Broken Juliet (8 page)

I nod. “Yeah, I know.”

I hang up and rub my eyes. The truth is, I know no such thing.

I pretend to read even though I’ve been staring at the same page for over an hour. My headphones block out the sound of Mom and Dad bickering downstairs. I have Simon & Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock” on repeat. I kind of hate the song, but the lyrics speak to me.

They talk about a rock not feeling pain and an island never crying. Sound good to me.

I’m sick of the pain, and if I never cry again, it will be too soon.

I just want to be over Ethan. Now. I don’t want to be wondering how his holidays were. If he fought with his dad. How drunk he got.

If he thought about me.

I don’t want any of it.

I want to be mine again and not his.

The way forward is to purge and cleanse. Push every positive thought about him out of my system. It’s the only way I’m going to survive seeing him again. I refuse to pine for Ethan Holt for the next two years. No freaking way.

I close my eyes and try to focus. I picture him as I listen to the song, over and over again, and I let the lyrics harden my paper-thin layers.

I’m going to become a rock.

Ruby drops me off at our place before heading to the store for supplies.

I look around my apartment. Everything’s the same yet seems totally different. That’s the door that opened to him, as he stood there wide-eyed with panic. That’s the wall I pressed him against as I told him I loved him. The same place where he said he wished he didn’t love me. Right over there is where he undressed me and kissed me until I was breathless. On the floor was where we …

I shake my head to clear it.

When I step into my room, my stomach coils.

My bed.

It’s stripped back to the bare mattress.

The morning he broke up with me, I’d ripped the sheets off and taken them to the laundry room. Then I’d turned the machine to “hot” and doused everything in far too much detergent.

I remake the bed with fresh sheets. I breathe deeply as I tuck and smooth, and palm over the areas where we made love like I can wipe them clean of memories.

When I’m done, it’s perfect. Pristine.

I look at it for long minutes as phantom lips suckle my neck. Ghost hands trail across my thighs.

Screw this.

I shower. Wash my hair. Finish with water so cold it shocks me into distraction.

When Ruby gets home, we fall into a pattern of easy familiarity. We reheat frozen dinners, drink wine, watch TV, laugh.

We don’t talk about him.

When eleven p.m. rolls around, we yawn and say good-night.

Ruby goes into her room.

I sleep on the couch.

The classroom is noisy, filled with chatter about who did what during the break. I’ve missed my friends, and I can’t deny their hugs are welcome.

Aiyah and Miranda are holding hands. Like Ethan and I, they got together last year. Unlike Ethan and I, their love survived the holiday. Jack is telling jokes, and I smile as Connor and Lucas crack up. Heck, I’ve even missed Zoe and Phoebe and their shrill conversations.

They all seem happy to see me, too.

None of them know about the breakup. How could they?

I guess they’ll figure it out soon enough, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them.

The second Ethan enters, I know it. A bone-deep vibration shudders up my spine and sets every hair on edge.

People say his name. Ask how he is. He answers, his voice low and quiet.

I don’t want to look at him, but my body turns of its own accord, and there he is, towering over most of the people around him, even as his shoulders sag.

Excitement tries to fire in my veins, but I suppress it.

Unwanted fantasies about kissing him crawl through my brain. It all seems so unlikely now that I almost laugh out loud.

He glances over at me, and that’s when all the air goes out of the room. His mouth sets into a hard line, and he looks away several times before returning. It’s like he wants to look anywhere but at me, but is incapable.

I know how he feels.

This what I’ve been preparing for.

I breathe steadily and make myself over. Smooth down the rumbling waves of emotion. Make myself a rock.

I stare at him without apology and let him see my indifference. Dare him to challenge it.

For a moment, he frowns, like he expected something else. Hurt, maybe. Or longing.

If he expected to find me a blubbering, emotional mess, he must be sorely disappointed.

His expression is one of indescribable sadness, before his familiar barriers slide into place and it’s almost as if nothing happened between us.

We’re two perfect characterizations, flawless in our denial.

No one can tell how bitterly unleashed I am on the inside. Not even him.

Especially
not him.

A line from
As You Like It
comes to me:
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
Standing here, staring at Ethan, that concept has never been more true. The Grove is now our stage, and these are our new roles.

Separate.

Loveless.

Unaffected.

I take a deep breath.

Curtain up.

ELEVEN

OPEN BOOK

Present Day

New York City, New York

The Apartment of Cassandra Taylor

My head is on his chest, my arm draped over his waist. I’m gripping his shirt like it can keep me here in this place. Where everything that happened between us hovers on the edge of my consciousness like white noise. Not forgotten but dimmer.

After our hallway confrontation, he brought me in here. Laid me down. Reassured me we’ll be all right.

Now he has his arms around me and is stroking my arm.

I can’t quite believe he’s in my bed, the scene of so many angst-driven fantasies about him. We’re both fully clothed and completely silent, yet this is the most intimate I’ve been with a man since … well, since him.

He takes my hand and places it on his chest, then presses it down against the pulse of blood and silent promises. I can feel him willing me to trust him.

I want to, but it’s like my heart’s too small for him now. When he left, it collapsed like a balloon, empty and deflated, and over time it atrophied into that shape. And now he wants me to make room for him again, but I don’t know how.

“Ethan?”

“Hmmm?”

“When did you know you were capable of … changing?” He strokes my hand for a few seconds, but doesn’t answer. “I mean, you tried to change when you were with me, right? To become more open?”

“Yes. Jesus. I tried so hard. And failed spectacularly.”

“So, how did you go from the guy who left me twice to the guy you are now?”

He looks down at me. “I did mention I’ve been in therapy for three years, right? And I’m not talking just one session a week. In my darker days it was two … three sessions a week. My therapist had the patience of a saint.”

“Yeah, but you could have gotten therapy when we were together, couldn’t you?”

“Technically, yes. But the thought of it scared the crap out of me, and we both know that back then, I was ruled by fear.”

“Then how did you decide you weren’t scared anymore?”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you this story, but I guess you deserve to know.”

“What story?” I break out in goose bumps, certain I’m not going to like what I hear.

He grabs my hand and pushes it under his shirt. On the left side of his rib cage, my fingers graze a clump of scar tissue. I’d noticed it when we ran our love scenes, but I was always too distracted by his kisses to find out more.

I lift his shirt and lean over to get a better look. “What is that?”

He strokes my forearm as I continue to graze the rough skin. “That’s where a tube was shoved into my lung to drain out the blood that was drowning me.”

I look up at him and frown.

“And there’s this…” He takes my hand and lifts it to his head. At the back, there’s another patch of raised skin. “That was where my head smashed into a tree. Fourteen stitches.”

Bile rises in my throat. “Ethan, what the hell…?”

He takes my hand and plays with my fingers. “After I left you in senior year, I hit my low point in France. The show was a hit, and I was getting great reviews, but I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I felt so goddamn guilty about failing you. Again. I already told you I was drinking a lot. Getting into fights.”

I nod.

“Well, after our season, we had a week off before we moved on to Italy. The rest of the cast was going to do a tour of the wineries, but I couldn’t cope with being a miserable bastard around them, so I hired a motorbike and just … left. Traveled aimlessly around southern France, thinking I had the world monopoly on self-loathing. Driving drunk, driving too fast, taking crazy risks. I was a fucking mess. I don’t think I had a death wish, but deep down…” He looks at me. “I guess I wanted to hurt myself more than I’d hurt you.”

“Ethan…”

He shakes his head. “Pathetic, right? Well, one night, after hitting a French pub, I decided to make a play for the Italian border. It had been raining. Too much alcohol, too much speed, zero self-esteem. I took a curve too fast and slammed into the guardrail. My bike went cartwheeling across the road as I flew over the rail and crashed down a steep embankment. Pretty sure I hit every damn tree on the way down. By the time I’d reached the bottom, my helmet was cracked, my leather jacket was shredded, and it felt like someone had shoved a dagger into my ribs.”

“Oh, God…”

“I lay there for a while, just trying to breathe. When I moved, I was hit with so much pain, I almost passed out. I managed to pull off my helmet, but that was it. There was pain in my shoulder, my wrist, my chest. I could feel blood running down my leg.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugs. “I tried to figure out if I was dying. And when I seriously thought I was, I took a moment to try and figure out if that was a bad thing.”

“Ethan…”

I take his hand and he lets out a shaky breath. “It’s weird, you know, facing your own mortality. People talk about their life flashing in front of their eyes, but I didn’t get that. All I got were flashes of you. They were so vivid, it was like I could reach out and touch you. I wondered how you’d react if I died. Would you mourn me? Or would you be happy I’d never hurt you again?”

As I listen, anxiety begins to coil in my chest. Thinking about him dying makes my throat close up.

He strokes my face. “Hey, it’s okay.”

“How could you think I wouldn’t mourn you?”

“I was in a dark place. I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“God, Ethan, if you’d died…” I can’t finish the thought, let alone the sentence. Even at the height of my enmity, I couldn’t imagine living in a world without Ethan. The mere concept was distressing beyond words. “Okay, tell me what happened next before I freak out about the death thing.”

He wraps his arm around me and pulls me in to his side. “I don’t know how long I was lying at the bottom of that hill. Most of the night, at least. I slipped in and out of consciousness, and as time passed, I realized no one was going to find me down there. Unless I did something, I was going to die. I had to get back to the road.”

“But your injuries…”

“Yeah, I found out later that I had a dislocated shoulder, a fractured wrist, three broken ribs, and a punctured lung, as well as a concussion and multiple lacerations.”

“Oh my God! How did you even move?”

“Willpower. Stubborness. The thing is, I knew that climbing up that hill was going to be the most painful thing I’d ever done, but it was necessary. I had to survive, because if I didn’t, I could never get you to forgive me, and that was not fucking acceptable.”

He touches my face, soft and reverent. “So, I climbed. Every step made me scream in agony, but I kept moving, one foot in front of the other. By the time I reached the top, I was sure I’d died and gone to hell. The pain was blinding. I managed to crawl over the guardrail before collapsing on the road.”

“How did you get out of there?”

“A delivery driver found me a couple of hours later and called an ambulance. When I woke up, I was in a French hospital, tubes everywhere, dosed up on morphine. Elissa and the company manager were there. They told me I’d been out for a couple of days. Elissa was fucking furious. She’d been lecturing me for months about my drinking and self-destructive habits. When she was done yelling, she started sobbing. I’d never seen my sister cry like that before.”

“Of course she was upset. She could have lost you. We all could have.”

“But the ironic thing is, the way I was living … it was like I was already dead. It took the accident to bring me back to life. While I was recovering in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think. It occurred to me that, for most of my adult life, I’d had this thing for self-sabotage. When I broke up with you the second time, it was me slamming into the barrier of my goddamn issues. I knew if I didn’t do something to fix them and find a way to get you back, my life was pointless. So, yeah. I decided to live. As soon as I got out of the hospital, I tracked down a therapist who specialized in abandonment issues and climbed the fucking painful hill of recovery. Three years later, here I am. Scarred, but grateful.”

I want to be grateful, too, but I’m too busy being fixated on a mental image of him lying in a hospital bed, crumpled and broken.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You could have asked Elissa to contact me.”

He shakes his head. “I couldn’t. I mean, I’d almost killed myself because I was pining for you. How fucking lame is that? Plus, I vowed the next time you laid eyes on me, I’d be the man you deserved, not some scared little boy.”

I look up at him. “And now, here you are.”

He brushes his thumb over my lips. “Here I am.”

He leans down and kisses me, warm and open and soft. When he stops, I’m boneless.