Come to Me Quietly(113)

Both of them.

Clutching the back of my head in my hands, I buried my face between my knees as I gasped for breath. “Fuck” scraped from my raw throat.

What had I expected, coming here? This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? To punish myself a little bit more? There was no other explanation for the f*cking impossible draw I’d had to return to this place.

Unbidden, Aly’s face lit up like a flare that struck behind my lids. My lids were mashed together tight, but the image hung on like it didn’t want to give way to the ones that destroyed me. The girl was like a second’s relief amid the insufferable penance I served.

God, I wanted it to be her. It skirted along the brink of my reality, the idea that maybe there was more, because, damn it… maybe I really did want there to be.

I let my head rock against the wall and lifted my face to the haze of the night sky.

But that was just a fantasy – and not the fairy-tale kind.

I didn’t get the happily ever after.

Still I didn’t want to let the idea go. I needed to feel her. Just for a few more minutes I wanted to let her touch take the pain away.

I stumbled to my feet and made my way back toward the apartment.

It was late. The city slept, the dense silence only broken by the drone of semitrucks echoing from the freeway and the random car speeding down the road.

The hour Karen and Augustyn stayed at the apartment had been complete hell. Aly had suggested we all stay in to catch up instead of going out, so I’d sat down at the kitchen table with them all. I’d done my best at forcing smiles and tossing out bullshit answers to all the inane questions Karen asked. Clearly, she’d been tiptoeing around the questions she really wanted to ask. The entire time, I sat there itching to run. If I’d stayed in the confines of those walls for one more second, no question, I would finally have hit the edge.

It only made me feel worse that the entire time Aly had again offered me that comfort she so freely gave. Though this time, it wasn’t in her arms, but in the way her eyes constantly washed over me, and in the one gentle brush of her hand she’d hazarded under the table. Like maybe she was telling me it was okay and she understood the misery her mother brought with her when she walked through the door.

But like the * I was, I left the second Karen and Augustyn finally said their good-byes.

I knew Aly was dying to talk to me, but Christopher had been there, and there was little she could do, little she could say, although her plea radiated from every cell in her body.

Stay.

She should already have known I couldn’t.

Now, with my shoulders hunched, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and strode toward the apartment that was just a block away. The humid night clung thick to my skin. Lights from the city glowed against the blackened sky, dragging the heavens too close to the surface of my f*cked-up world.

Before I’d ended up behind the vacant building, I’d spent the entire afternoon and most of the night at the Vine. Once again, I’d been foolish enough to think there was some way I could drown the past out. But it didn’t matter what I did. I could never outrun it. Could never hide from it. I could fight it all I wanted, but it’d never change who I was or what I’d done.

Incredulous laughter rocked from my hoarse throat. All these nights I’d been lying to Christopher, telling him that I’d been unwinding at the Vine, when really I’d been locked away in Aly’s room, lost in her comfort and her touch and everything I wished was real. If I just had stayed at the bar that first night, none of this would have happened. If I just had told Christopher no.