16. A Coward and a Dumbass
Chapter 16
A Coward and a Dumbass
R ose
I wanted Jason. But I didn’t want to want him. The whole Uber ride, I reminded myself of all the reasons I would never go back.
He got mad at you for being yourself in what he told you was your home. He wouldn’t stand up for you. He was embarrassed of you. He couldn’t bring himself to say he was serious about you when it really counted. You’re not heartbroken, you’re pissed.
The driver pulled away as I walked up the sidewalk to Heather’s real-life dream house: a gorgeous, old New Orleans mansion. I knocked and waited. If she and Abby weren’t home, that would be what I got for not calling first.
Just as I was pulling out my phone to call, Abby appeared through the glass door. Her gaze darted to my pile of things and back to me.
She yelled for Heather as she opened the door. “Rose! What happened?” She threw her arms around me. Heather joined us, throwing her arms around me, too.
I sobbed out Jason’s name as I hugged them back. They took all my stuff from me, brought me over to the velvet sofa in the living room, and sank down on either side of me.
“I’m sorry to bust up in your house, but I didn’t want to go to my mom’s,” I said. “And since I stupidly got involved with my landlord, and there’s a tree-sized hole in the roof over my bedroom, I couldn’t stay there. Not with him.”
“Of course, baby, you’re always welcome here.” Heather grabbed a tissue box off the wooden coffee table and pulled several out, handing them to me.
When I could speak again, I told them both what happened. “He said he loved me, but that was a lie. Just like he’d lied to his mom about us. I’d started to think I was serious about him. That I might…love him.” The words tasted both foreign and true on my tongue. “But I could never be serious about someone who treated me like that.”
Abby’s blue eyes met Heather’s brown eyes, and the latter took a long breath to speak.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I need to get him out of my mind and move on. It just really hurts tonight, you know?”
Heather shook her head. “No, I don’t think you should make any decisions tonight. I’ll move your stuff into your old room and make you a bath and the most luxurious bed I can put together. The whole thing’s just gonna suck, but you might have a clearer head tomorrow.”
“I don’t need a clearer head. I need to put him behind me. It all happened so fast anyway. It’s not like we were gonna get married or anything.” The pictures we took playing bride and groom rose in my mind’s eye, and I started crying all over again.
“Is putting him behind you what you really want?” Abby rubbed my back and handed me another tissue. “He—”
My phone started blasting The Bee Gees, “More Than a Woman.” I reached over and shut it off. “And he won’t stop texting me. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’” I said in an unkind mockery of his deep voice. “‘Come back, Rose.’”
“He apologized?” Abby asked.
“Repeatedly. But they’re empty words. Like his ‘I love you.’ He doesn’t mean any of it.”
Heather grabbed up my phone. “What could he do to show you he meant it?”
I sputtered. “Do something about it. Stand up to his mom. Stand up for me. Take some kind of action to show me he understands how I feel and…that I really am important to him.”
She glanced at me and went back to my phone. “All I can see is the preview, but it says, ‘I told Becca everything, and I sent screenshots of Misty’s texts to Mom. She’s out of the wedding. You never have—’ and it cuts off.”
I laughed unkindly. “So glad I busted my ass to get her dress altered.”
Abby shrugged. “But at least he did the right thing. Finally. And you don’t have to see her at the wedding.”
“Oh, I’m not standing in the wedding. I might not even go. I was supposed to walk with him down the aisle. Can you imagine?”
Heather set my phone face-down on the coffee table. “Where does Jason fall in your levels?”
I closed my eyes, grateful for the shorthand between old friends. “I’ve been asking myself this since last weekend. He’s not a One. I mean, the sex was transcendent , oh my God. But we meant so much more to each other than that.”
“You’d said he was a strong Two,” Abby gently supplied.
I nodded. “We’re friends, no doubt. We play together, support each other. We laugh all the time when we’re together. Life was just good and easy with him.”
Jason was right. There was so much more to us. The look in his eyes when he told me he loved me made me panic. Because I knew deep in my soul, even then, that I loved him, too.
I loved Jason. With everything that I was.
“He’s a stupid Three!” I wailed. “How did this happen? I know better than this.”
Abby handed me more tissues. “Having a fight doesn’t always mean a friendship or a relationship is over. And it sounds like he took some baby steps. If you really love him, you owe it to yourself to get all the information you can about the situation before you make any kind of permanent decision. What if he’s the love of your life? You can’t just cut him off. Right, Heather?”
Heather sighed. I hated that heartache haunted her pretty dark eyes. Her ex left her at the altar for a bridesmaid almost seven years ago, and I still wanted to punch him in the balls.
“I shouldn’t weigh in,” she said. “But I do think some time apart from him is a good idea. And like Abby said, don’t cut him off cold. He’s trying.”
Abby nodded. “You went from friends to living together and in love in only a few weeks. That has to be overwhelming for you both. Maybe the distance will help you clarify how you feel about him.”
I clutched my best friends closer. Their squishing me was a comfort, but it made me miss Jason even more. I wanted him to comfort me. I missed how hot his body always ran, and how he always gravitated to where I was in the church, even if it was just to sit near me while I read or sewed, or to drop a kiss on my head as he went past. I even smelled like him now, or at least this amalgam of me and him.
Heather and Abby made a big fuss over getting me comfortably situated in my old room and tried to cheer me up with dinner and conversation. But I took my bath and went to bed early. The murmur of my friends talking low in the kitchen comforted me even more than the plush bed Heather made for me. I needed sleep, but first I pulled out my phone. Missed calls from Mom and Lily. Five missed calls from Jason, a voicemail, and a long string of texts. Besides the bit about Becca and Misty, his texts were increasing amounts of groveling, which I perversely enjoyed. I took a deep breath and listened to the voicemail.
Baby, please say something. Anything. I called your mom and Lily looking for you, but they don’t know where you are. Now I made them worry, too. If something happened to you because of me—
His voice choked up, and he sniffled, his voice raw. It cut me clean to my heart.
I’m so, so sorry. And I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all these calls and texts. I fucked up, and I’m so sorry. My mom was so horrible to you, and I should’ve stuck up for you. I should’ve made you feel comfortable in your own home. I should’ve told the whole world how much I love you. Because I do. There’s no excuse for my behavior. I know I…I have to make changes to be worthy of you, because you sure as hell deserve someone stronger and braver than me. I love you, Rose, so much. And I just want you home with me. I miss you.
The emotion in his voice felt like someone ripping all the stitches that held my heart together. By the end of his message, I was sobbing. I didn’t trust myself to call him and be able to talk rationally. So, I texted him back, texted my mom, and turned off my phone.
Jason
This French Quarter dive bar was the last place I wanted to be. It’d been three days since Rose left. Three days since her last text to me, the night she broke up with me. Sitting alone at the bar, I pulled my phone out to read it—and my response to her—again.
Every day without her was a little more of my soul whittled away.
I threw myself back into my socials, custom pieces, and hurricane repairs, but everything I worked on reminded me of her. Working on my Insta made me go to her profile and check her follower count. I worried about her keeping up engagement because she hadn’t touched it in days. I couldn’t pick out a wall color for the bathroom because I wanted to make sure she’d love it. I was up late last night working on my plans for the community room for the first time since Florida, and I was out of my chair to bring the plans to her sewing table and ask her what kind of rooms she wanted in her dream house. Then I remembered.
And this morning I called Faduma and turned StudFinders down. She definitely didn’t expect it. She did her best to talk me into it, but I told her, respectfully, that I couldn’t sign a contract that dictated how to live my life. She was disappointed but understood, and she wished me luck. I may never be able to afford to finish my house, but none of that mattered if I had to hide the woman I loved.
Alex stumbled up beside me at the bar. “Come on, dude—”
“For the last time, Alex, I don’t want a fucking lap dance.” I pushed my brother back toward the crowd in this godforsaken Bourbon Street strip club.
He laughed at me. “I already paid for it, so I guess it’s for me!” He whooped and retreated back into the crowd as my dad sat beside me.
“I see you enjoy this kind of establishment as much as I do.” He took a sip of the beer he’d been nursing for an hour.
“It’s not my scene on a good day.” My eyes flickered back up to the football highlights playing on the TV over the bar. The bass thrumming up through the soles of my shoes was making a nauseating slosh of the peanuts and beer in my stomach. The other bars the bachelor party hit tonight were cleaner than this one, and the streets in between reeked of puke and piss.
My dad studied the TV for a minute. “Saints might have a chance this year, with that new running back.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“I ever tell you how when I started dating your mother, her parents hated me?”
I frowned over my beer and snapped my gaze to his. He was studying the TV still, the images flickering over his glasses. Alex may’ve looked more like Dad, but I was more like him. I was more sensitive, usually more open about sharing my emotions. Which is why I was shocked that I’d never heard this before.
“What?” I needed him to say it again.
“They absolutely hated me.”
“Nana and Pops love you.”
“They do now, after thirty-some-odd years of faithful marriage and giving them four beautiful grandchildren. But back then? They didn’t want me dating your mother. They were upset when we got engaged, and…”
“And?” I took a sip of my beer.
“They were furious when I got her pregnant before we were married.”
The beer went down the wrong way. I coughed, grabbing napkins off the bar to get myself straight. Son of a bitch. Rose was right. “When you did what ?”
Dad laughed. “Don’t ever tell your mother I told you.”
“So, wait. Mark was born out of wedlock?”
“No, your brother was born plenty inside wedlock.” Dad shrugged. “He was conceived out of wedlock in the back of—”
I put my hand on his arm. “Dad, stop. I don’t want to hear anymore. Excuse me,” I said, catching the bartender’s eye and pushing my half-drunk beer away. “Can you bring me a Sprite?”
Dad shrugged. “All I’m saying is that it took a lot of hard work for us to show your grandparents that I was a good guy who’d do right by their daughter. Our hard work together. You mom seems to have forgotten all that.”
“And you’re telling me all this…because?”
“Let me answer that question with a question. When your mom asked you the other day if you and Rose were serious, apparently she said yes, but you didn’t answer. Why not?”
“Because I’m a coward and a dumbass.”
“Son, are you serious about Rose?”
“Yes. I love her. She’s everything to me.”
“Is she good for you? Do you see a future with her?”
“She’s so good for me. Things are just…easy with her. We work together in such harmony. We laugh together, have fun together…”
“I don’t want to know what else you do together.” He took another sip of his beer.
I laughed, straightening out the plastic straw wrapper, folding it over in half, and folding each end under alternately like Rose taught me with her ribbons. “You know, in Florida, I asked her if she’d designed any wedding dresses for herself over the years. And I can’t get it out of my head, how…” I pinched the wrapper at the end of the folds and pulled one side so it formed a rose. “The whole time she was showing them to me, all I could think was how I wanted to marry her in every one of those dresses.”
Dad pointed at the straw wrapper rose I’d made. “I know you went through hell, but I agree with Rose. It wasn’t because you made bad decisions.”
“Wait, you talked to her?”
“No. It’s something she said to your mom on Sunday, before church. That it wasn’t fair to blame you for bad choices when Kasey was abusive.”
My face heated with welling tears. She stood up to Mom for me when I couldn’t.
“You always were a smart kid with a good heart. And I’m so proud of the man you’ve grown into. If you love this girl, then she must be alright. And you have something worth fighting for.” He took a sip of his beer. “It’s not all or nothing, you know, your mom’s happiness versus yours and Rose’s. I know you’re too old for me to tell you what to do, but you can’t roll over and give up.”
He clapped his hand on my shoulder, and I grabbed it. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”
“I love you too, son.” He slipped out of the stool and tossed his head toward the other room. “Brad looks miserable. I’m gonna go see if I can talk his best man into shuttin’ this party down. And make sure Alex doesn’t go home with a stripper.”
I laughed and cleared my throat. “Hang on; I’ll come too. I’m gonna say my goodbyes and call a ride. There’s something I have to work on at home.”