23. Teeny
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Teeny
NOW
James said I could leave Sadie with him. She could stay for dinner, watch a movie, keep Sophia entertained while he and Kendall set about their bedtime routine. He even offered to let her stay the night if I needed to. Just so I could get a moment alone with Everett.
I make it to the hotel at an easy pace. I’m not rushing, I’m not buzzing with anxiety in anticipation to see him. For the first time in a long time, my body just feels…ready. To walk away from my past. To close a chapter so I can finally move on.
As soon as I reach Everett’s room, searching the marked numbers based on his instructions, I knock on the door. Even my knuckles rap with a calm hollow thump.
“Hey,” Everett calls as soon as he sees me across the threshold.
“Hi.”
He opens the door wider to let me in, and I walk past him, getting a hefty whiff of him. He smells clean, like a lavender scent, mixed with something spicy. Like aftershave. I find that his room isn’t just a simple accommodation with a single king-size bed and the usual amenities, but more of a penthouse suite with a formal living room.
“You have all this space to yourself?”
He smirks. “Gets a little lonely sometimes.” He’s the embodiment of a lazy Sunday afternoon with his low hanging sweatpants and undershirt. There’s a slight dampness to his hair, evidence that he either just got out of the shower or he’d done some strenuous activity. Though with his appealing eau de Everett fragrance wafting around him, it’s likely the former.
I perch myself on the sofa, the soles of my white canvas shoes firmly set on the carpeted floor, and Everett sits across from me.
“Is everything okay?”
I nod, picking at one of the purposely slashed tears on my faded jeans. “I know I sounded really vague over the phone, but I needed to talk to you in person. I just felt like you deserved an…explanation? Or at the very least, more than just a cold shoulder after last week.”
He nods too. “Okay.”
“I think you’ve been giving me some space to think things over, and I really appreciate that,” I continue. “It’s given me time to think about what I want to say to you.”
He stays quiet, though if he spoke, I feel the words, “Tell me everything,” would match the forbearing way he looks at me.
“What happened between us was…a little impulsive, I think.”
His brow lifts and his forehead wrinkles. “Impulsive?”
“I feel like maybe we should’ve talked about things before we let it get that far.”
“Yeah, I agree, but I don’t regret it.”
A small smile slips, and I don’t know what it means. If I’m agreeing with him or if it’s something more reassuring and appreciative. “So, I guess, I’m here to talk.”
“Okay,” he says again. His patience doesn’t waver. And if it does, he’s doing a damn good job of hiding it. He’s sitting across from me, his posture completely open with his knees angled in my direction and his shoulders leaned forward to give me his full attention.
“I loved you,” I say, my words spoken fondly. “I loved you with my entire heart. And when I was sixteen, I really thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with you. When you were planning for college and everything, I really wasn’t scared because I knew we would figure things out, no matter how far away you’d be.
“I didn’t expect things to turn out the way they did, and it happened really fast. Looking back, I think it was a lot to take on at such a young age.”
We sit there, letting my words hang around us. They aren’t big or scary, all the things we’ve been holding back for so many years. Instead, they’re just there, waiting for us to sift through.
“I thought you’d come back,” I add. “At some point, I thought you’d call me or something.”
“I wanted to,” he says, his voice sounding loud after his resigned stretch of silence. “Things went to shit with my parents, and after it settled, I wanted to come to you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He shakes his head in a motion of uncertainty. “I don’t know,” he says, his gaze on his hands bracing his knees. “I know I was scared, but I couldn’t get over it. I just felt like I’d let you down so badly, and I didn’t know how to make things right. That whole pregnancy scare…I handled it so horribly. And when you told me to leave…you said you thought things would be better if we broke up, and I didn’t know how to argue that after everything I did.”
“I know,” I say, the first of my tears starting to gather. “And a part of me thought you’d fight for me. I know what I told you, but I thought you would try to convince me to…change my mind.”
“Would you have?”
Now it’s my turn to be uncertain. “I don’t know.”
“Maybe I should’ve come back sooner,” he says, his voice sounding more urgent now. “Maybe I should’ve at least called or something, but…” He stops talking, looking at me with so much sadness. “I didn’t know how.”
His words hit me like a warm balm. Something to soothe and ease the pain. I wasn’t going through it alone. I wasn’t the only one suffering, spending night after night crying in my bed. He was going through the same heartbreak I was. And I know it’s now or never.
“I was.”
His face turns soft with concern and confusion. “Was what?”
I swallow the ball lodged in my throat. “I was pregnant.”
I see it the moment my words hit Everett like a wrecking ball. I see it in the way his face falls slack and his eyes grow blank. Even his breaths that were coming in and out of him at a steady pace start to become choppy and ragged.
“What?” he whispers.
“Ye-yeah,” I start to explain. “I don’t know if the first test was faulty or maybe my body wasn’t ready to test positive yet. At least that’s what the doctor said. And um…James was home for a long weekend, and I started getting really sick. My parents were out of town. They went to Florida to see my Aunt Annabelle. That really eccentric one with the red hair and tattoos. She had all those parakeets in her living room. She was throwing a party for an anniversary or a birthd—anyway,” I say, interrupting my rambling. “That’s not important.
“James got really worried when I kept saying I felt dizzy and weak. And he said I looked so pale. He took me to the emergency room and um, yeah. He was there when they told me.”
His body slumps to the floor, on his knees like his weight gave out from underneath him. “Wh-what,” Everett stutters. “Where…”
“I didn’t—I took care of it.” I say the words boldly, my heart pounding in my chest. “James—he took me in, made sure everything went okay. Luckily, I didn’t need my parents to consent for it. I guess that was a plus.
“I tried to wait until I told you first. I went to your house, but you weren’t there. I wanted to call you, but I thought it wasn’t the kind of thing you say over the phone, so I waited and waited. After a few weeks, I saw a For Sale sign go up in your front yard.
“You never came back, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have a baby all on my own.” I feel…ashamed and chastened and even guilty. The same way I felt when I told Leo after he’d pressed on why James told him that my ex-boyfriend was a “sack of shit.” But Everett doesn’t look at me the way Leo did, eyes sifting through the dozens of responses to make sure he doesn’t sound judgmental or pious. Everett looks at me as if his entire world is falling apart.
“No, no,” he starts to mutter. “No. That can’t—” His chest starts to heave, his back and shoulders moving up and down to help him move the air in and out of his lungs. His fingers grip his temples, and he lowers his head toward his own lap. His hands shake violently as he curls into himself like he’s taking shelter. Those pants begin to sound desperate, and it starts to scare me.
“Everett,” I say, landing on the floor on my knees right in front of him. “Everett, what’s wrong?” I put my hands on his arms, and the trembling skates along his skin, making his entire body rattle.
His breathing doesn’t calm, and his eyes look frantic as he searches the ground below him. I shake his shoulders, trying to get his attention, but his entire body is locked. It’s like he’s in his own little bubble of panic, and I can’t seem to get him out.
“Everett,” I say his name again firmly. “Look at me.”
He doesn’t look at me. Almost as if he’s still bouncing around in that bubble, and I need to catch him so I can finally bring him back down. But I don’t know how. I used to. At one point in my life, I knew how to ground him. How to make him realize that he just needed to put one foot in front of the other and walk through life while holding my hand, but I haven’t been that person in a really long time. I don’t know how to be that person again. And the realization that I’m no longer that person, and that quite possibly he doesn’t have anyone to ground him like I used to, makes the same panic in Everett’s eyes spread through my own body.
“Everett!” I shout. I grip his face and urge him to look at me, desperately calling his name and forcing his eyes on me. “Please! It’s me. I’m here. Please, just look at me!”
I see a small nod bring him back to me. His eyes finally focus on mine, and something in him clicks. I’m here. I’m here to bring him back down. To ground him to something solid instead of feeling like he’s drifting away.
“Baby,” he cries softly. “No, no, no…”
“I’m here,” I whisper, making sure to keep my eyes on his. I pull him close to me, cradling his head against my shoulder and letting his breathing even out. His hands start to move, first hesitantly, and then with more assurance. But it’s still cautious in the way he makes sure I’m okay with it before getting closer. He starts at my hips, his fingertips moving over me like he’s making sure I’m here, and then they wrap around my back. He encircles his arms around me like he’s holding onto me for dear life. And then it becomes desperate. He grasps for me, his fingers clawing at my shirt like he’s trying to catch me, but I keep slipping through his fingers. And when his hands finally find their place, like an anchor being dragged across the bottom of the ocean only for it to finally find purchase on a rock or some other solid part of the earth, he calms. I feel his body sag against mine, and his breaths start to even out.
“It’s okay,” I whisper against his temple.
“Teeny…”
“I’m okay now.” I sound sad and scared and completely unsure, but it doesn’t matter how I feel. I need Everett to know that I’m okay. He needs to know that I’m okay. I couldn’t live with him living like this. Worried about me when he should be searching for his own footing so he could finally find a place to land.
He pulls away and looks at me. “I’m so sorry.”
My throat tightens at the sound of his voice. “It’s okay, Everett,” I tell him as I start to cry. “I’m okay now.”
“I’m so sorry.” He grips my face in his hands. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
I force a smile, though it’s wobbly and faint. “It’s okay,” I repeat through a shaky voice. “It’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. “I should’ve been there.”
“It’s okay.”
“You went through that all alone.” He places a hand over my heart, and I don’t know why, out of all the reactions and emotions he’s working through, this is what breaks me. It’s as if he’s surveying that damage. After all these years, he’s looking at the wreckage only to find that it’s no longer reparable.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I repeat it, over and over again. And I don’t even know if I believe it. If, after all these years, I’m still mourning over something that could’ve been. But I have to be. I have to be okay with it. I have Sadie, and my life, and so much more that I wouldn’t change a single thing for, and for all of that, I have to be okay.
He starts to kiss my face. On my cheek as the tears pour, on my chin as if he’s catching them before they fall into the space between us, on my forehead, soothing away whatever guilt he’s held onto all these years.
“It’s okay,” I say one more time.
“I should’ve been there.”
* * *
I don’t know how long we’ve been lying here on the couch with our bodies pressed against each other, but I can tell the sun is slowly setting outside. I see the orange glow mix with the purple haze of dusk streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Everett’s fingertips graze my arm, moving in slow, drowsy strokes while my arm rests lazily across his stomach. Our legs are loosely tangled around each other, and this feels like the most carefree I’ve been in a long time.
We’ve been talking on a random tangent, saying things on our minds as they pop up without any direction or path. I ask him about his mom’s new husband. He asks me to tell him about Sadie’s birth, like how long I was in labor and who she looked like when she came out. He chuckles when I tell him she looked like Hasbro came out with a russet potato model of a Cabbage Patch Doll. And I giggle when he tells me about his mom’s sixtieth birthday when his stepdad surprised her with a new puppy who chewed through her favorite pair of cowboy boots.
“Daniel.”
I nuzzle my nose against his chest. “Hmm?”
“If it was a boy, I wanted to name him Daniel.”
I look up at him, turning my face to see his gaze is fixed on the recessed light fixtures on the ceiling. He finally looks at me, those deep brown eyes melancholy and mournful.
“When you told me you weren’t pregnant after all, I was a little disappointed,” he continues. “I mean, a part of me was relieved because we were kids ourselves, but I started planning this future for us. Moving into a small one-bedroom apartment just outside of San Diego, somewhere where your parents and my mom wouldn’t meddle and let us have our own lives. And I got excited to see you with a big ol’ pregnant belly.”
“But you…”
“I know I was upset,” he says, explaining himself. “My dad…he cheated on my mom. Again. And he got this woman pregnant. I kept thinking how I’m no better than my dad. That I couldn’t be responsible enough to avoid an unwanted pregnancy, and how badly I’d let my mom down. But after I got over that initial shock that my own kid and my dad’s baby were going to be the same age, I started to realize how much I loved you. How this meant we could watch each other become parents, and that there’d be this little baby that’s half you and half me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? About your dad?”
He shakes his head. “I was so embarrassed. He’d obviously not learned his lesson. Turned out that the woman was just trying to blackmail him, and there was no baby at all. And my mom…she was so desperate to make things work. She kept saying it was all her fault, that she threw him into the arms of his mistress. She tried so hard to make it work. That’s why we went back home. She…she thought by going back, he’d realize what he was missing.”
“I’m sorry,” I say softly, my cheek pressed against him. “I’m sorry you went through that alone. And your mom…I know it couldn’t have been easy on her either.”
“I guess we both needed each other.” He pauses before adding, “I had my first panic attack in college. I was walking to class. I was a little late and rushing. At first, I thought I was just winded from walking too fast or something, but then I felt like…I wasn’t ever going to catch my breath. It felt like I was dying, and I was vividly aware of it.
“I saw a doctor. I thought I was getting asthma or something, and they told me I should talk to someone. Like a therapist.”
“When’s the last time it happened?”
“About six years ago,” he answers calmly. “I’ve been getting pretty good with working through it before it gets out of hand.” After another short pause, he adds, “Josh doesn’t know, does he?”
“How did you know?”
“He wouldn’t have asked me to come if he knew,” he says. “He wouldn’t have forgiven me.”
“James did.”
“Yeah,” he says morosely. “But it’s different. Josh was one of my best friends.”
“Do you regret coming? Reopening our past like this?”
“Teeny.” His hand is cupping my face, forcing me to look at him. “I came back for you. Whatever past you want to bring up, I came to face it.”
“But you knew I was married…”
“Yeah, I knew.”
“And you still came?”
“I had to see you,” he says hoarsely.
I don’t know how to feel or what to think. He did exactly what I wanted, just twenty years too late. After I’ve moved on. After I’ve lived an entire lifetime. Built a home with someone else when I desperately wanted it to be him at one point.
He’s here for me, right when my life hit an unexpected crossroad, leaving me confused and uncertain. But what if I decided to let Everett in? What if him coming back right now was for a reason? Those questions and all the wrong in my life swirl like a big scary tornado in my head, and I feel like the air around me is being siphoned out of the room. Facing this, my past, my marriage, my future, feels suddenly daunting, and I just want to step away from it. Out of sight, out of mind feels like the perfect solution right about now.
I start to push away from him and sit up, and he follows. “I should go. I left Sadie with James.”
“Yeah.” He sounds reluctant. Like he wants to convince me to stay but isn’t sure if it’s allowed.
I stand and walk to the door with Everett close behind me. When I reach the door, I turn to face him. “Thank you for…letting me tell you, I guess.”
“Teeny, you don’t have to thank me.”
I nod. “I know things are really complicated. For me, for us. And it’s all really confusing to me.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
“Teeny.” I look at him, feeling so lost and scared. “I’m here,” he says, his eyes soft and gentle. “I know it took me a really long time to come back, but I’m not going anywhere.”
My fingers find his hand, tracing over the wrinkles lining his knuckles and the bumpy ridges of his veins. He lets me, giving me a moment to study the hands that used to touch me without permission. With his hand in mine, I look up at him, wishing I could find more than just the solemn look on his face. Maybe answers.
I expect him to do something. Anything that’ll help those confusing fitful thoughts to become quiet and hushed, but he doesn’t. Instead, he gently dips his head to place a small, gentle kiss at the top of my head before opening the door for me, and I’m left feeling bereft.
“I’ll see you at the wedding,” I say softly as I turn away to leave.
“See you at the wedding.”