Chapter 9
Ami
I never meant to fuck up my life.
I’m sure my father thought that was my intention.
Maybe my mom did too. That’s why he decided to marry off his three daughters and get us out of his hair.
Because I was wild. That was the rumor. Because I liked to go to parties and hang out.
I liked to have friends. I liked to be liked.
That translated into me being wild and out of control, so at twenty-two I was parceled off with my sisters.
For the last year I’ve been trying to put my life together.
I’m going to graduate right away. Get a decent job in a steady, boring career like everyone else.
I’m going to have a nice house one day, a car, maybe even a cat.
All the things my parents thought weren’t in the cards for me, because they, like everyone else, thought I was little more than a slut sleeping around and partying all night.
I’ve heard it from a lot of people.
I just didn’t think Gage would be one of them.
I scurry around my apartment after the drive from Helena. My eyes feel grainy and sore and I’m not sure if it’s from focusing on the road for so long or because I was crying.
I never cry.
At least, I try not to. I learned a long time ago that crying doesn’t help. It always makes me feel worse, not better. I don’t like being vulnerable. Feeling mushy and ruined inside. I hate the swollen eyes, the puffy cheeks, the way my heart feels tender and bruised after.
It’s easier not to think about it. To block it out and pretend that it never happened. It’s easier just to keep looking ahead because looking behind only ever made me trip and stumble.
And then Gage kissed me.
I really wanted him to sign those papers.
At least, I thought I did. I figured it was the fairest thing for both of us. We both have lives we want to live. I wasn’t brave enough to face him until I knew I was absolutely ready. And I was. Honestly.
And then he kissed me.
I haven’t been touched in a long time. I’ve focused on school and work and kept myself busy with the few friends I’ve made in Tampa. The rest of the time, I’ve done boring things like read and learn about antiques, since I always liked old furniture.
And then he kissed me.
I was into it. It felt… good. It felt good in ways I couldn’t imagine that ever being close to another person would feel like again.
His mouth, his hands, his body, the way he opened himself up to me—it was all a sucker punch straight to the heart of me.
It turned me to ash and shattered everything I thought I knew about myself.
Because all I’d known, when it came to being touched, was fear. Ever since I was fifteen.
And then he kissed me.
He kissed me, and it all went to shit.
I had nothing else to think about the entire drive home. I could still feel Gage’s lips on me. Firm, insistent. Scalding. Possessive and raw. Claiming me. Owning me.
I’m not trapped in my car anymore with nowhere to go, the confined space locking me in like the cage of my ribs enclosing my wild, aching heart.
I’m away from him. Away from Helena and all it stands for.
Away from a family who moved on without me.
Away from sisters who are firmly entrenched in their own happiness.
Away from a tight knit community and a club with men closer than brothers.
Away from the life happening all around me and the loneliness it always represented.
Giving my head a shake so hard that my neck cracks, I pick up my cell.
I start firing off texts to the numbers I have programmed in there, hoping that someone will be free and respond back.
It’s late enough to go to bed, but I know I won’t be able to sleep.
Anxiety churns in my stomach and bitterness floods the back of my mouth.
He’s just like everyone else.
The man I wronged. The man I married. The man I held out this absurd hope for, a tiny speck in my heart that I never allowed or fully acknowledged. Even he condemned me.
Fuck.
I don’t want to think about it, any of it, but I can’t help it.
That set of papers is still sitting in my tote, unsigned.
I’m back in Tampa without resolving things with my sisters.
I crashed my nephew’s party when I haven’t even met the kid and he’s a year old.
My life is just as much of a mess as when I took a week off work to try and get my shit figured out.
I have exams coming up that I should be studying for.
I could clean the apartment. Do laundry. Go out and get groceries. Start searching for jobs. Something. Anything.
My phone remains ominously silent, even after waiting nearly an hour. As usual, the few friends I have here are busy with their own lives. That’s the thing about meeting people who aren’t eighteen anymore. They have lives. They’re busy with school. Work. Family. Even kids.
I’m stuck here in this no-man’s land of my own making. Unable to go forward or back.
I’d finally grown brave enough to take a chance.
I tried to shove past the shit storm that had been my life, but somehow, I’m still here.
Nothing is resolved. Nothing will ever be resolved.
I know that when I go to bed tonight, I’ll probably dream about it.
No, dream isn’t the right word. I’ll have my usual nightmares.
Wake up in a cold sweat. I’ll head into the bathroom for a shower, scrub my skin raw, refuse to look at myself, because if I do, I’ll see the marks he left.
I’ll think about those papers, about how my confused body betrayed me and my bleeding heart longed for just a scrap of compassion after so many years of wandering in a dry desert of forcing myself to feel nothing.
I force myself to do something. Anything—just to distract my mind.
I take a few things out of the fridge, ingredients I don’t even see.
I assemble a sandwich—a disgusting combination of stale, tasteless, white bread, wilting lettuce, overripe tomato, deli meat that is on the verge of going bad, laced with enough mustard that I can’t taste anything else.
It would have been like sawdust in my mouth, even if it was the most gourmet meal. I’m not hungry. I doubt I’ll ever be truly hungry again. I can’t remember having an appetite since I was fifteen years old.
It’s hard to believe that was nine years ago.
That I’ve been trying for nearly a decade to find myself and put myself back together like some sick puzzle that is never going to be whole again, since the pieces are all bent and jammed and missing.
That I’ve lost all the pieces that used to be me anyway, so even if I could make the puzzle whole, it wouldn’t even begin to resemble me.
That night changed my life forever. It shaped and formed me.
It made me who I am. It defined me to the point where I’ve always wondered if destiny is just really another term for the past. Like all the things that came before, predict all the things that are to come, like a curse or trap you can’t stop yourself from falling into.
That word. That one word.
It’s bled into me over the years. Leached from my skin into my bloodstream.
Worked its way into the heart and soul of me until I believed it.
Until it’s become my existence. There was a point where it was all I was.
I’ve spent the past nine years trying to prove that it wasn’t true.
To everyone else, but I know that I’ll never be able to fully prove it to myself.
That word is stamped on me like a brand. It’s scarred into my skin.
A knock at my door jars me out of my toxic train of thought.
I shake my head, hard. I realize that I’d made myself a sandwich and that I’d taken one bite of it and gotten lost inside my head again. I barely even remember assembling anything, so it’s amazing that there’s food there at all.
I blink hard, willing away the scent of fear and loathing in the air. I wonder if only I can smell it, or if someone else entered the apartment, if they’d comment on it. Ask me what died in there. What the terrible, pungent odor coating the air belonged to.
There are only a few people who ever knock on my door.
No one can get into the building without buzzing first, so not any of my friends.
Never my sisters, as I’ve never asked them to visit me here and I’ve made it pretty clear that I don’t want them to.
Never any of my brothers or my father, because to them, I probably barely even exist any longer.
Never my mother, because she was always too involved in her own life to be truly involved in mine.
People in the building stop by now and then. Asking for change, borrowing things, making small talk. One neighbor is a little too eager to invite me over, but I always turn him down. Another, an older woman, asks for baking supplies often enough that I keep them stocked just in case.
I don’t mind helping. If anything, it makes the place feel less empty. Still, seeing her family come to visit sometimes leaves a bittersweet ache—the kind that reminds me no one’s coming for me.
The knock sounds again. A gentle rap of broad knuckles against the solid door.
A man’s knock.
Definitely Peter from upstairs.
I let out a raspy, exhausted sigh that sounds terrible, even to me, as I skirt across the kitchen, to the entrance.
My mind whirls, trying to come up with a way to politely decline whatever invitation I’m about to receive.
I’m still trying to formulate something firm, but sympathetic, when I slide the deadbolt out of place and twist the handle, tugging open the door.
“How?” I breathe, but even as I do, I know how stupid it sounds. I already know how. I already know how he got inside.
It’s Steel’s name on the lease for this place. Of course he’d have the code to the front door. Of course he would have given it to Gage. Of. Fucking. Course.
I try to slam the door on him, but he’s too fast. His big, strong, capable hand shoots out, holding the door open a foot.
He doesn’t wrench it from me or send it flinging backwards, even though he could, with all the brute strength coiled latently in his massive build and those sleek, striated muscles.
His fingers curl around the edge of the door and when I’m brave enough to sweep my eyes up to his face, I find his jaw clenched so tightly that it’s a miracle he has any teeth left.
“Steel,” he grinds out between his clenched teeth, even though I’ve already figured it out.
I want to blurt that he had no right. That this is my home, but it’s not like Steel actually forced me to open the door. He just gave Gage the code to get inside.
Gage slowly slides his hand away, leaving the door open. That foot of space yawns between us, an aching chasm that I know neither of us will ever be able to bridge.
Silence. The silence is so heavy that it’s deafening. It pounds through my eardrums and fills up my head like a flood, until I want to slap my hands over my ears, just so I don’t have to hear the sound of it anymore.
Gage clears his throat and when my eyes sweep to his, half in relief that the sound, as rough and sandpapery as it is, broke the silence, half because I can’t help myself, I’m surprised to find them soft.
Those liquid depths shimmer like I lake I want to dive into, a serene lake with a shimmering moon overhead and nothing and no one but me to witness it and break the serenity.
“I wanted to say…” his words are even rougher, scraping over a throat that sounds completely raw, like he’s just downed hot coals.
His eyes never leave mine, though, and I can’t tear mine away.
“I wanted to say that I’m sorry. For what I said.
I was angry. Just a fucking mess. You’ve rejected me over and over.
Humiliated me. This was just one more fucking time and I couldn’t stand it.
I’m sorry I said what I did. Called you a whore.
You’re not a whore. You’re not. I just… thought about another man having you, having you all these years, and I lost my fucking mind.
You might be my wife, but we know that’s never been our reality.
I went to Wraith and Leena’s to apologize and tell you I’ll sign the papers, but they said you left.
I had to come. I had to give us closure that we both should have given each other a long time ago.
I’ll sign the papers. Right now. Then you can be rid of me, and we can move on with our lives. ”
The fog of his words reaches my ears and seeps slowly through the rest of me.
It infiltrates my bloodstream, which reaches my slamming heart.
It knocks against my ribs so violently I’m astounded that they hold.
My pulse hammers at my neck, nearly choking me with its furious beats.
When I clench my hands, curling my fingers into the palms, I’m not surprised to find them soaked.
This is what I wanted.
Those stupid papers signed.
It’s what I dreamt about for the last year. Had nightmares about. Stressed and fretted and spent countless nights rolling and tossing and turning because I couldn’t sleep thinking about it.
Freedom.
Freedom to live my life. On my terms. My past is like a monster holding me back with arms reaching from the grave. I want to sever yet another one of those web-like strands.
So why can’t I force out that one simple word? Why can’t I just say yes and go to my tote and pull out the papers and shove them at him along with a pen, thank him after, and tell him to get the hell gone.
Why does my tongue form words all on its own? Words that I don’t want to thrust between us? Words that I don’t want to mean? “Do you want a coffee?”
He stares at me, his eyes changing, that placid surface becoming stormy and turbulent below. On the outside, he looks composed. Serene, even. In control. Beautiful in that rugged, ruined, seen too much life, sort of way.
The same way I am.
“Yeah,” he finally rasps with a hard nod.
He pushes the door the rest of the way open, and when I stumble back, he steps inside.