Before We Fall (23 page)

As I say the words aloud, it validates what I feel even more. I
don’t
want to end things. I don’t know what I want, but I don’t want that. Somehow, against my best efforts, I’ve let her in. And now that she’s in, I can’t let go of her. I can’t experience that kind of loss again.

She closes her eyes. “You can’t give me what I need, Dominic,” she says plainly. “So what’s the point? I can’t settle for less. Not anymore.”

Panic wells up in me, leaving a bitter taste on my tongue, because she might be right. Not because I don’t want to give her what she needs, but because I might be incapable.

But I can fucking try.

“What do you need?” I ask, and the words scrape my throat painfully.

“You,” she answers simply. “All of you… and you aren’t able to give me that.”

My breath comes quicker now, in rasps and almost pants. I don’t know what a panic attack feels like, but I feel like I might be getting ready to have one. My ribs feel like steel bands that are constricting my lungs in a vise. I suck a harsh breath in, then let it out slowly.

“How do you know?” I ask finally. “I haven’t tried.”

“Because I know you,” she says simply, her eyes closed and her eyelashes dark against her pale cheeks. “I know you.”

“Do you?” I ask, my voice empty. “Do you
really
?”

Jacey opens her eyes again, and I see a million things there. Painful things, confused things.

Hopeful things
.

“Fine. Maybe I don’t, so why don’t you tell me?” she suggests softly. “Tell me who you are. Tell me about Emma. That’s a start.”

Jesus. I can’t breathe.

The vise around my lungs moves to my heart, constricting it, crushing it, grinding it to a pulp while I try to breathe.

I manage to take a breath and stare into the corner of the room, into the dark.

“Why that?” I manage to ask. “Why do I have to talk about Emma? She doesn’t affect you and me.”

Jacey stares at me, her gaze dark. “Doesn’t she?” she asks softly. “You’re in love with her, Dominic. And she’s there… in every little thing you do.”

I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to force out the truth. But I know she’s right. Everything I do, everything that is fucked up about me, is because of Emma. And if I ever want to get past it, if I ever want something that is real and good, I have to confront it. I have to confront
her.

“See?” Jacey asks quietly. “I knew you couldn’t do it. Just go, Dom. I’ll call Kaylie to sit with me.”

My eyes fly open.

“No,” I say firmly, fueled by desperation. “Let me try.” Jacey stares at me doubtfully, afraid to hope now.

“I’m not
in love
with Emma. She’s dead. I know that. But I can’t help but love her. She was my first everything. My first kiss, my first love, my first time. I’ll always love her. Because of everything that happened with her, I’ll never get away from it. From her.”

I pause, letting the words soak in for Jacey.

“Emma’s dead. She died a horrible death and it was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I can describe that night, I can’t even put it into words. I’ve never been able to talk about it with anyone… not even my family. I think about her face and that last night and I freeze up. The words die in my mouth and I can’t say them. But if you need this… if this is what you need… I’ll try.”

The air is charged between us, and it hangs heavily. But it doesn’t matter, because the one thing I need happens… Jacey’s face softens at my words and she nods.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers softly. “I know it’s hard. But I
do
need this. I need to understand what happened, because I think it will explain everything. I need to know you, Dom.”

I feel weak with relief, but at the same time I’m tense. I know I have one shot to explain, to make her understand, and I have to get it right. Even though there’s no getting anything with Emma’s fucked-up situation
right
. It was always all wrong. On every level.

I look out the window at the night sky as I speak. I can’t look at Jacey’s face… it might kill me to see her reaction. There’s no way I want to see her face when she hears what I did. Who I was. How I acted.

“Emma and I grew up together,” I begin. “She was always at my house, with Kira, playing with Duncan, Sin, Fiona, and me. We were all like family.”

“Until you started dating,” Jacey interrupts. I smile, just a little, at the memory of my first date with Emma.

“Yeah. Our first date was an accident… when we were sophomores. Her car died on our road. I was on my way out, so I picked her up and took her with me. I was driving my dad’s old classic Nova… and it had a cassette tape stuck in the deck. If we wanted to listen to anything, our only choice was “Brown Eyed Girl.” We probably listened to that song fifty times that night… but it turned out all right because the night ended with a goodnight kiss. All of a sudden, we realized that we didn’t feel like brother and sister anymore.”

Jacey stares at me, a knowing look in her eyes. “That’s how you knew about Brand. You recognized it because that’s what happened with you and Emma.”

I nod.

“We dated all through high school. No one said our names separately… we were like one person, Dom-and-Emma. But then, my senior year…”

My voice trails off as pain rips through me. Memories are so vivid, so fucking vivid, and I close my eyes against them.

The blood, the pain in Emma’s eyes. The guilt, Jesus Christ, the guilt.

My spine feels like it’s being ripped out of my body at the mere memory.

I swallow hard, then swallow again. Jacey waits patiently, but I can feel her watching me, wondering if I’m going to be able to do it.

“Emma killed herself because of me,” I finally manage to say thickly, and my tongue feels like a dead thing in my mouth.

All the blood,
her blood
, swims in front of my eyes, and for a moment I only see red. I’m starting to wonder if it’s the only color I’m ever going to see.

Jacey gasps a ragged breath and her eyes widen. “Oh my god. Jesus, Dominic.” She takes another breath. “What happened?”

I try to make myself numb, like I always do when I think about this, about Emma.

I reach into my pocket, turning the aquamarine pendant over and over in my fingers. Like always, knowing that she used to wear it around her neck when she was still healthy and alive calms me down enough so I can speak.

“Does it matter?” I finally answer. “The important thing is that she did. And it was my fault.”

Jacey stares at me, her eyes still horror filled, but now there’s something else too. Curiosity. A need to know. A need to understand. And beneath all that, a hope that I’m wrong—that I’m not to blame.

But I am.

“I can’t imagine how it was your fault,” she answers slowly. “Suicide is a personal choice. You couldn’t have made her do such a thing. But if you think that’s true, then we need to talk about it, because it has definitely affected you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut hard, trying to blink away the red, then take another breath.

“Emma cheated on me with Cris. She told me about it and she cried. She was
so sorry.
Apparently, they got drunk one night when I was out with other friends. One thing led to another, and they had sex. She was
sorry
and I was devastated.”

Jacey freezes now, her eyes glued to mine. “That’s why you hate Cris now.”

I nod silently.

Jacey stares at me a second, then speaks hesitantly. “Okay. I can see where you would be pissed at him. But to this degree? You were kids, Dom. I mean, you were teenagers. Even adults make that mistake.”

“I know.” I sigh. “But Emma got pregnant, Jacey. And since we always used condoms, we had a pretty good idea that the baby was Cris’s.”

I look away. “I remember standing over a pile of pregnancy tests in Emma’s bathroom, all of them showing a fuzzy pink plus sign. If I could go back in time to any one moment, it would be to that one. I would handle everything differently.”

I wouldn’t have annihilated her.

Jacey sucks in her breath, her hands twisted in her lap. “Jesus. I don’t know what to say, Dom. What happened?”

I failed her.

“I was so pissed at her,” I admit. “I screamed and she cried, but at the end of the day, it boiled down to one thing. I loved her. More than anything. More than a pregnancy, more than her cheating on me.”

“So you stayed with her?” Jacey asks hesitantly. I can see that that notion doesn’t match the idea of me that lives in her head. That’s because that version of me died with Emma.

“She swore to me that it was a one-time thing, an accident. That she’d been lonely because I’d been away so much, visiting colleges. I’d pulled away from her a little and Cris moved in. He took up my slack and hung out with her all the time. I should’ve seen what he was doing, but I didn’t. He was my best friend and I was blind.”

“So you think it was your fault that Emma cheated on you?” Jacey asks doubtfully.

I ignore that and take a gulp of water. “Because I could see that it was true, that Cris had swooped in on her and I’d been neglecting her, I forgave her. He took advantage of her. And they were drunk. But I demanded one thing from her in exchange for my forgiveness.”

I pause, staring out the window again as I remember the way Emma’s head had dropped when I told her. How I’d stood over her and how I didn’t feel sorry about what I was asking. I didn’t care that it devastated her. I didn’t care about anything but myself and my own pain.

I hadn’t even begun to know pain yet
. I just didn’t know it at the time.

I don’t want to say the ugly words to Jacey. I don’t want her to know. But she prompts me.

“What did you demand?” she asks quietly, but there’s a certain knowingness to her tone, an aching fragile timbre.
She knows
.

“An abortion. I demanded that she have an abortion. I wasn’t man enough to raise his baby. I forgave her, but I couldn’t do that.”

Jacey’s quiet now, still. She watches me, waiting for me to continue. I don’t want to, but I know I have to. The bullet is out of the gun now. There’s no putting it back.

“We were just eighteen,” I say quietly, staring at the wall. “We were getting ready to go away to college together. We were going to have a new start, away from Cris. I made my forgiveness contingent on that one thing. She had to get an abortion. If she wouldn’t, then I was done. I made that very clear.”

Emma’s face is in my head, innocent and young, as she pleads with me.

Dominic, I can’t
, she’d cried.
My parents would kill me. And it’s wrong, Dom. It’s wrong.

“I pressured her hard,” I finally continue, even though those words are a gross understatement. “Every day. Every hour. She cried and I raged and I refused to give in. I didn’t care that her family was strict Catholic. I didn’t care that she thought her soul was in jeopardy and that her parents would never forgive her. In my head, I thought of the baby as an
it
, as Cris’s mistake. I didn’t think of it as an actual human life. I was too blinded by my anger and my hurt and my hate to care about anything but myself.”

I pause and stare at Jacey. “Do you see how selfish I was?”

Jacey is deathly pale as she stares at me, as a million thoughts flash through her eyes. “Anyone would’ve been upset, Dominic,” she finally answers hesitantly. I can see that she doesn’t know what to say. I can’t fault her for that… because who would?

I turn away, staring into the dark, trying to focus on the night instead of the memories in my head.

“I took her to get the abortion. It was a quiet ride. They wouldn’t let me go back with her, so she had to do it alone. On the way home, she huddled into the car door and cried. She wouldn’t talk to me for days. But she talked to Cris. Because a few days later, on our graduation day, I went over to her house and got there just as he was leaving. I lost my shit. I told her that I never wanted to see her again, that if she wanted Cris she could have him. So after making her have an abortion for me, I left her anyway.”

Jacey utters a weird noise, a guttural sound that I’ve never heard pass her lips before. Her knuckles graze her teeth as she presses her fist to her mouth.

“Emma skipped the graduation parties. She didn’t come and I didn’t care. I went to a party with Sin and Duncan that night, determined to get drunk and forget all about her. So that’s what I did. I was getting a lap dance from Taylor McKay when Emma called me. It was late and she was babbling and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what she was saying… except that she’d cut her wrists. And that she needed me.”

“Did you go?” Jacey whispers, and I can see from her face she’s afraid of the answer.

“Of course I went. But it was too late to save her.”

Jacey shakes her head in disbelief now, like she’s expecting that I’m just spinning a tale, acting out a scene. “Dom… I…”

She doesn’t have the words. Because the answer is clear. I’m a horrible person. A monster.

I nod curtly, once, determined to keep my composure.

“Emma was a light. Everyone who met her knew that. She was too good for me. And I failed her. She trusted the wrong person, because I turned away when she needed me the most. I abandoned her. The worst part is that she loved me anyway.”

And she did. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she saw me come in. It was like everything was right in the world, even though she was dying in a sea of her own blood.

“What happened when you got there?” Jacey whispers.

I’m wooden now as I force the words from my lips. I stare back out the window, away from Jacey’s horror, as I see the memories in my head.

“The bed was covered in blood, and Emma was pale and shaking and cold. She’d sliced her arms from wrist to elbow, and I knew that it wasn’t a cry for help. She wanted to die. She didn’t want to be saved. She was surrounded by poems that she had written, all about death. I don’t know how I didn’t see that I’d broken her so completely.”

I pause, trying to untangle my tongue, trying to swallow the emotion that lingers there, trying to swallow the memories so that I can act calm. I’m a fucking actor, for Christ’s sake. I can act calm.