30. The Long Story
THIRTY
The Long Story
SHANNON
Shannon squeezed out her damp hair and checked the towel for bits of blue dye before settling back on her pillow. She felt Caleb’s eyes on her as he waited for her to speak.
After they came to their senses in each other’s arms, she began the long story. The months between the wet T-shirt party on Labor Day and the fake pregnancy scare on Christmas Eve had taken close to an hour to tell, and exhausted and disgusted her enough to require a shower—two, really, since she cranked up the temperature as high as she could stand after Caleb got out, scorching her limbs bright pink from the heat as she burned and scrubbed Hayden’s fingerprints from her skin one last time.
Caleb rolled onto his side and propped himself on his elbow, still stunned and a little horrified by the presentation of the ring during the recorded phone call. He stroked her forehead and her hair in silence, ready whenever she was for the final chapter.
“Shannon, baby, why haven’t you called me back?” Hayden asked, nearly shouting. “I’ve been worried sick. It’s been an entire week. I called you ten times a day, and you didn’t even call back before the bowl game. What’s going on?”
“I’m sorry, Hayden, I’ve just been having the worst time,” she said, coughing a little to weaken her voice. “I haven’t felt well since we talked. And I didn’t want to bother you since you had the game to worry about.”
“Baby. You can’t keep shutting me out like this,” he said, his voice beginning to hitch. “How are we supposed to work on things if you don’t call me back? Did you… you know? Did you get a better test? This is a big deal for both of us. I want to take care of you.”
“I got a test. And I was just so scared.”
“Shannon, come on. I mean, you’re not alone. I’m here for you, and I told you I’ll handle whatever we need.”
“I’m not pregnant.”
She heard him flop onto his bed. “Oh, thank God. Please come see me. Or I’ll come see you. Tomorrow. Or sooner, if I can get a flight, okay?”
“And I never thought I was.”
“What?”
Shannon dropped the wobble in her voice and flipped her hair over her shoulder, tossing the blue strands so they flashed their brave color in her bedroom mirror. She steadied herself and drew in a deep breath. “I never thought I was pregnant. Everything about that was a lie to get you talking about a pregnancy you do not want and that you will be happy to dispose of whether I like it or not. After what they said in court, I had to know. It’s sick how fast you took that bait and tried to manipulate me. ”
“Why would you do that?” he stammered. “You’re the one who’s sick. You scared the shit out of me!”
“Like you scared Delilah, you creep? Your ‘repentant defendant’ look is bullshit, and it’s not going to stick.”
“I didn’t want a kid then and I don’t want one now,” Hayden said. “That’s not manipulation. That’s all I ever said.”
“Do you think that’s all you said? I recorded our call. Single consent recording is legal here and there, and you more or less offered to do to me what you did to her.”
He caught his breath. “Shannon, I practically proposed to you on that call. Do you expect anyone to believe I’d just turn around and threaten you?”
“My recording got a little fuzzy during that part of the conversation. What can I say? I was pretty floored by that ring and had to step away and lie down for a minute.”
“You still don’t trust me when I tell you the thing with Delilah was an accident? I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
“You have other cars.”
Silence.
“I don’t believe in you anymore. I didn’t break up with you because of Delilah. I did it for myself, because I am not the girl you thought would marry you and tolerate your poor behavior.”
He breathed heavily through clenched teeth. “I don’t need you to believe in me. I don’t need your sick games or recordings that probably aren’t real, and I guess you don’t need much of a reputation anywhere on campus now. I think everyone should know to steer clear of you.”
“The recording goes straight to Delilah’s lawyers if you don’t shape up,” she said .
“If you think you’re going to blackmail me or my family?—”
“I’m going to keep you in line.” Shannon lowered her voice. “I am aware the recording might not be enough to hurt you as badly as you deserve. I may need something else to prove more of a pattern. So I will keep it to myself as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. If you find a girl to sit down and shut up and smile for you, good work. I won’t bother her with the truth if she’s truly happy with you. But if you touch another girl against her will, I’m on the phone with the lawyers, and you will find out what I can do to you. Either Delilah will be the worst mistake of your life, or I will be when I make you pay for it with interest.”
She gave him a moment to respond, but heard only his labored breathing. “You have my number if you have questions about these terms, and you will have a restraining order if I don’t like where I see you. Happy New Year.”
“And from there, I had all these wild swings between feeling like a super chick on top of the world and absolutely humiliated,” Shannon whispered, pulling the cool cotton sheet to her cheek. “For a little while, I wondered if the girl you met at the party was really me, because I didn’t know who the real me was. I had completely devalued myself as a person to make him happy, and to this day I can’t give myself a good reason why I did that. I made it about my hurt feelings, my embarrassment at falling for his pretty lies, and… and in the end, missing him a little. My heart sank when he showed me that ring. He’s about ten percent a really great guy, and when yo u only know that ten percent, it’s hard to see the rest is so horrible.”
“Oh, I can see that,” Caleb said. “He’s the kind of guy you want to believe in until he makes it impossible and there’s no going back.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I came down here for a clinic when I was in high school and saw him slinging it with some receivers, and I was just in awe.” He cleared his throat and flushed, as though embarrassed to admit it. “Throwing into double coverage from his corners and safeties, hucking these long go routes, absolute dimes. I went out there and broke up a few catches and he was a good sport about it. He told me he hoped I’d come play here. I was a little star-struck and didn’t notice he didn’t have a defensive line coming at him in those drills.”
“He had life set on ‘easy’ mode,” Shannon agreed, wiping a tear that escaped the corner of her eye and rolled over her temple to her ear. “What happened that made you change your mind about him?”
“When we lost the game to Isaac’s team in September, and he got sacked twice by a guy wearing my name. There’s a lot of bad blood between Isaac and Hayden. It was the first time my brother and I played against each other, and my mom and dad came down for pictures on the sideline. SportsCenter even came over for a few minutes to do a little brotherly-rivalry bit when they saw our jerseys. I was the last one to the locker room. Hayden went out of his mind when I walked in. He screamed that I was a traitor, then tried to yank my jersey over my head and got it stuck on my pads. I had my helmet in my hand and swung it. Caught him on the side of his head. ”
Shannon rolled to face him, slack-jawed. “I thought he was going to need stitches from that gash. He didn’t say… well. Of course he wouldn’t say how it happened.”
“My dad always said that in hard times, a man shows you what he’s made of.” Caleb shook his head. “Hayden is phenomenal at getting the guys fired up. He’s a hype guy, and you need a quarterback who can do that, even if it’s an act. He pulls it off, and some days, it’s good enough to believe. He damn near took us to a national championship with that energy. You want to believe in the guy who says he believes in you.”
“God, I can relate,” Shannon whispered.
“All that talent is a waste,” Caleb said. “He didn’t look at his own performance. He wanted someone to blame that day. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do with my jersey. Burn my brother in effigy? It was downhill with the entire team from there.”
She poked his chin, then slid her palm over the soft, sparse hairs on his chest. “I wish I’d known how you felt about him that first day. When you told me your name, I went from being embarrassed to scared. I thought everyone loved him, and if I tried to explain to you what really happened, it would all blow up. I’d lose the leverage I had to get him to behave and that tiny bit of dignity I’d just gotten back.”
He brushed his lips against hers. “Did you really feel like the girl I met that night wasn’t the real you?”
“For a little while,” she confessed. “When I talked to Missy about you… well, Missy is very good at reminding me of who I was before she thinks I flipped out. Blue hair meant the apocalypse was near. She thought I should get back to normal and lectured me after Christmas. ”
Caleb groaned. “Missy’s ‘normal’ is overrated.”
“My little mission became as much about redeeming myself as getting justice. I wasn’t hurt so much by what he did to me, but I was still furious about what I did to myself. I allowed him to treat me like that. I thought I needed to earn my self-respect back, and I had the chance to do something Delilah and those other girls couldn’t do alone. Which is why at the library?—”
“We don’t have to talk about that,” he said, slicing his hands through the air to cut her off. “Really. I understand.”
“Yes, we do,” she said. “When we talked in the library and I flipped out about you feeling obligated to step into other people’s fights, it’s because I was trying to let my fight go. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I didn’t want to fight for people who never asked me to. I wanted my old life back, that easier me who had never been so foolish.”
Shannon paused for a deep breath. “You made that impossible. And your honesty and good heart and bravery were a smack in the face that night, telling me everything I should be that I wasn’t. I broke up with him for myself. My sanity. But I had to go after him for the people who couldn’t.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Please don’t be,” she said. “I was unreasonable and projected all this mess on you, and that wasn’t your fault. That was what I wanted to apologize for at the meeting, but you were still hurt, and rightly so. I was awful.”
“So I was awful in return, which was incredibly mature of me,” he said, grimacing at the memory.
“The strawberry cheesecake bar was really good, though.”
“It’s not vegetarian. ”
“I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have listened if you’d tried to explain.”
He stroked her hair off her forehead. “Even when we’re talking about the most difficult things, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier or more at peace than I am with you.”
“In our little storm.” She poked his nose. “I wonder how that metaphor works out. Peace inside a storm. Something about the winds of change?”
“A hurricane, maybe.”
“We could be the fire from a lightning strike.”
“I like the visual of that one,” Caleb said, leaning to kiss her lips. “It’s warm and powerful at once.”
“And it’s dangerous.”