Page 38 of Salvaged Heart
I thought she would hang up without another word, but instead, she added, “You know I’m only being harsh because I believe you can be so much more, don’t you, Beck?”
For the first time in our entire relationship, I was starting to think that wasn’t true. She was being harsh because she needed me to fit into the box she had created in her head for me. She needed me to become the perfect husband, with a fancy job that paid me well so I could buy her fancy things, and more than that, she needed me to be someone she could brag about to her friends and show off like some pedigree dog. Well-trained, well-mannered, well-bred. There had been a time when that had been all I’d wanted for myself as well. When I had just wanted to be good enough to continue being with a woman like her. But I was starting to think that wasn’t what I wanted anymore.
“I know.” The line clicked off, the lock screen of my phone illuminating a photograph of Laurel and me as the call disconnected. My arms were wrapped around her. My face turned into her cheek with an expression like I was looking at the most precious thing I'd ever owned plastered across it. She looked directly at the camera, posed perfectly, with a practiced smile. I had loved this picture when I’d set it, but now I saw it for what it was.Fake.
19
ANDERS
Irolled the red, shiny plastic coin back and forth between my fingers. The reality of the accomplishment washed over me. Never in my life would I have thought I could have remained sober a whole month, but here I was, holding the evidence of it inside my palm.
I’d done it.
Today was cooler than much of July. Last night’s rain had killed some of the oppressive humidity, making it the perfect day to knock out the kitchen installation. The manor had AC, but it was old and tired, unable to keep up with the muggy North Carolina summers. Most days, we were lucky if there was a fifteen-degree difference between the inside and outside of the home.
I brought a cigarette to my lips, enjoying the dull burn in my lungs on the inhale and watching my smoke on the exhale dance away from my face and into the breeze that was blowing across the lake. I’d left Beck, lost to his work, some time ago. Honestly, I was a little shocked he hadn’t yet come looking for me, but perhaps he knew I needed some space. He always seemed to know what I needed when I didn’t even know it myself.
Things had felt strained between us lately. We’d both been awkward and quiet, dancing around each other, trying to avoid the heaviness of all the things we wanted to say to one another, but we hadn't. Just being in that room today. Working where, just days ago, I’d had him pressed against the floor beneath me, running my tongue over his warm skin—it was too much. My palms felt sweaty, and my mouth impossibly dry each time my eyes raked over that spot on the floor where small dollops of dry buttercream still peppered the wood.
My dick was thickening just at the memory of having him below me. But I couldn’t turn back time. I couldn’t change the way I'd flinched when he reached for me, how I’d run like a coward away from the pleasure we both mutually wanted. Fear had locked itself like a vice around my chest, and I'd been powerless to it. I was trying not to beat myself up about it. Trying to talk my spinning mind off the ledge of guilt and self-doubt. But the more I tried, the more I wound myself up with a million what-ifs and possibilities that jumbled up in my brain.
Not many people made me nervous these days—when you expect the worst in people, they rarely surprise you—but Beckham did. Not so much him as a person, but the raging cyclone of emotions that spun inside me at just the single mention of him. I wanted to give him everything so desperately, but there were things I couldn’t do, places I couldn’t let us go. Compartments of my life that were too shameful to open. So, I'd settled in this strange place between hopeless longing and pent-up frustration. Pining over a man who remained frustratingly unavailable.
Why had I kissed him?Whyhad he not pushed me away?
I shook loose the troubling thoughts that were stacking up. I couldn’t let my mind venture down that path again. I couldn’t continue to fantasize about saying fuck it, throwing all caution to the wind, pulling him to me, and kissing him stupid like we haddone in that alleyway. Like we had done on that kitchen floor. I wouldn’t let myself consider whether this weird sexual tension between us could evolve into anything more.
This was so typical of me. For all the time I'd spent at rock bottom over the years, this was what I’d truly craved. Attention, affection, the feeling of being held by someone who gave a damn about me and my pathetic life. I’d chased it like I’d chased drugs, following strangers home and letting them use me just to feel another’s touch and kidding myself into believing that maybe they would ask me to stay. Maybe they would want to care for me. Maybe I could mean something to someone again. But it was never for longer than a night, and I would feel more hollow in the morning than I had the night before.
I wrapped my arms around myself, like the warmth of my own embrace could possibly dull the loneliness that was the pit in my chest, and shifted my focus from my internal spiral and back towards the lake. Two birds were squawking at one another in the tree that overhung the shoreline. Its big branches hung so low that the ends scraped the ground. I’d worried the storm that rolled through last night would have broken some of the smaller limbs off. The heavy claps of lightning from almost directly overhead had shaken the entire house, but come morning, the tree stood just as firm as it had the day before.
It was the kind of tree you’d tie a tire swing from, with a strong base and powerful limbs. I closed my eyes and pictured children running up and down the grassy lawn, giggling amongst one another, their father on their heels as they dove off the edge of the boat dock into the murky water while their mother laughed at the scene unfolding from where she stood on the deck.
The thought triggered something sour in my chest. Even before my dad left, he hadn’t been that kind of father. He was hard-working and present when he could be, and although travelpulled him all over the globe, he'd never had a playful bone in his body. He was all business, all about the appearance of things. If a family looked happy on paper and in photographs, then that was all that mattered. The truth that lay behind closed doors had no value.
My mother was different back then, nurturing and warm. She had been the kind of mother who baked cookies for every occasion and never missed a school event. She gave the best hugs a child could imagine and placed soft kisses on my head while whispering how wonderful I was. How smart. How kind. How loved.
She’d been happy. But the day my father left, my mother had too. Physically, she was still there, but the lighthearted woman who tended to my cuts with kisses and lollipops, who’d sing my favorite songs at the top of her lungs as she cooked, was gone. Instead, all that was left was a shell. A shell that looked and sounded like my mother but was cold, hollow, and empty.
She hadn’t told me at the time why my father left us. She barely acknowledged he’d left at all. One moment, he was there. The next, he was gone. The cloud of dust kicked up by his tires as he tore from the driveway was the last memory I'd ever have of him. The house was stripped of everything that hinted he had ever existed there. It was like my mother thought if she scrubbed hard enough, she could erase him from our lives completely. But there was one thing she could never escape from. I saw it in her eyes every time she looked at me. The heartbreak that overcame her face when she took in mine. Inherited features that would forever remind her of the man who’d torn the heart from her chest and left her to pick up the pieces.
Sometimes, I wondered if I'd done something to cause him to leave. Maybe I took up too much of her time. Maybe I hadn’t been a good enough son. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There were always a thousand maybes, but she finally told me the truthyears later. Well, not so much told than screamed. She stood on the porch of the home we shared with my Stepfather and Laurel, throwing the few possessions I owned into the street.
“You’re just like him.” She had spat. “Just like that pathetic excuse for a man. I won’t let you do to me what he did. I don’t want to ever see your face again.”
She’d changed again when Thomas Benson entered the picture. By then, it had just been my mother and me for several years. Monthly checks arrived from somewhere, but they hadn’t been enough to keep us in the house I’d grown up in any longer, so she'd gotten a job at a large accounting firm in the city. Thomas was a wealthy wannabe congressman, a known playboy, and the son of Frank Benson of Benson, Samuel, and Moon—my mother’s new employer. Within six months of their meeting, he'd proposed to her. Four months later, in a disgustingly outrageous ceremony, they said I do, and I found myself with a new stepfather who seemed to share my mother’s grievances over how much I resembled my father and a stepbrother who…well, he would becomemy everything.
Jonah was two years older than me, with straight blonde hair and sorrow-filled dark green eyes. They were deep and endless, the color of Christmas trees—evergreen—and I was captivated by something I couldn’t quite grasp every time I looked into them. He didn’t like me at first, no one did, but I tried hard to be his friend. He seemed like he needed one. But the more I tried, the more he pulled away.
In the end, my efforts didn’t matter. Three months after the wedding, Thomas hit my mother, and we ran for the hills. My mother filed for divorce faster than you could say the word, and I was free of the pair of them. Or at least, I'd thought I was.
Weeks after Mom and I made our escape, Jonah showed up at our door clutching his ribs, bruises every color of the rainbow littering his chest and side of his boyishly handsome face. To thisday, I have no idea how he found us, but he’d begged my mother to let him stay, to help protect him from the monster his father had turned into in her absence. To my horror, all she'd done was patch him up the best she could and then sent him back, promising she would give an anonymous tip to CPS. She either lied, or the tip was never looked into.
I’d thought about him daily for over a year. So much, in fact, that when I saw him standing in my new middle school cafeteria the following August, I'd been sure I’d imagined it. There was no way he would be attending the same school. But he’d beckoned me over to sit with him at the small table he’d claimed in the back of the room, and we became fast friends after that.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see him—moments in time caught like little movies over the years.
Jonah at thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen…
