by Frankie Rose
“Fly high, Icarus.”
TWENTY-SIX
AVERY
One minute I feel like I’m about to fall face-first off a cliff edge and each and every bone in my body is about to shatter on the descent. The next minute, Luke is taking hold of my hand and he’s whispering three words to me, and I feel like my bones are made of steel. I want to throw up. I want to cry. But I’m also so fucking determined to make it through this that I know I won’t be broken. They can’t break me. I won’t panic, and I won’t crumble. It’s obviously Wochek’s goal to make me do just that, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.
Chloe Mathers can go fuck herself.
I take the stand with my back ramrod straight, chin held high, and I see the small smile forming on Luke’s face in the gallery. I know I’m off to an excellent start. Wochek starts in on the questioning, trying to turn me around, trying to make out like I’m confused about what really happened. Maybe I didn’t lock all the doors and windows in the house that night. Could it be that maybe I, in fact, left the backdoor open and Chloe made entry into the property to simply make sure I was okay?
No. I definitely locked all the doors and windows. It was cold out. There was a storm that night. It was snowing like crazy.
And what if I’d been drinking that night? Could I have thought Chloe was trying to attack me when in actual fact she tried to help me when my boyfriend at the time, Mr. Lucas Reid, was pressuring me to have sex with him? Could it be that I’m now trying to cover up an attempted rape on his part?
No. I hadn’t been drinking. And there’s no way on this earth that Luke would ever do that. Besides, if he had, I wouldn’t frame an innocent woman of something like that in order to protect him, would I?
Okay. Well if not that, then perhaps something more accidental. I was bullied at high school for years. Would I say that had caused me lasting mental distress?
Yes. Probably.
And so, wouldn’t it stand to reason that maybe I had accidentally shot Luke myself? We’d had a fight. Maybe Luke had come over to mend bridges and I’d gotten trigger happy, thinking he was one of my old school mates, trying to haze me.
No. I didn’t shoot Luke. I hadn’t been drinking. Luke didn’t try to rape me. Chloe Mathers was not trying to simply check up on me. She broke into my house wearing a ski mask and tried to murder me.
It all feels like it’s happening to someone else. I breathe deeply throughout the forty-five minute grilling. I don’t get flustered and I don’t stumble over my words. Luke sits on the bench next to Brandon, leaning forward, elbows on knees with his hands covering his mouth, but I can tell that he’s smiling from the way his eyes are creased at the edges. He’s proud of me. Brandon, too.
By the time Wochek is done with me, he looks mildly perplexed, like he expected that to go differently, and District Attorney Whitlock has a deep frown on his face, too. They call a fifteen-minute break, and everyone begins to file out of the courtroom. I have to pass the dock to get out, which means walking past Chloe. I shouldn’t look at her, shouldn’t acknowledge her, but a part of me is rebelling right now. Back in February, when we went through this the first time, Luke told me over and over again that Chloe just wanted to see me scared. She would get off on the fact that I was intimidated by her, that she held so much power over me still. I don’t want her to have that now. I don’t want her to think of me at all. As I walk past the dock, I look up at Chloe, and I look her straight in the eye. I don’t blink. I don’t look away, and I don’t let her see the tiny stab of fear that twists in my stomach. I look at her as though I’m looking straight through her, bored and uninterested, and I watch the quiet smugness slip from her face. It’s like watching a light spark and then fizzle out, disappearing into nothing right before me. Her lips part, and it looks as if she wants to say something, but nothing comes out of her mouth.
Brandon grabs hold of me as soon as I’m close enough, and then he’s crushing me to him, laughing quietly in my ear. “Good going, sweetheart. Fuck, you were great. She looks like she’s going to break down and start sobbing or something.”
It would be gratifying to turn around and witness that for myself, but I don’t care anymore. Instead I catch sight of Luke standing a few feet away. His hands are in his pockets, hair looking kind of crazy where he’s brushed it back out of his face, and his eyes are shining just a little too brightly. He grins at me, nodding, and then he slowly walks out of the courthouse.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LUKE
Whitlock doesn’t make a decision. It’s unbelievable, but he doesn’t. Rather than call us back inside after everyone’s milled around for ten minutes and grabbed bad vending machine coffee, the clerk comes out into the hallway and tells us that the DA is adjourning until the morning so he can deliberate. God knows what there is to deliberate about, but there it is. Brandon and Avery leave as soon as the announcement is made, and I drive Mom home. She’s wearing her you’re kidding me, right? face when she sees me climbing out of her truck. “You’re coming inside?” she asks.
“Shouldn’t I?”
Next comes her, I raised you smarter than that, boy face. “You love the girl, right?”
She’s probably going to smack me upside the head if I pretend I don’t know what she’s talking about. “Yes. Always have.”
“Then you’d be a fool to step foot inside this house. You should be heading straight on over to that ramshackle place that uncle of hers keeps. How long have you been miserable in California, pining over that girl? And now you’re in the same zip code as her and you have the opportunity to do something about it, to try and fix everything, you’re going to come in here and get under my feet, being miserable and stealing my beer instead? Does that make sense to you?”
“Not much.”
“Didn’t think so. Get on with you now.” She turns her back and ambles into the house, not looking back to make sure that I’m getting back in the truck. She knows her work here is done. After all the time I’ve spent regretting my decision and making such a mess of things, it really would be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done if I don’t go and plead my case with Avery.
I love her. I need to tell her that. Right now. On the drive over to Brandon’s place, I turn on the radio and of all the songs that could be playing it’s Cottonmouth, and it’s such a bizarre, surreal, but also very wonderful feeling to know that I’m not playing the song from my own CD or iPod. It’s being broadcast to millions of people right now, and they’re either listening to it and appreciating it, or they’re not, but it just seems…it seems too easy somehow.
Thousands and thousands of people move out to LA to try and make it big there every year, and yet this deal that we have now just kind of fell into our laps. A label exec came to one of our gigs in New York, liked what we were doing and offered everything to us on a silver platter. I’ve been resentful of that for so long, and for the first time I realize how amazing it is that we’re making music and we’re getting paid for it.
I keep my mind occupied on that as I drive. Better not to think about Avery and what I’m going to say to her. I don’t have the first clue, and that scares the living shit out of me. Rafferty would say I should simply tell her the truth, but the truth is so weak. What if it’s not enough?
When I get to Brandon’s place, I sit outside for a while with the engine idling, contemplating just throwing the thing into gear and heading back to my mom’s place. I won’t do it really, but sitting quietly and thinking about it for a while calms my nerves, though. After ten minutes, I finally have my shit together. Or at least together enough to climb out of the truck and slam the door behind me. I plan on coming up with something miraculous to say to Avery by the time I’ve reached the front door of the house, but that idea’s thwarted when I look up and see that she’s sitting on the front doorstep of the house, watching me intently, arms wrapped around her body, holding onto herself tight as she studies me.
“That looked like a tough battle,” she says. �
�Thought you were going to drive off for a second there.”
“Me, too. How long have you been sitting there?”
She shrugs. “I saw you pull up. I wanted to slip out of the backdoor and run away, but Brandon put a stop to that. Said that if I could face Chloe Mathers and not even flinch, I could definitely have a conversation with you. I figured he was right.”
She seems tired. Worn down. She looks exactly the same way I do—well put together, functional, like she’s remembering to shower and brush her hair and her teeth every day, but also like she’s kind of given up. Like she could happily lock herself inside a dark room for days on end and she wouldn’t miss seeing people and interacting with the outside world one bit. “I take it you came here because you had something you wanted to say to me,” she says. “Finally.”
“How badly do you want to punch me in the face right now?” I ask softly.
Avery looks up at me, a tight, fake smile on her face, and I know that this is a waste of time. It feels like there’s a hand wrapped around my throat and it’s squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, threatening to squeeze so hard that I’ll never be able to breathe again. “I want to punch you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, Luke,” she tells me. “I want to break you. I want to cut you and make you bleed. I want to hurt you the way you hurt me, so you know exactly what it feels like. Is that what you want me to say?”
“If that’s how you feel, then yes, that’s what I want you to say. I want you to tell me the truth.”
Avery glares at me for a second. The sleeves of her sweater are pulled down over her hands, and with her body all folded up and drawn in tight she looks so young and small. Just like the fourteen-year-old girl who came and comforted me on the lawn of her house when I was breaking down and falling apart. She doesn’t even remember that. She was so traumatized and broken from the loss of her father that she remembers nothing for days after his death. I do, though. I’ll never, ever be able to forget her coming out to me and laying her hand on my shoulder.
“I could have used a hit of the truth back when you decided you didn’t want to be with me Lucas,” she says. “We…we had sex and it was great. You told me that you loved me, and you let me leave LA thinking everything was totally fine with us. And then I don’t hear a word from you?” It sounds like this is something she’s wanted to say to me for a very long time, but I get the feeling the words are meant to be screamed instead of said quietly, slowly, in such an weary manner.
“I know,” I say, and saying it makes me feel ridiculous. “I know I should have handled it differently. I know I should have taken better care of your heart, Avery, but I was terrified.”
“Terrified of what? You had no reason to be. I was never going to hurt you. I was never going to leave you, Luke. I was so desperately, painfully in love with you. I mean, I don’t get it. What did I do? How did you just wake up one morning and decide you didn’t want to be with me anymore?” She’s so close to tears. I can see the deep well of pain inside her, shining out of her beautiful eyes, and it nearly kills me. I’m not responsible for creating that well—I wasn’t the first person to make her hurt—but I am responsible for making it ten times deeper than it ever needed to be.
I scrub my hands over my face, trying to figure out the best way to even talk about this. It’s going to sound so fucked up, no matter how I word it, and that’s a worrying thought. I point at the step beside her, hoping I’m not pushing my luck. “Can I sit?”
She stares down at the spot on the step next to her where I’m pointing, clearly debating whether she should tell me to go fuck myself. In the end she slowly nods. I sit, sighing heavily, leaning my elbows against my knees. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Avery,” I say softly. “And I never stopped wanting you. Every single morning when I woke up, I would reach out for you, and it would feel like half of me was missing when I realized you weren’t there. I would sit and stare at my cell phone for hours, dying to call you, desperate to hear the sound of your voice, but at the time I thought I was doing the right thing by staying away. And after a while, a long time actually, I began to understand what a huge mistake I’d made by severing all ties with you, but by then it felt like it was too late. I knew you must have moved on, and calling you or emailing you just seemed…unkind.”
She laughs a hard, hurt laugh. “Jesus, Luke. Unkind?”
“I know. I know. I had it all backwards. I can’t even begin to tell you how badly I regret what I did.”
“Then maybe you should start with telling me why you did it. You say I didn’t do anything wrong, that you never stopped wanting me, but you have to see how hard it is for me to believe that. Everything seemed like it was fine. I thought we were happy. I thought we were in love.”
God, it feels like my heart is breaking in two. This is so fucking hard, and to hear her say those words…
“We were in love, Avery. I still love you now. Even more than I did then, probably, because the wanting and the needing you never stopped. It was incessant. It became a part of me that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to separate out from anything else now.”
“Then why did you do it? Why did you fucking leave me?” she shouts. This is the first time she’s raised her voice, and each word feels like a bomb going off inside my head.
“I—I had to! I was afraid. I was afraid that if you stayed with me, I was going to hurt you.”
“Hurt me? You don’t think you hurt me by just vanishing off the face of the planet?”
“I don’t mean emotionally, Ave. I mean…I mean physically.”
She rocks back from me, eyes growing wide, a stillness falling over her. “You’d never hurt me physically, Luke,” she whispers. “I know you wouldn’t.”
Frustration feels like it’s eating at me from the inside out. “Not intentionally, no. But when we were together…god. When we were together, when we were in bed together, I…I would get lost sometimes. I could feel myself slipping away. My dad…” My throat is burning, on fire and raw, like I just swallowed razor blades or something. I don’t want to finish this sentence. I don’t want to continue explaining this to her, because then she’ll know how dark and fucked up I am inside and I can’t bear that thought. I have to tell her, because I don’t have any other choice.
“My father made me do things, Avery. And sex has always been a tough interaction for me because of it. That’s why I needed to hear how you felt about me before we slept together those first couple of times. Because I needed to know that you really, truly wanted me like that, and I wasn’t somehow getting you to do something that you didn’t want to do. After I looked you in the eye and you admitted that you loved me, I knew that wasn’t the case, but…fuck, I don’t know.” I can’t even look at her. I rest my head in my hands, breathing deeply the way Rafferty showed me to the first time I went to his office. “I’ve always associated sex with anger. The two have gone hand in hand since the dawn of time with me. I’d be transported back then, to all those events with my father, and this…this rage would just consume me from the inside out. I’d have flashbacks. I’d smash shit, completely trash my apartment. I’d be so angry with myself that I wouldn’t be able to think straight, but it was more than that. I was just so fucking angry in general. It wouldn’t have a direction or an outlet, and so it would just explode out of me at random. Things were so different with you, though. I thought…I hoped with you, I wouldn’t be the same way. And then…”
“And then you smashed that mirror in your bathroom,” she whispers.
I nod. “I relive that moment in my head—how totally and utterly out of control I felt. It was as though someone else was in charge of my body, forcing me to move against my will. I knew then that you couldn’t be around me. I would never have raised my fists to you on purpose, Avery, and I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure I wouldn’t have done it when that rage gripped me and I was lost inside it. But that last point zero one percent? That was enough for me. I wasn’t going to risk it. After everything
that had happened with Chloe, I was never going to put you in harm’s way again.”
Silence.
For a long time, we sit there and neither one of us says a word. To be honest, I didn’t expect her to say anything. I mean, telling someone that you wanted to go Eric Bana and hulk-smash everything every time you got a hard-on is a pretty big deal. At least she knows now, though. At least there are no more secrets. No more hiding anything. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me, Avery,” I say. “I don’t expect you to take me back and pretend like everything’s totally fine between us. I know that’s impossible. I just wanted you to know that…well, I didn’t turn my back on you. I never stopped loving you or wanting to be with you. I just didn’t know how to deal with what was happening to me.”
“Do you now?” she asks.
I slowly turn my head so that I’m looking at her. There are tears streaking down her cheeks and her whole body is shaking violently, like she’s in shock. I know her all too well. She wants to break down into a sobbing fit but she’s stopping herself, holding herself together. “Yes,” I tell her. “I do know how to deal with it now. I’ve been in therapy three times a week for months. The guy I see, Rafferty…well, he’s kind of an asshole but he’s also good at his job. I don’t think I’m done seeing him yet, but I know I have a handle on my emotions now. And that has changed everything.”
Avery nods, nods, nods, eyes distant, filled with tears, chewing on her bottom lip. “So you felt better. And you felt like you could move on. So you started dating that dark-haired woman in your music video.”
