Chapter 14
How Not To
Bryant
My own words haunted me during the drive to Texas. I didn’t want anything from her. I’d said that same thing the other night. I had meant it. Wanting her was selfish, but hell if I didn’t want to be selfish right now. I convinced myself she needed me. Then, reality hit, and I knew what she needed was closure. I would get in the way of that. I didn’t know how not to want more for myself while I was giving her all of me. I didn’t know how to walk away. I’d spent all week mulling over every little detail of the time we had spent together. I prepped myself every morning before I stepped through the doors of Skrillex, giving myself a pep talk of how our exchanges needed to stay professional. The entire week had been hell, and I had almost told Adam I couldn’t make the show because I was sick. I didn’t trust myself to be alone with her. I figured if I kept my distance she would do the same. We could pretend the previous kisses, touches, everything had never happened.
No, it happened and I didn’t want to take it back. I wanted to repeat it, over and over again. I wanted to pull her close to me and feel her body quiver against my touch. I wanted to hear her breathing become shallow and see her swallow down her fear.
I hadn’t been looking for a damn thing when my divorce was finalized. Amberly became an equation to a problem I didn’t know I had. Fate? Maybe. I hadn’t believed in fate. Not after my divorce. I had believed that fate brought Mac and I together and when she filed for divorce, I obliterated every thought that fate even existed. God, then a woman who I hadn’t seen in so long walked in and made me forget what road I planned to travel. But if that wasn’t fate what was it? Why the fuck was Amberly Hodge in my life then? Was I supposed to help her heal? Was I even capable of doing that when I couldn’t think when she was around? When I wanted her for myself? When all I wanted to do was be around her even if she needed space to find herself again?
I turned the radio up, drowning my own thoughts to suffocation. I was still pissed over what Lucas had told me Friday night. I wasn’t even mad at Amberly. I had pretended to be so maybe what I made her feel, she would forget about. It wasn’t as if she had intentionally appeared in my life. She didn’t ask for any of what she’d gone through. She was shattered and Cricket warned me, but I knew Cricket was also rooting for me. I was deflecting the real issue at hand.
Lucas did some digging and found that Sadie Wilcox was a girl that Mac had been messing around with. He was equipped with evidence as well. Footage from a nearby mall confirmed what he was telling me. According to the evidence, Mac and Sadie were still involved, despite Mac’s relationship with my best friend, Ian. Well, ex-best friend.
The news didn’t surprise me, it would have surprised me more if someone told me she hadn’t been messing around. Mac was never satisfied, and I had come to the conclusion that our divorce was all her. She wanted more, sometimes bringing women home from the bars she frequented. I had to sit on the couch in the living room and act like it wasn’t happening. The moans that came from the bedroom were unavoidable, unless I wanted to stand outside and wait it out. When the women left, I got to lay down beside her. She always fell asleep afterward. Our sex life diminished down to once a month. Weeks would go by before a light in her brain would go off that reminded her she still had a husband and hadn’t pleasured him in a while.
As time dragged by, it became nearly impossible for her to get me hard. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I had become numb, half of the man I had once been. I blamed myself but kept up the façade that we were some happy married couple with no issues to the outside.
Lucas said he would do some more digging to see if he could get Sadie to admit to planting the drugs. I told Lucas to do what he had to do, but I wasn’t as interested in going back to the police station to work. I was becoming attached to my new position. I’d take it one day at a time. If I was supposed to be there, I would be. Maybe I would have never gotten fired. A fleeting thought entered my mind. What if Mac had put Sadie up to it? That would make the most sense out of anything in my life. I couldn’t stop the thoughts. I played different scenes in my head, some made sense, others were so far-fetched it was unbelievable. It kept me busy during the long, boring drive.
After five stops, we made it to our destination. We were supposed to get a hotel room for the night and head over to the show first thing in the morning. I got out of the truck and stretched my legs, while reaching up to the sky in an effort to stretch the tightened muscles in my back.
“I’ll go get the cards for our rooms, you can start getting the luggage out.” Amberly said, locking the door to the car before taking off to the lobby of the hotel.
Her tone of voice told me she was angry. I was sure she had thought about what I’d said the entire way down here. Without doubt she’d read between the lines, finding fault with what I had said to her. I tried to do the right thing.
I lifted our luggage out of the back of the truck and rolled them behind me as I headed for the lobby. Two doors opened as I got closer. I swept passed them and sat the bags right behind Amberly.
“What do you mean there’s only one room?” Amberly’s voice was frantic, laced with hostility.
The woman behind the counter stumbled through her words, sounding incoherent as she tried to explain. “Mr. Levy only booked one room, not two.”
Amberly pitched a fit and started to dig out her wallet. “Fine, I’ll pay for the other one and he can reimburse me later.” She slapped the bills down on the counter, making the receptionist flinch.
The poor girl couldn’t have been older than nineteen. I cleared the bills from the counter and handed them back to Amberly. “Save your money.”
She turned around, pinning me with a death glare. “I’m not sharing a room with you.”
“Look, let's just take the luggage to this room, and we can call Adam to see if he can book another room.”
The girl lifted a hand in the air as though she were asking my permission to speak. Amberly turned back to her and she began speaking, her voice stammering through the words. “I’m sorry, we don’t have another room to book. They’re all full.”
“What the hell is this? Disneyland?” Amberly puffed, and her words bounced off the walls of the hotel. She acquired the stares of an elderly couple in the lobby who were enjoying brunch.
I tried to shush her but she ignored my request. “Seriously, I want to speak to a manager. I fail to see how my boss made such a colossal mistake. There’s no way he would have booked one room.”
I turned her around to face me, both of my hands grasping her shoulders. “Amberly, it’s not that big of a deal. We will be okay in one room. I’m sure it was an honest mistake.”
“You always book one room.” The receptionist chimed in. At that point I wanted to throw something at her. She was going to make it worse before I had the chance to defuse the situation.
Amberly pushed my hands off of her. “Yes, we always book one room. This year a guy came in place of Cricket, so we need two rooms.”
“That’s not necessary.” I swiped the card keys from the desk and started towards the elevators. Our room was on the second floor. Either Amberly was going to follow me or she wasn’t.
“I’m not sharing a room with you.” She argued when the doors to the elevator closed.
I didn’t say a thing until we got to our floor. “It’ll be like I’m not even there.”
“Please. You’re nearly six-foot-tall, how can I pretend you’re not in the room with me? Who knows, maybe you will keep me up all night. How do I know you don’t snore in your sleep?”
I chuckled as I jammed the key card into the slot and pushed the door. I held it open for Amberly. She entered and threw herself onto the bed. “I don’t snore in my sleep.” I offered, shoving the bags into the closet of the room.
She covered her face with her forearms, her legs dangling down the bed.
“Amberly.”
“Hmm.” She answered, not removing herself from the bed or her arms from her face.
I ran a palm over the top of my head before I spoke again. I couldn’t predict if my words would disintegrate her mood, but I hoped they would. “I’m sorry for earlier.” There was too much silence in the room. “Fuck. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to do what you need, trying to be what you need. I’ve been trying all week to pretend nothing ever happened between us because we’re both so fucked up that I don’t think either one of us know what we need. I may pretend that nothing happened but that’s not what I want. I want to remember everything, and I don’t want to feel guilty that’s how I feel. But I do.” I rubbed my palms together before crossing my arms across my chest. There. I said it. I admitted, in a round-a-bout way, that I wanted her.
She let her arms fall to her sides and, using her elbows, she propped up to look at me. “Why would you pretend that nothing happened?” She questioned, her voice breaking.
I exhaled and dropped my arms, twisting the desk chair in the room around so I could straddle it. “Because, I’m distracting you.”
She pushed herself up and paced back and forth in the room.
“There is no easy way to say this, but I’m going to try.” She inhaled a deep breath. “The day Haylie died was the day I found out my husband had been having an affair. I walked in on the two of them. So, I practically lost my daughter and my husband the same day. He wasn’t dead, but he might as well have been. He became dead to me after that. He shattered my existence and I felt I had nothing else to live for. I haven’t even so much as looked at another guy since that day. I’m not sure why. I wanted to focus on school and myself for a while before I even thought of trying to date again. And then you,” She paused using one hand to glide up and down through the air at me, “show up and confuse the shit out of me. You make me question the path I’m on. You make me want to forget everything bad that’s happened in my life. Bryant, you’re not distracting me. You’re the reason I even started considering fighting for Haylie again. If anything, you’re the strength I never had.”
I lifted myself from the chair. “Isn’t it a good thing if you forget the bad?” I held my hands out to her.
“No. No. No, it’s not. It’s a bad thing. A very bad thing. I need to feel and remember the bad in my life. I can never forget her, Bryant. She was my entire world. She still is. Maybe I can’t do the whole relationship thing right now, maybe I can. I’m just trying to get through all of this and the only way I know how to do that is to follow my heart.”
She stood up, her hands flying to her head as if it hurt physically to explain it to me.
I pulled her down to the hotel bed and made her sit down while I kneeled in front of her. “Amberly, Haylie wants you to move on. She wants you to follow your heart. Remember what we talked about at the grave yard? Keep that in mind. You won’t forget her just because you try to find happiness. In fact, you need happiness. Whatever makes you happy, even if it's not me, you have to go for it. You can’t keep living in the past.”
She burst into tears, her hands shielding her face from me. I pried them away and made her look at me. “I have to live in the past because that’s where she is. I don’t want to be in a world where she’s not.” Sobs racked her body.
I stood up and pulled her into me, smoothing down pieces of her hair as she cried into my shoulder.
“It’s okay. It’ll be okay.” I repeated the words until her cries were exhausted.
When she settled down she pulled away and looked at me. I wiped away a few tears from her face. “What if happiness is with you? What if you walk away and take my strength with you?”
“Amberly, whatever strength I gave you, I’ll never take away. You had a goal in mind before I came into the picture. I don’t want you to forget what that was because I showed up. I can’t be the reason you give up on that.”
“What if you’re the reason I don’t?”