Before I could stop him, he sat down next to me and grabbed the bottle from my hand. I looked over at him with a murderous glare, but he just took a swig and handed the bottle back to me.
I stared at him with a mix of confusion and contempt.
“What?” he asked, but I knew he didn’t expect me to answer. “If you’re getting fucked up, I am too.”
“Whatever,” I said, taking another pull from the bottle before I passed it back to him.
Chapter Five
Zack
I’d been drunk for the better part of five days, and I didn’t plan on stopping. What was the point? Every time I started to sober up, memories I never wanted to remember flooded back to me.
A church.
People dressed all in black.
A preacher whose words made my chest ache.
The coffin in the center aisle that I couldn’t bring myself to look at.
The picture of my mother, healthy and smiling.
I opened a new bottle.
Amazing Grace
The eulogy I’d managed to choke out because even though it was the last thing I’d wanted to do, I wanted people to hear just how amazing my mother had been.
The tears from those around me.
My aunts dabbing their eyes.
My cousin Molly holding my left hand and my cousin Reagan hold my right one.
I took a long pull, relishing in the familiar taste.
My father hugging me, telling me he was sorry.
The women she knew and their looks of pity as they gazed at me.
The drive to the cemetery. I’d had to stare at the back of that fucking hearse the whole way.
I fisted my hands and punched the floor of the porch.
The casket hovering above that dark hole.
The smell of soil that had been unearthed specifically for that moment.
The sickly sweet stench of the dozens of roses surrounding the gravesite.
The casket being lowered into the ground.
I felt fresh tears fall down my cheeks, cascading like rivers and took a long drink of the brown liquid that had become my salvation.
The casket stopping six feet into the earth. My mother’s final resting place was a goddam hole in the fucking ground.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
I took another gulp, and another, and another.
The processional of people who paraded by, each tossing a rose into the hole, saying goodbye.
My turn. I was the last one.
Sinking to my knees, I dropped the rose on top of the casket and let my head fall into my hands.
The feeling of complete emptiness as I said a final goodbye to the woman who’d raised me, who’d taught me how to be a good person, and who’d loved me in spite of everything else.
I took another drink, the tears stinging my eyes, running into my mouth and mixing with the sweetness of the alcohol.
Leo standing beside me. Helping me up and letting me lean on him when I had trouble putting one foot in front of the other.
Molly wrapping her arms around me and Reagan following suit. Jared patting me on the back.
My aunts telling me it would be okay, that she wasn’t in pain anymore, that she was in Heaven.
The preacher’s final words.
I’d looked up, met his gaze and reality had finally set in. My mother was gone. I would never see her again. She would never smile at me or tell me she loved me or tell me she was proud of me. She would never yell at me or laugh with me or hug me again. I would never hear her voice. I could never look into her eyes and know she was on my side, even when no one else was. She would never sing off-key while I played her favorite songs for her, and as much as I’d hated it my whole life, I’d never hear her call me Zacky again.
She was gone, and I was alone.
I lifted the bottle to my lips and drank, and slowly, the pain and the memories and the feeling of loss slipped into oblivion right along with me.
Chapter Six
Emily
I heard my name as I walked across campus to Starbucks. I chose to ignore the person calling my name. I only had an hour until my next class and wanted to get some caffeine in me before I had to suffer through Law of Mass Comm. It was easily the most boring class I’d ever taken and confirmed why I hadn’t ever wanted to be a lawyer. The law was so dull.
“Emily,” he said again, closer this time, but I still didn’t turn around. “Hey, Em!”
I didn’t stop when he caught up next to me, so he fell into stride beside me.
“What do you want Ben?” I asked, not looking at him. I hadn’t seen him since he’d shown up drunk in my bedroom two weeks earlier.
“I just want to talk,” he insisted, hiking his backpack higher up on his shoulder as he kept up with my rapidly increasing pace. I might have had short legs, but I was a fast walker when I needed to be.
“About what?” I asked, the aggravation in my voice apparent.
I’d successfully avoided Ben since school had started, but it seemed he’d finally learned my class schedule. I guess it was his only option after I’d refused to see him any of the seven times he’d come over to my apartment. Thankfully he hadn’t scaled any more balconies. He’d always knocked on the door, and each time I’d either not answered or Rachel had told him to leave. But he was persistent.
“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 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.
“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.
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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 to 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.
Broken Fairytales Series Box Set (Broken Fairytales, Buried Castles, Shattered Crowns) Page 33
