Page 3 of Free to Breathe
When I’m far enough away, I call a campus cab to come pick me up.
* * *
The next morning,I manage to sneak out of my off-campus apartment I share with Holly and Ali before either of them wake up. The doctors at the hospital first assumed someone had beaten me and wanted to call the local police. It was humiliating, but I recounted the story to prevent them from doing that.
After I got home from the hospital, I told Ali and Hols about how I face-planted on my way home the night before—nothing more, nothing less. Not long after, Colby knocked on our door. It was the first of many times I had Ali or Holly turn him away, preventing him from seeing me in the next week, until he graduated.
Because Colby didn’t just admit to what he truly felt about me that night. In the light of the morning, he set off a chain reaction that forced me to find out what I had.
And I can’t get rid of that as easily as ignoring it.
1
Corinna
Idon’t hold on to grudges because life’s too short. But there are three things that to this day I hate with a passion: the dark, Colby Hunt, and my tumor.
They’re constantly in my head. I can no longer separate them or get rid of them. No matter what I do, nothing diminishes their importance. I have to live with each in my life, day after day, night after night.
In my mind, the dark has become the spirit of my demons. Night—all darkness—reminds me of the humid night when sticky hands grabbed my body, waking me from a restless slumber as they stole my innocence. I was carted off into the night for my body to be used to pay a debt that was never mine.
Colby gave my demons a face when he betrayed my friendship in college. There hasn’t been a time when I’ve seen or heard his name since that I haven’t felt the betrayal his laughter about my body caused.
And my tumor is my physical manifestation, my punishment for ever believing I could truly be free.
What is freedom anyway? It isn’t the choice to live my life without judgment. College and the years after taught me that. My spirit tried to live free even when my soul was dying—no, dead inside after the lies Colby fed me to believe me ten years ago.
Ever since, I’ve been tried, judged, and found guilty of what? Choice. Spirit. Living.
It doesn’t matter anymore. None of my demons do. My demons surround me no matter where I turn. I can’t get a break from them now thathe’sback.
They’re everywhere.
2
Colby
There are things I can’t forget.
Like the pain that I don’t want to feel each time I remember I’ve lost my home. Knowing my father would rather have seen me broken than bend on what he thought was best for me. My father used his fists on me once—just once— and it was one time was too many. It wasn’t leaving the place as much as the memories I walked away from that I can’t let go of.
I can’t forget how I felt about being medically discharged from the Army. The physical pain I was in from being shot almost equaled the emotional state of mind I was in at having to resign my commission.
And I’ll never forget for the rest of my life the look of hatred in the eyes of Corinna Freeman every time we’re in the same room together.
Corinna hating me is the one constant that hurts me the most.
I was raised with everything I could dream of as a Hunt: a name that’s uttered with some reverence; a grandfather who’s a senator; a family who runs a billion-dollar empire with cars, homes, and money to burn. All I wanted to do was serve my country, to stand up for what was right for those who had fallen before and after me. To be a hero.
Maybe that’s what first drew me to Corinna: I was already a hero in her eyes. That wasn’t what kept me from falling in love with her, even though I knew I couldn’t have her. I couldn’t fall in love with her because she was too fucking traumatized by what had happened to her.
I was close to losing my ROTC scholarship when we first met. Hesitantly, she’d smiled at me during a business class we were both in as she’d slid into her seat. Later that same week, I stumbled into a pizza parlor on campus, drunk after a frat party, and saw her laughing with two girls, her golden eyes shining.
She’d given my heart a reason to beat. The same reason men like me go to war, to fight for a reason to come home.
Corinna became that reason for me even if she never realized it. With her came two sisters who were at first wary of me as a man, and later two more sisters and a brother. A new family. All of them were hesitant about my presence, and I didn’t understand why. When I found out, I became murderous over what had happened to each of her magnificent family members.
When I’d finally realized Corinna had become my entire heart, I knew I couldn’t do a thing about it. Not then. Maybe not ever. Because between one day and another, everything had suddenly changed.
