by Unknown
“I guess I lost yours, too,” he said, shrugging, his usually soft face turning to stone.
“You guys are totally lame,” Drew mumbled, shaking his head and walking outside. I watched him light a cigarette.
I would have told him to go fuck himself, but he was kind of right. We were acting like the other was made of powder, something that would disintegrate if we said what we really wanted to say.
I gathered myself, making words come. “You can tell your brother I’m not pathetic, just surprised. I didn’t know you’d be here or that Laura’s apparently been talking to both of you for months without telling me.” I listened to Laura breathing beside me, the kind of breathing where you’re trying not to breathe, so you can overhear the conversation next to you.
“She must have a better memory for numbers than you, I guess,” he said.
“No, she just likes talking to assholes,” I said, gazing over at Troyer with renewed death-eyes.
His face wilted. “I hope you’re only talking about my brother.” He moved so his gaze was level with mine, but I was avoiding his eyes like mine were moving targets and his were guns.
It was getting impossible to keep myself composed with him so near. I turned away from him and stared at the stupid painting on the wall behind the front desk. A canvas adorned with grassy hills and red barns, what Auburn must have looked like when it wasn’t covered in a shitload of snow.
I worked on slowing my heartbeat. Tried not to notice Ben behind me, wondering how I could turn away from him so easily, but also knowing exactly why I had to.
Fucking Ben, fucking back again.
How much would I let myself get hurt this time? How far would I open up now?
I’d been closed as tightly as a clam at Turning Pines. Slowly day-by-day, Ben’s charms, Ben’s eyes, and Ben’s touch had pried me open. Back then, it had taken the better part of thirty days.
He had two days now.
I heard the front doors of the lobby open and knew Ben had walked out to join Drew. He was giving up on me a lot easier this time. Maybe he really had lost my number.
Maybe he’d burned the shit out of it.
“Anywhere around here to eat?” Laura asked the guy checking her in at the front desk, her attempt to bring this unfolding soap opera back into normalcy.
I was using all my energy to keep my body upright. Holding the desk like it was a crutch, like I was an old person and it was a walker. Seeing Ben again brought back everything I had tried so hard to keep myself enclosed from in my brother’s dark apartment.
It came on me like a wave, like the waves we had splashed and embraced and kissed in on the coast of California when things were good. Waves meant something wonderful those two months, when we could have had no clue things would go bad.
When pretending was easier than seeing what was real.
Now they could do nothing but make me drown.
“With the storm, I’d suggest the bar and grill adjacent to the lobby,” the guy behind the counter said pointing.
“What storm?” Laura asked.
I was a Northerner, like Laura, and she should have known just like I did that the snow we drove through for six hours to get here was just a prequel to what was coming. Rawe was dead and the earth around us was frozen and, like Rawe’s body, would be buried.
“There’s a blizzard coming in. You’re not going to want to get stuck out there,” he said.
The thing was, even as a Northerner, I’d have taken it. Taken freezing to death out there over being stuck in here with Ben.
With my wave of feelings about Ben.
“I’m going to fucking kill you,” I whispered to Laura when the guy behind the desk walked away to get our room key. Killing her quickly wouldn’t be good enough. No, she’d earned me stripping her naked and tossing her out into the snow to freeze to death.
“I was prepared for that,” Laura said, not looking at me.
I knew it was for a very different reason than why I hadn’t wanted to look at Ben.
“We’re here for the next two nights whether you like it or not,” she said showing me the room key for proof. “Hopefully by the end of this weekend, it will have been worth risking my life to get you to start living yours again.”
Chapter Four
Ben
When we came back inside, Drew took his turn at the checkin desk, and I watched Cassie and Laura get onto the elevator. I’d forgotten how much taller Cassie was than Laura, almost like one of them was the reflection in a fun-house mirror. Cassie kept her head down on her furry winter boots the whole interminable time it took for the shiny silver doors to slide closed.
That was how it felt when she walked out of my life at the end of our time in California, like a door had closed, or worse, slammed. The silence following her exit was louder than anything I’d ever heard. They say silence can be deafening, and I guess that’s what they mean, because I heard her silence. It was the sound of screaming when my mouth could not.
I was almost as surprised by Cassie’s boots as Cassie might have been to see me. It was very unlike her to wear something so soft and girlie. Maybe she’d changed. Maybe they were Laura’s, or maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.
Maybe I never really had.
Our first meeting here hadn’t gone quite as badly as it could have. She didn’t scream at me, and she didn’t try to murder me, but her attempt to ignore me, her eerie calmness, was almost worse.
Cassie wasn’t ever the kind of girl to run into my arms when she saw me. Even when we were at our best, she would never do that, but I guess I’d thought she would have at least appeared like she wanted to see me, even if she was fighting desperately to keep that a secret.
Surprise, it’s the guy whose heart you broke.
That wouldn’t be a party for anyone.
“She seems nice,” Drew said, slapping my back after he was done at the desk.
She didn’t, of course, but she did seem like my Cassie—angry, vulnerable, whip-smart Cassie. She was just as beautiful as I’d remembered, only thinner and paler. Only not mine anymore.
It was exhausting to sense how angry she was, to realize I had clearly hurt her, too. My insides burned thinking of the loss of her legendary—if only because it was so rare—smile. I was breathless when I first saw a real one, unsolicited. As much a shock to her as it was to me.
I doubted I’d see one of those this weekend. I wasn’t sure I had the energy required to make her happy anymore, anyway.
“She’s just mad,” I said, looking at the closed metal elevator doors, our reflections blurry.
Drew shook his head. “I know girls and I know when they are trying not to cry,” he said, hiking his overnight bag higher on his shoulder. “She might seem like a robot on the outside, but inside she’s a quivering pile of mush.”
I couldn’t help sighing. “She’s one pissed-off robot.”
“Pissed-off is safer,” he explained. “At least pissed-off she can control.”
“That’s Cassie.” I nodded. “In control to a fault.” I envied her. I wished I could turn off my feelings so easily. Of course, I’d be able to shut them down completely once we hit the bar.
“Looks like I won’t have to worry about putting your heart back together if she keeps up the silent treatment.”
He wouldn’t. Cassie had the right idea: shove all that sappy shit right down into your gut, spin and whip and gurgle it until it becomes anger—until there was nothing else. “I’m fine,” I insisted.
“That lie seems to be working for you.” He shrugged. “So why stop now?”
“Are we going up to our room or what?” I asked, pressing the elevator button. I didn’t want to talk to him about Cassie. I didn’t want to think about Cassie. It was completely idiotic of me to have even come here. If the storm weren’t on its way, I would have told Drew to drive to Boston ASAP instead of being stuck here for the next two nights.
“Laura’s pretty cute, though,” he sa
id, ignoring my question. He had a look in his eyes I knew. A look that, before I’d met Cassie, I’d tried to emulate.
Before Cassie, Drew had convinced me being with a girl was all about conquest. After Cassie, I’d learned it was all about trust. Now that I’d lost hers and she’d lost mine, I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be about anymore.
How do you gain back trust? How can you bring yourself to trust again? What if you aren’t sure you want to?
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. That was all I needed. Considering how weird things were with Cassie now, there was no way they would be any better after Drew worked his magic on Laura. The magic that seemed like a fairy tale to the girl he used his bag of tricks on, but usually ended with a disappearing act.
“What the hell else do I have to do while I’m here?”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“Relax, little brother,” he said, smiling mischievously. “You know me, I’m gentle.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“I should be allowed to spend time with a girl here, too.”
“Your definition of ‘spend time’ and mine are very different,” I said. “Besides, I think it’s pretty obvious Cassie wants nothing to do with me.” I headed over to the opening elevator doors. And maybe I didn’t want anything to do with her, either. She hadn’t been the only one who’d been hurt. She might like to think her feelings mattered more than mine, but I’d had to spend the last three months trying to forget her, too.
He followed me inside. “Even if it were true that she hated you,” he said, clicking the button for our floor so it glowed like a red-hot heart, “it never stopped you from trying before.”
Chapter Five
Cassie
“Let’s eat,” Laura said, combing out her hair in the mirror.
I couldn’t help but flash back to our cabin at Turning Pines, the two of us getting ready in the morning just to have to deal with whatever wilderness punishment Rawe was going to dole out that day.
I guess now Laura was the one handing out punishment, because leaving the room, even just to eat, meant possibly seeing Ben again.
That was worse than anything I’d been through at Turning Pines—and I’d had body-covering poison ivy while I was there. I’d also had to spend two nights in the middle of the woods alone in a tent. Well, I was supposed to spend two nights alone, but Ben had come to rescue me.
Fucking Ben.
With Rawe gone, it seemed like Laura had decided she was going to take over as my drill sergeant. Or was she still just being my best friend? I guess in Laura’s case, they were the same.
“I’m not hungry,” I said, sitting on my bed. My arms were wrapped around me, my legs crossed underneath me like I was having a temper tantrum.
Who was I kidding? I was having a temper tantrum.
After seeing Ben, sitting this way was the only thing I had control over. My feelings for and about him could not be folded up and forced to stay stuck to the bed like I was making myself. Instead, they were bubbling up, spilling out.
Maybe I had been avoiding him all these months just so I could pretend we could still be like we had been in California again—hanging on to an openness, a chance.
Now standing face-to-face, that chance could pass for good.
“You have to eat,” Laura said, dabbing on pink lip gloss.
“Why?”
She turned to me and frowned. “I didn’t bring you to this funeral to watch you die, Cassie.”
“Oh, please, I’m not starving myself. I just don’t want to see Ben again.” There was no point hiding it from her—she knew.
But why would she have done this to me if she did?
“Like I said…” She smirked, the lip gloss she had applied clumped at the corners of her mouth.
“Your little plan isn’t going to work,” I said, my eyelids constricting like vises, the smallest slits. “You’re not getting us back together.”
“I’m not trying to,” she said, gathering her purse, “but closure can be a good thing.”
“We don’t need closure,” I said quickly. “We are closed for business, for renovations, forever.”
“It didn’t seem that way in the lobby,” she replied, her head cocked annoyingly, tilted like she couldn’t keep it straight because it was weighed down on one side from her cockiness.
“What you saw in the lobby,” I started, the words hard kernels of truth, “was me being fucking tricked by my best friend.” I paused and glared at her. “Thanks for that, by the way.”
“I had to do something,” she said, sitting next to me on the bed.
“No, you didn’t.” I looked away, hiding my lie. I focused on the chocolate brown of the mini-fridge. “I was perfectly fine without Ben.”
She sighed. Like a picture to some, a sigh from Laura meant a thousand words. Most of them had to do with how she wasn’t buying my bullshit. “Locked up in your brother’s apartment, alone for months on end, with a job where you wear a hairnet is not fine, Cassie,” she said, putting her hand on my knee. “Perfect or otherwise.”
“There’s a lot more to it than that. I listen to those people. I talk to them. Just because I’m not studying how to talk to them like you are doesn’t make what I do every day any less important.”
Sure, cooking at the VA might seem like a one-way ticket to snoozeville, but those people cared if I showed up and I cared about being there. With my brother gone, going to work every day had become as much a comfort to me as I was to the people I served grub at lunchtime.
What I hadn’t told Laura was I’d signed up for a community college class so I could start learning how to talk to them. She had enough on me without bothering me about that, too.
“I didn’t mean—” she started.
“I know what you meant.” I looked down at her hand, manicured light pink nails at the ends of her fingers, a silver ring on her thumb. She had come so far since Turning Pines, but what had I done? I could point to my job all I wanted, but I’d paused myself emotionally after what had happened with Ben, and seeing him again had rewound me right back to the day we split in two.
“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “Considering at one time in your life you could tell Ben everything and now can’t even say hello, it’s pathetic.”
“I said hello,” I snarked.
She stared at me with her Laura eyes, two crystal balls with psychic power. Something clicked behind them, and she shook her head. “You never told him.”
I turned away from her.
“You never told him about what happened with Aaron,” she said, louder.
Aaron, the guy I’d been with before Turning Pines, before Ben. Aaron: half the cause of my real issue.
“So what?” I deflected, but the truth was I couldn’t. I’d wanted to tell him, tried a lot of times during those three months, but it was kind of hard to just blurt out something like that.
It was never the right time to tell him I hurt bone-deep, the kind of pain that might never go away. It was never a good time to tell him I’d had an abortion.
Though Rawe would be proud I could actually use the word now, it didn’t make it any easier to attempt to talk to Ben about it.
“That explains everything,” she said. “You need to tell Ben your shit.”
Did Laura seriously just say shit? She never swore—that was my job—so it meant she must be serious. And my shit was serious. Why I used to punch myself in the stomach to remember the pain. Why I’d closed myself off from any boy ever again until Ben had somehow broken through, but not far enough to tell him about the pinprick point when everything in my life became before and after.
Before the abortion, I was the kind of girl who would have thought someone punching herself in the stomach was weak, but after, pain became the only way I could feel. It became my strength, my way to face each day. I touched my stomach, remembering the way I would hit once, twice, so deep and violent it made it hard to breath
e, made me nauseous down to my toes.
I moved my hand away, wrapped both arms tightly around me, and squeezed.
Now I guess I had a new before and after. Ben. Was this new hugging thing not progress, but a backslide? Now, instead of craving pain, did I need to feel affection because that was what Ben had finally given me?
Fuck me. Ben had turned me into a hugger.
“What? Is that your psychology student assessment based off of one semester of classes?” I asked.
“No, it’s my best friend opinion,” she said, “based off of knowing you better than anyone.”
“I was actually starting to get over him, moving on.”
“Now that’s an even bigger lie than the one I told you.” She forced her face into my line of vision, calling my bluff.
Of course she was right. She was always right. I hated her and loved her for it.
“Well, he’s over me now, anyway,” I said, but there was a question at the end of my sentence, like I wanted her to prove me wrong, like I needed her to.
“I don’t think he would have come if that was true,” she said.
My face heated uncontrollably, but I kept myself from smiling. There was no way I was giving Laura the satisfaction. “Fucking fine. Let’s go eat,” I replied, my eyes wide.
“I doubt he’ll even be down there.”
“I don’t think I can believe anything you say ever again, Laura.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, heaving her body off the bed and heading toward the door, “because without Ben, I’m the only friend you’ve got left.”
Chapter Six
Ben
Drew and I were at a table at the hotel bar, two beers and one shot of Jameson deep—luckily the bartender didn’t card—when Cassie and Laura walked in. I could see the moment they entered, Cassie wanted to dissolve into the floor below her.
I totally understood.
That was what I wanted to do, too.
