Sugar on the Edge (Last Call #3)(56)
I had my one chance at a child, and I failed miserably. I’m never going through that again, because the pain far outweighed the good. I’m never taking the chance of having to go through that pain again.
“Some deep thoughts brewing in that head of yours,” Brody says, and I turn around to blink at him. I had completely forgotten he was standing there.
“Savannah’s a deep woman,” I say. “She deserves deep thoughts, don’t you think?”
“She deserves the best thoughts,” Brody says, and I don’t miss the ominous tone in his voice.
I take another small sip of Scotch, appraising the man standing before me that Savannah has so much care and respect for. I have to say… the protectiveness in him over my woman both assures me and pisses me off. It’s nice to know Savannah has had someone looking over her, but that’s not needed anymore, so I decide to lay it on the line. “What’s on your mind, mate? Spill it.”
“I don’t want to see her hurt. Savannah is a special woman; no doubt, you already know that. But she wounds easily.”
“I have no intentions of wounding her.”
“What are your intentions, then? You’re here just temporarily, right?”
I turn my head and watch Savannah as she sips at her beer and laughs at something Gabby says. If she laughed with me like that every day, I’d have to seriously consider staying with her forever. Or convincing her to come with me back to England. Regardless, the point being, I don’t think I can give her up.
Turning back to Brody, I tell him honestly. “My original plans were to leave as soon as I finished my manuscript. But I’m thinking that’s easier said than done at this point.”
Brody seems to like my answer, and I can feel some of the ice melt away. “So what’s the problem? You can write anywhere, right?”
“That I can,” I tell him. “Seems like a simple solution, right?”
He claps me on my back and laughs. “Dude, there’s nothing simple about relationships. If it were easy, everyone would have them.”
“You make it look easy,” I point out. “You and Alyssa… you’re about as tight as I’ve ever seen two people.”
Brody’s eyes go soft as he looks at her. “We share a bond that’s hard to explain.”
Holding up my glass of Scotch, I give it a little shake. “I’ve got a glass of liquor to sip at, so I got the time.”
With appraising eyes, Brody stares at me. I can see the moment he feels like I’m worthy to hear his story, and it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with anything he knows about me. He’s trusting Savannah’s instinct about me.
Leaning back against the wall, Brody fiddles with the plastic cap on his water bottle. “Did Savannah tell you I was in prison?”
“Yeah… just that it was a drunk driving accident, someone died, and you went away for five years.”
“That’s part of the story. The other part… the part that only a select few know, and that select few includes Savannah… was that I wasn’t the one driving the car. I foolishly took the fall for my girlfriend because she begged me to… and I paid the price by losing everything that was important to me. I lost my freedom, my medical career, and my family for a time. She took everything from me.”
My jaw drops as I realize, at this very moment, Brody and I share something in common. We’ve both had loves who had taken something away from us. Granted, it was two very different ways in which we were hurt, but still hurt by women in a profound way all the same.
“I was pretty broken when I came out of prison,” Brody says as he continues his story. “Had given up on life… on people… on my family. I was existing in a world I didn’t know.”
His words are like a sucker punch to my throat, because I know exactly what he means. I know exactly how that feels. I open my mouth to talk, but my throat catches because of the rawness sitting there. I clear it and say, “How did you survive it?”
Brody turns from me and nods his head toward Alyssa. “I survived it for her. Because of her. All her.”
As I sip at my Scotch, Brody tells me how he had kept it a secret from everyone that he had not been the one driving. He told me that Alyssa came into the secret by mistake, by overhearing a conversation between Brody and his ex-girlfriend. How she kept his secret, and all the while shared his hurt and pain. How every time he was with her, talked to her, touched her… it became more and more bearable, until finally… he just couldn’t remember the darkness anymore.
He didn’t say it in quite those flowery words, and hey… I’m a writer so I tend to expound, but that was the gist of what he was telling me. By the time his story is over, I’m staring hard at Savannah because she’s offering me the very same path to salvation that Alyssa offered Brody.
This is not news to me. I figured that much out all on my own last night. But the moral of the story is the same… that not all women are created equal. That as humans, we can have untold suffering and still persevere and, above all else, there can be a full life after heartbreaking misery.
I suspected as much, but at least Brody is living proof that it is so.
Savannah and I end up staying at Last Call for the rest of the night rather than leaving to get our fill of each other. At this point, after listening to Brody, I’m pretty sure I’m not going anywhere after this manuscript is finished. I’ll have days and nights and more days and nights with Savannah, so the next few hours aren’t going to break me if I have to just watch her having fun with her friends from afar.