10 You Broke My Heart
10
You Broke My Heart
I was about to explode, with no idea when or how I would get over the fright. For a fraction of a second, I had seen myself dying at the hands of some psychopath. The police taking away my body. The headlines telling how I’d tried to defend myself with a wooden candlestick. Pathetic! My funeral full of strangers murmuring the usual clichés: How sad! She was so young! She had her whole life ahead of her! If only she’d had better aim!
I breathed in and out, trying to control the adrenaline that was shutting down my body. I pinched my arm, wondering if I was hallucinating. That was the only explanation.
Probably I had caught a cold from running so long in the rain. And now I had a fever, and I was actually still in bed, suffering an out-of-body experience, on the verge of death. That would explain why I was seeing him —that loose end I needed to tie up.
Good Lord, thanks to him, I was trapped between the world of the living and the dead! Or perhaps I’d died and gone to Hell, because if that happened, I had no doubt he would be there.
I blinked, and when I recovered, I stared daggers into him. Him. Trey Holt.
“What are you doing here?”
As if emerging from a trance, he responded, “The real question is what are you doing here?”
“This is my sister’s house, and she lent it to me for a few days. What about you?”
“None of your business.”
“Excuse me?”
He picked the candlestick up off the floor and weighed it in his hand.
“Were you going to hit me with this?”
“You should be grateful I missed,” I murmured.
“You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” he said, not even trying to hide his amusement. My blood was boiling, and it occurred to me that I still had time to hit him with something else, like maybe the table lamp there to my left. The temptation was enormous. I pointed to the door.
“Beat it.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You have to! I got here first, and there’s no way I’m going to stay here under the same roof as you.”
He pointed at the window. “Have you seen how hard it’s coming down out there?”
As if to strengthen his argument, the rain started pounding even harder, and lightning brightened the room. His clothing was soaked, and there was a puddle forming at his feet. His hair was stuck to his head, and he had to push it out of his face. A part of me softened, seeing him shivering there, but I remained firm. He didn’t deserve anything more than that.
“You think I care about that? You can sleep in your car. I’m assuming you brought it with you?”
Through his dark lashes, his eyes were icy as he clenched his jaw. Without a word, he turned toward the door. I smiled, thinking I’d gotten what I wanted, but instead, he picked up his suitcases and headed toward the stairs. I had to stand back to keep from being run down, and I turned to him, my jaw hitting the floor.
“This is a hijacking, Trey! This house is already occupied! By me!”
He replied sarcastically, “Occupied! You mean hijacked! I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I have a key. Given to me by Scott, for your information.” He lifted his hands. A tiny metal key ring hung from one of his fingers. “Scott, maybe you’ve heard of him, is the owner, and in case you forgot, he’s my friend, too.” He continued upstairs and, when he got there, shouted over his shoulder, “Don’t get all excited. You being here is the last thing I wanted, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, at least we agree on something. But since I got here first…”
With a snort, he shot back, “I’m not going anywhere, but feel free to kick and scream all you want. Just try to keep it at a reasonable volume. I’m tired and I need some sleep.”
At that, he slammed the door and vanished, muttering curses and probably even worse. I did the same on my way to my bedroom before getting into bed. Then, realizing I’d let him off easy, I got up, opened the door, and slammed it shut a second time.
That was more like it.
Still gripping the knob, I leaned my forehead against the wood and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to think. If I did, this craziness would make me lose my mind.
I got back in bed and massaged my temples. And I felt my forehead, just in case I did have a fever, but it was cool.
I couldn’t believe this was really happening.
I woke, hoping the night before had just been a dream. But the sounds coming from the ground floor dispelled my illusions like a needle popping a balloon.
I grunted and got out of bed with determination. I needed answers: how, why, for how long… The problem was, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as Trey, and that was going to cause problems for any conversation we might have.
I thought of myself as an adult, someone mature enough to deal with whoever. I knew how to adapt, how to find the best way to talk to everyone as an individual. But with him, I went back to being an eighteen-year-old. It was as if I was anchored in that time, as if I were a girl and not a woman and hadn’t learned a thing in the intervening years.
I mean, I’m not sure about that—I was as insecure as ever, that’s what this whole story’s about—but you all know what I mean.
It was still storming all over the island, and the wind and rain were striking the windows. The sound made me nervous. When I looked out, I saw a curtain of water concealing everything and strips of fog obscuring the trees and hills.
I’m not sure how long I stood there watching the water bead and drip down the glass until I finally admitted I was hiding and that shutting myself up in that room forever was ridiculous. I put on a strappy dress that hung to my ankles and threw one of my sister’s sweaters over my shoulders. The temperature had dropped, and the radiators weren’t working. I tried to turn on the lights. Nothing. What else could go wrong?
I cleaned up and brushed my hair, looking in the bathroom mirror. Then I stood there as the reality hit me: the last ten years of my life could be summed up with reference to one person. And that person was under the same roof with me now. Ten years of loving him and then hating him. And I still hated him. I had gotten so good at hating him that it was an art.
It took all the courage I had to go downstairs.
I found Trey in the kitchen, barefoot, in dark jeans and a ratty gray sweatshirt. His hair was sticking out every which way, as though he’d just crawled out of bed.
He looked up when I entered, and for a moment, we stared at each other. Then we made a point of ignoring each other. I walked over to the tap and poured myself a glass of water, drinking it in tiny sips. I watched from the corner of my eye as he fired up the woodstove. I was relieved that at least we could cook and even boil water for a bath if things got really bad.
He put on a pot of water and grabbed the instant coffee from the cabinet. My instant coffee. Without thinking, like a spoiled little girl, I said, “That coffee’s mine. You can’t use it without my permission.”
“That coffee isn’t yours, it’s mine.”
“I don’t think so. I bought it yesterday in the center of town.”
Bitterly, he responded, “What a coincidence…so did I!” And he turned around, dumping two spoonfuls of it into the water.
When I smelled coffee, I nearly closed my eyes from pure ecstasy.
“Seriously. I get that I’ll have to put up with you while you’re here, but hands off my stuff!”
I noticed the tension in his shoulders. He reached out, opened a second cabinet, took out a second jar of coffee, and set it rudely on the table. It was exactly as it had been when I bought it the morning before. His things were in the next cabinet over. He must have put them there when he got in at night. That explained the noises that woke me.
But I couldn’t say I was sorry, so I turned around and hurried out, sitting on the sofa, unsure of what to do. Outside, the storm was raging mercilessly, but it was nothing compared to the hurricane inside me. I was frustrated. I wanted to go home.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the plinking sound coming from the roof. Then I heard a thud. Slowly, I opened my eyes and saw Trey walking up the stairs. On the table, he’d left a steaming cup of coffee.
Now I felt guilty.
The hours passed with agonizing slowness. There was no thought of going out, and inside, there wasn’t much to do. I had fled Montreal so quickly that I had forgotten to bring anything to read—just Anne of Green Gables .
I tried to satisfy myself with the one book I did have, but I knew every word on every page and could even recite them in my mind, so I closed it and left it on the table.
Trey never showed himself again that morning. Only at midday did he come out to get some lunch. Whenever he appeared, I scurried off to the furthest corner of the house. We played this cat-and-mouse game all afternoon, not even bothering to try to be cordial. When night fell, our cold war had turned glacial.
After dinner, I lay down in bed and covered myself with the comforter. The temperature kept dropping. It was hard for me to believe it was late August. My head was starting to hurt, I felt something drilling into my brain, and finally I went down to the living room to get an aspirin from my purse.
Trey was kneeling in front of the fireplace. He’d lit a fire, and I could just feel the heat from where I stood. The flames glowed orange on his face, drawing out shadows and making him look slightly cruel. He turned his head to the side. There was something deep and firm in his stare. I held his eyes for a moment, but then I weakened and gave up.
I was nervous as I crossed the room to the chair where my purse stood. I felt around for the pill bottle and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the way back, I tried to pretend he wasn’t there, buttoning up my sweater, shivering. I was freezing.
“Harper, this is ridiculous.”
I stopped on the first step and turned around. Trey was looking at me with an expectant, almost anxious expression as he rubbed his chin and stood. His presence took up so much of the room that I felt I could hardly breathe.
“We’re acting like children. You obviously have a problem with me, and I don’t like the situation we’re in any more than you do. But this is how it is, okay? We’re going to be stuck here until the storm lifts, and it’s up to us not to turn the hours we have left into a living hell.”
I hated to admit it, but he was right. “So what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know. Let’s at least try to pretend we don’t want to kill each other every second of every day. You avoiding me like I have a contagious disease kind of gets to me, if I’m honest.”
“You’re doing the same.”
“Dammit, of course I’m…” He stopped himself. I guess he was trying to calm down. “You’re right. But look, it’s cold and we still don’t have power, so why don’t you stay here by the fire and we’ll try to act civilized?”
He sounded sincere, so I replied in a whisper, “Sure.”
Trey sat on the sofa, and I settled down as far as I could from him and watched the fire. As the minutes passed, my mood fluctuated between tension and anger. This was, without a doubt, the most uncomfortable situation I’d been in for as long as I could remember. The fire was crackling. Trey was shaking his leg nervously. Each second that passed was like an eternity. At last he sprang up and said, “I’m in the mood for a tea. You want one?”
Before I could respond, he’d vanished into the kitchen. A few minutes later, he was back and setting two cups down on the table. I shivered with disgust as he fell back on the sofa. It was one thing to put up with us sharing the same space. It was another to have tea with him like we were the best of friends, when I had to bite my tongue not to scream at him like a banshee. “I don’t want any tea.”
“Don’t drink it, then.”
My thoughts were a raging river, and the air was thick with tension. This was no good for either of us, so I decided to break the silence. “Are you staying here for long?”
He looked at me askance. I didn’t think he was going to respond, but then he shrugged.
“It all depends on how long it takes.”
“On how long what takes?”
“We’re planning an addition. Scott wants to renovate the house. But he doesn’t have the blueprints—apparently the only ones that exist are at the government offices on the island here—and I need them. We also need to check the state of the foundation and the retaining walls to see if the project is viable.”
“If that’s true…”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“All I’m saying is, if that was true, Hayley would have said something to me. The idea was that I would get some alone time here.”
At that moment, briefly, I saw interest in his face, a desire to talk that he immediately snuffed out.
“Your sister knows nothing about this,” he said. “It’s supposed to be a birthday surprise for her.”
I tried not to smile. My brother-in-law was the most adorable guy on the planet. I brought my feet up under me on the sofa and hugged my knees.
“I didn’t know you did home renovations,” I said.
“I don’t. It’s a personal favor.”
“Sure.”
Nothing we’d said those past few minutes had eased my nerves. Having him there made me relive everything I’d felt for him, good and bad, with intense clarity. It was as if all those feelings had been lying dormant, waiting for their moment to come out. He turned, and I saw the flames dancing in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Vacation.”
He looked skeptical. “You’ve picked a hell of a time for it.”
“The storm caught me off guard. No one told me the end of the world was this week.”
He nodded in agreement, as though to tell me he hadn’t seen this coming, either. He leaned back and sipped his tea. It must have gotten cold by now. I did the same, just to busy my hands with something, and because if I looked down into my cup, then I’d stop looking at him, and I’d stop trying to remember what that short beard felt like rubbing against my skin.
I hated being so weak.
He spit his tea into the fireplace.
“Ugh. That tastes like cat piss.”
“You seem pretty certain about what cat piss tastes like.” A giggle escaped me, and his look of repulsion changed to one of amusement. But then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to like him, and I froze. This got his attention, and he seemed to be sizing me up. I felt the room grow smaller and smaller the longer he did so.
“You’re nothing like the nice little girl I remember.”
“Maybe because I’m not a little girl,” I replied belligerently.
“Or nice, it seems.”
I stared at him, defiant, as though daring him to say something else.
And he did. “That’s enough! Just spit it out!” I looked away, not wanting him to see how this outburst had affected me. “Are you this stupid with everyone, or just with me? Because if it’s just with me, I think I have a right to know why.” He pointed at me. “And if you tell me I already know what the problem is, I swear I’ll…”
“You’ll what?” I got up, ready to return to my room, but he jumped between me and the stairway.
“Don’t even think about it. You’re not running away this time.”
“Move, Trey.”
“No.”
“Let me by.”
“Not until you tell me what’s up with you.”
I turned around. I couldn’t deal with this. My heart ached and he was acting like nothing had ever happened between us, trying to force out of me answers he already had.
That made me angry. Very angry.
I love a good dramatic scene in a book, but in real life, there’s nothing worse. And yet there we were, giving a marquee performance.
“What’s up with me? What’s up with me is that you…you…”
“I…”
“You’re…”
“Jesus, just spit it out.”
“You’re an idiot! I used to think you were a puzzle, but I’ve got you figured out, and I should have from the first time I met you. You’re selfish, heartless, a dickhead. And you’re an awful person for pretending nothing happened between us. You take advantage of people without thinking about how you might hurt them; you pretend your little games don’t have consequences. You don’t care about anyone or anything, just yourself. You use people. And you’re cruel.”
“Harper…”
I couldn’t stop myself. “You used me. You were mean to me. And it hurt, because I thought I mattered to you. There was a time when I really believed that. Then you threw me aside like I was a wadded-up napkin. You pushed me out of that room and out of your life, and you didn’t even blink. You hurt me, and I’ll never forgive you. Never. Understand?”
My words were ruthless and bitter, and they remained floating in the air around us after I’d said them. Trey was frustrated. I could tell there was a storm brewing inside him, and feelings I couldn’t really guess at. He seemed to have been looking back in time, and suddenly, he understood.
“Are you talking about that morning in the dorm room where I was living with Hoyt? About when I asked you to leave?” His voice was thin, surprised. And I didn’t like it one bit.
“You didn’t ask, you yelled at me to get out!”
“That’s why you’re acting this way with me?”
I didn’t reply. I just scowled. He brought his hands to his head and sat on the bottom step, looking humiliated and incredulous. “That’s why you’ve been treating me like a cockroach?”
“You are a cockroach.”
“My God, Harper, of course I told you to go. I had woken up with the worst hangover in human history, and the first thing I saw was you standing there naked in my room. I was out of it. All I could think about was Hoyt tearing my head off if he found you there. Try to understand that. You’re his little sister!”
I couldn’t stand to hear another word. I turned around, but he stopped me.
“You were just a girl! I shouldn’t even have been looking at you! I’m sorry if I was curt or if I said something rude. I wasn’t thinking; I just reacted. But you have to understand that I couldn’t let your brother find us like that. I can’t imagine what he would have thought.”
I tried to get past him, and again, he stopped me. I could see the tension in his shoulders and the doubts in his face. I laughed sarcastically, hoping it would keep me from crying and giving my feelings away. “So that’s your justification? There were a thousand different ways you could have let me know, and you picked the absolute worst one because that’s what was easiest for you. At no moment did you think of me.” My legs started shaking. “If we’d gotten caught, I–I… Look, I’d never have let Hoyt figure out what had happened between us. Never. But you didn’t care what I felt. What we did simply didn’t matter to you.”
Trey blinked, confused. “What we did?”
“It meant so much to me, and you throwing me out after what we shared was humiliating, absolutely humiliating. It destroyed me.”
“Wait a minute. Did you say something about Hoyt catching us? And what do you mean by what we did ? We didn’t do anything, Harper.”
I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from falling apart. My feelings and I needed some space. “I know. I know it was nothing to you. But to me, it was. It mattered. And you broke my heart.”
I saw a muscle twitching in his neck. “Harper, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Trey, are you fucking with me?”
“No!”
“Are you really implying that you don’t remember?”
“Remember what?”
“I can’t believe you’re such a bastard that you’d pretend. You’re an adult. An adult is someone who takes responsibility for their actions. It won’t kill you to admit you acted like a dog. I’m over it now anyway.”
At last, I managed to make my way into the stairwell.
“Harper, I swear on my life I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I remember is getting up that morning. I don’t know how else to tell you that.”
The despair in his voice was so intense that it made me pause. I turned around to look him in the face. He was about to cry. And I felt even more apprehensive than before.
“Please,” he said, “you’re starting to scare me. What happened between us?”
“You really are serious.”
“Yes, dammit, yes! The last thing I remember about the night before is my grandfather calling to tell me my mom had died of a heart attack. I felt like the worst son in the world. I was a coward, a jerk, someone incapable of facing my problems, so I got drunk to keep from thinking and I smoked Preston’s entire stash of weed. After that, everything’s a black hole.”
I knew he was telling the truth, and this realization threw the whole world off its axis. I had no idea his mother had died. I hadn’t even known she’d existed for him. As long as I’d known him, he’d lived with his dad, and he’d never mentioned any other family members.
“I’m not lying to you, Harper.”
I believed him. So I told him the truth. “We slept together that night, Trey.”
“Come on, that’s not funny.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“No. That can’t be true.”
“It is. We slept together. That’s why I was in your room with no clothes on.” I stopped trying to hold back the tears. “It was my first time.”
A nightmare gathered around me as Trey took in my response. I had no idea what he was thinking. I had never seen anyone’s expression change so quickly, from bitterness to sorrow to shame…
So I waited. I waited for him to face up to the challenge my words presented. I watched him try to put the pieces together, struggling to remember but unable to. Endless emotions tussled on his face as he tried to find reasons not to believe me.
But he couldn’t. He did believe me. I could tell. And now he was lost. My words had been a spark. And now there was a fire burning inside him.
He couldn’t even look at me as he walked out the front door. Before I could react, he disappeared into the darkness, into the storm.