Chapter 39 Brawls and Ballet #2
“I know that, but there are more types of abuse than just physical. There’s emotional and mental and on both accounts… you left me black and blue.”
Gabe’s touch held my wrist, showing me the support I needed from him while Jonah shook his head with an incredulous shine to his eyes that said nothing of what I’d just said penetrated his thick ego.
“You’re making shit up so you can play the victim. You always want to be the goddamn victim so that people feel sorry for you.”
“Jonah, shut the fuck up and leave,” Gabe snapped.
“I didn’t want to be a victim, but you made me into one and I didn’t realize it until it was too late. You fucked me up, Jonah.”
“Oh really? And just how did I fuck you up?”
“You know what you did to me. I am how I am now because of you. You turned me into a ‘yes girl’ instead of allowing me to keep my own opinion or dreams because I was so afraid you’d leave me if I ever said no to you.
You made it impossible to say no to you.
I’m terrified of practically anything that pushes me out of my comfort zone and especially love.
Not only that, but I genuinely don’t think I’m worth it either.
I don’t think I have what it takes to be loved and that is how you fucked me up, Jonah. ”
And there it all was, every insecurity and ugly truth I had laid out in front of the man that established them all.
All of my broken pieces out in the open, scattering through the wind like leaves instead of bearing down on my chest. I needed them gone, too.
There were so many new, heavier emotional bags to sit on my chest now that I just didn’t have room for Jonah’s baggage anymore.
Jonah’s mouth bunched together as he stared at me, something curious and unpredictable breathing in his eyes.
He was silent for long enough that I thought something I said might have gotten through.
Maybe he realized his mistakes. Maybe he never meant to hurt me in the ways he did.
Maybe I had just given him the revelation he didn’t know he needed to become a better man.
And then he said this—
“Did you ever stop to think you might feel this way because it’s true? That somewhere deep down you know you’re not worth anything as spectacular as love?”
His cruel words hit like a punch straight to my stomach, and I gasped just the same.
“That’s it. I’m gonna hit him.” Gabe started for Jonah and as quick as I could think, I grabbed him and tore him back to me.
“No, you can’t!”
“Alice, he deserves it!”
“I know, but he’s not worth it.” I put myself in front of Gabe, directly between him and Jonah, and caught his wild eyes with mine. “Think about it. You can’t injure yourself right now. You need your hands for the lifts.”
I watched how right I was slap the fight from Gabe’s face, but only for a brief moment before Jonah pushed his luck.
“Plus I would sue your ass, and I know for a fucking fact that you couldn’t afford that.”
“I would gladly pay the fines,” Gabe bit out.
“With what money? Everyone at the studio knows you and Sal are barely scraping by as is.”
Whipping my head around to Jonah, I shouted, “Stop provoking him!”
“Let me hit him! Alice, let me fucking hit him!” My fingers gripped around Gabe’s arms, feeling his muscles beneath working and begging to be used.
“No! You can’t hurt your hands! Please!”
Just then, a vision from behind Gabe seized my attention as it came closer. Shock expanded inside my heart as I called out his name.
“ Ethan? What’re you doing here?”
He barrelled his way closer to us, murder in his eyes and the wind tousling through his hair.
“Lending a hand.”
I had no time to gasp for breath between the time it took Ethan to rear his arm back and when his fist made contact with Jonah’s face.
A disgusting crack popped through the air, bouncing off the walls and chased after by the sounds of Jonah wailing in pain. He went down to the ground, both of his hands covering his face, and I stood there petrified.
Gabe’s arms around my waist were the only things anchoring me down to reality.
The rest of me felt dreamlike—light, heady, tingling.
I was in a dreamstate, set in a nightmare of violence as Ethan stood over Jonah on the sidewalk.
Ethan crouched down next to him, his tone as he spoke both steady and terrifying.
“You stay the fuck away from her. Stay the fuck away from both of them.”
“And who the fuck are you?!” Jonah tried to get up, but fell sideways back into one of the walls of the building and Ethan ducked out of the way to let him fall. When he finally righted himself up and turned to us, horror yanked my jaw down to gape at the bloody mess that covered his nose and lips.
Standing tall and protective in front of Gabe and I, Ethan nearly growled, “Someone who’s really fucking tired of your fragile ego hurting the people I care about.”
Jonah’s eyes rounded. No one ever spoke to him like that.
“My mom’s a lawyer, and she’s going to love putting whoever the fuck you are behind bars,” Jonah snapped. Ethan was quick to snap right back.
“Yeah, well so is her sister and so am I, so good luck with two against one. Especially when you have no witnesses to prove your side of the story.”
Innate confusion creased the bloody lines on Jonah’s face.
“What do you mean no witnesses? They saw the whole fucking thing!” Jonah yelled, pointing at both me and Gabe.
Ethan stepped into Jonah, bringing that intimidating aura he occasionally let out of its chains with him. Jonah sank into himself whether or not he meant to.
“All they saw was you trip and fall and smack your face into the sidewalk.” Ethan looked back at us. “Right?”
Gabe was quick to catch on. “That’s all I saw.”
Then all eyes were on me. God, I hated lying. Each lie hurt more than the last, but Jonah was no longer privileged to my kindness or my honesty. At the end of us, he had given me neither in return and today, I owed him nothing.
I’d tell a hundred lies before I ever let Jonah hurt Ethan.
“That’s all I saw, too.”
Jonah’s expression blanched and seconds later, he was screaming profanities at us all as Ethan ushered both me and Gabe back to my car. I went where his hand on the small of my back directed until I was sitting in my driver’s seat, Ethan pulling my seatbelt across my chest.
He locked me in place and I heard him ask Gabe, who sat in my passenger seat, if he was okay. Then it was my turn.
“Are you okay?”
I blinked, dazed and sure I should direct the same question at the man whose knuckles were quickly sprouting a nasty shade of purple.
“I’m fine, but your hand—”
“It’ll be fine,” he brushed off, hiding his hand away behind the car door. He checked behind him, towards where Jonah was standing, fuming on the phone with who I could assume was his mom. “I’m gonna stay here until he leaves. Make sure he doesn’t try to start shit again.”
The protective fire in his eyes was roaring, practically breathing with a life of its own.
I wanted to fall to my knees and warm my heart in his fire, to chase away the numbing cold that had been put there last night.
Last night was supposed to be it for us.
I snapped my heart in two and left a half for him, but here he was, less than 24 hours later.
“How did you end up here?”
That protective flame was snuffed out by a blanket of hesitation over his expression.
“I was on the way to the gym. Stopped when I saw what was going on.”
“The studio isn’t on the way to your gym.”
He opened his mouth to retort, but after a note his lips fell closed. A look of consideration fanned up his face, and a softness crept into his voice.
“I know. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
As he said it, I wanted to feel light and giddy and filled with bustling butterflies over how sweet and thoughtful he was, but more than anything, I just felt so unbelievably sad.
He wanted to make sure I was okay from last night, even when he knew from firsthand experience that there was no being ‘okay’ with what happened or with what our situation was.
He knew I wasn’t okay, but he was checking up on me regardless, and I had to wonder if I would have ever known he was checking up on me if Jonah hadn’t caused such a scene.
He would have remained a watchful secret, and I wouldn’t have been reminded how perfect he was.
“Thank you,” I said, holding his stare. He held mine back just like you would a flower, delicately and soaking up its beauty before it faded to gray and wilted to death, like everything else in life.
“Any time.”
My focus drifted down to his hand as he worked his bruising fingers, opening and closing his fist.
“Did it feel good to finally get all of that off your chest?” he asked.
So he had heard. He heard all of my insecurities and what I said about love, and what Jonah said about me not deserving it. No wonder he hit him.
“It did, yeah.”
It had all been sitting there for far too long that it had started to create a permanent indent on my life. Jonah Hart wasn’t worth any sort of permanent mark on my life.
“Did it feel good to finally punch Jonah?”
Though I wasn’t a fan of violence, I did know that Jonah deserved it for what he said, and I had a hunch that Ethan had wanted to bring Jonah some sort of pain for a while now.
“Yeah.” The edge of Ethan’s mouth twitched upwards. “It did.”
The tease of a smile was gone from his lips far too quickly as the disappearance of Jonah from behind him signaled our final goodbye.
“Let me see your phone.”
Ethan’s demand was sudden, but without thinking, I handed over my phone to him and watched as he tapped his fingers across the screen.
Passing it back over to me, he said. “I’m moving out of your sisters today and I’ll be staying with Julian for a while. He’s got a spare room I can crash in.”
An unpleasant shiver zipped up my spine as I recalled his friend Julian and the first and only time we’d met at Monica’s place.
He made me feel so uncomfortable and my disapproval of Ethan staying with him tried to escape past my lips, ready to beg, plead, or bargain with him to stay anywhere but there, but I stopped myself. It wasn’t my place.
“I just put his address in there under my name.” As he took his hand back, his thumb brushed in a gentle sweep over the back of my hand, and it could have been mistaken for accidental, but I knew better.
“In case you ever need me.”
God, what had I done to this man’s life?
When he met me he was engaged, happy, and living in a nice home with a bright future.
Now, he was single, crashing on a friend’s couch, and walking around with a broken heart inside his chest. Someone should lock me up for how much damage I’d caused to his life.
Ethan gave me one last wanton look before waving a goodbye to Gabe—who I’d actually forgotten was in the car with me—and walking away, back to his car, back to his own, lonely life.
I physically felt my heart try to go with him as it battered against my chest so hard it could have fooled me into thinking someone had just struck my chest with a baseball bat.
“So,” Gabe began next to me. “I don’t want to assume anything… but I feel like I’m six episodes behind on the whole Ethan saga. Did I miss something?”
I shrugged my shoulders, watching Ethan get into his car through my door-side window.
“Nothing that matters.”
“Did he say he was moving out of Monica’s place?”
I nodded.
“When did that end?”
“Last night.”
Gabe sucked back a shocked breath, expelling it out as he cursed. “Damn. Was it mutual?”
Letting out an exhale of my own, I sank my head into the palm of my hands.
“Not exactly.”
I turned in the driver’s seat to face him, watching him piece together the puzzle of what had most likely happened since he and I last spoke about Ethan. The last thing I told Gabe about Ethan was that he had almost kissed me twice, but that was going to be the end of it.
Not only was it not the end of it, but since then Ethan had done so much more than just kiss me. He had stolen my heart for good and tucked it away inside his own, and then together, we destroyed them both.
“Did he do it for you?”
The shock of his question ripped through my chest more than it should have. An earthquake of unstoppable guilt. It was a question to be expected, but admitting the answer out loud was so much more shameful than saying it in my head.
“Yes and no. It doesn’t really matter why he did it though. What matters is that he did it and… that’s the end of it. He doesn’t have a reason to be in my life anymore.”
Gabe nodded, digesting the information. “Does Monica love him?”
“She says she does. Ethan’s not so sure though.”
And then there was a pause.
“Do you love him?”
I opened my lips to answer, but nothing came out.
In my mind, I tried to form the words that yes, I loved him to the quantity that it became impossible to fathom how deeply I could love another person, but the more I thought about the words, the closer I came to tears.
They burned my eyes and choked my throat, and I positioned my hand over my mouth to quiet the trembling of my lips.
“Hey, hey.” A warm touch covered my other hand lying on my lap and gave it a squeeze. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say it.”
Sniffling, I nodded a thank you and used the back of my hand to swipe away a stray tear that had slid down to my chin. Blinking away the blur in my eyes, I looked to Gabe and knew I just had to keep going. Keep pushing. Don’t stop long enough to feel, to think, to remember. Just push.
“We should go in now and rehearse.”
“Are you sure you don’t just want to take the night off? It might be good to just drink today away.”
I wish it were that easy. I wish I could just drink until the burn from the alcohol scorched away the memories of today. I wanted it to be as easy as letting the poison from the drink poison my mind until all the pain associated with today and last night was a faint lingering at best.
Unfortunately, there was no drinking away this kind of pain. It was the kind of pain that wouldn’t only survive being drowned in toxic waters. It would thrive in them.
“No, I don’t want to drink. I just want to rehearse and be ready for Saturday.”
Flicking my stare up to Gabe’s, I steadied it there and let him see how serious I was. He knew me and he knew me well enough to know how I dealt with pain or any uncomfortable emotion. He knew I was about to push myself harder than I’d ever have, because this was all I had left.
This competition was it. My one goal, my one chance to take something I wanted in my hands and make it mine. We were going to rehearse until our feet bled and our bones ached, but we would win. This competition was the only thing left in my life that I could control.
And I had to win.