by R. K. Lilley
She sat down, not looking at me, and restlessly stroked her hand over the kitten's fluffy coat, over and over.
I thought that was the end of it, but our demons were not finished with us yet.
I rose, was about to move to her, when she said, voice low and accusing, "I should have had a choice. You should have given me a choice."
I didn't have to clarify what she was talking about. I knew. I fucking knew. And just like that, I was furious again. "A choice?" I asked her bitingly.
"Yes. You had choices. You could have told your mother to go to hell, consequences be damned. I didn't have that privilege."
"Privilege? You're going to call that a privilege? To go to fucking prison? That's what you wanted? That was never an option. I would never have allowed that, and you fucking know it."
"Look at what you did allow! Was that any better? I'd have taken prison over what you let her do to us. That's a fact."
"No. No. No." I felt my head shaking, over and over. She was about two sentences away from me losing my temper. I felt my rage taking over and told myself to walk away. But I just couldn't do it. We had to fucking have this out. "Not an option. Not a fucking option."
"I should have had the choice," she repeated.
I pointed an unsteady finger at her, upper lip quivering with fury. "This is why. This is why I couldn't tell you. I'd have taken the fall for this; it was a solution I could have stomached, but you, you stubborn . . . "
She curled my lip at me. "What? Say it."
"Would you have let me take the fall for you?" I knew the answer. I'd always known. Her stubborn pride had ruined us both.
I could tell she wanted to lie, just for the sake of winning this argument, but she couldn't do it, she was too righteously furious for that. "Of course not. Never. I would never have stood by and let you take the fall for something I had done."
My eyes were wild, screaming at her. "See?" I was shouting now. "This was why you didn't get the choice! I know you, and I knew what you would do. If you can't forgive me for that, I don't know what to do, but I still don't see that I had another way. I won't apologize for protecting you the only way I knew how."
She knew I didn't. I could see it in the resigned eyes she turned on me.
Even she, the mother of all grudge-holders, could only hold a grudge for so long.
"I'm tired of hating you," she said quietly, a world of regret in it. "When all my heart has ever needed is to love you." Those words were so very hard for her, I could tell, and the next ones were harder. "For helping me survive for so long, for going through hell with me and getting me, somehow, to the other side of it intact, I will learn to forgive you. Even with all of the ways you've destroyed me, I could never forget all of the ways you've saved me, Dante."
"You saved me, too. Never forget that, either."
"And destroyed you," she said the words lightly, but they held all the weight in the world. For both of us.
I smiled and it was so bittersweet that she had to look away. "Yes. Broken. Destroyed. But now saved again. It's enough for me. You are. You always were. I have many demons. But only one angel."
Now the problem, of course, was that she had to learn to forgive herself.
We both did.
It was later. We were in bed and she was tucked securely against my chest.
When I spoke, it was a quiet whisper into the night. "You learn more about someone when you're fighting them than you do loving them. Things you can only learn from war. We know each other in ways we wouldn't have. Maybe it wasn't all in vain. I love you in more complex ways than I did before. I understand you more intimately."
"You're a fool," she said forlornly into my chest.
"I know, tiger. Believe me, I know."
"I love you for it."
"I know, angel. That, too."
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
"Terror made me cruel."
~Emily Brontë
PAST
SCARLETT
It was almost nonsense to me—what he was saying. I only caught snippets, broken off sentences, half-phrases, but my numb brain slowly put it together. He was ending things.
The conversation only lasted minutes, mere minutes to take everything I held sacred and tear it open, rip out the insides, and smash them under his heel.
When he was finished, I felt diminished. Like I was nothing. Like I always had been.
I should have not been so surprised. I should not have been surprised at all, really.
The only real mystery here was that he'd ever tried to love me in the first place.
Even so, my pain was breathtaking.
I was inconsolable, and he did not even try to console me. He said his piece and hung up the phone.
It was devastating. Life changing. When you have felt like nothing with that much certainty, you never come back from it. Even if you manage to piece yourself up, a part of you stays in the gutter where you were left. Always.
It was a live or die moment. A get yourself off the ground or stay down and let this end you event. Walk away and leave him behind, or stay and let this kill you, kill yourself just to see if he'll bleed out with you.
I always thought I was too strong to be broken by anything. I always told myself that, at least.
But love changes you. No matter how strong you are, it makes you stronger. No matter how weak you are, it makes you weaker. No matter how hard you are to conquer, it will bring you to your knees.
A part of me held onto a small bit of denial. For days I held onto it. I couldn't get out of bed, but I held on. It couldn't be real.
It had been Dante's voice, but it hadn't been him. An imposter had broken me. Somehow Dante would make it right.
I was holding onto that delusion for dear life when I started receiving the texts. One after another. The first was only words, short and to the point.
This is Tiffany. Dante and I are getting married. Just thought you should know before it's announced publicly. He would like Gram's ring back.
I was still staring at that bit of evil when the next message came in.
Oh and I thought you should see these. Enjoy.
What followed was a furious flow of picture texts, one after the other, all showing roughly the same thing.
Him with her.
My God. Her? Tiffany?
Turns out it was right there in our foundation all along—the thing that would break us. Her?
The intimacy of it is what killed me.
He was supposed to be mine. Inarguably. Irrevocably. Every part of him, inside and out, belonged to me.
I'd never seen him so much as touch another girl's hand, and there he was, in picture after picture.
Sprawled on his back, being straddled, hands on her slender, naked hips.
That's what felt like the biggest betrayal, that he'd hidden it so thoroughly from me, this other side of him.
That his devotion to me could be nothing but a lie.
And just like that, the delusions, the denial, were gone.
I won't deny it. Those pictures broke me, took something precious inside of me, and left a hollow shell behind.
I did some terrible things after. Unforgivable things. Because I was lost, broken, and afraid.
Nate was just too easy of a mark. Too convenient. Too perfect for my purpose; which was, of course, revenge.
He came to me, flew all the way out to L.A. just to comfort me.
I let him, or at least let him try, let him go through the motions, hugging me, holding me, whispering reassurances.
I let him think he seduced me. I let him think that I wanted him back, as much as he wanted me, that I cared, that I was even capable of feeling, that anything he said or did or felt got through to me.
Nothing did, but I must have faked it convincingly enough.
I let him think that I loved him. I let him think that I would marry him.
I did it all for one reason. An obvious, vengeful one.
Nate w
as in the shower when I intercepted a call for him from Dante.
I was feeling particularly hateful when I answered it with a purring, "Hello, Dante."
Silence on the other end.
That was fine. I had enough to say for both of us. "Nate's in the shower. He's not like you. He doesn't like to wear his sex, always has to get cleaned up right after. Can I take a message for you?"
He managed to make out some word-like noises, something like, "Don't. No. Please, no."
"Too late. We did. Many times. Did he tell you? He proposed. I said yes. You're not invited to the wedding."
"Oh my God. What did you do, Scarlett? What did you do?"
I shuddered at the awful, anguished sound of his voice. I could feel his pain, reaching out across the distance, over the miles that separated us. Moving north to south. East to west.
Racing over mountains, across roads and through cities, flowing down from him to me.
It pounded out to me until it felt like my own pulsing hurt.
Every gory bit of us was strewn and twitching in the space between us.
"I think that's pretty obvious," I managed to get out. "Do you want me to spell it out for you? Would you like me to send pictures?"
"You're heartless," he told me, sounding like he couldn't quite believe it.
Like he thought I would deny it.
I did not. "Of course I am. Did you think I wouldn't be? You were my heart. And you left."
The sounds he made then were almost comforting in their familiarity, anguished, desolate noises that matched perfectly just how I'd felt since he'd left and taken not just my heart, but my soul with him.
So he wasn't over me. He still felt something.
It was humiliating how relieved I was.
I needed him to feel. Needed him to hurt, needed his wounds to throb in time with my own.
Needed to bring him to my hell.
At least then I would not be alone here.
A small distinction but a real one.
So I couldn't have him. At least I would still have the satisfaction of knowing that we suffered together.
"And what about you, Dante?" I finally managed to choke back at him. "Where did your heart go?"
"You still have it." He lobbed it at me like an accusation.
The bastard.
"And you can keep it," he continued, voice ragged, breath uneven. "But I'm finished with you. Finished. We are done."
And that was that. As he'd said, we were finished. Of course we were. We were beyond all repair.
I broke it off with Nate—he'd served his purpose. I wasn't kind about it. I didn't tell any pretty lies to soften the blow. I'd never loved him. I didn't want him. No, it had not been good for me. I'd only slept with him to hurt somebody else.
A week after I sent him from my sight I got a call from Nate's mother. He was in the hospital. He'd tried to kill himself with a bottle of pills. He'd live, but he was a mess.
She blamed me as much as I blamed myself and told me to stay the hell away from her son.
I was only too happy to comply. Relieved was an apt word for it.
And so it went. I became completely rootless for a very long time.
And I hated Dante with what little there was left of my heart.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
~Rumi
PRESENT
SCARLETT
I should have never brought it up. Okay, I didn't. It wasn't like it was a choice.
Nate called me while I was in the bathroom. I'd left my phone out on the bed.
Dante saw. It was bad.
Worse than rage, though that was there. It hurt him, wounded him deeply that I was in contact with his old friend.
"You know what happened after I broke it off with him," I told him, attempting to explain myself. "I was on a warpath after we ended, and I wasn't just callous with him. I was cruel. I felt—feel bad for him. At Gram's funeral he said he wanted to start talking again—as friends—and so I agreed."
"What happened between me and him," I said falteringly. "You shouldn't take out on him. It was me. I'd have done anything back then just to get your attention, just to hurt you how I was hurting."
He was shaking his head, lip curled up in disgust. "No. Bullshit. Did you know I sent Nate to you to comfort you? He was supposed to help you, because I couldn't. Instead he took advantage. I'll never forgive him for that."
My God. I hadn't known that. Just when you think a thing can't be worse, some new evil is added into the mix just for panache.
Story of my life.
"I won't stand for it. You need to stop talking to him." His voice was clipped, curt to the point of rude, demanding to the point of ordering. "Cut off all contact. Immediately."
I opened my mouth to argue with him, just on principle I suppose, instinctual contrariness, but then I stopped myself. He was right. If we were going to work, there were some things you couldn't take back, people you couldn't have around, reminders that you couldn't keep close—not for any reason.
It took one insanely jealous person to be sensitive enough to understand another. "Fine," I said carefully.
I made the mistake of thinking that was the end of it, but it seemed fated to be one of those days. The phone call had started it, set the tone, and after that, we were just at each other's throats. Thin-skinned and feeling destructive.
It was some random dig he made over some silly thing that had me taking it a step too far, delving into things I wasn't ready for.
"God, can't you ever just say you're sorry? For anything?" I asked him heatedly, but more than temper, there was pain in it.
"You want apologies? I see. What exactly should I apologize for? Tell me, tiger, please. Where would I even begin?"
Hello, temper. Again. Because every sentence out of his mouth held something in it, some bit of appeal that was the apology in itself, that told me he was sorry for everything, that somehow he'd taken it all on himself, added it to his cursed martyrdom, and I was supposed to have known it.
"I'll apologize for anything you ask," he said quietly, "but that's not the issue. What you're missing is not my contrition, and I think you know it."
I waved him off. "You're blowing things out of proportion."
"You need to find your faith in us again," he said with quiet intensity.
And just like that, he had me. I'd gone from annoyed and argumentative to sad and desolate. "I don't know how," I said, voice raw with the helplessness of it.
His eyes softened, and just like that I was in his arms. We were out on the back porch, and he sat down in one of the loungers, cradling me on his lap.
He stroked a hand over my hair, then again. "Do you remember when my touch used to comfort you? Do you remember when it brought you peace?"
I couldn't even speak, my eyes closed. I remembered too much.
It filled my whole being, the remembering.
Eventually I nodded, but not before rogue tears were seeping past my eyelids.
"I can be ruthless." His voice was quiet but vehement. "I can be mean. I can be jealous, and wrathful. I have a hellish temper." Whisper soft, his fingers traced over my tears. "We both know this too well. There have been times where I was so angry with you that I didn't think I ever wanted to set eyes on you again."
He paused, just stroking and stroking my hair, his touch tender and steady, and it seemed he wanted some response from me.
Finally I nodded.
He continued. "I can be manipulative, and I know I've done some things you don't agree with, things you don't understand. Things that sorry does not, and will not, cover. I know that at times your faith in me has been lost."
For some reason one tiny, hapless sob escaped me at his last sentence, and he paused for a moment, comforting me, before he continued. "But search your heart, angel, and tell me, and yourself, if yo
u believe that any of my actions, no matter how messed up, or misguided, no matter how unforgivable they may have been . . . Ask yourself, do you truly believe that any of the things I did weren't for you? We can disagree on my methods, but do you have any doubts that what I did, I did to protect you?"
I didn't answer, just let him rock me, and stroke me, wipe my tears, and comfort me. All the while, I was doing as he said, searching through my ravaged heart.
"Find the answer to that question, and you'll find your faith again."
I'd had my eyes closed for a long time, but when I opened them, I found him doing something that helped me to see the truth.
He was rubbing the chain around his neck, rolling the key and rings between his fingers—Gram's ring had been added—over and over, like it was a very old habit. For the first time in years, I let my hand cover his, let the pad of my index finger trace over the objects, let it linger on them, remembering them.
His shoulder jerked as he shook off a shudder. "You get it. I know you do."
"You never took them off. Even at the worst of it, you kept them on as reminders."
"Touchstones, yes. They help to calm me. And they help me remember what we are. What we're supposed to be. That no matter what, we'll find our way back to each other."
I was crying, but so was he. "No matter what," I agreed quietly.
I'd been so blinded by my own hurt and fear for so long where he was concerned, but when I let go of my doubt, my pain, my insecurity, I really did know him.
His soul was mine and always had been. I couldn't deny that if I tried now that the truth was out.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN
"If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
~Emily Brontë