More destructive.
She wants to know if I have romantic feelings. Sexual feelings. More than friends feelings.
“It’s complicated.”
Mandy glares at me. “It’s not complicated, Dean! You either want to fuck my sister or you don’t.”
Jesus.
I look down at my work boots, realizing I should have taken them off at the front door. I probably tracked mud and sludge through her apartment.
“I’m going to be sick.”
I glance back up as Mandy’s hand hovers over her mouth, holding back her horror. I shake my head. “This isn’t about Cora. I told you that.”
“Then what is it? You just fell out of love with me in a matter of twenty days? All the other thousands of days didn’t mean anything?” she demands.
I hesitate before blowing out a breath. “You don’t feel like there’s always been something missing between us? Like, we just haven’t been able to dig deep enough?”
She grits her teeth. “What the hell does that mean? You asked me to marry you, Dean. I assumed you had done your digging.”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I think I was just comfortable… everything had become routine and easy, you know? I’m close with your parents, we have the same friends, Blizzard…” I trail off, closing my eyes for a moment to regroup. “Change is fucking scary, Mandy. I cared about you, we had history, and on paper we fit just fine. It didn’t seem worth it to throw it all away.”
“So, what’s different?”
“Change was forced on me. I was forced to rot for three weeks in a serial killer’s basement, and it really put shit in perspective.”
Mandy taps her foot against the carpet restlessly, her long nails digging into the flesh of her arms. “It’s great to know you were down there thinking about how you couldn’t wait to break up with me.”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” I take a small step closer to her. “Jesus, Mandy, I’ve tried to give this time. I thought I just needed to clear my head and work through all the bullshit. I’ve spent countless hours wondering how I can fix this and make it work. I want it to work, but…” I throw my hands up with defeat. “We don’t fit anymore.”
Tears spill from her eyes, smudging her perfectly applied makeup. Her eyes are level with my chest, unable to meet my guilty gaze. Mandy runs her fingers through her hair, tugging it back and cradling the nape of her neck as she tries to control her grief. “Fifteen years. Fifteen years of my life wasted on you.”
God.
I’m an asshole.
A giant, fucking asshole.
“You want to know what I was doing while you were down in that basement, thinking about how much we don’t fit and “bonding” with my sister?” She finally lifts her eyes to me and they narrow with disdain. “I was making flyers. I was leading search parties. I was on the phone with police, with friends and relatives, with your mortgage company and utility providers letting them know your payments might be late… with fucking wedding coordinators begging them not to cancel our date because you were coming home.” Her cheeks are bright red, flushed with scorn. “I was driving around town looking for your car every single day. I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. All I did was cry and look for you, praying for you to be okay… picturing you standing at the end of that aisle.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, cupping a hand over my mouth and breathing deep. I know there’s nothing I can say to make this better. I know there’s nothing I can do to lessen her pain or make her understand. I can’t go back in time and tell her to stay the fuck away from me because I’m only going to break her heart one day.
All I can do is trust that this is the right thing for both of us and hope she sees it, too. She deserves better than this. She deserves more than half-assed kisses and hollow conversations. She deserves better than me.
“I’ll always care about you, Mandy. Always. And I know you’ll fall in love again and walk down that aisle someday. I know you’ll find someone who sees the scariest, darkest parts of you and loves the shit out of you anyway. Someone who presses your buttons, gets under your skin, makes you crazy in all the best ways. Someone who makes you feel so alive, you can’t imagine going back to the shell of a human you were before you met them. Someone who sees you, really sees you, stripped down and raw, and wants to collect all your broken pieces and cherish them like they are something beautiful.”
I take a deep breath. Then another.
My heart is pounding against my ribs, my vision blurring. Mandy is staring at me like I was momentarily possessed by Nicholas Sparks.
Fuck.
I close the gap between us and grab her face between my hands, pulling her forehead in for a kiss. “Mandy, Mandy, sweet as candy,” I whisper, echoing the rhyme I’d sing to her when we were teenagers. “I don’t regret you. And I pray you can forgive me someday and we can be friends, because my heart won’t be the same without you in it. But I understand if you can’t, and I respect that.” Her eyes are shut tight, weighed down by the burden I am handing her. “I know this isn’t the happily ever after you imagined. I’m so sorry for that. But I promise you’ll get it, and when you do, you’ll look back and this will all make a hell of a lot more sense.”
I place one last kiss against her hairline, watching as her tears silently dampen her cheeks.
Then I pull away and walk out her front door.
Chapter Twenty-One
Cora: I did a thing.
I’m sitting at my kitchen table that Saturday afternoon, eating one of those frozen macaroni and cheese dinners, when Cora’s text comes through.
Me: How outrageous are we talking?
Cora: Hmm. Upper medium?
Me: On a scale of “I cut my own bangs” to “I bought a llama farm”
Cora: Let’s just say I bought the llama from the farm. Two of them.
Me: Wtf?
I’m about to just call her when a picture text comes through and I almost choke on a noodle. It’s a selfie of Cora holding a scraggly Yorkie mix in one arm, while her other arm is draped around a German Shepherd, hugging the animal to her chest.
Me: … …
Cora: I sort of adopted a serial killer’s two dogs. Meet Jude and Penny Lane.
Twenty minutes later, I’m standing in her living room.
“Are you nuts?” I glance at the two dogs curled up together in one giant dog bed as the miniature bed sits empty. “You adopted Earl’s dogs? The ones who were going to eat us?”
She stands up straight after refilling their water bowls, pulling her hair up into a ponytail and raising an eyebrow at me. “I doubt they were going to eat us. Earl was just trying to scare us.”
I blink. “The guy was pretty honest and forthcoming, if I recall.”
“They needed homes, Dean. Nobody else wanted them. I already planned on adopting a dog, and this just seemed like the right thing to do. Look at them.”
We both turn our heads to admire the undeniably adorable display. Penny Lane, the little one, is curled up into a tiny ball against Jude’s chest. They are both fast asleep and content.