Jared
Fatigue weighed down my body. Closing my eyes like a shield, I flipped the switch just inside the door. Light blazed against my lids. Reluctantly, I opened them to the desolation of the empty hotel room.
Cold sank all the way to the marrow of my bones. I’d ridden through the streets of the city for hours, mindless, without a destination. Finally I’d given up the fight warring in my mind and headed in the direction of where I’d come. Cold air beat against my skin as I’d opened my throttle and barreled into the long, silent night. When I could ride no further, I pulled off the freeway and checked into a crappy motel.
Motherfucking story of my life.
On a heavy sigh, I tossed the keycard to the small round table under the window and scrubbed my palms over my weary face.
God, I felt so lost.
I missed Aly more than I could ever imagine.
This longing was different, though. Different from those months I’d lived without her when I’d been wasting away in Vegas, when the days had blurred and bled and spun in an endless oblivion of pain. When I’d filled my veins so full of any substance I could get my hands on I’d believed it’d somehow have the power to erase her memory that had been scored into my heart and mind.
Difference was, I no longer wanted to forget.
No longer wanted to run.
For so many years, I believed I didn’t belong anywhere.
Now I knew better.
I belonged with Aly.
I just didn’t know how to get back there, how to love her the way she deserved, how to be that man I felt like I’d almost become.
Ghosts.
My humorless laughter ricocheted around the walls of the barren room.
Fuck, that girl knew me better than anyone. She’d been completely aware of what I was suffering all the while I was pretending the past couldn’t touch me.
I’d run from it again, although in a completely different direction than I’d ever gone.
I’d run for Aly. Which was a really goddamned good place to be.
But I should have known it’d catch up to me.
I got why Aly had been pushing me. She knew where it was headed, and maybe she’d been clinging, too, doing her best to stop something that was inevitable.
I went straight for the bathroom. I didn’t bother with a light. I just turned the shower as hot as it would go. Steam filled the small space. I shucked my clothes and stepped into the blistering heat of the relentless spray.
Waves of chills rolled through my body as it was pelted with the shocking warmth, a complete contradiction to the chilled air I’d sped into for too many hours. Sucking in a breath, I let my eyes fall closed.
Green eyes stared back at me, and the girl smiled, full of gentleness and affection.
With belief.
I leaned my forearm on the cold shower tiles and dropped my forehead to it, pinched my eyes tighter as all these images rushed me, this girl who had me completely undone.
And she was there.
Aly.
Like I could reach out and touch her. God, I missed her so bad. I didn’t think I’d ever needed her as badly as I needed her now.
Every inch of me hardened, my body going rigid as my mind slipped into her hold, as I gave in to this girl who tore right through every wall I threw up.
She’d changed me. Touched me in ways no other person possibly could. Because she was meant for me.
Couldn’t stop myself when I gripped my cock.
God, I just wanted to feel her.
Wanted to touch her. Wanted her to touch me.
My hand slipped up and down my length in a punishing rhythm, as if I could pump this need right out of me.
With every stroke, the need only grew.
The muscles in my stomach clenched, rippled and bunched, and a deep, guttural moan climbed up my throat.
Aly.
My mouth fixed in a wide, silent cry as I came.
I banged my forehead repeatedly against my arm resting on the wall.
What a joke. Like my hand stood a chance at substituting for my girl.
It didn’t even scratch the surface of the need I felt for Aly.
It just left me feeling more vacant. Hollowed out.
Made me remember what I was missing and why I’d hauled my ass all the way to California, throwing myself on the mercies of a man I thought hated me.
I’d gone seeking answers. Instead, I ended up with more questions.
Exhaling, I scrubbed myself clean, turned off the water, and toweled dry.
Never in the million thoughts I’d had of him over the last seven years had I imagined that he would have moved on. It seemed impossible.
Wrong.
My chest ached because I didn’t know what to do with the information now.
Didn’t know how to process how seeing him felt.
In the dim light that spilled into the bathroom from the main room, I stared at the darkened silhouette of myself in the mirror.
So much anger lived inside me, day after day convicting me of this unbearable guilt.
Standing before him, I thought I’d feel ashamed.
Instead I’d just been shocked.
And sad.
Unbelievably sad.
Grabbing my phone from my jeans heaped on the floor, I shuffled back into the main room and flicked off the light. It plunged the room into darkness. Blindly, I flopped on my back in the center of the bed.
Aly held fast to my thoughts.
As if there was a chance of escaping her.
It was close to two, but I couldn’t stop myself. I just needed her to know I was thinking of her because I couldn’t stand the thought of my girl imagining I’d walked out with the intention of abandoning her and our baby.
Never.
I tapped out a simple message and hoped she understood it was my truth.
I miss you.
Almost instantly, my phone chimed with a message. I pictured her lying awake, too, thinking of me, tossing and turning in a vain attempt to find sleep.
I swiped the screen.
I miss you… more than you could know.
Two seconds later, another message came through.
Please. Find a way back to me.
Warmth spread through every cell in my body.
Still, I knew her words weren’t an invitation for me to go running straight back to her, as much as I wanted to, like I’d done more than three months before. Without regard, without thinking about how messed up I still was inside. Using all that shit as an excuse to continue feeling the way I did, pretending like it wouldn’t cause me to stumble.
Somewhere inside me, I knew I would.
And I did.
I fucked up the best thing I ever had in my life.
Sleep never came. For hours, I lay in the silence of the room, listening to the world passing me by.
Sunlight slowly climbed to the window. A thin strip of light bled through the small part in the heavy drapes.
The day dawned on my twenty-third birthday.
Sorrow spread, slowly taking me whole. Blood pulsed harshly through my veins, my body injected with a steady rise of fear.
Because Aly had been right all along.
It was time.
Wind gusted across the winter ground. Leaves whipped around my feet.
When I got back to Phoenix, I came straight here.
I struggled and managed to draw a lump of heavy air down my raw throat. Unbearable weight pressed against my ribs. Crushing.
Just like that day seven years ago.
The moment when my world shattered. When everything I loved was spoiled by my ruin. When I sat helplessly and watched her light dim in her blue eyes.
Screaming against the searing pain, I’d begged her to take me with her. It hurt so fucking bad, and all I wanted was to die.
That pain had followed me through the years, amplified in the moments when I closed my eyes, when my lids would flutter shut and the images would invade. When the memory drew so close it was all I could see.
All I could feel.
This same fucking pain.
Pressing my hand to my chest, I exhaled a jagged breath and forced my feet to move. My boots were silent as I treaded across what seemed an endless lawn. Nausea pooled low in my stomach, and sweat beaded on my brow.
I’d made a thousand promises never to return here.
The stupor of the day they laid her in the ground remained so distinctly clear, a photographic memory that somehow I hadn’t been present for. Like my eyes had been pinned wide open, forcing me to see what I’d done. But it felt as if I’d witnessed it from afar, my ear acutely trained to every cry that rippled through the grieving crowd as I watched on from a distance.
At the same time, I could feel nothing.
Excruciating numbness.
Like I’d been removed from the mourning because I had no right to it.
And God, I’d wanted to cry. I’d wanted to cry for her so badly, but it’d just locked up in my throat, wedged there forever because I didn’t deserve to weep for her when I was the one who brought all the tears to the endless sea of black surrounding me.
Swallowed by the pain of the crowd, I’d sat staring into the void.
Vacant.
Lost.
Lost in the spray of roses blanketing the shiny casket.
I’d been unable to look away. Like I was locked to the beauty getting ready to be left forever in the cold, hard ground, willing them to wrap me up and somehow take me, too.
It was the day I made a promise to her I would find a way to pay for the sin I committed.
Even through the numbness of that day seven years ago, I still knew the exact spot.
I slowed as I approached. Another wave of sorrow crashed into me. Overwhelming. Staggering. That physical hurt in my chest only intensified, and my breaths snapped in and out of my lungs. Weakness overcame me when I came to a stop in front of her stone.
Helene Rose Holt.
I sagged and dropped to my knees.
An intricate rose was carved into the marble behind the deep imprint of her name, a reminder of the beauty that had been my mother.
My fingertips brushed over the engraving.
Memorizing.
Guilt flickered around the edges of my consciousness, warning me I had no right to be here. But it was muted, nothing more than a fading burn replaced by an intense grief I’d never allowed myself to feel.
I missed her.
“Hey, Mom,” I whispered so low no one could hear, but my heart felt it deep. That rock of unspent emotion flared. A tingling sensation ran the length of my throat. I swallowed down the saliva gathered at the back of my mouth.
I’d give anything for her to be able to respond, to talk to me and look at me with that smile that promised I was her world, for her to once again tell me it would be okay.
But she was gone.
Had I ever truly accepted that?
Slumping back, I sat, planting my feet on the ground as I wrapped my shivering arms around my knees. Nervously, I tugged at the front of my too long hair.
I didn’t know if I had. All these years had been spent wrapped up in that one singular moment. The disastrous choice I’d made. For years, I’d been stuck there. A prisoner to all the shame, regret, and hate.
I never reached the point where I accepted I had to live in a world without my mother.
All the muscles in my body went rigid when I sensed the tentative footsteps approaching from behind. Maybe he didn’t know if he belonged here any more than I did. I stole a wary glance over my shoulder.
My father.
Swallowing over the sadness that hit me at seeing him there, I turned my attention back to my mother’s grave. “You followed me?” I asked on a quavering voice, not knowing if I wanted to cry out in some sort of fucked-up relief at the idea or run as far as my feet would carry me.
I stared at the date on my mother’s grave and buried my fisted hands between my knees.
February 3, 2006.
It was the day I’d begun the run.
The race.
Sprinting toward anything that would usher in my destined destruction.
I’d been so strong, so convinced of that certainty. Of my conclusion. Paying for my sins with an empty life I could never truly give, hating each day I was forced to live.
But God, I was tired, worn down, weakened now in that belief.
I felt my father’s presence grow as he advanced from behind. Slowly, his head drifted to the side, weighted by his own sorrow as he edged forward. Passing by me, he knelt and swept loving fingers across my mother’s headstone, even softer as he brushed them over the sacred ground.
I cringed, thinking of the woman who’d stood gaping at me from their front door yesterday.
Nothing made sense, because looking at my father now, I was pretty fucking certain he hadn’t forgotten about my mom.
Hurt dripped from his every pore.
I blew out a troubled breath, dropped my eyes because whatever passed through him now felt too private, too intimate for me to see.
Finally he stood and took a couple steps back. Exhaling heavily, he settled to the ground off to the left of me, facing into the stillness of my mom’s silenced voice.
“No, I didn’t follow you here,” he finally answered. “Figured if you came to my door, it was about damned time I had the courage to show up at yours. Should’ve done it years ago,” he admitted quietly.
I fidgeted, rubbed the back of my hand under my chin. Sure as hell didn’t know what to do with that statement.
At one point in my life, I would have confided anything in him. Now he’d become nothing more than a stranger. I didn’t know him any more than he knew me. And here we were, tiptoeing around all the shit we should’ve hashed out years ago.
His voice grew thoughtful. “As soon as you took off last night, Mary hurried inside to her computer and searched to see if she could find out where you lived.”
A hard breath escaped my nose. Mary.
“Saw you had a house back here in Phoenix. Drove all night to get here… hoping you’d gone home after you left my place last night. Went straight to your house.” He lifted his face in my direction and quirked a sharp brow. “Imagine my surprise when your front door opened and there stood Aly Moore.”
Aly.
Just her name tightened my chest.
Soft, disbelieving laughter seeped from him. “Pregnant, too.” He shook his head and looked off in the distance. “Would’ve made your mom real happy, the two of you being together.”
I tucked my knees closer to my chest. “I heard something about that.” I paused around the discomfort, sucked in a breath and forced myself to continue. “She always knew everything before the rest of us, didn’t she?”
God, it felt like treachery, talking about her aloud. Voicing her had always seemed forbidden. Taboo. Like I’d overstepped my penance, illicit in my taking, dipping my fingers into the memories of the good when I’d been given over to the wicked.
“She sure seemed to,” he mused softly.
His tone sobered. “I have to tell you when Aly saw me, it just about brought her to her knees, Jared. If I didn’t know how badly I messed up seeing you last night, then I sure as hell found out today.”
My eyes jerked toward him. Did he really have the nerve to come here and lecture me? Judge me? He had no clue what was going on between me and Aly.
He caught my exasperated expression, his own deflecting, his eyes flashing with regret. Nervously, he rubbed his hand over his mouth, cocked his head so he could see me better. “Aly didn’t reveal a whole lot to me. She told me if you wanted me to know what was going on, then that was between the two of us to work out. But I could see how badly she was hurting.”
He shook his head. “God, if that woman isn’t ferociously protective of you. She was angry. No question about it. She didn’t even try to hide her disappointment in me. But there was no missing her compassion, either. How happy she was that I came.” He stopped for a second, lost in thought. “She was always that way, even when she was a little girl. She was always one of the sweetest, kindest girls. But she sure as hell never kept quiet if she believed someone was being wronged. Clear not a whole lot has changed.” He smiled a little. “She loved you back then, too, you know. Obviously she never stopped.”
My stomach twisted, tangled with all the emotions pushing out from the inside, vying for release.
For a moment we sat in awkward silence. Then he dropped his face in his hands, burying the desperation of his words in them. “God, I wish there was a way for me to make you understand the relief I felt when I saw you yesterday. Like the weight of this ugly world had suddenly been lifted from my shoulders.”
I shifted on the hard ground, doing my best to keep my cool. To listen. To really fucking hear. Because a huge part of me wanted to unload on him. Pretty sure he didn’t know the first thing about burdens.
He pressed on. “But then I saw the disappointment in your eyes when you made the connection that Mary is my wife. You looked at me as if I’d been unfaithful to your mother. It just about killed me, Jared. You took off without letting me get a word in and all that weight came crashing back. And I knew I didn’t deserve a minute of your time… I still don’t… not after the way I failed you. But I had to try. I’m tired of living with all this pain. That’s why I chased you back here.”
He stared at me, his gaze traveling all over me again, like he’d done last night. Only this time slower. Studying. Like he was reading the horrific story painted on my skin.
“Look at you,” he said, the words laced with pain. “I didn’t know it was possible for my heart to break any more. But seeing this?” He craned his head toward my scars, to the evidence of my sins exposed in vibrant color, all of them shouting out my guilt. His jaw visibly clenched.
“Don’t pity me,” I seethed, the old anger I didn’t know how to rid myself of breaking free.
The shake of his head was harsh. Disbelief narrowed his eyes. “Pity you? I pity myself. I don’t even know my own son. The boy I raised and loved with all my life is getting ready to become a father and I had no clue until I showed up at your door an hour ago. It makes me sick, Jared. Sick. Disgusted with the person I allowed myself to become. It took my son being man enough to come find me for me to be man enough to turn around and try to find my son. There’s something majorly wrong with that picture.”
Blood sloshed in my mind, and a wave of dizziness swept through me. I wanted to cover my ears, to scream at him to stop, while the little boy locked up inside me felt frenzied, frantic with the need to hear him say it.
To say what I heard bleeding from his voice.
His gaze caressed the stone, and his voice dropped, became slow and reverent. “No one saw things like your mother did. She had an insight about her like no one I’ve ever known.”
He rubbed his forehead, seemed to waver on what to say.
“She loved you and Courtney so much. At night before we’d go to sleep, she’d lie in bed in my arms, dreaming about what the future would hold for you and your sister.”
My heart squeezed.
God, this was unbearable and seemed vital all at the same time.
Incredulous, low laughter tumbled from his mouth, like it originated somewhere deep within him. “It was always you and Aly in those dreams, Jared. I thought it was ridiculous. I chalked it up to her having some romantic notion about her son marrying her best friend’s daughter. I humored her…” He shrugged, like he’d always been as helpless to the connection he shared with Mom as I was to Aly. “… because how could I not? Aly was so cute, the way she followed you around. Turns out I was wrong about that, too.”
Sadness fell over him, and he looked away, his eyes tracing over the letters cut deep into the stone that marked her grave. “Without your mom, we all lost our way. Every single one of us.”
Shame bowed his head. “Jared, I need you to understand how much I loved that woman. I didn’t know how to go on when she was taken from my life. Somewhere inside of me, I knew you and Courtney needed me and you both were scared and hurting, too, but I couldn’t see through the pain to the other side. During that time, I couldn’t feel anything but my own loss. Nothing else mattered except for the way I felt. With the trouble you started getting into, it was easier letting you take the fall for it than admit you needed help just as badly as I did.”
He choked over a sob stuck deep in his throat.
I squirmed, staring down at my fisted hands.
“The night you stole the Ramirezes’ car… I knew what you were trying to do, Jared.” He lifted his face to the sky, his eyes squeezed tight.
Something rocked through his voice. “My last memory of you was in a hospital bed, escaping death for the second time in months. God, you were so messed up, Jared… your eyes wild… but I saw you under it. Saw someone who was suffering as deeply as I was, and I couldn’t handle it. I just turned my back and walked away.” He touched his chest. “I betrayed my own son because I hurt so bad inside.”
That lump expanded. I choked over it. “I thought you hated me.”
“For a while, I thought I did, too,” he said, completely honest.
And fuck, it hurt, him coming right out and saying it. But I got it, understood being blinded by pain.
I’d been blinded by it for a long, long time.
Something heavy broke free inside of me. Sorrow gripped me tight. My eyes blurred. “I needed you,” I whispered.
“I know,” he said, his voice strangled. “I know that now.”
Restlessly, he propped his forearms on his knees and wrung his fingers between them. “When your grandma passed, I had to pull myself together because Courtney had no one left. I packed up our stuff and headed to California, looking for a new start. But it didn’t take me long to realize that start wasn’t moving away. It was realizing how badly my child needed me. Those couple of years messed your sister up. Scarred her. She wasn’t immune to any of it, either, and I knew it was time I was strong for her. But once I finally found that strength, I soon found I needed to be strong for myself, too. I was never going to truly get over your mother until I allowed myself to move on. Moving on was impossible, though, knowing you were out there. There’s been a void inside me for years, and not just the one left behind by your mom.”
I reeled, my fingers digging into the back of my neck as my head dropped.
“When I met Mary… she loved me through a lot of crap, Jared. She also helped me come to terms with what was missing from my life.”
I crammed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to stop the emotion welling there. My fucking throat burned and tingled and throbbed.
“But I’ve been struggling with the guilt, not knowing how I had the right to ask you to become a part of my life after what I’d done. I had to find you, I knew it, but guilt kept holding me back. When I saw you yesterday… it was like looking at myself, Jared, seeing all the same guilt I’ve carried for years.”
He huffed a heavy breath from his lungs. “I love my wife, Jared, but no one will ever replace your mother. She was the love of my life. My soul mate.” He shook his head with a soft chuckle. “Didn’t believe in any of that shit until the day I met her.”
I smiled a little. Now that I could relate to.
“But I had to find a way to live again. Had to finally accept Helene would always be missing from my life.”
Sadness deepened the line between his brows when he looked at my knuckles. “You’ve got to let your guilt go, Jared. You’re almost there, son. I can see it. Feel it. I may not have seen you in almost seven years, but I recognize you. Recognize the boy who always made me and your mom proud. I can also see him clinging to the past, afraid of letting it go because it might mean letting your mom go. But guilt doesn’t do anything but destroy what’s good. Neither Aly nor your baby deserve that. You don’t deserve it, either.”
Tears gathered in his eyes. “I’m sorry, son,” he said, the words raspy as he pushed them up his throat. “So sorry I left you to deal with what was never your fault. You were just a boy… a boy who made a mistake.”
His admission tore through me.
Shit.
I couldn’t tell if his words comforted or cut.
Emotion tightened his voice. “Don’t ever feel guilty for loving someone, Jared. I have to believe your mom can see us now… have to believe she’s looking down and sees the happiness returning to our lives. I have to believe it makes her glad and she wants that for us. That she knows she’s getting ready to be a grandma and you’re living the life she wanted for you. Don’t let your guilt over what happened destroy that for her. Don’t let it destroy it for you.”
I felt pinned by the magnitude of his stare. “Don’t repeat the mistakes I made. Fight for what you love. For what’s important. Cherish it. Only a fool believes there’s a good enough reason to let love go.”
He climbed to his feet and gently settled his hand on my shoulder, spoke out into the distance behind me. “I know you can’t forgive me overnight. I have a lot of years to make up for. But I sure hope you let me try.”
That rock of unspent emotion raged like a ball of fire.
“Yeah,” I whispered hoarsely. “I’d like that.”
He squeezed me once before he turned to walk away.
I watched him make his way over the grass, his head hung low as he retreated.
My heart pumped hard. Too hard.
All the years of guilt and pain knotted at the center of my chest. It surged and spun, my mother’s voice the softest echo in my ear. God, I’d loved the sound of it, loved the way she’d sit and listen and whisper her belief into me. I drifted on it, like I could feel her here, like maybe just like my dad had said, she was looking down.
Maybe she knew how lost I’d be without her.
Maybe she knew how much I would need Aly.
I lifted my face to the subtle warmth of the winter sky. Sadness twisted up my expression, but somehow it was still a smile.
And I felt shocked, almost horrified, when that rock of unspent emotion finally broke free.
Tears burned hot, dragging all the torture inside me finally out into the light.
Into her light.
And I just fucking sobbed.
Sobbed like a baby because it hurt so bad.
Because I missed her and I wanted her back and I wished I could change what I’d done.
But I couldn’t.
Fuck, I couldn’t.
But I also couldn’t hang on to the guilt any longer.
I thought I’d gone to my father for mercy.
But he’d shown me that mercy was buried somewhere deep inside of me.
And I knew, just like I was sure my mother knew.
Just like Aly knew all along.
It was time I forgave myself.