Buried Castles

by Monica Alexander

  “Us,” he said, as I yanked open the door to Starbucks.

  The wonderfully strong coffee aroma hit me, and I inhaled deeply. No matter how bad I was feeling or how pissed off I was because my ex-boyfriend was stalking me, that smell somehow made everything better. There was only one other smell in the world that made me feel better than coffee, but I knew it could never be replicated.

  “There is no us, Ben,” I said, turning to face him.

  His gaze drifted to my nose ring for a brief second before drifting back to my eyes. After being forced to remove my diamond stud during Rush Week, I’d put the ring in, if for no other reason than to make a statement. I’d considered adding purple streaks to my hair or something more radical, but I was afraid the purple might not come out of my light blond hair, and then I’d really regret it.

  “I want there to be an us,” he said, as he nodded to a few football players he knew who were walking out with their drinks. The look on his face said he didn’t want to be bothered. He was on a mission. He turned back to me. “I love you.”

  “Ben, stop it,” I said, stepping forward in line.

  “What can I get for you today?” asked the cheerful barista. I noticed the artwork on the inside of her wrist as she leaned on the counter, her hands resting backward on the edge. She had a series of small flowers in all different colors that grouped together looked like a garden. It was actually really pretty – not that I was considering getting inked, but I could admire tattoos on others.

  “She’ll have a tall, non-fat caramel latte,” Ben said, stepping up next to me. “And I’ll have a Pike Place coffee – black.”

  I opened my mouth to protest as he pulled out his debit card, but he just waved me off.

  “I buy, you spend ten minutes talking to me. Deal?”

  “Will you go away after that?” I asked, only half-serious. I felt kind of bad for him.

  He grinned at me. “Yes.”

  We settled into two cushy chairs near the window, and neither of us said anything for a few minutes.

  “Em,” he finally said, and I looked up at him. “I’m not delusional. I know you don’t want to be together, and that sucks, but at the end of the day, I just miss you.”

  “I miss you too,” I said grudgingly. It was true. “But that doesn’t mean I want to get back together.”

  “I know,” he said, and I knew a part of him was hoping I’d change my mind all of a sudden. His gaze drifted out over the coffee shop, fixated on some point in the distance.

  “So,” I prompted, wondering what he’d wanted to talk about if he knew we weren’t going to get back together.

  “Can we be friends?” he asked tentatively, his gaze finally moving back to me. He was actually nervous.

  I smiled a friendly, ‘I’ve known you for five years and feel bad that I broke your heart’ smile, hoping it would ease some of the tension that was suddenly between us. “Of course.”

  Ben returned my smile. “Good,” he said sounding relieved as he took the first sip of his coffee since we’d sat down.

  I looked up and saw Taryn Ellison, one of my good friends in Gamma Pi, come in. She looked over at me in confusion when she noticed Ben sitting next to me. I shook my head a few times and returned my focus to Ben who’d started talking non-stop about football and the upcoming game they had, and how we were playing Clemson, and how they were supposed to be pretty good this year. I didn’t think he was going to let me get a word in, but I also wasn’t quite sure how to be friends with my ex, so letting him do all the talking was probably best.

  Suddenly he looked down at his watch. “Shit, I need to go,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’m supposed to be in my anthropology class, but I saw you and I wanted to talk, so I figured I’d skip the first few minutes, but if I miss too much of class, the professor will tell coach, and he won’t let me start this weekend.”

  The first game of the season was on Saturday, and as one of the starting wide receivers, who was also a captain, Ben couldn’t miss any part of it.

  Before he left, he reached down and hugged me, catching me off-guard. “I’m glad we’re going to be friends,” he said. “Let’s hang out soon.”

  “Okay,” I said, realizing it was the first thing I’d said since I’d agreed to be friends with him.

  “I thought you guys broke up,” Taryn asked me as she sat down in the chair Ben had vacated with her Venti Frappuchino a few minutes after he left for class.

  Taryn and I had been friends since freshman year, and we took a lot of the same classes since we were both PR majors. She was a cool and independent and fun, and she’d also been one of the few girls to voice her opinion that we were all being a little bitchy and elitist during Rush Week. I appreciated her for that. Of course, she’d been quickly shut down by Brynn, but hey, at least she’d said something. I hadn’t even had the guts to do that much.

  I watched her weave her long, loose blond curls into a bun at the base of her neck as she waited for me to respond.

  “We did break up,” I said, “but he wants to be friends.”

  “You do know he’s still in love with you, right?” she asked, taking a big sip through her straw.

  I nodded. “Yeah, he told me. He wants to get back together, but I’m not interested.”

  “What happened between you guys?” she asked, and it was the first time anyone had asked me.

  Most of the time I got a mix of responses when I told people Ben and I weren’t together anymore. It was anything from, ‘Oh my God! I can’t believe it! I thought you’d be together forever,’ to ‘Oh, Em. Are you okay?’ to, ‘He’s so hot! I can’t believe you broke up with him! Um, is he seeing anyone now?’ That last statement usually earned the asker a glare from me. It didn’t matter if I had broken up with Ben, I didn’t want him dating any of my friends.

  I took a deep breath, wondering how it would sound to tell the story out loud. Rachel and Chase were the only people who knew. I hadn’t even told my sister, Keely, even though she’d begged me for details on more than one occasion.

  “I actually met someone this summer,” I said, my heart squeezing just a bit as I thought about Zack. It had been nearly four weeks since I’d last seen him, and I still wasn’t anywhere near over him. I kept waiting for my feelings to diminish, but they never did. It was frustrating.

  Taryn raised her eyebrows. “You did?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he was this really great, fun, gorgeous guy who completely stole my heart, and I ended things with Ben so I could be with him.”

  “What happened with the guy?” she asked, knowing I was currently single, so I obviously still wasn’t with Zack. “He broke your heart, didn’t he?”

  “How do you know that?” I asked defensively, shifting in my chair so I was sitting up a little straighter.

  “Because no one looks as depressed as you do if their break-up was amicable,” she said simply, and I wondered just how transparent my feelings were.

  I nodded, dropping my head, afraid the tears pricking the backs of my eyes would fill them and spill over.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Taryn said, putting her arms around me.

  I hugged her back, steeling myself to pull back on my emotions. I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry. And when I pulled back, I was eighty-five percent sure I was okay – for the moment, at least.

  I looked down at my watch and back up at Taryn. “We have about thirty minutes before class. Do you want to go over the notes for the quiz?”

  She nodded and smiled sympathetically at me, and I decided I hated that look. I didn’t want her sympathy or anyone else’s. It was bad enough I had a broken heart. I didn’t need everyone thinking I was pathetic.

  Chapter Seven

  Zack

  “Dude, get up. It’s already noon,” Leo said, barging into my room and opening the blinds like an insensitive asshole.

  “Fuck off,” I said, rolling over and pulling the pillow over my head. The light was making it throb.

&nbs
p; “Jen’s called like five times already today,” he said.

  “I don’t want to talk to her,” I growled. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. “Tell her to stop calling.”

  “Just call her back,” he insisted, and I pulled the pillow tighter, trying to muffle his grating voice. “She’s worried about you.”

  “She can fuck off too,” I said, lifting the pillow just enough so that he would hear me. “Now get out of my room.”

  Leo paused for a minute, no doubt reeling from what I’d just said. “You honestly can’t mean that,” he said in complete disbelief.

  I didn’t mean it, but I felt like shit and was honestly still drunk from the night before. I wasn’t in my right mind. I loved Jen. I just didn’t want to talk to her.

  “Zack, she’s just worried about you. We all are,” a softer voice said.

  “When did you get here, Reagan?” I asked, annoyed that my family was slowly launching an assault, one by one. I knew Molly would be the next one to arrive.

  “This morning,” she said, as she put her hand on my back. I shrugged it off.

  “Great,” I grumbled.

  “I’ll go make you some coffee,” she said cheerfully, getting up from the bed, not even fazed by my less than appreciative treatment of her.

  Why couldn’t my family just take a hint? I wanted to be ALONE! I did not want them around, watching me and worrying and wondering when I was going to snap out of it, because it wasn’t going to be anytime soon. I was staying like this until I felt good and goddam ready to stop. I felt like wallowing in my misery, and I was going to do just that. Me, a bottle of my good buddy Jack, and a few cartons of cigarettes were all I needed.

  Noise from the living room grabbed my attention for a moment, but I dismissed it, not really caring what was going on out there. It was probably one of my mother’s friends dropping off another casserole. The freezer was already full, but these women wouldn’t stop cooking. Didn’t they know that I didn’t give a shit about food? Couldn’t they take the hint that I didn’t want visitors who were just going to tell me how sorry they were and remind me again what had happened? I wanted to forget.

  “ENOUGH!” someone screamed as the door to my bedroom was thrown open.

  Before I knew what was happening, the pillow was yanked off of my head and light bore into my eyes, making them burn. I squeezed them tighter.

  “Jesu–” I started to say but I couldn’t get the words out before a bucket of ice water was dumped over my head, causing me leap and stumble out of bed screaming obscenities.

  “Shit,” Leo hissed from the corner of the room, so I knew it wasn’t him who’d doused me.

  Without looking, mostly because my eyes wouldn’t quite focus, I knew exactly who’d done it.

  “What the fuck, Jen?” I asked, as I flipped my saturated hair out of my eyes and glared at her, standing by my bed, arms crossed, looking like she wanted to throttle me.

  “Enough!” she said again, throwing the metal beach pail I used as a request bucket when I played at Phil’s on the ground with enough force to bend the rim. It clattered noisily as it banged against the hardwood floor for a few minutes before rolling to a stop next to the bed.

  I fought the urge to cover my ears, but I was too pissed to move.

  “What is the big idea?” I asked, yanking my soaking wet t-shirt over my head and throwing it in the general vicinity of my dirty clothes basket. I stood there facing her in just my boxers as water dripped from my hair onto my shoulders, running down my back in rivulets.

  “I figured you needed a shower,” she said haughtily. “You smell.”

  “Screw you,” I said, for lack of anything cleverer in that moment.

  “No, Zack. Screw you,” she said, as she moved to stand within a foot of me, her finger poking my bare chest hard. “You selfish, arrogant, self-centered, asshole! You think just because you lost someone important to you that you can hole up in here and forget about everyone else in your life? Well not anymore!”

  “Excuse me for mourning the loss of my mother, Jen!” I screamed back at her, grabbing her finger and yanking it off my chest.

  She just glared at me. “Oh give me a break. You’re not mourning shit. The only thing you’re doing is burying your feelings in bottle after bottle of Jack Daniels. Real mature. Do you think for one second that Lynne would think that was okay, that she would find that response to her death acceptable? No! She wouldn’t. She would tell you to be sad when you needed to be but to remember the good times you had with her. She would NOT want you lose sight of every good thing you have going for you.”

  I laughed, a short non-humorous laugh. “I don’t have shit going for me,” I said, moving to sit on the end of the bed – the only part of it that wasn’t wet.

  I let my head fall into my hands. My heart was beating a steady rhythm in my ears, giving me a headache that was starting to make me nauseous.

  “Zack Easton, that is the only time I will EVER let you get away with saying that.”

  “It’s true,” I said, reaching to my desk for my pack of cigarettes and lighting one with my left hand. “I’m a fucking bartender at a bar that only gets busy three months out of the year. My life’s fucking great.”

  Jen walked over to stand in front of me, reeled back and slapped me as hard as she could across my face. My head jerked back, and my hand instantly went to my jaw. Before I could respond, she grabbed something from my desk and shoved it in my face, grabbing my jaw, so I couldn’t look away.

  “Look at it,” she growled, and I forced my eyes to see what she’d placed in front of me. It was a picture of my family at my graduation from Duke. My mom looked so happy in that picture. She was smiling at me like she couldn’t have been more proud. “That is your reason for living – these people right here. Because she wouldn’t want you be like this, and I would never want her to see you like this.”

  She pointed at someone else in the picture and my heart squeezed in my chest. I wouldn’t want her to see me like this either.

  “I like the you in that picture a lot better,” I said sarcastically, looking up at Jen. In the picture, she was smiling too. The girl standing in front of me now was acting more like a crazy stalker or serial killer. She wasn’t messing around.

  “Zack, I’m not kidding,” she said. “You know I love you, but I will not hesitate to put some distance between us. Do you understand?”

  Those were the words I needed to hear. They were what finally hit home for me, and she’d saved them for last because she knew it too.

  I nodded. “I hear you,” I said definitively, slumping my shoulders at the idea of what she was insinuating. I couldn’t do distance. I’d already had enough. I wouldn’t do it again.

  “Good,” she said firmly. “Now get in the shower, brush your teeth, shave, and put on some clean clothes. I’m going to make you something to eat, and it will not come with a side of Jack Daniels. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Jen, I get it,” I said curtly, grabbing my towel off the back of my desk chair.

  ***

  “Here,” Jen said, setting a tray on the table in front of me.

  When I’d gotten out of the shower, she’d ordered me outside for some fresh air, and I’d settled in at the table on the deck. She’d wiped it down and emptied my ashtray. I also noticed on my way out of the house that she’d cleaned up. Three previously full bottles of liquor sat on the kitchen counter, their contents no doubt having gone down the sink. It seemed my wallowing days were over.

  “You made me mac and cheese with little hot dogs?” I asked, looking down at the plate of food I’d never be able to finish. She must have cooked two boxes of macaroni and cheese and put in six hot dogs.

  “It’s your favorite,” she said simply, proving how well she knew me.

  “Because my mom used to make it for me when I was a kid,” I said, pushing the food around, but not eating any of it.

  “I know,” she said, and she winked at me. It was the first kind gestu
re she’d made since she’d arrived.

  I was suddenly overcome with emotion as my shoulders slumped, and I couldn’t help the tears that started to fall. It was exactly what I’d been trying to avoid and why I’d been numbing my senses. I didn’t want to feel this shitty and miss her as much as I did. Her presence was all over the house, a constant reminder of how things had literally stopped mid-life.

  Jen was by my side in an instant, her arms around me, and I let her hold me until I stopped crying.

  “I miss her so much,” I said, swiping at my eyes with the backs of my hands.

  It was only the second time in my life I’d ever cried in front of Jen, and it felt strange, almost emasculating or exposing. I didn’t like it, but I told myself that we’d seen each other through more than either of us ever anticipated over the last year and a half, and I appreciated that she wasn’t judging me for breaking down in front of her. She was just being a friend, just like I had been when she’d come to me in a similar state, feeling like she’d hit rock bottom. It was almost as if she was now reciprocating, most likely because she knew how I felt in that moment better than anyone else.

  “I miss her too,” she said, kneeling next to my chair. “She was an amazing woman.”

  I just nodded, not able to do more than agree with her.

  “And she’d want you to eat. You look like you’ve lost fifteen pounds since she went into the hospital. She’d hate that.”

  She would. Jen was right. If my mother was there, she’d have yelled at me for not taking better care of myself – for not eating. So I picked up my fork and forced myself to eat a few bites, even though it tasted like cardboard.

  “You’re such a mom,” I teased, pushing back the raw feeling of loss. Jen rolled her eyes, as she settled into the chair across from me.

  “It comes with the job. I can’t help it. I mother everyone now.”