emilia’s efforts to break me of that habit. At one point I found myself typing out exactly what I wanted to say to her. Despite the emotionally painful confrontation on the beach the night before, there were plenty of logical facts and reasons for deciding on how to proceed. I agonized over them. We were both burying ourselves under mounds of grief and guilt and pretending we could make it go away without having to deal with it.

  We were both good at doing that.

  I didn’t want my words to be delivered from some impersonal email so I instead memorized the main points of what I wanted to get across and called it even. At six a.m. I changed into my shorts and running shoes and went down to work out in the exercise room.

  I’d already run ten kilometers on the treadmill and was getting a drink before going back to do some weights when Emilia came down for breakfast. She was fully dressed in jeans and T-shirt, a bandana tied around her head. And she was pale, drawn, with dark circles under her eyes.

  She’d slept about as well as I had, apparently.

  I was refilling my water bottle when she came to stand beside me at the fridge. I took a deep breath and said, “Good morning.”

  A faint smile ghosted her lips before vanishing. “Hey.”

  “I’d ask how you’re feeling but… well, I think I already know.”

  She looked into my eyes then. “Yeah. Best not to ask that.”

  I screwed the top back on my water bottle and turned from her when her hand darted out to stop me. “Can we talk now? Please?”

  I froze and turned back to her, my insides constricting. I hadn’t wanted to do this now. I’d wanted to wait a little while, until lunch maybe, or the afternoon. Because I knew exactly what I wanted to say to her but I wasn’t ready for how she was going to take it. I’d need a few more hours to get the courage up for breaking her heart.

  Despite that thought, I said, “Sure.”

  I moved to the kitchen table and sat down and she sank into a chair across from me. I set my water bottle aside.

  “That was a pretty gigantic can of worms we opened last night,” she began.

  I fell back against my seat, watching her carefully. “Yes.”

  She stared at her laced her hands on the table in front of her. “And I’ve been up all night trying to think my way through it. I think between the two of us, there’s a lot of brainpower here, and I know there has to be a way through this for us.”

  I envied her that hope. Because I just didn’t feel it. I studied her delicate, feminine features, the way she fidgeted with the woodwork on the table, tracing the pattern with her finger, the way she bounced one knee up and down.

  The love. That pure, strong, unquestionable emotion. It was there, like always, but dampened, muted. Drowned out by a howling ocean of pain.

  Before I let her travel any further down that road of hope, I knew I had to get this out quickly, like the proverbial ripping off a bandage. I swallowed. “Emilia…”

  Her eyes shot to mine and I saw the fear there. She knew and she was trying to avoid the inevitable.

  She shook where she sat. “Please don’t say it…” she murmured.

  I said it anyway—could barely get it out, but I said it. “We need to be apart for a while.”

  She inhaled and the noise that came from the back of her throat sounded like a sob. She sat back as if I’d slapped her. She took in another long breath, as if it might be her last and shook her head. Her fist closed on the tabletop and her
features flushed.

  “You don’t get to do this, Adam. You don’t get to give up.”

  “I’m not giving up—”

  “Bullshit!” she said, standing up so fast the chair behind her scraped across the floor. “This is bullshit—” Her fist pounded on the table. “After what I did for you—” Her voice cut off again in a strangled sob.

  I sat, fighting the emotion rising up, clenching my own fist at my side, willing myself to calm down when I wanted to stand up and start shouting, too.

  “Sit down,” I said quietly.

  She folded her arms across her chest and didn’t move. Our gazes met and the betrayal I saw there—it sucked all of the fight right out of me. I pulled my eyes away, leaned forward, put my head in my hand.

  “Did you just hear yourself?” I said, my own voice shaking with emotion. “After what you did—you think you did it for me, for your mom, for your friends. Because somewhere inside of you, you can’t let yourself believe are worth putting yourself first for your own sake.”

  Emilia turned for a moment, her back to me, then reached out for the chair, and instead of pulling it back to the table so she could sit down, she pushed it over. It clattered across the stone floor and she had her face in her hands.

  “This fucking sucks!” she said, and then, with a kick that might have done more damage to her than the chair had she connected with more than a glancing blow, she lashed out again. “So now…I get to live—hooray!” She threw her arms up in a mock cheer but her eyes and cheeks were drenched with tears. “But I don’t have you. And I don’t have a baby.”

  “Emilia—”

  “No, you don’t understand.”

  I swallowed. “You’re right. I don’t.”

  Our eyes locked and the minutes stretched out into what felt like an eternity when I couldn’t breathe. “You need help. I can’t help you. And you are incapable of asking for help. Therefore, this situation is impossible.”

  “What about you?” she hissed. “Is everything so perfect in there?” She pointed at my head.

  “No, it’s pretty fucked up in here, too.”

  Then she really started to sob, so much that she couldn’t even stand up straight. She doubled over as if in physical agony and seemed to be gasping for breath. I was worried she was going to lose her balance and fall over.

  I shot out of my chair and went to her, pulling her into my arms. “Breathe,” I said.

  But she was gasping so quickly that I thought she might pass out, her face buried in her closed fists. On instinct, I tightened my hold around her and miraculously she almost immediately calmed down. Her breaths came at a more measured pace and her sobs slowed until, minutes later, there was just congested breathing punctuated with a quiet whimper. My shirt was now drenched with her tears.

  Finally she spoke, her face pressed against my shoulder. “I can’t believe that it ends like this. Is that life’s way of playing a sick, cruel joke?”

  “It’s not the end, Mia,” I said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just…time…time we need to take to get our shit together.”

  “Why can’t we do that together?”

  “Because we’re both pretty messed up in our heads right now. I think we have to work on ourselves first.”

  Another period of silence and then she stiffened in my arms, gently pulled away. I let my arms fall slack and she took a step back. Yanking off her bandana, she mopped her face with it, avoiding my eyes.

  She cleared her throat and when she spoke, her voice was calm. “How long?”

  I took a deep breath. “I think you should go home to Anza. Spend some time with your mom before her wedding…maybe go talk to your old therapist.”

  “And you’ll stay here and work? How will that be working on things?”

  “I haven’t thought all that through yet, but I have some ideas.”

  I met her gaze and wished I hadn’t. Her eyes were stricken, haunted. I wanted to abandon this plan. I was hurting her. Too much.

  “And then what?” she asked.

  “There’s the wedding in June. We’ll see each other then.”

  “That’s two months from now,” she rasped. “You honestly think that the best way for us to communicate with each other about our issues is to…not see each other?”

  “Emilia, we’ve been put through a lot of shit in a short period of time. We need to try to heal from it.”

  She shook her head. “I hope to God you know what you are doing, Adam, because I think this is a really bad idea.” Then she pressed her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes as if to will the tears to stop.

  Mine were minutes away from starting. But I had to show her the brave face—what I definitely wasn’t feeling—that I was confident this was a good idea.

  I cleared my throat. “I think it will be good…for both of us. I couldn’t let you go, before…when you wanted space. I kept trying to force the issue and I made things worse with us. I think I’ve learned now…”

  She sucked in a painful breath but didn’t speak until she finally stuffed her bandana in her pocket and straightened. “I’ll go pack, then. I need to get my car back from Kat.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t drive there today…in this condition.”

  She turned to me, her eyes clear but full of pain. “It will be a lot easier for me to drive than it will be for me to stay here another night like this.

  I frowned, running my hand across the morning beard on my jaw. “Okay. Then at least take the Tesla. I want you in a safe car. I’ve been driving the Porsche everywhere, anyway.”

  She turned and left on shaky legs. I watched her go, running a hand over my face.

  This was so hard. I wanted her more than anything. I wanted her here, in my life, by my side, but we were both so wounded I had no idea how we could do that until we healed. Until we figured out where our heads were—where our hearts were.

  I loved her with everything that was in me.

  But sometimes love just wasn’t enough.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Mia

  Full circle. That’s what this was. Eleven months ago, I’d made this same drive with an injured heart and emotions like tropical storms swirling inside me. And here I was back where I was then, making this same drive. Like my life was on some kind of sick, endlessly repeating loop.

  Only this time, I’d left my heart behind. Battle-wounded and bloody and left for dead. I fought fresh tears every stretch of that two-hour drive until…until I was about fifteen minutes from pulling into the driveway of the ranch. Passing through the old familiar sights of town—the convenience store on the corner, the little rustic café where I hung out sometimes, the small high school, some of my old friends’ houses. A weird sort of peace came over me. I had no idea what it meant. Just that I hoped it would be okay. That I still had any hope at all inside me was a miracle.

  Mom greeted me with concern in her eyes, pulling me into her tight hug. When I’d called her and told her I was coming to stay for a while, I hadn’t given her details. But I’m sure she’d concluded a lot.

  “I’m glad you’re here, baby.”

  I wished I could say the same. I had no idea what I’d accomplish here for the next eight weeks. Going back to Anza was going backwards, I’d once told Heath. But sometimes no matter how old a person got, they needed their mom. And thank God she was here.

  “Mom,” I said, pulling back from her and looking her in the eyes. I’m sure she could see from the swelling in mine that I’d been crying—a lot. “I want you to know that I’m so completely happy for you and Peter. And—whatever happens between me and Adam won’t change that.”

  She nodded, taking my bag off my shoulder and turned to take it into the family wing of our Bed-and-Breakfast home. “You don’t have to talk to me about this at all. But as far as I’m concerned, you are here to heal your body and your heart.”

  She turned to me and smiled, putting a hand to my head. �
�Your hair is growing back! It’s coming in darker than it was before.”

  I put a self-conscious hand to the fuzz on my head.

  “You’re going to have respectable coverage by the time the wedding rolls around.”

  “Yeah? It grows that fast?”

  She grinned. “Yeah. It will be back in no time. Thick and glossy. And the rest of your body will bounce back, too. You’ll see. I’m on a mission to fatten you up.”

  “Not sure I feel much like eating these days, even if I’m not nauseous anymore.”

  “Well, you have no choice in the matter. We need to put some weight back on these bones. And I’m fixing your favorite stuff every day. I just made a whole fresh batch of baklava. We’re healing body and heart. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  Mom left me and I immediately went to my desk, rifled through my drawers and found an old blank notebook that I’d been saving until I had something important enough to write in it because it was just so pretty. It had an imprint of illuminations from the medieval Book of Kells, with Celtic knotwork design and gold embossing. I ran a hand over the cover and pulled it open to gaze at the creamy blank pages within.

  Without realizing what I was doing, I grabbed a pen and began writing. Those first few entries might have contained more than a little anger. There might have been smudges staining the pages with my tears. But I began to feel better because I had my own place to let it all out.

  I wrote in it every day.

  And I went to see Dr. Marbrow, my psychotherapist. I was determined to do this thing. I was determined that when I saw him again, I would be healthy enough in body, mind and spirit to look him in the eye and tell him how much I wanted him. How much I needed him in my life and to hope that he felt the same way.

  So with that goal to fuel my courage, I faced my demons.

  ***

  After some weeks in Anza, Heath and Kat came up to spend a long weekend with me. I think Heath was really worried about me because he kept giving me that look over dinner—homemade gyros and fresh Caesar salad from Mom’s garden. Of all the delicious things my mom made, this dish was his favorite, but he barely paid attention to it.