Chapter 34
CHAPTER 34
GABE
Fuck, this has been a long and exhausting day.
I toss my keys into the bowl on the table in the entryway of my Manhattan penthouse as the elevator doors slide closed behind me and kick off my shoes without untying the laces.
Despite it being Saturday, the murderous traffic on the drive down from Warm Springs this morning left me only enough time to drop off my bags and get changed into workout gear before heading straight back out to meet Jamal at the team gym.
Even though the day’s been hectic, I haven’t been able to stop wondering if Natalie has found my letter yet.
I climb the spiral stairs to my bedroom and bathroom, checking my phone for the three hundredth time to see if she’s sent me a furious/hurt/abusive message.
Still nothing.
I could text her of course, but what would I say? Hey! Have you found the note saying you’re amazing but I left anyway and we’re never going to see each other again?
So either…
She’s been to the house, the letter’s blown away, and she thinks I’m an asshole who’s disappeared into the night without a word.
She’s been to the house, found the letter, and thinks I’m an asshole.
She hasn’t been to the house—probably because she thinks I’m an asshole.
I cross the bedroom to the huge wall of windows and their view of skyscrapers against the dark sky. The city lights make it almost impossible to see the stars—the exact opposite of Fool’s Hill.
Now that I’m not racing through traffic or being put through my paces by Jamal and finally have a moment of peace to think, I’m wavering like hell as to whether I did the right thing.
My head might be certain that walking away from Natalie was the correct decision, but the nauseating black hole where my internal organs used to be is in violent disagreement.
But I can’t undo the note. It’s done.
I pull my shirt off over my head, drop my shorts and underwear, and yank off my socks as I make my way to the bathroom. Time for a shower to wash everything away.
If I hadn’t been completely starving I’d never have been able to swallow a single mouthful of this Chinese food, never mind demolish it .
The tightness in my throat and chest from worrying about Natalie’s reaction is getting worse.
And all I’ve been able to think about while watching The Science of Squid —which under normal circumstances would have been utterly absorbing—is how much of a cowardly jackass she must think I am.
She would never just run out on someone and leave them a note. She treats people well and completely non-dickishly.
My dickish score right now is pretty fucking high.
I drop my fork into the empty take-out box and place it on the coffee table, then put my feet up next to it.
My phone rings next to my feet as the credits and gentle swirling music start to roll over the squid.
It’s Mom.
“Hey, how’s Dad?”
“See for yourself.” She shifts her phone to show him sitting up in bed side by side with her, both of them under the covers.
“Well, you look a lot better than yesterday.” There’s actual color in his face. “A lot less like a slightly green corpse.”
“So much better,” he says. “But we called to check on you. How did your shoulder hold up today?”
“So far so good,” I say. “The trainer wouldn’t let me lift as much as usual, but I managed what I was allowed to do just fine. It’s not even aching or sore.” I rotate my left arm as evidence.
“Then why do you look so down?” Mom asks.
“Down?” And there was me thinking I was sneakily disguising that my insides are eating themselves over Natalie.
“Your eyes are crinkly again,” she says. “And you were so happy last week.”
Yes, well, last week was kind of unique.
Dad peers closer to the screen. “Makes no sense being more sad when you’ve finally got the thing you wanted.”
Except I didn’t get the thing I wanted. I threw her away. “Just a bit tired. The trainer’s tougher in person.”
“Good thing you went to that amazing rehab center,” Mom says. “It obviously worked wonders.”
The weight of guilt over lying to my parents piles on top of the already heavy load of guilt at running away from Natalie.
None of them deserve this. I need to be better.
I plant my feet on the floor and rest my elbows on my knees.
I need to be more Natalie.
A surge of courage, or strength, or balls, or whatever the hell it’s called when you realize you have to bite the bullet and do the right thing, swells within me.
I’m going to do it. Come clean. Just fucking do it.
“Um, about that rehab center.” My heart rate rises. I’m not backing out now.
“I bet Natalie was a big help,” Mom says to Dad. “I could tell she was a good one from the moment we set eyes on her.” She turns back to me. “How is lovely Natalie, Gabe? Will she get to work on you again?”
The accidental double entendre would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
“The thing is, folks…” I take a giant breath, like I’m about to dive to the depths of a bigfin squid. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you about all that.”
Mom looks baffled, like she can’t conceive of me ever telling her anything less than the one hundred percent truth.
“This is going to sound ridiculous…” I claw at my hair, tugging at the roots. Jesus, I could rip it out for getting myself into this situation. “But I wasn’t at a rehab center.”
That’s it. I made myself say it. But I still feel sick.
“What?” they say at the same time.
“It was actually my new house.”
“New house?” Mom’s brow pinches and she shakes her head. “But you have your apartment in New York. You’re there now. I can see it. Why do you need a new house? And why were you pretending? I don’t understand. What’s going on?”
Her face is flushed and her eyes a little watery.
This is what I’ve done to them. This is how I’m making them feel. This is how much of an ass I am.
“Couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to play and having to watch the games from a box.” Christ, the truth sounds so fucking pathetic. “So I wanted to get away for a bit.”
“And the answer to that was to buy a house ?” Mom’s words come out slowly as she tries to put together all the pieces of this complex puzzle.
“I’ve wanted a house for a while anyway. And there’s this small town a couple of hours north of the city that Wyatt mentioned a while back. Said he always decompressed when he was there. So I looked around, found the perfect place in a couple days, and snapped it up.”
They stare back at me, nodding their heads in silence.
“You’d love it up there. I’ll take you when you get back.” Well, actually not until a couple of weeks into the new year when I’m sure Natalie will have headed south. “You’d adore Main Street, Mom. It’s full of cute little stores.”
“So who’s Natalie then?” Mom asks. “If she’s not a physical therapist.”
How do I explain that? Maybe with the bare minimum of the truth. “She’s a local teacher. Who got stuck at my house because she hurt her ankle. When a tree fell across the road.”
“What?” Dad asks. “Maybe I haven’t recovered as much as I’d thought. This is all very confusing.”
“None of it makes sense,” Mom says. “Because if you hadn’t gotten us this cruise, we’d have been home and you could have just stayed with us while you recovered. Like a longer Christmas vacation.”
Now the fabulous Chinese food flips in my stomach. But Natalie was right. If I can’t be honest with the two people I care about most in the world, who can I be honest with? Not even myself probably.
“Thing is…” I rub my forehead and bite my top lip for a moment.
“Go on.” Mom’s tone is caring and full of love.
I can actually hear the stress-beats of my heart. Here goes everything. “I don’t like Christmas.”
They lean toward the phone, their brows furrowed, like they’re trying to examine a tiny bewildering object they can’t quite make out.
Then they look at each other.
Then back at me.
“What?” Dad asks at the same time as Mom says, “What do you mean?”
The tightness across my chest loosens slightly as I inhale. At least I’ve forced out the words. Now I have to deal with the consequences .
“I don’t enjoy Christmas. And I…never really have.”
Mom’s mouth drops open and her hand flies to her neck. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about. You’ve always loved it.”
That tremor in my guts, that roiling in my belly, that ache in my chest, that’s shame. Shame for all the years of deceiving them.
I drop my forehead into my hand and close my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“You mean you’ve always just pretended to like it?” The hurt in Mom’s voice is obvious. “Pretended to have fun? Pretended to like the gifts?”
“Oh, it’s not like that.” I look back up at their pained faces. It’s so simple to me, but now that I’m trying to put it into words, I realize how complex it is. “I love the time with you and appreciate the gifts. It’s just the…I guess the pressure of it.”
“Pressure?” Dad says.
“Honey, we have never pressured you.” Now Mom’s hurt has morphed to defensiveness, like she thinks I’m accusing her of ruining all my Christmases. “We’ve always said you should live your life. We have never once pressured you to spend the holidays with us.”
“I know,” I tell them. “It’s not you. It’s all my fault.”
And it is. I should have nipped this in the bud a decade ago. I should never have let the holiday habits get so entrenched that at twenty-eight years old I have to make an awkward I Don’t Like Christmas And Never Have declaration.
“But what don’t you like about it?” Dad asks.
“And have apparently never liked about it?” Mom adds. There’s an edge to her voice now, like the hurt that morphed to defensiveness is morphing to pissed-off-with-me-ness.
“I guess it all goes back to when I was a kid and you’d get me all those gifts even though I knew you couldn’t afford them.”
“Didn’t you like them?” Yes, Mom definitely has an undercurrent of pained anger.
“It was hard to like them when I knew you didn’t have the money. And there were more important things like groceries, or the electricity bill, or car repairs, or whatever.”
And now I know what it looks like when my mom’s heart breaks in two. It looks like her clutching the chest of the oversized I’m Cruisin’ T-shirt she’s wearing as pajamas and sucking in her lips.
“We thought we were doing our best for you.” Dad’s getting a bit huffy. “But all the time you hated it?”
Oh, God, no. This is why I’ve never mentioned it before. It can all so easily be misconstrued. To me I was being a thoughtful, unselfish kid. To them I sound ungrateful.
“I know you were doing your best, Dad. I get it. I totally get it. And I appreciate it more than you can know.”
I lean back against the sofa. This is going even worse than I ever imagined. How the hell can I salvage it now?
“So you gave us this cruise to get us out of the way so you wouldn’t have to spend Christmas with us?” Mom asks, her voice cracking, her eyes red-rimmed and so shiny I have no idea how she’s holding back the tears.
“That’s really not how it is, Mom. I gave you the cruise because I like giving you nice things. Nice things you were never able to have for all those years when you were working so hard for so little reward and spending hours on end taking me to practice and games.”
“And we just wanted you to have nice things at Christmas.” Her voice is so quiet it’s almost like she’s talking to herself.
Dad shuffles closer to her and puts his arm around her.
“All you had to do was say if you didn’t want to come for the holidays,” Mom says. “You didn’t have to just pretend every year.”
She leans out of shot to reach for something and comes back with a tissue to wipe her nose.
I have never hated myself more.
“I just wanted to make you happy.” Yet what I’m doing right now is the exact opposite. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted. And you both love all the Christmas stuff.”
“We just want you to be happy too, son,” Dad says, and kisses the side of Mom’s forehead as she dabs the inner corner of her eye.
“The last thing I wanted was to upset you, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She lifts her head and sniffs. “At least we know now. So, no more Christmases.”
“No, that’s not what I meant either.” Jesus, this is out of control and on a rapid downward spiral of frustration. “I just meant…” I let out an exasperated sigh. I don’t even know what I meant or what I wanted to achieve any more. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned any of it.”
“Well, we don’t want you living a lie,” Mom says.
As much as she’s breaking my heart, that is objectively a bit dramatic. “Mom, I?—”
“We should get some sleep,” Dad says—to Mom, not to me. “We have snorkeling early tomorrow.”
I really don’t want to end this conversation on bad terms, but it’s clearly going nowhere other than down the drain right now. Dad’s right, we should probably all sleep on it.
“Snorkeling sounds amazing.” I try to be all cheery and upbeat and like I haven’t really just sledgehammered both their hearts.
Mom nods. “Good night, sweetheart,” she says. “Take care of the shoulder.”
And we all give feeble waves and hang up.
This must be what it felt like in those medieval executions where they cut out your insides while you’re still alive. Unfortunately, I caught the end of a National Geographic show about that a few weeks ago while I was waiting for the Komodo dragon special to start.
I can’t believe I’ve managed to make everything worse. I was trying to make it better, but instead I’ve set fire to the one good thing in my life—my relationship with my parents.
Like Natalie said, I’ve distanced myself from everyone so much that these two are my only friends.
And now I’m driving them away too.