Now
I wish I were more surprised to see him. When Teller said I’m coming for you, I didn’t think he meant literally, but here he is, playing out a scene we’ve repeated many times before.
With my bare feet on the biting, splinted wooden porch, I stand over his sleeping form, smiling because he thought far enough ahead to bring a blanket just in case I didn’t let him in. The truth is, if he did knock when he arrived, I didn’t hear it. But he assumed right; I wouldn’t have opened the door.
Leaving a thermos of coffee beside his head, I shake my intruder awake and slip on my sandals resting on the steps before heading down to the walkway that leads to the street. “Get off my lawn, Teller.”
He isn’t coherent enough to reply in the time it takes for me to get in my rental car and drive away. And it isn’t until I’ve turned the corner that I allow his presence to crash down on me, bringing tears to my eyes.
You knew he’d show up eventually, I remind myself.
I told him I wasn’t ready for this, but since when has any Reddy taken someone else’s wishes into consideration, especially Teller? If he did give two fucks about my feelings, he would’ve told me about Kristi and Joe’s affair right away, and he wouldn’t have lied when I asked who Melanie was. He would’ve told me right away she was the woman he cheated on Kristi with, when she confronted us at the hospital after we made our relationship official. His failure to do these things took me back to the days when our relationship was chaos, and I can’t do that again. I need more. I deserve more.
After I park my car at the home improvement store, I pull down the sun visor and wipe the tears from my face. Not a single day in the three weeks since I left him has been tearless, but these tears are particularly painful—these tears make the day I left him feel like it was only yesterday.
Taking my time to gather the supplies I need to paint the rooms in my childhood home, I walk up and down every aisle, like this is the most interesting store I’ve ever been to and my heart isn’t broken into a dozen pieces.
By the time I make it to the register to check out, my cart is filled with things I don’t need, and I’ve killed my painting budget.
“Looks like you have a big project on your hands,” the cashier says, scanning the buckets of paint, a tin flamingo statue, and a brownie maker.
I’m an emotional eater.
“Yeah,” I say, ashamed of my purchases. “I’m ambitious.”
In spite of my impulse buys, I didn’t burn more than an hour in there, and I don’t trust it was enough time for Teller to get a clue and off my porch. So, I go to Bed Bath & Beyond where I buy a crème brûlée torch, a neck pillow, wall art of the Golden Gate Bridge, and onion goggles.
Which is ironic considering I haven’t cooked a single meal since my return to St. Helena. I carry a few extra pounds around these days as substantial evidence.
Retail therapy takes the edge off, but the chili cheese fries and strawberry shake I order from a drive-thru almost make me feel normal. True to my word, I ambitiously shove a forkful of fries into my mouth as I pull curbside at my house. The empty porch leaves a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach, but it’s what I want.
I’m walking up the small pathway with my food and shake, deciding to unload the car once I wake from the food coma I hope to succumb to after I finish my feast of carbs and high fructose corn syrup when Teller motherfucking Reddy emerges from the side of my house like a cat burglar.
“Dammit!” I scream. My heart stops, and I drop my lunch. The shake splatters everywhere, and my fries land upside down. “Look what you’ve done now. Why are you still here?”
The sight of my perfectly blended indulgence—made with real strawberries, not that fake shit—breaks me, and I tilt my face to the sky and cry out like the madwoman I am. The only thing he’s here to burglarize is what’s left of my sanity, and what I’ve picked up in weight, I’ve lost in mental wellness as it is.
“Your fries should be okay,” Teller says, picking up the container. He tries to give them to me, but I smack them out of his hands. This time the Styrofoam breaks open, and I kick my almost-meal across the lawn. “What the fuck did you do that for?” he asks.
White-hot anger fills me all the way up, turning into a firestorm when I notice he’s made himself comfortable. Dressed in a plain white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his jeans are caked with mud, and he’s cleaning dirt from his hands with a rag I remember leaving on the back patio.
“Because you’re not supposed to be here,” I shriek, shoving my hands onto his chest. He takes three steps back as I yell, “Put my rag back where you got it.”
He holds his hands up in surrender, dropping the rag to the ground with the food. “I was pulling weeds while you were gone. Curb appeal helps to sell a house.” Teller’s eyes shift to the For Sale sign perched at the edge of the lawn.
“No,” I say, reaching down for the rag, the empty cup, and what’s left of my chili fries container. “You don’t get to help me now. Go back to L.A., Tell.”
“Ella…”
Walking away from him feels impossible, like my feet are stuck in cinder blocks, but I do it with my chin held high. It falls as soon as I shut the door and lock the deadbolt. I stand with my back against it for one, two, three breaths before I continue forward to the kitchen and dump everything into the trash.
With my hands braced on the counter, I drop my head between my shoulders and squeeze my eyes shut and remind myself, He’s a lying sack of shit. He’s a lying sack of shit. He’s a lying sack of shit.
The shrill of the telephone scares me out of my trance. I answer it on the third ring, grateful for the reprieve from reality.
“Hey, Ella, it’s Diana Murry,” my realtor greets me. “I’ve received a couple of calls regarding the house, but no offers yet. Do you have time in the next week for an open house? I think it’ll help us gain a potential buyer.”
“Sure,” I say, forgetting my past is loitering on my front porch while I focus on my future. “Let me grab my appointment book to see what I have available.”
The truth is, my schedule’s wide open, but I don’t want Diana to know what a complete waste I am. I want her to think I’m important, and that I’m so busy I need a pocket calendar to keep my life together. We bounce dates back and forth, all of which I have available, but I make up fake conference calls and doctors’ appointments to be convincingly complicated.
Deciding on a date two weeks from today, Diana asks, “Are you sure you don’t have something sooner? I’d hate to see your house sit for so long in this market.”
“I’ll let you know if something comes up,” I lie.
“Okay,” she says regretfully. “I know the house is aged, but it has character and potential. People love a project. Get rid of any clutter but leave the furniture. It’s better if potential clients imagine themselves living in the home instead of viewing it as an empty house.”
“Well,” I answer, just as regretful. “I had the secondhand store come by and pick up most of the furniture.”
They hauled everything but the bed in the master bedroom and my dad’s recliner. When I first arrived, I was all about flushing out the old and starting new. I may have gone a little overboard, leaving myself without basic comforts and an un-staged home for a buyer. Good thing I bought that tin flamingo today.
Glutton for punishment knocks on the door as I end my call with Diana, bringing me back to the here and now. Teller peeks through the window and beckons me over, saying, “Please, baby.”
I drag my brick-like feet through the living room, but I don’t open the door. I stand on the other side of the window where he can see me and ask, “What do you want?”
“Can we talk?” he asks, muffled by the glass partition. “I came all the way here to see you.”
His bright green eyes are pools of despair, stretching my heartstrings. Teller’s dangerous when he’s apologetic—halfway sincere but wholly helpless—and not once since the day we met on UCLA’s lawn have I stood a chance against the rare spotting of his vulnerability.
Until this day.
Today, I’m making a change. I ignore the way his susceptibility weakens my knees, waving to the empty room behind me. “Can’t you see how busy I am? I’m sorry you flew out for nothing, Tell, but I don’t have time for a heart-to-heart.”
Despair searches the space over my shoulder, only able to see as far as the dining room. But it’s enough to grasp the gist of my pathetic situation. My father’s house is falling apart around me. The roof needs replacing, the patio is rotted, weeds have ransacked the yard, and giving away the furniture was a huge mistake. Now you can see where the floral wallpaper is torn, how warped the wood floors have become over the years, and I suspect the popcorn ceilings are filling my lungs with asbestos as I stand here.
Now that I think about it, the house has an uncanny resemblance to my life.
“Let me in,” he replies. His eagerness advances on my uneasy resolve, lessening my stance. “I can help you. Tell me what to do.”
There’s nothing I’d like more than his help, but when I close my eyes at night, I can still hear what it sounded like when his bat collided with my car. The panic I felt is just as potent today as it was then. Once I relive that scene, there’s no holding back the avalanche of emotions our history plagues me with. It keeps me up at night, tossing and turning, missing and hating him all at once.
“No, that’s okay.” My voice shakes. My hands, knees, and chin quiver. “I’ll call you when I get back to L.A.”
He rakes his tattooed fingers through his hair, turning away for a second before returning his stare to me. “When are you coming back?”
“After I sell the house,” I say.
“My flight leaves tomorrow morning. Come back with me, baby,” he tries again. “I need you home. I need you home so fucking badly.”
“Can’t,” I say. Tears blur my vision. “I have to paint the bedrooms.”
Hitting his hands against the window, sending me back a foot with my heart in my throat, Teller drops his arms to his side and spits off the patio. “This isn’t over, Ella.”
“Go home,” I say, unable to manage anything else.
The stubborn bastard has never listened to a word I say, and he isn’t going to start now. He’s a problem to be solved by calling the neighborhood watch. My entitled, nosey, do-gooder neighbors would love to feel important by ridding our beloved community of a tattooed hooligan like Teller, but the weeds do need attention. He’s free labor, and I’ve never looked a gift horse in the mouth.
Of course, that’s what I am doing.
Spying on him through the blinds, I tiptoe from window to window, watching his progress. I’m not mad at the cigarette hanging between his lips, or the sweat glistening at his hairline—especially when he lifts the hem of his shirt to wipe it away, exposing the art across his abs. I’m pissed he showed up, but I’ve always appreciated eye candy.
“Get a grip, Gabriella,” I whisper to myself, lifting a section of the blinds above the kitchen sink with careful ease.
The setting sun is in my line of sight, turning everything into a blinding neon yellow. I climb onto the kitchen counter before my corneas burn, careful not to make any loud noises that he can hear from outside. The excitement lost to me for weeks returns in a rush of heat and short breaths. The fractured pieces of my heart jolt to life, recognizing Teller’s nearness as the one who kept it together for so long before he dismantled it completely.
With my knees perched on each side of the small sink, I slip my pointer finger between the sun-bleached panels and split the blinds apart. I inhale sharply, spotting Teller on his feet over the patch of ground he cleared. He’s taken off his shirt and tucked it in his back pocket, resting his hands on his hips to catch a breath. The sleeplessness under his eyes and the heaviness in his shoulders make my favorite chain-smoker look older than he is.
Love drops rose-colored glasses over my eyes, and Teller’s unhappiness fills my stomach with empathy I’d be stronger without. History torments me with a selective memory and a soft spot I thought I filled with concrete until I found him sleeping on my front porch, that sly son of a bitch.
Someone so beautiful shouldn’t look so sad.
What does he need? Food, water, shelter … a hug?
Teller sips straight from the hose before he runs the water over his head. It cascades across his sun-kissed shoulders, down the kaleidoscope of color that tells a story on his arms, to his hands that save lives. It’s the last shove that sends the determination to stay away from him over the brink of self-preservation, plunging my willpower to its grave.
My body moves faster than my mind, and before I have a chance to jump to my feet, my knee slips into the sink, and I clutch the blinds to keep from breaking my neck. But they’re older than me, splintering under my grip and breaking free from their brackets. I fall on my side, kicking on the faucet and spraying water across the kitchen.
Two decades of dust scurries in the air, reflecting like snowflakes through the incoming sunrays streaming through the exposed glass. I’m bruised, embarrassed, and soaked by the time I stand upright and shut the water off.
“Everything okay in there?” I hear Teller ask with a smile in his tone.
Shaking water from my hands, I can’t meet his eyes when I say, “I need to replace the blinds anyway.”
“What were you doing?” he asks from the other side of the window.
“Measuring,” I reply. Teller’s smirk spreads into a full grin, hiding the dark circles beneath his lower lashes. His arrogance reminds me of why I don’t want him around, and I save what’s left of my dignity before it’s buried alive in a field of ridicule.
“Where’s your tape measure?” To a fiend like him, my unease is delicious, and he licks his lips.
Pulling the rest of the blinds down, I say, “I’m eyeing it. You know, estimating.”
“You should probably hire a professional to replace the blinds, Smella.” He looks over my shoulder to the ruined wallpaper and bent floors. “Or let me help you.”
Embarrassment leaves no room for compassion. If looks could kill, I’d paint the walls in Teller’s blood for being such a heartbreaking Judas. His traitorous, soul-sucking, mood-killing crooked smirk is all it takes to catapult me back to that place where he’s the enemy.
“You can’t help yourself, Tell. How are you going to help me?” The words come out sharper than I intended, cruel and unusual.
He drops the preconceptions and says, “Let me explain what happened, Gabriella.”
“The part where you knew Joe and Kristi were fucking, and you were going to go right ahead and let me marry him anyway?” I ask. “Or that part where you lied to me about Melanie, and I had to find out exactly who she is through a damn letter I was never supposed to read?”
Teller flinches, but he doesn’t shrink away. He came here with firsthand experience and the knowledge that I refuse to go down without a fight. But what he hasn’t figured out is I have no intention of turning a blind eye to what’s torn us apart. He broke that cycle of addiction when his bat hit my windshield, and I finally decided enough is enough.
“You were never going to marry him,” he replies. All signs of spirit disappear from his face. “Do you really fucking believe I would have allowed it? The night of the accident—”
“Shut up!” I shout. “I don’t want to talk about that night or any other night with you. What I want is for you to get off my property.”
Now that I know the truth about Joe and Kristi, the night of the accident holds new meaning to me. It wasn’t a coincidence they were in the car together—that wasn’t chance; it was fate. They were in love, and I was too oblivious to notice … because I didn’t love Joe enough to get to know him. He could have waved a flag in my face that read we don’t belong together, and I wouldn’t have seen it. I was too worried about what Teller was doing.
“Stop running away from me,” he replies. “All I want is a conversation.”
“And all I want is some fucking peace for once in my life,” I say before walking away.
“I’m not leaving you, Gabriella Mason,” he shouts. “No matter how much you try to push me away, baby, I’m not leaving you like everyone else has.”
Lord, have mercy on his soul, the man is proud.