Chapter 12
TWELVE
COLTON
SEPTEMBER | COLUMBUS, OHIO
“Turn the fuck around!” I shouted at the screen.
“Voice down!” Sorrento, my teammate and mentor, said. “You wake ‘em, you take ‘em.”
“Sorry!” I griped. “But your kids love me anyway.”
I was playing Call of Duty at Sorrento’s place, giving myself something to do on our night off.
It was pouring buckets outside, with thunderstorms of varying strength rolling through.
Gloomy, gross, and frankly, depressing. I didn’t have space for anything else depressing in my life.
I called Sorrento because I needed the brain chemical boost of being with other people.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I leaned to get it. “Hang on, let’s pause.”
My breath caught when I saw the name on my screen, a picture of long chestnut hair and blue eyes.
Violet.
“Hello?” I answered.
All I heard on the other end was sobbing, cut with gasps for air.
“Violet?”
“Hey.” Her voice was warbled through an attempt at sounding sunny. “Where are you?”
“I’m . . .” Stunned? Why was she asking? “In Columbus?”
“Right, but where?” She sniffled and coughed.
“Friend’s house. Upper Arlington. What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“I just left my therapist. Or, I haven’t left. I’m in the parking lot.”
My stomach dropped and my muscles tensed. “You’re in Columbus?”
Her voice was sheepish. “Um, yeah.”
“Oh.” My mind reeled. For how long? How long had she been in the same town and not talked to me? She implied to my mom that she was coming back, but this phone call was one hell of a comeback.
“I’m sorry, Colt,” she wailed.
I stood from the couch and paced behind it, waving Sorrento off as he shot me a worried look. “Baby, what are you sorry for? What’s going on? Are you hurt?”
“I need to talk to you about something.” Her sobs started up again, her wheezy gasps throwing me off. The last time she cried like this in front of me was when she left the first time.
Jesus, did she have a secret baby Stelle had somehow forgotten to tell me about? We used condoms when we met up a few years back. Why would she be here to talk to me?
“Should we talk now?”
“Never mind,” she rushed out. “You’re with friends.”
“No, I’ll come to you. Text me the address of where you are. I’ll leave right now and be there as soon as I can.”
Violet’s small sedan was one of a few left in the office building’s parking lot.
I parked two spots away from her and ran through the rain to the driver’s side door.
The windows were tinted dark, but I could make out her shape leaning her head on the steering wheel.
I knocked gently on the window, rain dripping from the brim of my baseball cap.
“Violet. Open up, baby.”
The door latch popped and I got a good look at her: eyes swollen, cheeks splotchy, a massive pile of tissues in the passenger seat. She lifted her gaze to meet mine and her lower lip trembled again. She fought back tears with a series of quivering sniffles.
My lips fell open. “Who did this to you?”
Her face crumpled as she fell apart again. I couldn’t stand to see her like this. Why she hadn’t called me sooner didn’t matter. My Violet was in pain and she called me for help.
My knees dropped to the wet concrete, and I leaned in to wrap my arms around her.
Violet fell into my embrace, her body shaking, her cries thick and watery.
It was her. It felt like some surreal fever dream.
Three years? It had been three years. Rain drenched the back of my shirt while her tears soaked the shoulder of it.
I held her tight. Stroked her back. Kissed the side of her neck.
“It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be okay.”
That made her cry harder. She had just been in therapy. What kind of therapist would let her leave this upset? Her fingers dug into my skin, a desperate grip.
“It’s okay. Just breathe, baby.”
Vi hiccuped and did those gasps you do when you’ve cried too much. Gasps that I knew from dark nights when I missed the very woman in my arms.
“You c-c-c-came,” she stuttered out.
I sat back from her, my legs and feet soaked from just wearing sports slide sandals in the rain. “You called,” I said, using my thumbs to clear her cheeks, something of a pointless task. “I’ll always answer for you.”
She pulled me to her again and ratcheted her arms tight around my neck. I drank it all in: the way my arms fit around her body, her warm breath on my neck, her shivers.
I couldn’t have her shivering in the rain.
“Hey, do you want to move to my car? Your seat’s all wet now.”
“Okay.” She grabbed her purse and box of tissues. I held out my hand for her purse, then her hand. I opened my passenger door and let her sit. Once she was all tucked in, she looked at me with a thumbs up and an attempt at a smile. I jogged around to the driver’s side and got in.
The summer night remained hot and humid, but with both of us being so wet, I blasted the heat and turned on her seat warmer. Once I got all the controls settled, I turned to face her. She combed her fingers through the front of her dripping wet hair. “I’m going to ruin your seat.”
“I’m not worried about that.” I extended my hand, palm up, fingers wiggling. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”
With a reluctant glance, she laid her palm across mine, fingers loosely curling around the back of my hand. “I figured out the thing that messed me up all those years. With you. The thing that made me run.”
I squeezed her hand and my throat tightened, not sure what to say. For years I’d wanted an answer and had made peace with the fact that I might never get it. “Okay.”
She nibbled the inside of her lip. “I was assaulted in college. Before I met you. The first week of school, actually.”
“Oh my god.” I sandwiched her hand between mine, scouring her face to see just how bad it was. It shocked me how quickly my stomach turned. This wasn’t about me, but it produced a visceral reaction in me. “I’m so sorry, Vi.”
She nodded, starting to cry again. “I’m sorry too.”
“Why would you be sorry?” I asked. “Someone hurt you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then I hurt you. I pushed you away because I was too scared to deal with it.” She sucked in a choppy breath and blew it out through her lips, then swallowed.
“I couldn’t just push through it, and I couldn’t face it either.
I could have stayed with you and tried to work through it, but I chose not to. I ruined . . . everything for us.”
I shook my head and lifted our joined hands to kiss the back of hers. “You did the best you could. I could never be mad at you for that.”
I wanted to say it, to make her feel better about ruining everything—us. But it had a cost. Long nights where I wondered if I was insane. A stint in the tattoo chair. A lot of polite declining offers from friends to set me up with someone. A lot of turning down perfectly nice women.
But most of all, the biggest cost was what we didn’t have: a life together. A family.
So even if she didn’t ruin everything, the situation did.
Since I couldn’t tell her it didn’t hurt, I focused on what I could give her. “I was serious when I said I’d always be here for you. That hasn’t changed.”
“Thank you.” She pressed a soggy tissue to her lashes with her free hand.
“God, I’m sick of crying.” She steadied her palm in the air and squeezed her eyes shut.
“All this time, my brain had blurred it out, like it was protecting itself from the memory or something. I knew something bad had happened, but I couldn’t remember what.
That whole period of my life, my memory was just .
. . gone. I knew certain things would trigger me.
Certain things about sex. Seeing him. And I just figured out why today. ”
My elbow leaned on the console and I stroked her forearm with the hand not holding hers. “Tell me as much or as little as you want. You don’t owe me anything, but I’m here if you need someone to hear it.”
Her voice sobered. “I need you to hear it. Because it involves you.”