Chapter 33 Blunt
BLUNT
Jack
I was a world-class asshole. I couldn’t do this to her. I was a ticking time bomb, and I could explode at any minute. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t trust my instincts.
Awake since four in the morning, I sat parked on the couch, my head in my hands.
I’d worked for a few hours, pounding out answers to emails, dealing with business issues with Casey.
I’d gone for a walk, leaving behind a note that jet-lag had beaten me and I would be back with bread and croissants.
I had them in a bag on the coffee table, and now I was waiting for her to finish her shower.
She didn’t know I’d returned, and I didn’t know what I was going to say.
But I had to tell her the truth. She’d opened up to me on everything, and I’d given her nothing.
Soon, I heard the water stop running, then a few minutes later she emerged, her hair sleek and wet. A towel was wrapped around her body.
She smiled the second she saw me, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “See? Two mornings in a row. I’m still not a dragon.”
I could barely crack a grin in response. But I tried. For her. “And you still have ten toes.”
She wiggled them. “Have you been up for a while?” she asked and joined me on the couch, tucking her feet underneath her.
I shook my head, heaved a sigh, and bit the bullet. “Listen, Michelle,” I began, and she sat ramrod straight.
“Listen, Michelle is never a good way to start a sentence.”
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said quickly, trying to ease her concerns. I reached for her hand, clasping it between mine, but she drew hers back. She pressed her lips tight together and motioned for me to keep talking.
I had no choice. This was it. But hell, this was why I came to see her in the first place.
I hadn’t been able to get the words out with Kira.
We’d circled it and danced around it, but I’d never told her about the chain reaction my lack of love had set off.
“I need to tell you the truth about Aubrey’s death,” I said as quickly as I could.
This was the only way I could manage. Heave it up.
No doubt it wouldn’t be the first time she’d heard someone toss his or her distorted emotions at her feet.
Her eyes widened in shock, and her features froze. Oh, shit. She thought I did it? Well, I might as well have. She scooted away from me.
“I didn’t kill her,” I said, backpedaling faster than I’d expected to.
She jumped up from the couch, one hand clasping the ends of the towel. “I didn’t say you did. And I’m honestly not even sure why you would say that.”
“Because of how you reacted,” I said, pointing at her retreating.
“I’m going to get dressed,” she said crisply, and I understood the implication loud and clear. She was not going to let herself be vulnerable during this conversation.
She moved to her suitcase and pulled on a bra and panties faster than I’d ever seen a woman slip on clothes.
Fuck this. I wasn’t going to mince words.
“I broke off the engagement twenty minutes before she died,” I said, blurting it out, and I wanted to scream from the pain.
It was worse than ripping off a Band-Aid.
It was like slamming my hand in a car door.
Everything I’d held inside for more than a year was exposed, and it hurt like a motherfucker.
“What?” she asked, blinking.
Even with the ache all over, the open, bleeding wound, I had to keep going.
Get it all out. “It was a week before the wedding,” I said, each word like gravel in my mouth.
“I took her to the mountains for the weekend, thinking that would be the best place to tell her the news that I didn’t want to marry her.
” The bitter sting of regret rose up again.
How wrong had I been? I should have told Aubrey in her apartment.
I should have told her at a park. Anywhere else.
“You picked the mountains because she was a skier,” Michelle said softly, seeming to understand as she tugged on a skirt and a shirt. But even if my choice had made logical sense, it was the wrong choice.
“The mountains were her favorite place,” I said, with a scoff directed at myself.
“I wanted her to be near something she loved when I delivered the news. After I told her, she got on the slopes, tore down the hill, and hit a tree,” I said, getting the last part out as clinically as I could so I wouldn’t have to feel the fresh devastation of the moment I’d learned she died all over again.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, waiting for me to speak more.
“That part is all true,” I added, as I stood up and moved closer, but she held up a hand. This was as close as she wanted me to be. Damn. I knew this was how it would go. The second I’d opened my mouth around a woman and voiced the full truth, I’d caused more damage than I’d ever intended.
“Okay. Go on,” she said, scrunching her eyebrows together. “What part isn’t true then? Why you didn’t want to marry her?”
I shoved a hand through my hair, digging hard into my scalp.
Is this what it would have been like to tell her in her office?
As her patient? Maybe. I couldn’t know because I was someone else to her now.
I was her lover who couldn’t even tell her how I felt.
Frustration flowed thick in my veins. What I wouldn’t give to rid this guilt from my body.
That was too much to ask though. I sat on the edge of the table, and tore off more of the truth for her. “The image the media paints of me?”
“The near-widower with the broken heart,” she supplied. “That image?”
“Yeah,” I said, with the shame that the title brought surely evident in my features. “That image.”
“That’s not true,” she said in a calm, comforting voice.
I suspected it was her work voice, and that she’d segued into it.
I only hoped she didn’t start viewing me as a project, as someone who needed fixing.
I didn’t want to be that person with her.
I wanted to be so much more, but I hardly knew how.
“I cared about Aubrey deeply. I loved her as a friend. But…” I began in a low voice, one I barely recognized as my own. Because I’d only said these words out loud to my sister, and to Nate. “I wasn’t in love with her.”
“Oh,” she said on a long, loud sigh of understanding. It was all out in the open. She could see me for who I truly was. “But everyone believes you’re the person the media portrays you as. The grieving fiancé.” She crossed her arms, protecting herself from the man before her.
A calloused jerk.
I nodded. “Yes. Because that was the least I could do for her.”
She tilted her head to the side. “How so?”
“She died,” I said, practically shouting as the guilt charged back up through me, rearing its ugly head.
“She fucking died, and it was my fault because I didn’t love her.
I couldn’t be anything publicly but the grieving man.
I couldn’t go tell the world I didn’t love her. I couldn’t do that to a dead woman.”
“I understand that part,” she said, nodding several times, taking in what I was saying.
Then she was quiet as she stood up, walked over to her purse and rooted around in it until she found a band for her hair.
She twisted her wet hair up on her head and moved over to the couch near to me.
A dangerous thing called hope dared to make an appearance.
Maybe she’d forgive me. “But you think it was your fault she died?” she asked, continuing her questions. I couldn’t read her.
“Well, yeah. I told her how I felt. She went for a run down the mountain. She was always incredibly safe, and that was the one time she was out of control. How could it be anything but my fault?”
She didn’t speak at first. She steepled her hands together, and there was something about this side of Michelle that scared me.
She’d retreated into her work mode, and she was excellent at it, but it wasn’t how I knew her and experienced her.
She was methodical; she was assessing me.
Even though I knew she didn’t judge her clients, I felt judged.
I felt small. I felt stupid. I was all of those things and more. I deserved to feel this way.
“Jack,” she began, her voice distant. “Why did you stay with her for so long if you didn’t love her?”
Her question surprised me. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t asked myself that question. Ever. I’d only beaten myself up for not loving her. But I’d never delved into why I’d stayed with her so long.
I parted my lips to speak, but no words came.
She spoke for me. “You were together for a few years, and engaged for nearly a year? Why, if you didn’t love her?”
I nodded, the hot shame rolling over me again. “I think I just felt as if we were supposed to be together. Everyone expected it. We were high school sweethearts, and then we got back together years later. It just seemed like it should have worked.”
“But you knew you didn’t love her? How long did you know that?”
“Several months,” I admitted, swallowing down a lump. That was the real rub.
“What made you think you should marry someone you didn’t love? Why would you stay? That’s what I most want to understand,” she said gently.
I answered her honestly, feeling completely exposed and naked as I bared the truth to her. That I was a man who was so disconnected from love that I stayed with someone I didn’t. “I really don’t know.”
“Were your parents like that? Like you and Aubrey?” she asked, probing, as if she were on a fearless hunt for my truth.
Her question echoed through the quiet room. It rattled through my head, like a top spinning wildly, then finally settling down. The light bulb went off. The buzzer dinged. And there it was. Something that made sense about my choices. An answer, maybe. A truth I could grasp. Was it that simple?
“They weren’t in love either. They stayed together until Casey graduated high school,” I said, then shared more details of my parents’ marriage.