I didn’t respond for a very long time, I held my peace the entire way home.
My voice broke through the tension coated silence when he slowed on the small road between our houses. “I don’t know what to tell you, Jordan, or what you want from me. I tried to give you everything you could need, I really tried. Up until the fight with Hunter, I would have forgiven you anything. Because I knew you were hurting.” I took a shaky breath as he parked the truck. “After what you said to me, I can’t.”
He grabbed my hand before I could escape. “When I saw you with him, something snapped. I was so damned angry, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to hurt him because I couldn’t hurt you. I couldn’t make you feel like I felt in that moment.”
“But you did hurt me.”
“I know, and I’m so damn sorry.” He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, knocking the hat back off his head. “I’ve fucked up a lot of shit in my life, but that’s the one thing I wish I could take back. I thought that nothing could be worse than Devin dying until I lost you.”
I opened the door to the truck and took a deep breath. “I feel like all my insides have been ripped outside of my body and then you ran them right over. I can’t make sense of that, I don’t know where we go now. I need time to think about it, to work it all out. I can’t do that when you’re so close.” Shakily, I let my breath out in a rush. “I can’t do that if you don’t let me breathe. When you talk to me, when you touch me, when you’re close to me? Nothing makes sense anymore.”
I slid from the truck but stopped short of closing the door when I saw the quiet anxiety on his handsome face.
“Is this it?” he asked with a voice laced with trepidation and sorrow.
“I don’t know.” It was the only answer I had…and no answer at all.
****
I didn’t fall immediately to sleep, and I couldn’t blame it on the sunlight filtering through my curtains. It was hard to sleep when your soul was being torn in half. The bitter part of me said I needed to walk away. He’d hurt me, he would hurt me again. It was spite and it made me feel small and petty.
That part of me wanted to hurt him, just as he’d hurt me. It was the same part of me that had pitted him against Aiden that morning at the shop. I loathed the vengeful part of myself more than any other.
The softer side of me loved him and wanted nothing more than to run into his arms, hold him and never let him go. Jordan was the only man I’d ever truly wanted, the only man I could imagine spending my entire life with. But, he’d hurt me badly. Could I manage to forgive him, well and truly?
When the front door closed almost too quietly, I sat up from bed and poked my head out of my bedroom door.
“Hey,” I called quietly to Breanna as she tiptoed down the other end of the hall.
She spun on her heels and whispered conspiratorially, her eyes more than a little wild. “When did you get home?”
“Earlier than you.” I didn’t bother whispering. “Where’d you go?”
“Ssh.” She tiptoed into my room and shut the door behind her. “Don’t wake Mom and Dad. Mom always asks a lot of questions when I stay out all night.”
“She never asks me questions.” I crawled back onto my bed.
“Yeah, but you’ve only done it a few times.” She tossed herself onto her back beside me. “And when you do, you’re always with Jordan.”
“True.” I picked at the comforter, but curiosity got the best of me, and I used Breanna’s life as a distraction from my own. “Where’d you go when I left?”
“Out,” was her noncommittal response. She wasn’t wearing the jeans and tee she’d been wearing when I left her at the race spot.
“Out where?” I tugged at the hem of her short black skirt.
“Out with friends, stop asking questions.” She rolled her eyes. When I gave her a pointed stare, she sighed. “I’m not like you and Aiden. I can’t sit around and do the same old things all the time. It gets boring. So, I go out. New people, different scene, different things. If I didn’t I’d probably suffocate or shrivel up like an old prune.” She was silent for so long after that I figured she was asleep. Until she spoke again. “Devin used to go with me sometimes.”
I wasn’t, Mom. I wasn’t going to push. It wasn’t my place to do so. We were different people, grieving in our own way. While Breanna was barely out of high school, she was as much an adult as I was. I reached out and squeezed her hand.
“Now, back to more important things.” Breanna yawned. “What happened with Jordan? We all sort of tripped out when y’all left like that. If it had been
anyone else, I think Aiden might have driven all over the county to find you.”
“I don’t even think we were in the county for long.”
“Really?” Her interest piqued now, Breanna rolled to her side and propped up on her elbow.
It was my turn to fling myself back, I landed on my pillows with a poof. “We drove, for a long time. He let me make a quasi-pass in the truck.”
“Bad ass, but not as important as what happened before that.” She plucked a piece of lint from the covers.
“Bree…you don’t have to pretend you want to know.”
She looked genuinely hurt but soldiered on. “I deserved that. The truth is, I do care. I hate seeing you both like you’ve been.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, nothing really happened.” I stared at the ceiling, contemplated how much I should tell her. “He wants me back.”
“What do you want?” She didn’t voice an opinion on the matter. I was grateful for that.
“I don’t know.” This time when I laughed Breanna joined me. “I really don’t.”
“I’m not going to ask if you love him because you can’t say you don’t know. I’m not going to compare your relationship with Jordan with anyone else’s. I’m not going to tell you what I think you should do. What am I going to tell you is that—I wasn’t angry that you slept with Jordan. Or because of Devin.”
She was so sad and looked so lost, I reached out again and took her hand.
“It took me a long time to figure out what I was] mad at. I was angry because I thought I was losing you. Because I knew that the moment the two of you hooked up…nobody else would matter as much.”
“Bree—”
“No, hear me out.” She cut me off with a palm in my face as she sat up on the bed. “I can see it in your eyes now. I see it in his eyes every time he looks at you. You two love each other so completely that the rest of us have to rush to keep up, to hold onto you both.”
I hadn’t seen my sister this sincere in my entire
life.
“Love like that is rare, it won’t go away. You and
Jordan need each other, you always have. Sure, he said and did some things that hurt you. Sure, you did some things that hurt him too. Does that mean you sit back and let that love die? Think about it, okay?”