50. Reclaiming My Forever
OLIVIA
I’m going on six hours of sleep. Six hours split between three nights. It gets so much worse when I pair it with my shitty sleep Saturday night and the near all-nighter from Friday.
Because now it’s Wednesday morning and I’m sitting at a grand total of thirteen hours over the last five nights.
Let me be clear: I am not functioning properly. My brain is a foggy, dark mess that I so desperately want out of but can’t find the ladder to crawl up. I’ve been living off iced lattes and Big Macs. My stomach hurts, I feel like shit, look like hell, and don’t care.
Frankly, it’s a miracle I’m dragging myself to work. But work is the only normalcy I have left, and with only two days left now, no one’s dared say a word to me so far.
I roll over, pulling the blankets tighter around my shoulders.
The soft orange glow of the rising sun peeks through the tiniest crack in the curtains, and all I want it to do is rain.
I’ve spent months feeling like sunshine, even during the bleakest, snowiest winter, and the grayest spring.
Now that the sun’s here, all I want it to do is go away.
My phone tells me it’s barely five. I still have two hours until I have to be up, but I know any chance of sleep has left.
There’s an irrational, fucked up part of me that frowns at the notifications on my phone, the texts and missed calls.
I have tons, but none are from Carter. The logical part of my brain tries to tell me the space is good.
It’s what I asked for, after all. The rest of me begs me to call him, to make sure he’s okay.
Because he promised he’d be back, but he’s not.
I’m here and he’s there, and with each passing minute, the distance feels farther, the hole in my heart gaping wider.
He promised me answers, and the longer he’s away, the more I worry there isn’t one.
I swipe at my screen, over and over again, pictures of us together smiling up at me, until I settle on one of my favorites.
I’m laughing, looking into the camera, and Carter’s got his arms around me from behind, his chin on my shoulder with his biggest, dopiest grin.
But he’s not looking at the camera; he’s looking at me.
Never in my life has somebody looked at me the way that man looks at me, like I’m the only thing he sees, like someone seeing in color for the first time.
He holds so much love in his gaze, fierce appreciation, devotion, and that right there is why my heart keeps urging me that something isn’t right, that something doesn’t add up.
It’s why I promised him the time he begged for right here in this room, the time to figure it out.
The door to my room creaks open and I hug my phone into my chest, swiping at my tears as Cara pops her head inside.
She smiles and starts padding toward the bed. “I knew you’d be up.” Slipping beneath the covers, she snuggles into me. “It’s like I can hear the wheels in your head turning.”
“What are you doing up?” Besides the obvious, which is checking on me.
I feel awful. Cara and Emmett are getting married this weekend and I’ve invaded their space, their life together. I’m all Cara can focus on, but she insists it’s a welcome distraction from wedding worries. I don’t know if I believe her, but she sure makes me feel like I belong here.
“Just couldn’t sleep. You wouldn’t talk to me last night and you know I don’t deal well with the word no .” She pulls me closer, her hand skimming my phone, and she gives it a tug. “What’s this?”
I hug it closer to my chest. “Nothing.”
Cara pins me to the mattress, wrestling my phone from my grasp, because like she said, she doesn’t deal well with no ’s.
She doesn’t say anything when she finds the picture, nor when she drops the phone on the bed, slamming her body into mine from behind in a hold that has the power to cut off my oxygen supply if she were to squeeze a touch harder.
I can tell she’s crying by the slight quiver in her body, the tiny sniffles. She thinks I don’t hear her cry to Emmett at night, but I do. My best friend loves me ferociously, and for that, I’m truly blessed.
“Where is he?” My body shakes with a sob, and Cara buries her face in my hair, shaking right along with me. “He said he’d be back. He said he’d fix it, that he’d find the answer and explain everything. He promised, Cara, but it’s been two days and he’s not here.”
“He’ll be here,” she whispers. “I know he will.” It’s a promise she sounds so certain making, no matter how heavy the words are. When I roll out of her arms and sit up, she sits up, too, wiping her cheeks.
“My heart hurts so much,” I admit, brushing at a tear that gathers in the corner of my eye.
“This doesn’t feel like Carter. Not at all.
He was talking about our wedding and babies.
He was calling it our home long before I moved in.
He wanted to share everything, his whole life.
And I only wanted to be a part of it, a part of him. ”
“Oh, honey.” Cara covers my hands with hers. “You’re the biggest part. You know that.”
“Why can’t he just talk to me? What’s stopping him? What doesn’t he want me to know?”
There’s a part of me that’s sure Cara knows what’s going on in some capacity, that she’s dying to tell me, and if I’d come right out and ask her to, she would.
But it puts her and Emmett in a position they shouldn’t have to be in, between their best friends.
I don’t want them to have to choose sides, because I don’t want there to be sides.
I have to believe there’s a perfectly logical reason for all of this, even if it’s a little misguided.
“What if he never comes back? What if we can’t fix this, whatever it is, and our forever is over?”
Cara opens her mouth to reply, but I shake my head, stopping her words before they start.
“If this were reversed, if it were me trying to find my way through this, Carter wouldn’t take no for an answer. Carter would push down the door and demand that we do this together. He wouldn’t let me go through this on my own, even if I begged him to, no matter how much I’d try to push him away.”
Cara’s blue eyes hold mine. “You’re right.”
“I don’t want him to do this, to try to be strong on his own.”
“Then what do you want?”
My throat feels tight as my heart beats way down low in my stomach.
Every nerve ending feels jittery, alive with the desire to make this right, to be next to my person instead of feeling so lost without him.
So what do I want? I want him, I want us.
Together and forever. I want the answers I deserve, and if he’s having trouble finding them, then I want to help him look.
“I want to show him what he’s been showing me all along. That we’re stronger together.”
That’s why I call him on my lunch break.
Three times, actually. When I get his voice mail a fourth time after work, I wind up sitting in my car out front of the house that was supposed to be my home, the one that’s been my home all these months, simply because of the person inside it, the memories made within the walls.
His truck sits in the driveway, though it was last tucked in the garage. He barely drives this thing anymore; he says it’s my baby now, and I’m his.
So if he’s home, why isn’t he answering the door?
I knock again, over and over again, and my phone keeps buzzing, the video doorbell telling me there’s someone at the front door. I know there’s someone at the front door; the someone is me.
I’m not proud of the way my knocks go from timid and gentle to frantic and hard, my palm slapping the wood as I beg for Carter to come, to open the door, to let me in.
I call his phone once, then twice, and when I finally give in, punching in the code to the front door, when it beeps three times and tells me it’s wrong, that the code’s not the one it was just days ago, the tears come.
I sink down to the steps on the front porch as the floodgates open, and with my knees pulled to my chest, I bury my face in my arms and sob.
Everything leaves me, the hope I was clinging to, and now all I have is the fear I’ve been trying to ignore, the one that creeps up my stomach and tries to make a home in my chest. I don’t want to let it.
Something warm and wet touches my elbow, then my fingers. It laps at my ear, and I draw in a sniffle, peeking down through the crack in my arms at the two golden paws that rest between my feet.
“Ollie.”
My chest cracks wide open at my name, all the love it’s whispered with, the shock at finding me here. That fear that’s been trying so hard to root claws its way out, escaping as two warm hands capture my face.
Glossy emerald eyes peer down at me, watching me, and when I cry out his name, Carter’s sharp inhale catches in his throat before he wraps his arms around me and yanks me into his embrace.
“You didn’t answer your phone,” I cry. “And the code. I tried the code, and it’s not working. You locked me out.”
“Oh, baby.” His palm skates over my back, his touch rough as I cling to him. “No. I would never try to keep you out. I changed it to keep everyone else out. Everything’s been so overwhelming, and without you here, I needed some time to myself, time to think without people in my ear.”
“You said you were coming back, Carter. You said that. But you…” I pry my face from his neck, swiping at my sopping cheeks as he holds me. “Why haven’t you come back to me?”
Shame tints his cheekbones. Carter takes a seat on the step, setting me on his lap, and smooths my hair back from my damp face as Dublin lies beside us.
“It’s still broken, Ollie. I have to…I have to fix it before I deserve to come back to you.”