Settling Scores (Piper Anderson Series) (15 page)

“Everything you said last night, hoping I could see through the murkiness in you that was bullshit?” Josh accused, and Willow felt her face go as gray as thundercloud. It wasn’t that she hadn’t meant what she said; it was that in the morning she wasn’t as ready as she thought she’d be to live that truth.

“No. I didn’t know last night what I planned to do. I didn’t make any promises to you. All I can say is that I’m not going back there but I think all of you should. I’m fine now. I’ll figure out what to do next.” She knew she was not fine, far from it. But she also knew having them here wasn’t going to change that one way or another. No one wants an audience when they’re spiraling out of control.

“You ever notice that you make all your decisions without thinking of how anyone else might feel? That’s a good way to end up alone,” Josh shot back as he stood and stormed out of the restaurant.

“Aren’t you going to go after him?” Bobby asked, looking at Willow like she had three heads.

“He’s right. I do. Even if I went after him, what argument would I make? Listen, I do really appreciate the time you guys took and the fact that you gave up your honeymoon. It would have taken much longer to get to this point without you.”

“Do you know the first time I met Piper, I had to chase her out of a diner just like this and apologize for being an ass? It’s what makes what we have today possible,” Bobby explained with a pleading tone.

“You don’t understand,” Willow argued as she dropped her fork loudly into her plate.

"You can tell everyone else they wouldn’t understand, but that argument doesn’t work on me,” Piper cut in with an edge to her voice. “I’m one of the few people who understands what this moment feels like.”

“I doubt it,” Willow huffed back like a petulant child. By this point she was even annoyed with herself, but she didn’t know how else to send all these people back to their lives and stop wasting their time. They had to hate her as much as she hated herself.

“You close your eyes and you see their faces. You remind yourself that all you would have had to do was speak up and they could be alive right now. When you start to feel happy, even if it’s by accident, you remind yourself you don’t deserve it. So you punish yourself. You push away what feels good because if those dead girls don’t get to have it, neither should you.” Piper laid out the scenarios in a way that made it clear she certainly did understand.

“I know this is what you’re going to school for, talking to people like me, but…”

“No you can’t find this feeling in a text book,” Piper interrupted, her face red with frustration.  “For me it comes from watching my father kill my mother and then attempting to kill me. It comes from waking up in the hospital and being asked if I knew the person who attacked me because he was a serial killer they’d been hunting. It comes from being too scared and selfish to say anything.” Piper’s voice was growing louder and Willow watched as Bobby gently covered her hand with his, a simple act of comfort in a moment of pain. “Delanie Morrison will never have a chance to get married, but I will. She’ll never have a chance to be loved by someone like Bobby because when my mouth was shut, my father was out killing her. I’ll live with that every day of my life. I’ll always see her face in the quiet moments of my life.”

“I didn’t know that,” Willow said, swallowing hard.

“You know what else you don’t know? That pain and my happiness are mutually exclusive of each other. I can carry both of them. You don’t just walk through life. You can design your own if you’re willing to work hard at it. I can go to Betty’s every Wednesday for dinner and cuddle my godchild. Bobby can love me and I can love him back. You know what the difference between my story and yours is?”

“You’re only talking about one girl,” Willow said, staring down at the table, her cheeks blazing with a growing anger she couldn’t pin down the source of.

“No. I was an adult. I was a full-grown person when I sat there and lied to the police about not knowing who attacked me. Ten years or more older than you were when you didn’t speak up. But I’ve still managed to find a way to stop punishing myself. Finding my way in the world doesn’t dishonor Delanie’s memory, it does the opposite.”

“And that’s an epiphany you had, what, like the day after she was killed? Or a couple weeks later? You met Bobby and you just magically knew what to do?” Willow’s voice was prickly with sarcasm. Though she was portraying these statements as accusations, they were actually questions. She wanted to know how Piper had managed to find her way but couldn’t find the courage to just ask.

“No,” Piper said, with a look of acknowledgement on her face. “You’re right. It took some time. I made some wrong turns.”

“I’m glad you’ve found a way to be happy Piper but excuse me if I’m still working on it,” Willow blurted out as she got to her feet and headed for the door.

“She is a pain in the ass,” Bobby groaned, running his hand over his stubble-covered cheek. Josh, who had made his way back into the restaurant and flopped into the booth after Willow had left just nodded his head in agreement. “I don’t know how you’ve been putting up with her,” Bobby continued.

Josh shrugged as he pushed his eggs around his plate. “I guess it’s time to ask myself why I am.”

“She’s in a rough patch,” Piper sighed, though even she was starting to wonder if this was something Willow could pull herself out of.

“I don’t think anyone would blame you Josh if you stopped chasing her. Maybe it’s time to let her take care of herself,” Bobby suggested.

“Where do you think I’d be if you’d given up on me when I kicked you out of my place and told you to go to hell?” Piper asked, raising an accusing eyebrow at Bobby.

“True.” Bobby smiled as he wrapped his arm around Piper’s shoulder. “But you were a little nicer than she’s being.”

“I think she’s afraid to be nice, as if it will make us all like her and then she’ll start to be happy. You’d be surprised how scary happy can be for some people,” Piper explained. “Josh, we’re heading home in the morning. Do you want to book the same flight as us?” Piper softened her face as she tried to imagine what it must feel like to be him right now.

“Thanks for the offer but my patients are covered and I’m not ready to go back. It might not be easy to understand why but I know exactly what’s waiting for me back in Edenville. I’ve dated plenty of girls who aren’t any trouble. The kindergarten teachers and the sweet librarians, they fit perfectly into my life the way it is today. The only problem is I don’t fit there. Willow is different. She challenges me. It’s harder to care about her, to understand her, but I feel like myself when I’m with her.”

“That actually makes perfect sense Josh,” Piper said, squeezing Bobby’s leg below the table, partially to keep him from saying something insensitive but also to remind him that she hadn’t been all that easy to love either.

“Then what’s your plan?” Bobby asked, looking more skeptical than Piper.

“I guess I wait to see what her plan is. But I know it’s not Edenville. I’ll be there for the wedding though, I promise. No matter what she’s got going on, I’ll be there.”

“Hopefully she comes too. But if she doesn’t that isn’t on you. The most important thing for you to remember is it’s not your job to make her do anything. You can’t force this to get better, you can just hope to be around when it does,” Piper offered, channeling the memories of her own rough patches.

“I better go try to catch her at the hotel before she takes off to God knows where. Thank you both for everything you did. I can’t imagine how long of a process this would have been if you hadn’t stepped in.” Josh tossed some cash on the table for breakfast and headed out the door.

“You think they’re going to be all right?” Bobby asked as Piper leaned her weary head on his shoulder.

“Who knows? I still wonder some days if we’re going to be okay. I don’t have the energy to speculate about anyone else’s relationship.”

“Since when do you worry about us? Getting cold feet?” Bobby asked, leaning away and looking down into her face.

“No, of course not. I can’t wait to marry you.” She leaned in and kissed his lips in a way that told him she was serious. “I guess I’ve been looking at Michael and Jules and wondering if that’s ever going to be us?”

“Crazy? You want to be crazy like them?”

“They aren’t crazy. They just work. You know what I mean? They have Frankie now and they look like they’re exactly where they’re meant to be.”

“We’ll be there some day. Little kids of our own running around. Our house will be all settled and we’ll wake up one morning and know we’re exactly where we’re meant to be.”

“After a week like this I really wonder if I want to bring a child into this world. Between both of us, we’ve seen so much. We know how bad it can be. I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. I’m not trying to spring this on you, I just think we should talk about it.”

“I don’t know if the craziness of the world is a reason not to have kids. There have always been problems; every generation has something. It’s how you prepare and protect your kids that matters. I think we’ll be great parents some day.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want to be parents, I’m just wondering if we should think through other options. Between my experience and everything I’m studying at school, I’m realizing how many kids in the world need help, need stability and love. I feel like maybe that’s my calling. Our calling.”

“I guess I never really gave it much thought. Adopting was a big part of my childhood. The time we had Jedda in our house was some of the best years of my life. Obviously it didn’t turn out how we’d hoped but that wouldn’t keep me from doing it myself. There are plenty of success stories out there. With our experience, I think adoption could be a great thing. I’d be open to it.”

“Really?” Piper asked, looking unconvinced.

“Sure. I want you. I want a family. But nothing we’ve ever done has been entirely conventional. Why should we start now?” Bobby pushed his plate away and dropped some money on the table for the bill. “Let’s pack up and get back to Edenville. I don’t think there is much else we can do here.”

“Do you think Betty would give us a hard time about adopting? She’ll probably want us to have kids of our own.”

“Are you kidding me? Betty will love the idea. She’s been adopting all of us for years.”

“I wasn’t sure I’d catch you,” Josh said, standing in the doorway of the hotel room. Willow could feel the heat of his eyes on her and it was unnerving.

“I wasn’t sure you’d try to,” she answered, not able to meet his stare.

“Me either,” he admitted as he leaned himself against the doorframe. It wasn’t lost on her that he was blocking her exit. That was how she felt about him in general. He was the one thing that made her hesitate, made her think twice about cutting herself off from the world. But at the same time, it also made her feel trapped.

“So why did you?”

“Can we stop playing games Willow?” His voice was harsher than she’d heard it before and it made her feel guilty for putting him through this. “I love you, dammit. Even though you’ve given me almost no reason to. You’ve been in my brain since the first moment I met you and I can’t get you out. Tell me right now, how do you feel about me? That’s all I want to hear from you. Nothing else.”

“I care about you, too,” Willow conceded, looking more like she was being punished than proclaiming affection for someone.

“Don’t look so happy about it.” Josh muttered, and Willow’s guilt grew.

“I’ll put this in terms you might be able to understand. Imagine you had a disease; you were infected with something a long time ago and every day it eats away at you a little. Then the older you get the more you realize it’s contagious. When you come into contact with someone they don’t make you feel better, you make them feel worse. You take bits and pieces of their happiness away from them. I care enough about you not to want to do that to you.”

“Bullshit Willow. Don’t give me that. Your analogy doesn’t work. Because what you have isn’t incurable. You just don’t know today how to work through it. I’m willing to lose little bits of my happiness for now to help you. Because I believe you can get through this and when you do, I know we could have something.”

“Maybe that’s the part I like about you. The part that believes I can get well, be better. But it suffocates me right now to think about that.”

“So what does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“The thing about loving you, Willow, is I can already see the running look in your eyes. I already know you’re going, even if you don’t want to admit it yet. Just don’t lie to me.”

Willow sucked in a breath and gave in to his penetrating stare. “I’m going back to California. It’s the only place I’ve felt like my head was above water.”

“That’s because you were hiding. Hiding feels good for a little while but you can’t live that way.”

“I can try.”

“I’m not going to chase you out there. I’m not going to follow you. If you walk away right now, I’m done. I can’t want this more than you do. It’s only fair that I let you know what’s riding on your choice right now. I’ll have your back wherever you want to go and whatever you want to do if we go together, but if you bail on me now, I’m done.”