41. Forty-One
Forty-One
DYLAN
Sunday
I paced nervously around the hotel room, killing time. My suitcases were packed and neatly positioned near the door. Marie arranged a new room for me. I didn’t bother unpacking anything. It was just a place to wait before I needed to leave for the airport.
There was a knock at the door. I knew it would be Brax, but I checked the peephole just in case.
Steeling myself, I opened the door. “Hey.”
“Hi. Can I come in?”
I opened the door wide, indicating for him to follow me to the lounge where we sat down. Crossing my legs underneath myself, my knee grazed Brax’s thigh. I tried to ignore the zap that coursed through my body. There was still so much electricity between us.
“How’d it go with the police?”
I shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Steven will be charged.”
A couple of seconds passed.
“Wonder what his face looks like today?” Brax asked, breaking the silence.
“Fucked up six ways from Sunday.”
Brax smirked. "Be a hell of a mugshot.”
I replayed the brutal bashing Brax gave Steven. I'm surprised Steven wasn't in the hospital. I wondered if he would press charges against Brax. Criminal charges would be the fucking cherry on top. Brax didn't seem concerned, so I didn't ask.
"Thank you doesn't seem enough," I said softly.
He took my hand in his and gripped it tightly. The memories of what happened flashed across my mind again.
It sounded dramatic, but I really felt I owed him my life. I wanted to tell him how I really felt, tell him how grateful I was, how much I loved him.
But I couldn't. Instead, I tightened my jaw and stiffened as I remembered what I had to do. I pulled my hand back, changing the subject. “When’s your flight?”
“Not til Tuesday now,” he said, slightly taken aback that I withdrew from his touch. “Greg called me earlier. He wants me to stay a few extra days, now that the Studio Pase project is… on hold." Brax's eyes flicked over to mine. "Are you off the job?"
I nodded, "I'm off work entirely. I have to take mandatory leave. The firm has strict procedures in place apparently. Marie wants me to take at least four weeks."
I wanted to protest when she mentioned taking leave. The last thing I wanted to do was be alone with my thoughts and guilty conscience. But there was no way around it. It wasn't my call. Ultimately, I couldn’t continue on the Studio Pase project anyway. Not anymore. Not now that she knew the truth about Brax.
“So, when’s your flight?”
I lowered my gaze into my lap and bundled my hands together. “This evening.”
Brax sighed. “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you I was engaged.”
I braced myself for the conversation we needed to have. I twisted my rings around and around, refusing to look at him. “Why didn’t you?”
“I was going to tell you. The last thing I wanted to do was hide anything from you," he said, pulling his phone out of his pocket and placing it on the coffee table. "But I wanted to end things with Ally first.”
My mouth felt dry as I swallowed and looked him in the eyes. I wanted him to see the pain behind mine. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure I even wanted to hear his justification.
“Believe me, in hindsight, I wish I’d told you that first night at dinner,” Brax’s eyes darted to the floor, then flicked back up. He was annoyed at himself. “I told you it was complicated though. Honestly, I never wanted to be engaged to Ally, but at the time I felt like I had no choice.”
“You always have a choice.”
He blew out a long breath and averted looking at me in the eyes. “She was pregnant.”
The oxygen disappeared from the room.
I froze, every muscle locked as if movement might shatter me completely. Brax searched my face trying to get a read on me. His gaze was intense, probing, almost desperate.
My lungs felt like they’d forgotten their purpose.
She was pregnant?
A surge of heat flushed through me, anger boiling just beneath my skin. My hands started to tremble, but I clenched them tight. This was so, so much worse than I originally thought.
I’d been sleeping with a man who had a pregnant fiancée.
It was fucking diabolical.
“P-pregnant?” I stammered.
My hands shot up to cover my face as my vision blurred, the room spinning around me. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if pressing hard enough could block out the nauseating feeling that was crawling all over my skin like thousands of tiny bugs.
“Dylan, she––”
“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” the words tumbled from my lips. There was a pounding in my ears. I couldn’t listen to another sickening second.
I hated him.
“Dylan, please look at me.”
I shook my head.
No.
There was no way I could look at him. If I didn’t look, maybe it wouldn’t be real. I couldn’t hold the tears as they traced salty paths down my cheeks. Brax’s hands gently tugged at mine, trying to pull them from my face, but I barely felt it.
I let my hands fall, like a dead weight. Everything was hazy. I felt like I'd taken a double dose of codeine. I was here, physically, but it was like watching myself from a distance. Maybe this was what disassociating felt like—hollow, detached.
There, but not there.
“We got engaged because I was trying to do the right thing,” Brax began, his voice tight, each word like it weighed a thousand pounds. “There was pressure from her family, from Greg, and the moment—and I mean the very moment— we got engaged, I knew it was a huge mistake. She knew it, too. We were never right for each other. The only reason we got engaged was because she was pregnant.”
I let out a choked scoff, and shook my head. “That’s shitty, Brax.”
He nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“So that’s it then. You’re going to be a father.”
“No, I’m not.” Brax looked up. "It was a false positive."
My mind raced as I struggled to understand what the fuck that meant.
"What does that even mean?” I whispered.
"It's rare, but it happens apparently."
My mind drifted to Ally. What must she have felt? To think you're having a baby, find out you're actually not, and then a few months later discover the man you planned to marry had an affair?
Fuck, Ally had been through hell.
I had a sinking feeling she would haunt me forever.
I deserved it.
“I need you to know,” he went on, “that even if I hadn’t run into you, I was ending things with Ally. I was unhappy, she was unhappy. Nothing about us made sense."
Brax's eyes were pained as he continued his truth tour. "I was actually relieved when she said she wasn't pregnant. I don't know what that says about me…"
His eyes drifted downwards. "I just didn’t want to be an asshole and break up with her right after it all. In my mind, I was going to give it some time and then end the relationship. I was trying to do the right thing.”
I let his words sink in, forcing myself to understand them. I could almost see his logic, fucked up and fractured as it was. The picture he painted was ugly, flawed, but…human.
"Why didn't you just tell me?"
He ran a hand through his hair. "Because I know how bad it sounds… that the only reason we got engaged was because I thought she was pregnant. I was scared of your reaction, I guess."
I rolled my head across my shoulders. The trauma of the night before was still pulsing through me. I felt like I was standing in a wreckage listening to Brax.
“Dyl, I want you to know that I never wanted to hurt you. I made mistakes. Poor choices… whatever you want to label them. I was trying so hard to do the right thing—by both of you—that I ended fucking everything up. I never wanted it to turn out like this.”
He wasn't the only one that had made poor choices. We'd both dug own own graves.
“I made bad choices too,” I whispered, pressing my fingers to the cut on the forehead. It stung. “I need to figure my life out, Brax. So do you.”
“There’s nothing left for me to figure out. Ally and I are over. I want you Dylan. I want us. Two days ago, you told me that’s what you wanted too.”
I let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, and look at what’s happened since then. Everything’s changed, Brax. I need time to figure it all out. I need to figure me out.”
"Alone?"
The truth in my silence was thick and suffocating. Brax reached for me, his fingers tilting my chin until our gaze met. He searched my eyes as if he might somehow find the answer hidden there. “Did you mean what you said last night?”
I forced a shrug, pretending I didn’t remember what venomous shit I’d flung at him on the night before. But I remembered it all. Every poisonous word. “Which part?"
“When you said you didn’t love me.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab him and shake him and tell him that he knew I loved him, that he’d always known.
But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t say the words. Talking with a lump in your throat is fucking hard.
“Dylan? Why are you pushing me away?”
"Because," my voice broke as I jumped up and paced across the room, every step charged with exhaustion and frustration. “I’m a fucking mess, Brax! What we’ve done…" I let out a shaky breath. I was at my limit, wrung out, emptied. "Our lives… they’re just too different.”
“Seriously? Too different? They weren’t ‘too different’ when we talked about being together two fucking days ago.”
I knew it sounded stupid, laughable even. Our lives weren’t different at all. The only thing that was different now was the painful truth spilling out between us.
I turned away, cutting him off. “That was before I knew you fucking lied to me!”
I hated how broken I sounded.
He took a step closer to me, his voice raw, pleading. “I’m sorry! I am so fucking sorry.”
“So am I," I said quietly. "But it doesn't matter now. It's over. We're done."
“Done? So… that’s it? All of this was for nothing?”
Even though I was desperately sick of all the deception and dishonesty, I still chose to lie. I didn't want us to be over. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I forced myself to continue lying to his perfect face.
“I–I’m messed up, Brax. I can't do this."
"Do what?" He asked, exasperated.
"Ruin my life!" I yelled.
Brax's face crumbled, and for a moment, I wanted to take it back, to erase the words I had said. "Ruin your life? Being with me, would ruin your life? "
I knew he loved me. I knew it down to my rotten core. But I had to learn to love myself, before I could ever love him the way I wanted too.
"This isn't love, this is just… infatuation. Lust."
“You're wrong.”
I knew that. I knew it was love. It was love in its most brutal, most raw and messiest form.
We'd destroyed people for each other. We'd destroyed ourselves for each other.
Which is why we couldn't be together.
Slowly, he crossed the space between us. The scent of him—intoxicating, comforting, devastating—washed over me, pulling me back to when everything was right and not upside-fucking-down.
“Do I get a say in this?” Brax asked, his voice rough.
"No."
He stared at me, realizing that nothing he could say could make me change my mind. He leaned in close, his breath ghosting over my skin as he placed a soft kiss beside my lips, so close it made my knees buckle.
“Don't do this,” he whispered. “You're tearing me into pieces.”
It took every ounce of strength to stay still, to remain the ice queen I was pretending to be.
He stepped back and I felt my heart splinter into a million tiny pieces. I realized suddenly, and desperately, I wanted him to fight for me.
My mind screamed, Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go .
I wanted him to grab me by the shoulders, shake me and tell me I was being fucking stupid.
I wanted him to use his strong, tattooed arms to sweep me up and throw me onto the bed—to fuck some sense into me so everything would be made right again.
I wanted him to scream at me, to tell me that we were supposed to be together, that all the pain, all the mistakes, all the fucked-up choices didn’t matter when it came to us.
If only I could have just mustered the courage to be honest.
Instead, I stood there and watched the love of my life collect his phone from the coffee table and slowly walk toward the door.
“If I walk out this door, I’m not coming back.”
His words not a threat, but a promise.
When I didn’t respond, I saw it in the way his body moved and how his shoulders dropped, that he was done. "I hope you find your happy, Dylan."
I stood there long after the door had closed.
Utterly heartbroken.
I'd hit rock bottom.