29. ashton
twenty-nine
ashton
. . .
In His Arms - Miranda Lambert
When I wake, there’s a dull, gray light pouring through the gap where my bedroom blinds aren’t quite closed.
A quick glance at my phone—plugged in on my nightstand, next to a strip of Advil and a half-full glass of water—says it’s almost eight.
With a groan, I swing my legs out from under the blankets and let my feet sink into the plush sheepskin rug at my bedside.
My house smells like coffee, and quiet laughter pulls me out of bed.
I’m still fully clothed, minus my boots and socks.
I brush my teeth quickly and change into a pair of cut-off sweats and a sports bra, before wrapping a chunky knit cardigan around my body and padding down the hall.
My brother and Ruth are sat in my kitchen, two steaming cups of coffee between them.
Ruth has her back to me, but Everett spots me as I walk in.
“You’re up,” Everett says. Ruth turns to face me.
“I’m an apparition,” I mutter. I make a beeline for the still-steaming jug of coffee on the counter. “M’not really here.”
“Are you feeling any better?” Ruth asks. I pull my favorite mug from the cupboard and fill it with coffee. “I can make some breakfast, if you like.”
“A little,” I answer. I still feel a little like I’ve been run over by a herd of bulls, but a million times better than the way I felt at the cavern last night when I was on the phone with Reston.
I need to text him and thank him. “I don’t think I have any food.
My flight leaves tonight. I emptied out my fridge yesterday. ”
“Not to worry,” Ruth says. She pushes up from her seat and crosses the kitchen to the fridge, pulling the door open.
The only thing I left in there was the last of my favorite hazelnut creamer, but a small box of eggs and a half-empty bag of shredded cheese now sit front and center on an otherwise-empty shelf.
That’s when I notice a string grocery bag on the counter.
I reach for the creamer in the fridge door and empty the bottle’s remaining contents into my cup, filling it to the brim and watching as my coffee changes color from black to milky brown.
“I brought breakfast with us. Everett says you’re an eggs for breakfast girl? ”
I smile weakly. “Harriet usually makes them cheesy. With sriracha.”
Everett smirks. He’s always preferred tabasco in his eggs, but Ruth pulls both kinds of hot sauce from the grocery bag, along with a round loaf of bread. It smells fresh and familiar, a little like—
“Is that Ellison’s sunflower sourdough?”
“Called in a favor,” Everett answers. He joins us at the fridge. “Can’t send you back to New York hungry. And I know you’re always hungry after a migraine. Sit and relax, let Ruth make you some breakfast.”
I look at my sister-in-law. She smiles encouragingly, already reaching for my favorite pastel yellow mixing bowl on the counter.
“‘Kay,” I concede. “I gotta finish packing, too.”
“Go,” Everett says. He swats lightly at me. “We’ll shout when it’s ready.”
I return to my bedroom with my coffee in my hand.
I hadn’t noticed it earlier, but my suitcase is in the corner, zipped up and handle extended.
I pull it to me, hoisting it onto the bed and opening it.
I’m exactly where I left off with my packing yesterday: a case half-packed with clothes and little else; everything I love most too big and too human or equine to squeeze into a bag to come to New York with me.
The only things I’ll take are material. I rummage through drawers and toss a few things in, barely caring what they are or what season they’re best suited to.
I collect three fresh tubes of lip balm—the ones Brooks bought—from my bathroom cabinet, along with my razor and toothbrush and a handful of other necessities.
By the time Everett calls down the hall to me, I’ve tossed my sneakers and a brand-new set of gym shorts and sports bra—that I know I’ll never use at a gym—into the case, and I’m ready to zip it closed.
“You sure you’re okay, Ashey?” Everett asks over breakfast. He wasn’t kidding all those times he told me Ruth is a phenomenal cook.
These eggs might be better than Harriet’s, and that’s saying something.
She beams as I compliment her, and won’t accept any help from anyone to wash the dishes, even though it’s my kitchen and she did all the cooking.
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “Just… hard to leave this place, you know?” I know Everett understands.
I also know he thinks I’m speaking generally about the ranch and about our family—the Harts and Fishers included—and in some ways, I am.
Once you live here, on this ranch and in this town, it’s a hard place to say goodbye to.
It might be a small dot on a map, a town people drive through without pausing to look at what’s outside the window, but it’s my map dot.
It’s where I was born, where I grew up. It’s where my home is.
And it’s where my heart is.
Ruth and Everett stay a little while longer, and once I’ve showered and dressed in my travel clothes, I toss everything else I’ll need into my backpack and Everett hoists my bags into the back of his truck.
We spend an hour with Mom and Dad before hitting the road for the airport, and I cry silently as the Airbus takes off into the Texas sunset.
I wake up with a pounding head again. It’s not quite a migraine, but it has the potential to become one.
The churning stomach, the way my head feels like it’s being stretched out and tightly compressed at the same time.
The way my vision tilts if I inhale too deeply; the way it grays at the edges and my gag reflex twitches if I exhale too hard.
I only vaguely remember coming back to my loft last night.
I landed into LaGuardia airport as the heavens opened, and thanks to some kind of public transit meltdown, it took three buses and two different subway trains to get home.
By the time I got here, I downed a glass of water, dumped my backpack on the sofa, and collapsed into bed, barely taking the time to change into pajamas and brush my teeth first.
I still remember my first migraine, and I suspect I always will.
Much like my first allergic reaction to shellfish, it was an unfortunate but defining moment in my life.
At thirteen years old, I’d known a headache once or twice.
Been knocked on the head standing up too fast under open stable doors, and had plenty of bumps and bruises trying to match pace with my brother and his friends.
But that first migraine sidelined me for three days, and I’d never known pain like it.
The only other time I’ve ever seen my parents afraid was when I had my first anaphylactic reaction in a restaurant in Austin, when I took one bite of Dad’s shrimp fettuccine and immediately couldn’t breathe.
After the migraine, Mom took me to the pediatrician, who simply said hormones, but three years later—after they started showing up right on time, every month, and on plenty of days in between, too—a second doctor finally called it episodic migraine disorder, with a clear correlation between my menstrual cycle and migraine episodes.
And my body seems hell-bent on making me suffer, because the first medicine I tried contained shellfish derivatives that my doctor didn’t notice, and—naturally—I had an immediate allergic reaction. Nothing else I’ve tried has ever really been able to hold them off.
People talk all the time about the effects of chronic conditions. How migraines or other chronic pain can be debilitating, and how it can affect day-to-day life. How it can dictate your diet and how active you are—or aren’t. How it can stop you working.
But no one ever really talks about the grief or the guilt.
I never imagined this would be my life—stuck in bed for several days out of every month, sick to my stomach and completely intolerant of light and sound.
Even after years of this, I still hung on to the hope that I might grow out of it someday and live a “normal” life, whatever that means.
A life where I don’t have to rely so much on others to pick up my slack.
Where I’m not a burden, creating more work for everyone around me.
I mourn the life I thought I’d get to live—the one where I don’t have to be careful about whether there’s red wine in the steak sauce, or whether there are flashing lights.
How much water I drink or how regularly I eat.
And I grieve for the days where none of those things mattered.
I miss the girl I used to be before my body rebelled, and I miss the girl I always hoped I’d be, the one who doesn’t have to suffer. I even miss the girl I was two weeks ago, when in spite of the secrets threatening to blow my life to pieces, I felt like I was on top of the fucking world.
What goes up must come down, I guess.
I went home to heal my heart. I never expected to repair the break and then shatter it all over again.
Two months ago, I flew home to Texas and without even trying—without any warning at all from my beat-up, just-barely-healing heart—fell into the arms of the one man who knows me better than anyone else.
Perhaps even better than I know myself. Brooks has always seen me, always met me right where I am.
He’s always seen me, always known my heart, and at this point, I think I can safely say my heart has always been his.
The universe sent me home at the perfect time.
I needed to realize the depth of my feelings for Brooks; I needed to see him, and to see us, as we are now.
Two adults who’ve led lives intertwined, whose hearts have always been in one another’s hands.
Seeing him again showed me that the teenage crush all those years ago was the start of something more.
That I’ve always been in love with my best friend, with my brother’s best friend, with one of the steadiest and most constant men I’ve known my whole life.
We had two perfect months of falling all the way in, of building something beautiful. And then between us, we broke it. We tossed it up in the air and like glass, it shattered. Because for every reason I want to be with him, there are ten more why I shouldn’t. Why I can’t. We’re not worth the risk.
He told me as much.
And so, I came back to this cramped apartment on the edge of the city, with no fight left in me. Maybe I wasn’t as okay as I thought. I want to believe we had something worth fixing, but I don’t know if Brooks feels the same.
The sloped skylight of my studio apartment is covered in raindrops—the kind that race each other down to the frame, merging and mingling in a way that has me irrationally jealous of the miserable, autumnal weather.
It’s gray and gloomy: a duller kind than most Sundays, and the rain splashes onto the angled window with the kind of apathy I can’t even bring myself to feel.
Then it rolls away, spent, and lies in the gutter.
I shouldn’t let myself think of him. I should do anything to protect my mind and my heart, but I can’t help it—he’s living in my brain and paying no rent, and I can’t help but wonder where he is.
What he’s doing, if he’s thinking about me like I’m thinking about him.
If he’s wishing we were together right now, instead of being seventeen hundred miles away.
The chasm in my heart feels about seventeen hundred miles wide right now, too.