by K. Bromberg
By the time the ceremony is over and I’ve said goodbye to the boys, my nerves are frayed. I’ve gone from concerned, to pissed, to uneasy, to angry, and as I speed up Pacific Coast Highway toward Broadbeach Road—his voicemail answering every time I hit dial—I’m sick to my stomach with worry.
By the time I reach the gates and pull into an empty driveway, I’m a freaking mess. I unlock and fling open the front door, his name a shout of my lips. But before I even make it past the kitchen, I know he’s not home. It’s not just the frantically excited Baxter that tells me but also the eerie silence in the house.
I open the sliding glass door to let Baxter out as a new thought hits me. What if something happened to his head? What if he’s injured somewhere and needs help and no one knows?
I run back to the kitchen counter and dial Haddie.
“Hey!”
“Has Colton called the house?”
“No, what’s wrong?” Concern floods Haddie’s voice but I don’t have time to go into details.
“I’ll explain later. Thanks.” I hang up on her while she’s still talking, telling myself I’ll apologize later while the phone’s already ringing for the next person.
“Rylee!”
“Becks, where’s Colton?”
“No clue, why?”
I hear a female giggle in the background and I don’t even give a second thought about interrupting whatever it is I’m interrupting. “He didn’t show up at the ceremony. Shane said he got a call and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”
I hear Becks tell the woman to be quiet. “He didn’t show?” Apprehension laces his voice as I hear shuffling on the other end of the line.
“No. Who’s Kelly?”
“Who?” he asks before the line goes silent for a moment. “I have no clue, Ry.”
His silence makes me question his honesty and the scattered thoughts in my mind reach my mouth. “I don’t give a fuck about man code and all that, Beckett, so if you know—I don’t care if it’s going to hurt me—you have to tell me because I’m worried fucking sick and … and …” I’m rambling frantically and I force myself to stop because I’m starting to get hysterical and I really have no reason to be, except for the intuition that tells me something isn’t right.
“Calm down. Take a breath. Okay?” I squeeze my eyes shut and get a grip. “Last I talked to him he was taking Shane out driving and then heading to the ceremony. You know—”
“Why is he not answering his phone then?”
“Ry, he’s got a lot of shit he’s sorting through, maybe he just …” He fades out, not sure what to say to me. I hear him blow out a loud breath as I walk over to shut the door Baxter’s just come in through. The house phone on the counter starts ringing and the caller ID says Quinlan. Something’s going on and the sight of her name tells me that I’m right to be worried.
“Q’s calling. Gotta go,” I tell him, switching the phone as I hear him tell me to call him back.
“Is he okay?” My words come out in a rush of air as I answer her call, anxiety causing acid to churn in my stomach.
“That’s what I was calling to ask you.” The concern in her voice rivals mine.
“What? How did you know something’s wrong?” I’m confused. I thought she knew what was going on.
“I was in class all day and had my phone off. I just turned it back on and he left a message.” I’m afraid to ask her what that message said. “He sounded upset. He rambled saying that he needed to talk to someone because his head was all fucked up. That he knows. But he didn’t say what that meant.”
Lead drops through my soul as I try to connect puzzle pieces that don’t belong together.
“Did something happen, Ry? Is it because of the miscarriage? I’ve just … I’ve never heard him sound like that before.”
Thoughts flicker and fade in my mind as I try to figure out what could have happened to Colton. And I’m already on the move and racing upstairs as my brain starts grasping at the possibilities of where he could be. “Q, I think I know where he is. I’ll call you when I know for sure.”
I toss the phone on the bed as I rush into the bathroom stripping my business suit off, leaving a trail of clothes as I go. Within minutes I’ve changed into my exercise clothes and am lacing up my shoes as fast as I can. I grab my phone and am down the stairs, out the doors leading to the deck, and racing down to the beach below.
I break out in a full sprint toward the place Colton took me on that first fateful night here, his happy place, where he goes to think. The more I think of it, the more confident I am that this is where he is. He’s probably sitting on his rock watching the sun sinking into the sea and coming to terms with everything that’s happened.
But why did he not take Baxter? Where is his car? I push the doubts away, convincing myself that he’s just there contemplating things, but uncertainty starts to grow with every pounding step.
But I know when I round the bend I’m not going to find him here. And as I come to the clearing, I already have my phone dialed and ringing.
“Did you find him?” I can tell Becks is freaked, and I feel bad for making him feel that way, but I’m worried.
“No. I thought I did but …” I have to stop to catch my breath because my lungs are burning from my sprint down the beach.
“Ry, what’s going on?”
“He called Quin and said he knows and his head is fucked up.” I pant out. “So I ran to his place on the beach but he’s not here. You know him better than anyone … where does he go when he needs to clear his head besides here?”
“You.”
“What?”
“He goes to you.” The honesty in his voice resonates through the phone line.
My legs stop moving at his words. They strike deep and make my heart twist with love and worry. Tears spring in my eyes as I realize how desperately I miss him in this moment—the him I’d only gotten back weeks ago to be taken away again by God’s cruel twist of fate with the miscarriage. I swallow the lump in my throat and it takes me a minute to find my voice. “Before me, Becks …”
“The track.”
“That’s where he’s gotta be.” I start running back toward the house. “I’m headed there now.”
“Do you want me to—”
“I have to do this, Becks. It’s gotta be me.” I’ve never spoken truer words because deep down I know he needs me. I don’t know why, I just know he does.
“I’ll text you how to get in the facility, okay?”
“Thanks.”
It feels like it’s taken me forever to reach the speedway because of the traffic on the freeway. I pull off the exit in Fontana, my heart lodged in my throat and my hope up in the air as I wonder what I’ll be walking into when I find him.
Panic strikes when I pull through the gates of the complex because it’s pitch black except for a few random parking lot lights. I drive around the side of the facility toward the infield tunnel, and I breathe out a huge sigh of relief when I see Colton’s Range Rover.
So he’s here, but now what am I going to do?
I pull up beside it, the darkness of the empty speedway seeming ominous. I put my car in park and shriek when I hear a knock on the passenger side window. My heart is hammering, but when I see Sammy’s face in the window I tell myself to breathe and get out of the car.
The concern in his eyes has me even more worried. “Please just tell me he’s okay, Sammy.” I can see him struggling about speaking to me, and betraying his boss and his friend.
“He needs you.” That’s all he says—the only thing he needs to.
“Where is he?” I ask, although I’m already following him through a darkened entrance underneath the massive grandstands. We reach a gap between the bleachers and I realize I’m in the middle of the grandstands, looking out on an eerily empty race track. I meet Sammy’s eyes through the darkness, and he signals over my left shoulder. I turn around instantly.
And I see him.
There is
a single light on in a section of the grandstands and just in its fringes I see a lone shadow sitting in the darkness. My feet move without thinking and start climbing the stairs, one by one, to him. I can’t see his face in the darkness, but I know his eyes are on me, can feel the weight of his stare. I reach the row of bleachers he’s sitting on and I start walking toward him, anxious and calm all at the same time.
I try to think of what to say, but my thoughts are so jumbled with worry I can’t focus. But once I’m able to see his shadowed face, everything vanishes but heart wrenching, unconditional love.
His posture says it all. He sits leaned over, elbows on his knees, shoulders sagging, and face stained with tears. And his eyes—the ones always so intense but dancing with mischief or mirth—are filled with absolute despair. They lock onto mine, begging, pleading, asking so much of me, but I’m not sure how to respond.
When I finally reach him, his grief crashes into me like a tidal wave. Before I can say a single thing, he strangles out a sob the same time he reaches out and pulls me into him. He buries his face into the curve of my neck and just hangs on like I’m his lifeline, the only thing keeping him from slipping under and drowning. I wrap my arms around him and cling to him trying to give him what he needs.
Because there is nothing more unsettling than watching a strong, confident man come completely undone.
My mind races as his muffled sobs fill the silence and the trembling of his body ricochets through mine. What happened to reduce my arrogant rogue to this distraught man? He continues to hold on as I shush him and rock subtly back and forth—anything I can to quiet the storm that’s obviously raging inside of him.
“I’m here. I’m here.” It’s the only thing I can say to him as he releases all of the tumultuous emotion. And so I hold him in the dark, in a place where he made his dreams come true, hoping that just maybe he’s coming to terms—stopping and facing head on—the demons he usually uses this track to outrun.
Time passes. The sounds of traffic on the highway beyond the empty parking lot lessen and the moon moves slowly across the sky. And yet Colton still holds on, still draws whatever he needs from me while I revel in the fact that he still needs me when I thought he didn’t anymore. My mind jockeys back and forth from memories of a shower bench and him clinging to me then like he is now. Of what could figuratively knock this man of mine to his knees. So I just hold him now like I did then, my fingers playing in his hair for comfort until his tears slowly subside and the tension in his body abates.
I don’t know what to say, what to think, so I just say the first thing that comes to my mind. “Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”
He loosens his grip and presses the palms of his hands into my back, pulling me tighter against him, if that’s even possible, while drawing in a shaky breath. He’s scaring me, not in a bad way but in the sense that something huge had to have happened to draw this kind of reaction out of him.
He leans back and squeezes his eyes shut before I have a chance to look into them, scrubbing his hands over his face before blowing out a loud breath. He hangs his head back down and shakes it, and I hate that I can’t see his face right now.
“I did …” He blows out another breath and I reach out and place a hand on his knee. He just nods his head as if he’s talking to himself and then his body tenses up again before he speaks. “I did what you said I should do.”
What? I try to figure out what exactly I told him to do.
“I did what you said and now … now my head is just so fucked up over it. I’m a goddamn mess.”
The raw grief breaking his voice has me sitting beside him and waiting for him to look up into my eyes. “What did you do?”
He reaches out and grabs my hand, lacing our fingers together and squeezing tightly. “I found my mom.”
The breath catches in my throat because when I made that comment, never in a million years, would I have thought he’d actually do it. And now I don’t know what to say, because I’m the catalyst for all of this pain.
“Colton …” It’s all I can say, all I can offer besides lifting our hands and pressing a kiss to the back of his.
“Kelly called me while I was … Oh fuck! I missed the ceremony. I stood you up.” And I can tell by the absolute disbelief in his voice that he really, truly forgot.
“No, no, no,” I shush him, trying to tell him that it doesn’t matter. That only facing his fears is what matters. “It’s okay.” I squeeze our hands again.
“I’m so sorry, Ry … I just … I can’t even fucking think straight right now.” He breaks his eyes from mine and averts them in shame as he uses his other hand to wipe the tears from his cheeks. “You know...” he shakes his head as he looks out at the darkened track in front of us “...it’s kind of funny that this is the place I come to forget everything and tonight it’s the first place I thought to go in order to come to terms with it all.”
I follow his eyes and look out at the track, taking in the enormity of it all—the track and his actions. We sit in silence as the importance behind his words hit me. He’s trying to face things, to move on, to begin to heal. And I’ve never been more proud of him.
“I asked my dad a couple of months ago if he knew what had happened to her. He got me in touch with a PI—Kelly is his name—that he’d hired when I was younger who kept tabs on her for ten years to make sure she didn’t come back for me.” His voice is even, flat, such a contrast to the hiccupping despair from moments ago, and yet I can feel the extremity of the emotion vibrating just beneath the surface. “He called me today. He found her.” He looks over at me, and the forlorn look in his eyes—a lost little boy trying to find his way—undoes me, breaks the hold on the emotion I’m trying to hold in so I can be strong for him.
Be the rock while he crumbles.
My first tear falls as I reach out and place my hand on his cheek, a simple touch that relays so very much about what I think, how I feel, what I know he needs from me. I lean in, his jaw clenching beneath my palm, his eyes fused with mine, and place a feather soft kiss to his lips. “I’m so proud of you.” I whisper the words to him. I don’t ask him about what he found or who she is. I focus on him, on the now, because I know his head is desperately trying to reconcile the past while trying to figure out the future. So I focus on the here, the now, and hope he understands that I’ll be here for every single step of the way if he lets me.
We sit like this, the silence reinforcing the reassurance of my touch and the understanding behind my kiss. And for once, the silence is comforting, accepting of his tortured soul.
He works a swallow in his throat and blinks his eyes rapidly as if he too is trying to understand everything, and yet he has so many more pieces of the puzzle than I do, so I sit and wait patiently for him to continue. He breaks our eye contact and leans back, eyes drawn back to the track.
“My mom is dead,” he says the words without any emotion, and even though they float out into the night, I can sense them suffocating him. I stare at him, take in his moonlit profile against the night sky, and I choose to say nothing, to let him lead this conversation.
Restless, he shoves up out of his seat and paces to the end of the aisle and then stops, his figure haloed by the single light beyond him. “She never changed. I guess I shouldn’t have expected to find anything different,” he says so quietly, but I can still hear every single inflection in his tone, every break in his voice. He turns to face me and walks a few feet toward me and stops.
“I’m … I’m—my head is such a fucking mess right now I just …” He scrubs his hands over his face and through his hair before emitting a self-deprecating laugh that sends shivers up my spine. “I don’t even have any positive memories of her. None. Eight years of my fucking life and I don’t remember a single thing that makes me smile.”
I know he’s struggling and I so desperately want to cross the distance between us and touch him, hold him, comfort him, but I know he needs to get this out. Needs to rid himself
of his self-proclaimed poison eating his soul.
“My mom was a drugged out whore. Lived by the sword and died by the sword …” The spite in his voice, the pain, is so powerful and raw I can’t help the tears that well in my eyes or the shudder in my breath as I inhale. “Yep,” he says, that laugh falling out of his mouth again. “A druggie. She wasn’t discriminate though. She’d take anything to get that rush because it was what was important. Fucking more important than her little boy sitting scared as fuck in the corner.” He rolls his shoulder and clears his throat as if he’s trying to choke back the emotion. “So I just don’t get it …” His voice fades and I try to follow what he is saying but I can’t.
“Don’t get what, Colton?”
“I don’t get why I fucking care that she’s dead!” he shouts, his voice echoing through the empty stadium. “Why does it bug me? Why am I fucking upset over it? Why does it make me feel anything other than relief?” His voice cracks again, his words ricocheting off the concrete.
My stomach knots up over the fact that he’s hurting because I can’t do a goddamn thing about it. I can’t fix or mend or resolve, so I reassure. “She was your mom, Colton. It’s normal to be upset because deep down I’m sure in her own way she loved you—”
“Loved me?” he screams, startling me with the sudden change from confused grief to unfettered rage. “Loved me?” he yells again, walking toward me and pounding on his chest with his words before walking five feet and stopping. “Do you want to know what love was to her? Love was trading her six year old son for fucking drugs, Rylee!”
“Love was letting her drug dealing pimp rape her son, fuck her little boy while he had to repeat out loud how much he loved it, loved him, so she could get her next fucking fix! Treat him worse than a fucking dog so she could score enough drugs to ensure her next high! It was knowing the fucker is giving her the smallest fucking quantities possible because he can’t wait to come back and do it all over again. Love was sitting on the other side of the closed bedroom door and hearing her little boy scream in the worst motherfucking pain as he’s ripped apart physically and emotionally and not doing a goddamn thing to stop it because she’s so fucking selfish.”