by Jessie Lane
Now, as I slowly scrubbed myself down to get ready for the party, I feared seeing the blonde-haired girl from across the street as much as I longed to. She was both my greatest strength and my greatest weakness. Thoughts and dreams of Gin had kept me sane while I was on the front line, battling terrorists. Knowing I couldn’t have her now because I wasn’t the sort of man she deserved was enough to gut me raw, leave me feeling hollow. The reality had often caused me to prefer feeling numb than feel anything at all.
I was pulled from my thoughts when I heard my mom shout Ginny’s name from somewhere in the house, causing me to turn my head and find her watching me through the cracked door. The little shit had been watching me while I was in the shower!
She scurried away before I could say anything, but that didn’t keep me from getting both hard as a rock and annoyed that she had been spying on me.
After doing some algebra in my head while I willed my dick to deflate, I dried off and got dressed. I had every intention of tracking her down and chewing her out for spying on me when it happened.
It being the moment my life changed, the moment I realized I was going to live in perpetual hell forever.
That was because, when I laid eyes on Ginny standing in the backyard with our family and friends, I forgot how to breathe, forgot how to form complete sentences. Even my heart forgot what it was supposed to do for a few seconds, skipping a beat.
During my time away, she had grown from that skinny, petite, pretty girl into a curvy knockout. She had finally blossomed into the woman I’d spent years waiting for. She was a young woman who was on the verge of being ready for a white picket fence and forever, two things I could no longer give her.
While I was standing there like a stupefied idiot, my mom pointed in my direction from across our backyard, and Gin followed the movement to see me staring at her. A rosy blush spread over her creamy pale skin, and then she ducked her head timidly to stare at the ground.
It took everything I had not to gawk at her. That innocent quality about her had the caveman in me coming to life. I wanted to throw her over my shoulder, cart her off to a nice hotel room, and debauch her in so many ways she could never think of another man. I wanted to put a ring on her finger and make her promise to be mine. I wanted to take that innocence of hers and fucking own it.
I couldn’t do it, though.
I mentally kicked my own ass and forced a blank look onto my face. It didn’t matter how gorgeous she had become; she was off limits now more than ever.
In the two years I had been gone, I had seen things that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I had walked by burning buildings with dead bodies littered in the streets of Afghanistan; watched good men in my unit fall down and not get back up; written letters to those men’s wives or girlfriends, giving my condolences. Those experiences had taught me a valuable lesson: I had nothing except more of that ahead of me, and men like me shouldn’t settle down.
It wasn’t fair to the women and children left behind when we got our ass blown up or our head shot off by the enemy. Therefore, I ignored the strange looks from my brothers by the pool at my strangled silence. I ignored whatever my dad had said to me from where he was cooking food on the grill. I ignored all of them so I could walk back into the house, away from everyone—especially Ginny—to go to the kitchen for a breather. I needed space between the two of us before I gave into my primitive urges, dooming a good woman to a possible life of heartache.
Going to the refrigerator, I opened it, bent over, and was swiping a beer when I felt someone behind me.
“Lucas,” I heard her soft voice call.
Steeling myself against all sweetness that was Ginny, I turned, wearing that blank look on my face, only to have her lips cover my own in a sneak attack. It was the first attack I had never seen coming and probably the one most detrimental to my sanity.
Her tongue swiped the seam of my lips, crumbling my resistance in an instant. I wrapped my free hand around her neck and plundered her mouth. I had never tasted anything or anyone like her. Like cinnamon and sugar, she was a small hint of spice with a whole lot of sweet.
I was milliseconds from letting my inner savage beast free to have her when she grabbed my arm as she moaned into my mouth. Her little nails pricked my skin through my shirt, and the small pain brought me back to my senses.
Pushing her away to break the contact, I noticed her free hand held a rather large, flat, rectangle wrapped box in shiny blue paper with a white bow. Her cheeks flushed, and her voice was damn near a Marilyn Monroe sultry purr when she murmured, “Happy Birthday, Lucas.”
The hope in her eyes brought it all back to me—why I couldn’t have this, us. God, what I wouldn’t give to have that bit of sweet and spice in my life for the rest of my days. She deserved better than that, though. She deserved a man with a safe job that had him coming home every day after his nine-to-five shift, someone pure and whole who could give her the white picket fence and kids.
And that person wasn’t me.
The man I was couldn’t stand the thought of sullying someone as pure as Ginny with the death and harsh reality that now surrounded me. More than likely, my ass would die in some war zone, and then that hope would die. I couldn’t be selfish by doing that to her.
Therefore, I did what I had to do: I acted like an asshole.
“First, you spy on me while I’m in the shower and now this? Damn, how desperate are you to have someone pop your cherry? You should warn people before you stick your tongue down their throats, Gin. That was like kissing my fucking sister. Jesus, I need to go rinse my mouth out now.”
Her eyes watered up, and the first tear fell as I pushed past her, roughly shoving her aside as I made my way toward my bathroom. Before I closed the door, I heard my mom shout her name in a concerned voice as the door to our house slammed.
Regret and anger crashed through me. I wanted to punch the wall, destroy something as much as I had just destroyed both Ginny and me with my lies. I couldn’t. If I started putting holes in the walls, my family would know something was up, and I didn’t need them butting into my life.
Walking over to the sink, I turned on the cold water and splashed my face. It didn’t do a damn thing to help me, and that only pissed me off more.
Overwhelmed with anger at myself, I punched the only thing I could in the bathroom without breaking it—the sink.
My knuckles slammed into the unforgiving porcelain several times before I noticed the red I was leaving behind. I had split my knuckles open. Fucking fantastic.
Growling in frustration at myself, I reached out to open the medicine cabinet doors and grab the rubbing alcohol and bandages but stopped when I caught my reflection and cringed. Was the hateful look that I had on my face now what I had shown Ginny when I’d spewed all those nasty words? If that were what I had looked like, there was no way to tell her I didn’t hate her; I hated myself.
I wasn’t going to be able to look myself in the mirror for a fucking month after this.
Ignoring the mirror completely, I gathered the supplies I needed from the medicine cabinet then cleaned and bandaged my knuckles. Not feeling up to being around my family anymore, I stalked to my bedroom and slammed the door shut, locking it.
I ignored my mother’s concerned voice when she knocked on my door thirty minutes later.
I ignored my father’s stern voice when he called out to me through my door an hour after that.
I even somehow ignored my sister’s raging shouts as she banged on the door so hard and for so long that I thought she might knock it down two hours later.
What I couldn’t ignore was the need to get rip-roaring drunk later that night, long after I had listened to everybody go to bed.
As a result, I quietly unlocked my door and went down to the kitchen to get a glass of ice and grab my dad’s bottle of whiskey.
When I went back to my room, it was to find the present Ginny had held in her hands with a note taped to the top of it. I glanced up and down
the hall, looking for whoever might have delivered it to my room, but I didn’t hear or see anything except the dark silence of the night.
Closing and locking my door again, I slowly walked toward the box on my bed as if it were a bomb about to go off at any minute. In a way, it was a bomb, one I just knew was going to destroy my heart. Nevertheless, I had to see what was in it since it was laid before me like some sort of self-inflicted punishment I more than deserved.
Pulling the note off the top, I could see my sister’s angry scrawl yet couldn’t read the words until I reached over and turned on my bedside lamp. Once the light was on and I started reading, I sort of wished I had let myself stay in the dark.
You don’t deserve her, asshole. - Olivia
They said the truth hurt, and that note was proof whoever had coined that phrase was right.
Just as my sister’s note said, I absolutely did not deserve Ginny. That was why the reality of my situation and what I had done to her today hurt worse than any form of torture I could ever endure.
Right then, I felt like I could cut out my own heart with a rusty blade. What could possibly hurt more than that?
Seconds later, I wished I had never asked myself that question as I sat with Ginny’s birthday present to me in my hands.
In a black wooden frame with a gray mat, one of the most beautiful things I had ever laid eyes on besides my Ginny was displayed: an eight-by-ten, full-color drawing so detailed and vibrant it would be seared into my mind forever.
In profile, Gin and I stood on the sidewalk in front of each of our houses, staring at each other from across the street. She had captured the way our street, the trees, and neighborhood would look from that angle flawlessly.
She had drawn me in the jeans and gray Army T-shirt I had worn the last time I had been home. She had drawn herself in a pair of torn jeans, a white T-shirt, and her favorite black converse tennis shoes that she had worn forever. Looking at this, I could see the deliberateness of each line, the purpose of each piece of the pseudo portrait.
It was a representation of so many things to us: home, our lives growing up, the way the two of us seemed meant to be, and yet there we stood on the sidelines, apart. It was the perfect little piece of paper to represent my perpetual hell in agonizing detail.
If the picture itself weren’t enough to bring me to my knees, then the note in the corner was.
A piece of home for you to take wherever you go.
I’ll be waiting.
Love, Ginny
Classic Gin: gorgeous, loving, and thoughtful, giving me something to remind me of home because she knew how much it would mean to me.
My fingers traced the lines that made up her form on the page, and I felt something in me wither and die.
My angel in white with worn chucks. Sweet innocence ready to be plucked by a man’s hands. Only, those hands would never be mine.
Ginny
Eighteen Years Old
My hand was frozen from holding the pint of chocolate ice cream I had almost demolished. There was a time when I had sworn ice cream could cure anything, but today had proven that wrong. Nothing could cure today. Absolutely nothing.
After all of these years, with just a few words from the boy I had loved almost my entire life, I knew all hope was gone.
Lucas Young would never care for me the way I cared for him.
Perhaps I would always be his little sister’s best friend or, as he had yelled at me today, like a sister. Either way, I would never be the thing I wanted most: his.
I put down my ice cream and grabbed the heart-shaped locket around my neck. I should take it off, put it up in my jewelry box, and never look at it again. Even as my mind screamed at me to do more than that—I should tear the damn thing off and throw it in the trash—I couldn’t seem to make my hands move.
How pathetic was I?
There I sat in the middle of the night, the lights off and staring at the darkened window of Lucas’s room across the street, my heart ripped in two from his cruel words, yet I couldn’t take off his necklace. How much battering and bruising could a heart take before it finally broke irreparably?
Apparently, my stupid heart wanted to find out.
Crawling off the floor and into my bed, I curled into a ball.
When I had been a little girl, I had curled into a ball to protect myself from an alcoholic father who would lose his temper and take his frustrations out on me and my mother physically. Now I was curling into a ball to try to protect what was left of my emotions.
The funny thing was that I swore the verbal beating I had taken from Lucas was ten times worse than any physical pain my father had ever caused. Who knew words could hurt so much?
I closed my eyes, and Lucas’s angry face came into focus. As my mind played back the incident for what felt like the hundredth time, I picked up on two things I hadn’t noticed before.
First, Lucas had kissed me back. Not timidly, either, but with a ferocity that had surprised and almost scared me. If kissing me were so awful, why had he kissed me back like that?
Secondly, there had been something wrong with his eyes as he had raged at me. Something more than anger had been there. A hint of sadness? Bleakness, even? It was hard to say for sure, but I suddenly realized something had happened to the boy I loved while he had been gone these past two years.
He wasn’t the same person he had been when he had given me the locket. Something inside of Lucas Young had died, and I wasn’t sure I could bring it back to life. Therefore, I was going to do the only thing I could do—: give Lucas space.
People said, if you loved something, set it free, and what you loved would return to you. I didn’t know if Lucas would ever return to me as the man he was before, but I loved him enough to set him free.
Still, I was going to keep the only piece of him I could possibly keep now: the heart-shaped locket. Then, one day, perhaps when I was stronger, I would take off his necklace and store it away in a box in the back of my closet where it would inevitably be lost. Until then, I would have to find a way to move on, although a piece of my shattered heart tried to tell me it wasn’t possible.
I eventually fell asleep with my hand still wrapped around my heart-shaped locket, sad that was the only piece of Lucas Young’s heart I would ever truly hold.
Chapter
9
Lucas
Twenty-Three Years Old
Due to another deployment, the next time I saw Ginny was a year and a half later. In that time, I hadn’t received one card, letter, or email from my little sister’s best friend. Mission accomplished, right?
Perhaps a little too well. I couldn’t take not hearing from Gin at all. It might be selfish on my part to want to keep in contact with her, but I couldn’t handle not knowing how she was doing.
I’d spent half my time in Afghanistan distracted, wondering about what she was doing. What she was drawing. If she had finally given up on me like I had done my best to force her to do. Imaging her with another guy was a double-edged sword. But that was what I had wanted for her, right?
The problem was, the mere idea made me want to puke my guts out, punch holes in shit, blow something up. It was irrational, and I totally didn’t give a fuck. I’d spent too much of my life taking care of the blonde-haired angel across the street to give her up completely. Maybe I couldn’t have her in the capacity that I wanted her, but I still needed her in my life in any way I could get her.
She had been dropped off at the family dinner by her boyfriend. My secret worst fear. I had no one to blame but myself, though, right? Then I had to watch as that shithead put his hands all over her while kissing her good-bye.
It had burned like a motherfucker to watch her with him, but that was my burden to bear. She was safe, seemed happy, and that was all I had ever wanted.
What bothered me that night was that she wouldn’t look me directly in the eye. She had looked over my shoulder, at my chest, but she refused to look at my face. That burned, too. I had
done that to her.
I might not be able to have her in my bed for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t stand the thought of not having her in my life. I had to fix this shit.
As a result, I cornered her in the living room when she went to go grab her forgotten cell phone off the end table while everybody else was in the kitchen.
“Gin.”
Her body froze. It was painfully obvious she would rather talk to a rattlesnake than be alone with me, making me feel like more of an ass than I already did.
After turning toward me, she stared at a spot over my shoulder and replied, “Yes, Lucas?”
Nope. I refused to talk to her if she wouldn’t look at me.
Reaching out a hand, I gripped her chin with my fingers and pulled her face until I caught her gaze. “That’s better. I want you lookin’ nowhere but me while I say this. I get why you’re gun shy around me. I was an ass last time I was here. I shouldn’t have spouted off the way I did. You caught me off guard, and I reacted badly. Call me a dick. Call me a shithead. Call me whatever you want, honey. Just get it out of your system and forgive me.”
“Forgive you?” she snapped. “Why should I forgive you when I haven’t heard an actual apology yet?”
Seeing this new, sassy side of her made me hard, but I couldn’t concentrate on that, so I apologized, instead.
“I’m sorry, Gin.”
She only looked at me skeptically.
“Seriously, honey, I mean it. I was a dick that night, and I’m sorry. My head was in a fucked up place after my first deployment, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. Forgive me now?”
Although the uncertainty faded from her eyes, I watched as a bit of curiosity replaced it. She tilted her head to the side, and I had the distinct impression she was trying to figure me out, maybe see into my head.
Who knew what she was thinking? I had given up on trying to figure out women a long time ago. All I could do was stand there and wait to see if the girl I had known for what felt like forever would give me a second chance to be in her life in some capacity.
