A Perfect Mess (24 page)

“Did this make you cry?”

I couldn’t say anything. My throat was clogged with tears, old memories and secrets. I was afraid of what would happen when I told, and afraid that if I didn’t, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror again or allow myself to enjoy Booker’s company.

“Aubree? What’s wrong, sugar?”

I was so physically tired, emotionally exhausted, tired of feeling out of control. The denial of my own feelings built a pressure in my chest that grew and grew, like an inflating balloon. It crowded against my lungs, squeezed my heart, closed off my throat, pushed hard at the back of my eyes.

“I have to tell you something.”

Please don’t hate me.

“Okay.” He rocked me and murmured to me. I ached, feeling so raw inside.

I drew a shuddering breath. “Remember, you asked about the bleacher story, but I refused to tell you?”

“Yes. I didn’t press you. I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.”

“I don’t know if I will ever be ready.”

“Tell me, sugar. It can’t be that bad.” His voice was so soft and tender.

“I lost my bracelet behind the bleachers. One my aunt gave me. I had to go back. It was the night before the last big game in the fall.”

He walked over and got me some tissues and I blotted at my eyes and blew my nose.

“The game with Fairmont?” His voice was hushed.

“Yes.”

He went pale. “You saw me. That day that I called Langston out?”

I nodded.

“You saw me get my ass kicked?”

He stepped back away from me, his hands going into his hair, his face stricken.

“I saw you stand up to them with honor and integrity. It was two against one, Booker, and I know. I
know
you could have had your brothers backing you up, but you didn’t.”

“You heard what Langston said.”

“Yes. I heard it all.”

He groaned. “But you left after the fight, right?” He reached out and clasped my upper arms, his eyes filled with a sick dread. “Tell me you left after the fight.”

“No.”

#

Booker

“Oh shit. No!” I stepped back, humiliation rushing through me with a vile kind of heat. I stared at her dumbfounded. All these years she’d known how I felt about her. All this time. “You saw me….”

“Cry?”

I closed my eyes. She was being polite. I hadn’t cried. I had
lost
my shit, sobbed like my world was ending, like that day when I’d finally realized my father didn’t want me and burned the piano. For a moment, I’d let Langston’s words in. Let them rip at my heart and I’d lost it. In physical and mental pain, I’d lost it.

Because there was never a way to get around it.

This
girl always got to me, and always would.

“Why? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Lots of reasons. I was overcome, not just by your emotions, but by my own. And together they terrified me. I was headed to college with so many expectations, responsibilities, and obligations. I didn’t think I had time for you. I’m not proud to say it, but social status played a part in it. My studies, too. My terrible need to be perfect. I was afraid the feelings you had for me were stronger than I could cope with. No one saw you but me. No one saw me at all.”

I thought that my heart was going to shatter, it hurt so badly. She hadn’t chosen me. She chose silence and her need to be the girl most likely to succeed. “I’m such a fool,” I whispered.

“No, Booker. I’m the one who’s a fool. I never said anything to anyone, not even River Pearl and Verity, but they knew something had happened there and it involved you. But I never forgot what you said to Damien Langston, and I trusted that night, on Wild Magnolia Road, that you wouldn’t just help, but that you would also keep my secret and take it to the grave.”

I backed up another step. The pain sliced through me. “It’s true. I would have done anything for you.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but I bolted. I went out the front door, into the pouring rain. Not sure which way to run. She called my name and I heard the anguish, but I couldn’t stop. The humiliation and pain twisting inside me were like something poisonous and alive that would devour me if I didn’t move.

I just took off without a shirt, without shoes. The rough road biting into the soles of my feet. I ran blindly until I tripped and I stayed there on my hands and knees. After a few moments, I sat back on my heels, bent my head and dragged my hand across my eyes, then inhaled raggedly. A horrible feeling started to unfold in me, a feeling that torpedoed my anger and left me emotionally suspended. Ugly pieces falling into place with numbing clarity, and I shook from head to toe.

Oh, fuck. Oh fuck, no.
I thrust my hands into my hair, trying to process the awful realization. Aubree was just like my father. If it hadn’t been for the fact that her aunt was injured, she would never have come back home. I’d already bared my soul to her. She already had my heart and I’d given it up freely. The pedestal that I had placed her on cracked and crumbled. The Aubree I thought I knew, nothing but tattered and broken dreams. Raking my dripping hair back from my face, I tried to make my mind focus while shock drained the warmth from me.

Then I realized where I was. This was where we used to live. The place where I’d burned the piano. My rib cage expanded and contracted. Something broke loose in me. My vision blurred, my breathing harsh and erratic. The smell of charred wood lodged in my nostrils. And that pain, the pain I had buried all those years ago, came thundering out of the night, trampling me. An anguished sob rose out of me as that pain rumbled around inside looking for escape. Awash with a whole storm of emotion, I uttered a broken cry. A tremor coursed through me and I buried my face in my hands. I loved her, but was powerless to stop her, just like I had been powerless to stop my father. I needed her, and fear like I had never known wracked me. After what we had shared, it hurt ten times worse.

She’d let me believe what Langston had said was true. For years.

I had to move again. Escape the pain. I got up and ran. When the light registered and a house loomed in front of me, I knew why I had come here. I banged on the door and the outside light came on.

When my ma opened the door, she took one look at me and hauled me inside. She dragged me to the bathroom, where I stood shivering, more from the shock of hearing that Aubree had chosen to let me pine for her instead of talking to me or giving me some kind of closure. It felt like my dad all over again.

It fucking
hurt,
like needles stabbing into my gut.

My brain scrambled to get away from it, but there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. It twisted inside me in one long unending, annihilating pain.

Ma rubbed me down with a towel and then draped a blanket over my shoulders. I remember what it had been like that day I had come home after getting double-teamed by the Langston brothers. I had refused to say who had beat me up, and my brothers were pissed. But later, after my mother made them leave, she sat me down and gave me some hot cocoa. She prodded and poked, and the whole story about Aubree Walker came pouring out of me. She knew every embarrassing emotion, every altercation, every single thing. After that day, we never talked about Aubree expect for the day I gave her the tickets to the Greek Isles.

“Come into the kitchen, Booker,” she said, her voice soothing. I followed her in there and she put the kettle on the stove.

“I don’t think hot cocoa is going to fix this.” My voice sounded dead.

The worry deepened on my mother’s face. “What happened, puddin’?”

She hadn’t called me that since I was little. I told her everything, fighting to keep my emotions under control. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

“I think this is a good thing.”

My jaw dropped. “What?” I said. “She destroyed me, Ma.”

“I know. But Booker, you like to reframe pain instead of accepting it. You don’t deal with the negative. You just find it a learning experience and move on. You need a relationship with a girl like Aubree, who isn’t perfect, even though she desperately wants to be. No one can be perfect. Surface relationships are much easier than those that demand emotional involvement, because there is so much more at stake. You’ve idealized her, and what you have now…that’s not the picture you’re used to looking at. Take some time to think about this. If this girl means as much to you as I think she does, she deserves to have you hear her out.”

“How do you know that I didn’t?”

“Because I know you. You avoid pain.”

“I burned that piano. I thought it would help. It allowed me to understand that things like pianos shouldn’t have that much meaning or that much power over me.”

She nodded. “Feeling things makes you human, Booker. Plain and simple. You harbored the hope that your father would come back. I should have taken you away from here, but if I had...”

“He might not have been able to find us.”

“Yes. I’m not proud of that. I’m not making excuses for him. He believed his own reputation and that there was nothing that he could do to change it. I had family ties here, too. People who helped and supported me to raise triplets on my own.”

“I’ll take time to think about this, but I think it might be better if she and I part ways.”

“Why? Because she was young and scared? Because she didn’t know how to deal with a boy who had these strong feelings for her?”

“No, because like father, like son.”

“Oh, Booker. You’re nothing like your father.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes while she fixed the hot cocoa.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

My mother gave me a ride home. By then the rain had stopped and everything sparkled in the car’s headlights. I half hoped Aubree would be there, half hoped she wouldn’t. When I got there, her car was gone. I thanked my ma and went inside. Folded neatly on the piano bench was my t-shirt.

A lead weight sank in my chest. She’d let me continue believing that what Langston had said was true. She’d let me die a little each day while Langston smirked at me in the halls.

I picked it up. It still smelled like her. I hurled it across the room.

Chapter Twelve

Aubree

I let myself into the house, moving on autopilot. I was afraid of what would happen if I stopped. It was dark, but the fire was going, and when I glanced in, Aunt Lottie and Sheriff Dalton were dancing to music only they could hear. Not wishing to disturb them or embarrass my aunt, I tiptoed up the stairs, trying with all my might to contain the guilt and the knowledge of what I had done, knowing I had just lost the best thing that ever happened to me. I let myself into my room.

I ran a bath. I was so cold. But the cold felt familiar to me. I equated it with the numbness that acted as a layer of protection around my heart. I had thought Booker was different. I had hoped he would understand and accept my flaws, but I had been wrong. I’d lost him because of it. Lost him as surely as my heart was breaking. And I had no one to blame but myself. My need to be perfect and my need to put that above anything else had destroyed what we might have discovered in each other.

After dumping in a generous dollop of bubble bath and letting the water foam up, I turned off the water and sank down into it. Numbness had been my friend. If I couldn’t feel, couldn’t hurt anymore, maybe it would get better.

But when I closed my eyes, Booker’s stricken face was burned into my retinas. The way his face had looked made me hurt like little else ever had. I folded my arms tightly across my abdomen, the knots of pain and emptiness and guilt tightening into a sick mess inside me. I leaned back against the porcelain, not even trying to contain the pain. Letting it flow and engulf me was all about being a grownup, and Booker deserved this…I owed it to him to feel this agony. I was the one who had screwed up. The dreadful hollowness in my stomach pulled me forward as I covered my face with my hands and a ragged sob broke from me. The floodgates opened, and I cried for everything—for my ignorance, for my carelessness, but mostly I sobbed because I wanted what Booker and I had begun to build. The real part of it
was
real. I wanted him…wanted him.

I had been young, and my fear had been strong back then. But I had known even then that just standing there watching and doing nothing was wrong. And it had eaten at me every day since then. I’d had no idea, really, who he was. I only knew what he had done for me.