“Options?” Mom spat condescendingly. “What options?”
And I finally uttered my deepest wishes to the woman who could make them come true. “He could stay with me! He likes my place, he’s happy there, he’s—”
Her eyeroll cut me off. “You can’t be serious.”
“Yes, I’m fucking serious! I wouldn’t even ask you for anything. He’d be fine, we’d—”
“Should I remind you of why we’re in this position to begin with?”
I shook my head, blinking at the burning sensation in my eyes. “Don’t you fucking dare. I will fucking—”
“Blake,” Dad said, standing up from the table, “go home. We’ll talk about this in a couple of days after you’ve cooled—”
“Fuck you,” I shot back, now aiming my finger now toward him.
“Excuse me?” He scowled, crossing his arms.
“I said, fuck you.”
“I’m your father,” he said, as though that meant something.
“Yeah, you are, and you promised me,” I replied, as if that should’ve meant something to them, and I turned away with my throbbing hand and stormed out of the house.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
AUDREY’S MOM, Ann, a resident nurse, held my hand in both of hers as Audrey grabbed one of the beers she kept for me in her fridge. I winced at her mother’s manipulations on my fingers as she slowly studied each digit.
“Well, your fingers aren’t broken,” she declared, slowly moving her fingers to my palm, and I hissed through my teeth. “But you might’ve fractured something in here. Might just be a sprain, but you should still get it X-rayed.”
I shook my head. “I’m not going to the fucking hospital.”
Ann peered at me through a pair of matronly eyes I don’t think I’d ever seen before in my life. “Well, I guess you could just leave it alone, and then we’ll see how much longer you’re able to work after your bones mend improperly.”
Groaning, I thrust my other hand through my hair. “Couldn’t I just wrap it tonight and go to the hospital tomorrow? I can’t even fucking think straight right now.” My voice cracked under the pressure of my emotions and I cleared my throat, instantly embarrassed by how fucking weak I’d become.
Audrey came over with the open bottle of beer and passed it into my good hand. As I drank, she asked her mom, “Where are your bandages? I’ll go get them.”
Ann sighed and patted my hand before laying it on the table. “Nah. I’ll go up. Be right back,” and with that, she turned and left Audrey’s apartment.
The drive from my parents’ house had been done in a blind flurry of rage and desperation. An endless string of curse words and a periodic smash of my fist into the steering wheel had been the soundtrack to my post-Thanksgiving trip back to Salem, and in a single shred of clarity, I knew I couldn’t be alone. I knew being in that dark house, alone with all those liquor bottles, wouldn’t lead to anything productive or good. I’d turned in the direction of Audrey’s place with only one thought in mind: Jake knew. Somehow, he fucking knew, and now, I sat at Audrey’s kitchen table, shaking my head and pinching the space between my brows, asking nobody how the fuck that was possible.
“How is what possible?” she asked softly, reaching out to touch my arm.
“Jake,” I choked, my chest heaving and aching. “How the fuck did he know I’d be here tonight?”
Audrey faltered before replying, “Um … maybe he just figured—”
“No.” I shook my head and dropped my hand to the table. “He knew I wasn’t seeing you for a couple days, but he was insistent that I’d be here tonight. And I just don’t fucking understand how he could know.”
“You don’t know the extent of his, um …” Gift. I saw the word written on her face, etched into the blue of her eyes and highlighted across the tops of her cheekbones. But she hesitated to say it, knowing how I felt about it. Knowing I’d shake my head and shut her down with an insistence that there wasn’t such thing as gifts. But right now, I wished she had said it, declaring that’s what it was so that I wouldn’t have to. The word never left her lips, though. She simply shrugged apologetically, shifted in her seat, and the cross around her neck glinted in the light.
My gaze fixated on the delicate piece of silver, rising and falling with the rhythmic expanse and collapse of her chest. I found a hypnotic calm in its gentle glow and matched my breath with hers.
“No, you’re right. I don’t know the extent of it,” I answered, my voice gruff and rumbling in my chest. Then, I harshly admitted, “I fucking hate this shit.”
I could’ve been talking about anything—my pulsing hand, my parents and what they were doing, Jake’s symptom, that fucking cross—but Audrey didn’t ask for clarification. She just simply nodded somberly and said, “I know.”
I could’ve gone on to elaborate. About the breathing anger I held toward my mother, nestling deep inside my gut and turning sour with my Thanksgiving dinner. Or the conflict between my brain and heart over what the hell I believed. And the weight of my helpless and broken heart, crushing against my chest and splintering my ribs. I wanted to tell her everything I hated about it all, but the words failed me as I looked into her eyes that seemed so impossibly blue and kind.
“What the fuck are you doing with me?” I asked, shaking my head.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I went on, reaching out to take her hand, “I can be such an insufferable, angry piece of shit. I’m a total fucking mess. And I still cannot understand why, after everything these past couple of months, you still want to be with me.”
Audrey cocked her head as those delicate fingers intertwined with mine. “You always say this like I have a choice. Like I could just walk away.”
“Well, yeah,” I replied. “’Cause you can.”
Shaking her head slowly, she smiled so sweetly and so adoringly, the weight against my lungs was lifted. Just a little. “But I can’t.”
“Oh, no?” I challenged. “And why not?”
“Because …” She hesitated, as though choosing her words carefully, before going on, “Because there are certain things in our lives—certain people—that are just supposed to be there. We don’t choose them, or what they’ll mean to us; they’re just a part of who we are.”
My old instincts said to laugh, snicker, or belittle her insistence that this wasn’t all one big accidental misunderstanding. But I couldn’t give in to them when that voice, getting louder every day, told me there was something to what she was saying. Something honest and true and so fucking terrifying, I could hardly stand it.
“And what is it you think I am to you?” I asked instead, surprised to find my voice so hushed, I could barely hear it myself. And without hesitation, she answered, “You’re the man I’m meant to love.”
A simple four-lettered word had never choked me up as much as it did in that moment. And it wasn’t that it had never been given to me before. My brother loved me and often told me so. Sometimes Cee admitted to a platonic love, while giving me a hug or in parting. Yet, this love from Audrey was new and strange and one I had never felt worthy of before. But with her hand holding mine, I knew it was the truth. The Real Deal.