Hell on Heels (17 page)

My silence had hit an expiration date, and I exploded.

“That’s your big explanation? That you cheated on me? That you knocked up the girl you cheated on me with and then chose her over me? That’s it?” I was practically yelling now.

He threw his hands in the air. “Would you just shut up for one goddamn minute and let me explain?”

Dean had never yelled, not the boy I remembered anyway, but the man did.

He did so well enough that I shut my mouth.

“So I left. I left in the middle of the night like a little bitch, because I couldn’t tell you what I had done.” He took a step towards me and I took one away from him. “Brooke went into premature labour two weeks later.”

I crossed my arms over my chest like I was protecting my heart from what was coming.

“There were massive complications during labour, and they had to take her for an emergency C-section.” I closed my eyes. “She haemorrhaged on the table and died.”

Jesus Christ.

“I thought I’d done the right thing.” His voice broke a little, and my heart started to hurt for the little girl I’d seen this afternoon. “But now I was a twenty-two year old kid with a kid of his own, and you were about to go to school, and I couldn’t…” My eyes opened when his voice stopped. “I couldn’t burden you with that. It wasn’t the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do would have been to tell me!” I shouted. “I’m sorry about what happened to Brooke, and I’m sorry you went through that, but you abandoned me too, Dean.”

“I know,” he whispered.

I took a step towards him. “No. No, you don’t know. Where were you when Henry died, huh? My world was falling apart, and where the fuck were you?”

I knew I’d landed a hit with that one when he flinched.

Maybe I was a callous bitch, but he deserved it.

“What happened to Brooke is tragic, but you knew her for weeks. You knew Henry since you were eight years old! You knew me! Where the
fuck
were you?”

He put his head in his hands. “I drove out for the funeral.”

I stopped yelling and felt my chest heave.

“I saw you, in that black dress, but I couldn’t do it.”

“You’re a coward,” I told him, the tears rushing down my face. “How dare you make me love you and then leave me?” I cried. “Did you really think so little of me that I wouldn’t be there for you? Even as your friend…”

“I—”

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not going to forgive you just so you can feel better about yourself.”

Somehow as I spoke, I didn’t realize I was taking steps towards him.

“Do you know what it’s like on the days I forget to forget you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Do you?” I screamed, and saw his eyes close.

“No,” he said.

I leaned into his space. “It’s fucking horrible. It’s like being awake while someone cuts your heart from your chest.”

Forgetting was both a blessing and a curse. It knifed you when you were least expecting it.

“Charlie.” His hands settled on my hips, but I was too far-gone to notice.

“I thought I was looking for you in all the men I’d dated—”

He interrupted me, “Baby, don’t.”

“I am not your baby, Dean Porter. I am not your fucking baby.” My heart broke as I yelled at him. “I was wrong. I’d been so fucking wrong. I wasn’t trying to find you in them. I was trying to find me.” I cried black tears. “I was trying to find the part of me that died that year.”

“Please,” he begged me to stop, but I was a runaway train and there was no slowing down.

“That’s why it never works, you know. That’s why sometimes I’m so lonely at night that I have to talk to my dead brother just to feel whole again!” I was wailing now. “I’ve spent nearly a decade chasing men who will never love me back, because I forgot how to love myself. That year broke me.”

He tried to pull my body against his chest, but I pressed my palms into his middle.

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he pleaded with me for understanding. “I loved you. I still love you. I’ve always loved you, Charlie.”

My tears came harder as I took that like a knife to the throat.

“No.” I shook my head. “You don’t just get to say that and make the last ten years go away.”

He pulled me tighter and my arms became trapped between us. “Please forgive me.”

“Show me that your heart riots!” I screamed at the wall of his chest. “Show me that you’ll bleed for something. Show me that you’ll fight like hell for once in your goddamn life.” My head was pounding and it felt foggy from the whiskey. “Show me that I matter. Show me any of that, and maybe I’ll forgive you.”

He looked down at me, fire in his eyes. “I’d do anything for you, Charlie.”

I glared at him like a sinner to a sin. “Then fucking do it before I remember to forget you again!”

His lips came down on mine, hard.

I fought his lips with mine and pushed at his chest with my pinned hands.

He was relentless.

Lips touching. Tongue tasting. Breath hot.

My fight engaged and I poured my pain into him.

I made him feel my agony.

We kissed like enemies before a ceasefire.

I pushed at his jacket and he pulled at mine.

Kissing Dean Porter was like coming up for air after you’d been drowning. I was hopeless to stop it.

We fell together like old memories.

Long-lost lovers with too much to say and no words in which to say them.

His shirt. My sweater.

Our jeans.

It was effortless in the way you just knew the beat of your favourite song.

He took me in a way that both broke me and healed me until we lay sweaty and breathless on my hardwood floor.

I forgot sometimes. For a very brief moment in time, I would forget. I would forget I was broken. I was awarded a proverbial hall pass from my suffering. Then a shadow I wouldn’t recognize would come to pass behind me and I’d remember that not a single soul on Earth could fill the holes in my heart but me.

Sanctity was mine to choose, but wasn’t that the nature of things? Happiness was simply a choice, yet it was one I’d forgotten how to make.

“Charlie.” Dean kissed the bare skin of my back.

“Don’t.” I sat up, reaching for my sweater. “Only my family calls me that, and you lost that privilege years ago.”

My mind was catching up with me and I suddenly felt dirty.

“This was…”

Pulling my sweater over my head, I found my thong and shimmied it up my legs. “This was a mistake. You have to go.”

I stood and tried to avoid the way he sat naked on my floor like he belonged there.

“Are you serious?” The anger in his voice returned.

Picking up his clothes, one-by-one, I started throwing them at him. “Yes. Get out.”

Panic was crawling up my throat and I couldn’t look at him.

“You don’t forgive me.” He stood, stepping into his jeans.

I shook my head. “No.”

“This wasn’t a mistake,” he growled, and I swung around to face him.

“You don’t get it, do you?” I snapped. “You caught it by the handle, Dean, but I caught it by the blade.”

He slid his plaid up his arms. “I’ll still be here, Charlie. Like it or not, Monday to Friday for the next four months, you’ll see me every day.”

I threw his wallet at his chest.

“You find a way to deal with this, and when you do, I’ll still be there.” He shoved the leather into his back pocket and shoved his feet in his boots. “Whenever you get done hurting me back, I’ll
still
be here.”

I said nothing.

Walking to the front door, I yanked it open. “Goodbye, Dean.”

He leaned in to kiss my cheek and I pulled pack, making him wince.

“This isn’t over.”

I slammed the door on him.

I was the worst kind of lover. The kind that could surgically remove themselves from your life without a moment’s notice and no hesitation, leaving you to haemorrhage blood in every place my lips touched.

It was the only part of me I let them keep, the memories.

I severed affection like an infected limb. Sacrificing one for the majority.

I was like all wounded people, ruthless and calculated, with efficiency in self-preservation.

I wasn’t whole.

I was made of borrowed parts, little pieces of those I’d loved along the way that I claimed as my own.

I was patchwork.

“Let go, Charlie bear.”

Closing my eyes, I leaned against the wall. “I’m trying.”

“Forgiveness isn’t weakness.”

“I’m not ready,” I said into my empty apartment.

“You will be.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Eight Weeks Later

“D
on’t you think the water will be cold?” I called out to him as we ran down the porch stairs.

He laughed in the way I knew meant he found me amusing.

“You’re always so scared, Charlie bear.”

I threw my towel at the back of his head. “Am not.”

He ducked. “Are to.”

I ran, but he was always so much faster. Picking up my towel, he waved it around in the air. “Catch me if you can, ya big wuss!” he yelled.

“Give it back, Henry!” I chased him down into the sand.

He whipped the towel at my legs and I screamed in the way only little sisters do. Jumping into the water, he waded out with my towel above his head. “Come and get it then.”

He loved to tease me, to push my buttons.

I dipped one toe into the ocean water and jumped backwards. “It’s too cold for swimming!” I wailed.

“So what?” He shook his head at me, bemused.

I stomped my feet in the hard packed sand. “So I’ll freeze!”

Henry laughed. “It’s just water.”

I frowned but remained standing at the water’s edge. “I don’t want to be cold,” I pouted.

He waded in deeper, up to his ribcage. “You have to live a little,” he told me, shaking his head. “Life’s not that scary, Charlie bear.”

“Are you all right?”

I pulled my gaze from the window and smiled at Beau. “I’m better then all right.”

“Good.” He squeezed the hand he had on my knee and I rested my head on his shoulder.

We were on our fourth date, driving along the Seawall that surrounded Stanley Park. It was too cold at this time of year for anyone to be on the beach, but still I found my memories there.

I missed Henry.

I missed him all the time.

The weeks that had passed had been busy ones. We wrapped up both the Weizmann fundraiser and the party for Caroline Clarke at work. We were now ramping up in preparation for the holidays. Leighton and I had also decided on ten days in Mexico this year, much to Morgan’s dismay, and Kevin decided he’d join us.

We only had to make it through the rest of December first.

I’d seen Dean nearly every workday in passing at my building, but in all the times I saw him, we never spoke. Maybe he was waiting for me to apologize, or maybe he was giving me space to come to terms with everything he’d told me. Maybe I was still too embarrassed about what I’d let happen. Either way, I’d kept my head down and my mouth shut, hoping the problem would solve itself.

We were a war. Not at war, but the very war itself. Two people dancing around each other, armed to the teeth and never knowing when the other would stumble across a landmine and blow it all to shit.

Yes. Dean and I were unfinished business, no doubt.

That aside, the man next to me, I continued to grow fonder of. Beau never ceased to amaze me. We’d been to dinner at the revolving restaurant on our second date, and he’d taken me to see the Vancouver Canucks play the Detroit Red Wings at Rogers Arena on our third date.

Each time together, he made me feel special, cherished, and like I was normal.

He didn’t see a damaged person when he looked at me.

Though sometimes, like tonight, I’d find myself thinking of Maverick. He seemed to have taken a hiatus from my dates with Beau. I hadn’t seen him since that night at the theatre, and it had always been Jason on protective detail ever since. I sometimes wondered where he was, or if he’d been there and I simply hadn’t noticed.

It perplexed me why it mattered, but often I tried not to examine those thoughts too closely.

“Did you enjoy the lights?”

I felt his head lay down to rest on top of mine. I smiled into the dark interior of the town car. “They were beautiful. I had a wonderful time.”

Every year, as Christmas approached, the train in Stanley Park would host the Bright Lights. It was romantic, although the snow had yet to fall and it was unlike any date we’d shared thus far. It seemed more intimate. We sat curled up on the train with a blanket in our shared laps and hot chocolate in our hands, while the train took us through the park showcasing some of the most exquisite Christmas light displays in all of Vancouver.

I’d loved it, but more so, I loved experiencing it with Beau. I felt at home with him in a way I never had before, but like I said, Beau was easy to like.

“Never as beautiful as you,” he whispered, and my heart flipped in that happy way it tended to do when I was around him.