“Are you okay?” a familiar voice asked, and I opened my eyes to see Ben standing over me, appraising me with a concerned look on his face.
He had apparently seen me leave the bar, and even though I knew he hated the smell of cigarette smoke since he told me every chance he got, he sat down next to me so we were shoulder to shoulder. We hadn’t really touched since the time he’d hugged me at Starbucks after he’d asked if we could be friends, and our friendship was awkward at best, but for some reason, that night, when I was feeling lower than I had in weeks, I welcomed his presence.
I rolled my head so I could look at him. “I’m fine,” I said, as I took another long drag off my rapidly dwindling cigarette. I looked away, blowing the smoke up into the night sky.
“I know you better than that, Em. Come on. I told you I wanted to be friends, and I’d say right about now, you need a friend.”
He was being so sweet, and the weight of what I was feeling was making my head ache. So I welcomed his words and his broad shoulder and his familiar warmth. It had been months since I’d let anyone hold me, and suddenly, it didn’t matter what had happened between Ben and me over the summer. He was being sweet and kind, and I suddenly missed what we used to have together.
“You don’t want to know,” I said, letting my head drop onto his shoulder. Ben responded just how I thought he would and put his arm around me, pulling me against him.
He sighed, long and loud. “Em, I know you don’t want us to be together. I get it, but let me be your friend. Please. Don’t push me away anymore.”
I needed a friend in that moment, and when I glanced up at him and saw the sincerity in his eyes, I sighed heavily and started talking, telling Ben, the one person I knew didn’t want to hear it, our whole story. Worse, I cried as I talked, wishing I could shut up, but the words and tears just kept coming. Ben held me tight and listened. He didn’t say anything, especially when I got to the part about sleeping with Zack for the first time. I knew it hurt him to hear that, but he didn’t say a word. Afterward he continued to hold me as I cried. I hoped the tears would provide some sort of relief, but they just didn’t.
“I’m so sorry he hurt you, Em,” Ben said, causing me to look up at him in surprise. “He’s a jerk.”
I just nodded, but at the same time I knew Zack wasn’t a jerk. He was incredible and sweet and devoted to his family. Yes, he’d hurt me, but it hadn’t been his intention. That much I knew. He’d done the right thing when he’d chosen his mom over me, but it still hurt that he hadn’t ever bothered to call. He’d just cut ties completely, and that was what killed me.
It made me believe that what we had was just a casual summer fling after all. I’d fallen head over heels in love with him, and I thought he’d been falling right along with me, but I was wrong. I remembered his words from the last time we spoke, wishing I could forget them.
I’m not good for you.
You deserve so much more than a guy who can’t get his shit together.
I didn’t want someone to fall in love with me.
You don’t even know me.
You don’t know half of the shit that I’m dealing with right now.
I’m fucking broken, and you can’t fix it.
My heart ached just thinking about him sitting next to me on the porch steps as he broke my heart over and over again, severing any far-fetched ideas that we’d have something long term. It was never going to happen. He’d been so cold, so detached, so different from how he’d been all summer, and I knew something had triggered it – something more than his mother’s illness. That had been part of it, but there was something else.
“I would never hurt you, Emily,” Ben said then, looking down at me, and I could see the love he still felt for me, even after I’d cheated on him.
In that moment, I looked up into his deep blue eyes, taking in the familiarity and comfort that they held. I knew he was right. He was a nice guy, and he’d never intentionally hurt me. He loved me. In the end, he hadn’t done anything to deserve what I’d done to him. I had vilified him in my mind, but he was never in the wrong. I was the one who was screwed up by looking for something more than he could give. I was the one who’d fallen out of love with him. Sure, he’d called me some pretty shitty names when we’d broken up, but I could overlook that. I’d done a pretty shitty thing to him by cheating.
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said, shaking my head sadly.
Ben held me against his side. “Em, I know I won’t quite ever understand where your head was at this summer or what you needed from that Zack guy, but he’s not here. I am, and I love you. I miss you so much, baby. I think we were really good together. I just wish you’d give me another chance. Please.”
“I don’t know, Ben,” I said, looking up at him and reading the plea on his face.
He was in as much pain as I was. Only I was responsible for causing his pain, which meant I could also take it away, and at the same time, maybe ease some of mine. Without really thinking, I leaned up and kissed him, taking him by surprise.
The only problem was that I knew in the back of my mind that I’d cheated and broken up with him for a reason. Just because I was lonely didn’t mean I had to sell out and get back together with him. I knew I never should have kissed him. Doing that had just brought back hope that we could be together, and I knew in my heart that Ben wasn’t the guy for me. Of course, I was a little drunk and pretty vulnerable that night, so when I asked him to come home with me, I wasn’t exactly in my right mind.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever feel again what I’d felt with Zack – with Ben or anyone else. That had been an all-consuming love that had swept me up in a torrent of emotion that had been unimaginable until I’d experienced it. But it had been taken away from me so quickly that I’d started to think that maybe it hadn’t even been real. Maybe it had just been the newness of it all and the excitement that came with being with someone who was so different from me. Maybe it was falling in love in a strange place where normal rules didn’t seem to apply. Maybe that was why it couldn’t last in reality. Maybe real love was more of what I’d had with Ben all along – someone reliable who wouldn’t hurt me or leave me or do anything that would make me cry.
Or maybe I was just desperate not to feel so alone anymore.
Chapter Thirteen
Zack
I almost died once. I almost lost everything, but I didn’t realize how much I had to lose until it was nearly too late. It’s funny how you never see what you have when it’s right in front of you, but hindsight is of course twenty-twenty. I was feeling that way for the second time in my life as memories from the summer bombarded me – the sweet smell of her hair, the way she looked up at me and grinned like I was the only person in the room, her arms wrapped around my waist as we sped around the island on my Harley, her head resting on my chest and the way she’d just let me be when she knew I was breaking down inside.
Emily wasn’t supposed to be someone I thought about months later. She was supposed to be a fun distraction, like all the other nameless and faceless girls I’d hooked up with over the years. What we had was supposed to be casual, no strings attached, no commitments. It was what she’d wanted too – at first. She’d come to me having just broken up with her boyfriend of five years after she’d slept with me for the first time. She told me she didn’t want anything serious, she just wanted to have a little fun, be a little reckless. And I’d been more than happy to do all those things with her, thinking that at the end of the summer, she’d go back to wherever she was from, and I’d forget all about her. But then little by little, she’d fallen for me, and little by little, I’d started to realize she was more than just a nameless, faceless girl.
Now I was thinking about her and wondering where she was and if she ever thought about me. She probably hated me. I’d left her crying on her front porch. I was a bastard, and if she hated me, it was probably well-deserved. But I was starting to regret my impulsive decision to end things with her, even though it
seemed like the only solution at the time.
I hate having regrets. I rarely regret decisions I make, but for the second time in my life, I was looking back and wishing I’d done things differently.
The first time this happened to me was nearly two years earlier.
See, when you’re the lead singer of a rock band who plays college venues almost exclusively, and you have a gift for writing music that connects to people, girls like you. They hover around the stage, they wait for you after the show, they’re willing to do almost anything to get some time with you. When this happens, you develop a little bit of a god complex, and without knowing it, your life can get away from you.
There are also temptations that find their way to you, that you sample, because you’re a rock star, and people scream your name, tell you they love you, and they make you feel invincible. You don’t ever think anything bad will touch you, so you do things that you might not do if hot women weren’t offering to give you blow jobs, because simply the fact that they’re offering is fucking cool. So you party with them, sample some party favors and add a little something to your system that makes said blow job that much more mind-blowing.
All too soon you find yourself with a new girl whenever you want one, a god complex and a recreational drug habit that numbs you to the fact that your life isn’t all that you hoped it would be, and you’re actually really depressed, but you live for the high that comes with the drugs and the girls, because for a short while, you actually feel happy. It’s not a good place to be.
The night I almost died, I was with Derrick. We’d played a show in Raleigh, and afterward four girls had offered to come backstage, hoping to score with the band. Leo had declined because Kristin Decker was there that night, and he was hoping they might finally leave the friend zone if he paid her enough attention. Kristin was a good girl, a minister’s daughter, so Leo had to play his cards just right with her. Andrew, our other guitarist had been battling the flu, and had barely made it through the set without passing out, so he’d headed back to Durham with our gear immediately after we’d packed up the van.
That left Derrick and me with four eager co-eds. We partied with them backstage for a few hours, sampling from Derrick’s plentiful stash and drinking the free beer that Mitch, the bar manager, kept bringing us. The girls, who seemed more than happy to remove those burdensome layers of clothing they we wearing, were more than eager to show off their skills with each other and with us. It was pure, reckless fun, and we loved it.
By the time we left the club at five in the morning, we were drunk, coked out of our minds and sublimely satiated. So of course neither of us thought twice when Derrick got behind the wheel of his Eclipse with me in the passenger seat. It wasn’t until the car was upside down, the windows popped out and my forehead was hovering inches above a concrete drainage ditch that I realized our mistake.
I don’t remember much from that night, but I know I was knocked unconscious and so was Derrick. I awoke to the sound of fire trucks screaming toward us, but Derrick was still out of it when a paramedic knelt down beside me and asked if I was okay. They got Derrick out of the car first, and he was still unconscious when they loaded him into the ambulance. The paramedic who’d first talked to me stayed with me until they pulled me out of the car. I was drifting in and out of consciousness as he explained that they were taking Derrick and me a nearby hospital and asked if he could call anyone for me.
I lost consciousness again while the paramedics were examining me on the side of the road, but I guess I gave him Jen’s number because when I came to, she was standing over me with tear-stained cheeks. Her hand rested on her bulging stomach, and she was downright livid with me.
“You’re alive!” she hissed, and I felt her kick the bed.
I looked at her with a mix of confusion and irritation. I wasn’t exactly sure where I was, and she wasn’t being very nice by yelling at me. I tried to sit up, but my head felt like it might explode, so I stayed put.
“Last time I checked,” I said sarcastically, wishing I could wipe the sandpaper feeling from my tongue.
I looked to my left and saw a pitcher of water. I went to reach for it, but my arm wouldn’t unbend. I looked down, and panic flooded through me, succeeding in waking me up all the way. My arm was in a cast that went up over my elbow. My eyes darted around the room. I was in the hospital. What the fuck was I doing in the hospital?
Then I remembered the accident, and a shiver coursed through my body. Derrick had crossed the median and driven across three lanes of traffic. He’d swerved at the last minute to avoid hitting a semi head-on, and he’d succeeded in rolling the car several times. Shit.
“Where’s Derrick?” I asked Jen, my thoughts full of panic. Was he alive? Where was he? I was in a small room, and there wasn’t anyone else besides us there.
“He’s recovering from surgery!” she hissed, and I was almost grateful she couldn’t launch the full capacity of her voice on me. “And he’d better hope he’s okay, or I might have to hurt him!”
At least Derrick was alive, but I learned he was in much worse shape than I was. His spleen had ruptured, and he’d punctured a lung. Jen explained that I had a broken arm – a fucked up problem for a guy who plays guitar for a living – a gash on the side of my head from when it had smacked against passenger side window and shattered the glass, a minor concussion, two cracked ribs and about a thousand cut and bruises all over my body. I considered myself lucky.
“You are damn lucky to be alive, Zack!” Jen said, saying out loud what I was thinking. “Both of you are. What the hell were you thinking?!”
I just closed my eyes. I had no clue what we’d been thinking. We weren’t thinking. That was the problem.
Apparently Jen wasn’t looking for a response since she just kept ranting. I made out the words coke, drinking, tox levels, blood pressure, mother and five hours. At that, my eyes snapped open.
“My mother knows about this?!”
“Damn right she does,” Jen said, anger flashing in her eyes. “She’s on her way here.”
“Everything?” I asked, realizing the magnitude of what Jen knew. Was my mother in the loop too?
Jen narrowed her eyes at me and just said, “Yes. She knows everything.”
My whole body sunk, and I shook my head. “How long have I been out?”
“A few hours,” Jen said, and I wondered if she’d gotten woken up in the middle of the night. She hadn’t been sleeping well anyway, and I felt bad that she’d had to come down and deal with us on top of everything else. Derrick and I were assholes.
“I’m sorry, Jen,” I said, sincerely meaning it.
The she started sobbing. “Zack, you almost died! Do you realize that? Do you understand what that would have meant?”
I closed my eyes, not wanting to think about any of that. My first thoughts went to my mother. With my dad out of the picture, I was all she had besides her sisters, but one lived in Maryland and the other in London. They weren’t exactly close by. I was it.
Jen kept crying, and I realized that since she’d been living with us, and I’d taken to going with her to her doctor’s appointments, and listening to her read from her pregnancy book and talk through her fears of becoming a mom, I was all she had. Derrick loved her, but he just wasn’t dependable. Jen had come to rely on me, and I’d almost let her down – big time.
Shit. I could have died.
“Jen, I’m sorry,” I said again. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“Damn right you weren’t thinking,” she said, wincing for a few seconds before she regained her composure. “You and my idiot brother just figured you were sober enough to drive after spending hours drinking yourselves into oblivion?! And what were you thinking doing coke, Zack? Huh? You just might be the dumbest smart guy I know. You are so talented. You can play and sing, but you can also write. You have a future in music, and you might have just thrown it away tonight. I hope your arm heals. I hope you can get back to playing.”
; She said it so haughtily that a part of me thought that if I couldn’t play anymore, she felt I would deserve it, and that got me pissed. I opened my mouth to say something to her, but she beat me to it.
“And not even that! I need you. She needs you,” she said, jabbing her stomach with her thumb. “She needs her father!”
I froze the second she said that and had to shake my head a few times to register where her head was at. I noticed how heavily she was breathing, and I wished she’d calm down.
“Jen, come on. I know I told you I would be there for you, but I’m not Lily’s father. Jay’s her father. You can’t put this on me.”
Jen looked like I’d smacked her, and I knew I’d taken my role of caregiver too far. I had every intention of being there for her and Lily, but I planned to be a cool ‘uncle’. I wasn’t Lily’s father. Her father had walked out on her mother, and because of that, she would always have me in her life, but I wasn’t her dad.
My mind flew back to the night we’d named her. Jen had come home from work, and her feet had been aching, so I’d offered to massage them for her. She’d let out a giant groan, as if I was delivering the best massage in the world, which I knew was far from true, but for as swollen as her feet were, I’m sure it felt almost that good. I’d started throwing out names for girls as we’d been doing for the past few days, but she hadn’t liked any of them. ‘Lily’, I’d said, and from the way she smiled when she heard it, I knew it was the name her daughter would have.
Back in the hospital room, Jen rested her hands on her stomach and looked at me, and it was suddenly as if ice water had been dumped on top of me. Her look told me everything I needed to know. I closed my eyes as the anger boiled in my veins.
“I have to tell you something, Zack,” Jen said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her.
Broken Fairytales Series Box Set (Broken Fairytales, Buried Castles, Shattered Crowns) Page 37
