The Storm Inside (26 page)

“No, we’re bad for each other.”

“How? Name one way I’m bad for you... No? Can’t name anything can you? I help you study, I walk with you to class when you don’t want to go, I make you happy… how can you fucking say I’m bad for you?”

“I don’t know.” I said. “But I know I’m bad for you.”

She started crying at that point and I knew something was terribly wrong—and that thing was me.

“How are you bad for me? By making me awesome? I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life, Jake. You make me feel amazing. Like I’m special… how can you say you’re bad for me?”

She was kind of hyperventilating at that point and I knew I should hug her or something. That was what I wanted to do, but my brain wouldn’t let me. It was at war. My reality was splitting in two.

I knew my dad was right. I was worthless and unlovable. But here Eve was, crying and I knew—I knew deep down inside—she loved me. And I loved her.

How could both things be right?

Or maybe they were both in my head. Maybe it was all made up. Maybe the shit my dad was selling me was a bunch of bull and maybe Eve’s tears were the silly tears of a girl who only thought she was in love. But if they were both fake, if I had to choose to live in one false reality… well I was choosing Eve every time.

At least with her, love seemed like a good thing. With her I felt like I might be more than a useless pile of bones. Even if she broke up with me and left me… I still think I’d rather live in that world than the one my father gave me.

But I still wasn’t sure what to think. I had no fucking clue what was real and what was fake. I had no clue who to trust. I certainly couldn’t fucking trust myself. But I knew I couldn’t walk away from Eve. I just couldn’t. The idea of insisting we break up and walk out of that dorm room… I’d rather die.

So I said, “Ok.”

And she threw herself around me sobbing happy tears. “Don’t scare me like that again, Jake Spencer!” she said. “Don’t you ever tell me you don’t love me or that we aren’t good for each other. It’s a fucking lie!”

But I did scare her again. I left her. And I can barely live with myself for that.

I’d gone over that night in my head a thousand times in the years since. It was the first night I’d taken a stand in my life. I’d believed in us so strongly from so early on, but it hadn’t been enough. I’d analyzed that choice from every angle, wondering if there was a flaw in me. Why had I chosen my relationship with Jake to take a stand on? It was interesting to realize Jake’s side. I don’t think I’d ever really and truly understood how confused he was. It wasn’t in my toolkit to understand brainwashing made a person incapable of discerning reality from fantasy.

I sat in the middle of my giant bed with the journal open to the last page. The bed was neatly made, the room was tidy, there was complete silence. I knew Jake would be home any minute.

I finally heard the sound of the Bronco pulling up outside. The doors slamming and Jake’s footsteps on the stairs, “Hey darlin’, I’m home!”

He sounded so happy.

I folded my hands in my lap and quietly waited to ruin his night.

Chapter 19

The minute he walked into my room his eyes fell on the journal and he took a deep breath, his eyes steeling against the emotions that immediately boiled up inside him.

“Hey,” he said tightly, throwing his bag on the ground near the dresser. “I wondered if you were going to read that while I was gone.” He kicked off his shoes and loosened his tie, unbuttoning his cuffs and emptying his pockets onto the dresser. “I take it you have some questions.”

I took a deep breath and dove right in, “I am in awe of you, Jake Spencer.”

He snapped around surprised, his green eyes flashing in his handsome face, “Excuse me?”

“You lived in a bathroom for a month? He made you live on nothing but rice for three weeks? You had no real friends. He beat you like a dog, used you as a punching bag during his drunken rages, blamed you for everything that went wrong. He brainwashed you. And yet here you are…”

All the color left Jake’s face and he stood completely motionless, one hand leaned on the dresser. I suspect it was holding him up because he looked completely lost for a moment.

I kept going, “You should be broken. Anyone else would have folded under abuse like that, Jake. The fact that you are alive right now is remarkable. You could have turned to drugs or alcohol or any number of things to help you survive—but you didn’t. And instead you somehow found a way to get away from it, put it in your past, and become this remarkable person. You amaze me.”

He still didn’t move, just a statue standing across the room from me. After a moment he finally took a deep breath and eased back into the dresser, his eyes focusing on mine, “I didn’t have a choice.”

I smiled. “No, you did. You just didn’t accept defeat as a viable option. It takes an enormous amount of courage to change your life. And you didn’t just try Jake—you
conquered
. You are amazing, and I don’t just mean your work or your body. I mean you as a person. You’re happy, you’re positive and hopeful. It’s like the past doesn’t exist.”

He shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “It doesn’t, not anymore. It’s like a fairytale or a nightmare, I guess. I know it was my life, but I’ve dealt with it, put it in the past, and it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“No?”

He grimaced, “Look Eve, the way I see it, it was a different person who lived that life. By dealing with it all and moving past it, I can honestly say it has nothing to do with the man standing in front of you. All that matters is now and where we go from here. I know what I want my life to look like. I want to create good things in this world to help replace all the bad things I know are out there. I think a part of me believes if I do enough, then the bad will start to suffocate.”

“How did you do it? He had you so fucked in the head… how did you learn to socialize and… I don’t know,
function
?”

He laughed and rubbed his hands together, massaging his hands alternately as he spoke, “You know how I was… sometimes I was fine, I got it, I faked it, it was good enough for college. But once I snapped and left… I had to actually put in the work. It was like going to college all over again, except it wasn’t for math and English, it was for manners and conversation. I got lessons from my therapist and practiced. It took years to get it right. What you learned as a child and practiced as a teen, I learned over the last ten years. I can honestly say I really didn’t know how to make friends, sit down and hang out, be a good employee. Shit like that was all fake up until my therapist actually put me on a regimen.”

I had the journal laid open to the entry where Jake talked about graduation night. He strode across the room, all male confidence and completely different from the boy he talked about on these pages, and stretched out across the bed. He picked up the journal and looked over the page in question.

“Everything changed that night,” he murmured. “I had been standing with one foot in each reality up until that point. I was too afraid to walk completely away from my dad. But when he started in on me, and you were there watching… well, I had to make a choice. I had to pick a life. I had to either be the kid my dad trained me to be, live in his world and let him treat me like shit. Or I needed to take a stand. I needed to walk away and never look back.” He closed the book and tossed it to the side. “Eve, you made that choice easy. What life was my dad offering me? I had just spent four years with you, seeing a whole different world. I knew it was out there. I think he knew it, too. That once I started fighting back I wasn’t going to stop until he let me go. That was why it was so bad. There was no way I was letting him anywhere near you, and he wasn’t willing to let me go.”

I wiggled down on the bed until I was looking up at him from my back. He smiled sadly and ran his hand down my cheek, cupping my face. I still wished I could just take away all his pain—absorb it somehow so all he had left inside was goodness. “I love you, Jake.”

“And I’m grateful for that every day.” He dipped down and gently kissed me. “The past doesn’t exist, only here and now.”

I let him roll on top of me, his hips rocking into mine as I spread my legs and wrapped my arms around his neck. He was so sure the past didn’t matter anymore.

I, however, was not convinced.

***

It was a work night, but we didn’t care. We couldn’t stop talking. We talked through sex, which was slow and sexy, but made even slower by every pause to talk. Then we moved to the shower and talked as we washed each other clean.

Jake stopped and stared at me. “What?” I asked. He was looking past me, thinking about something that was making him smile.

“I’m not a talker,” he said scrunching up his brow and shaking his head in confusion. “I mean, I
talk
. But I don’t just sit around talking about the universe… unless I’m with you.” He chuckled as he pulled a white t-shirt over his head and a pair of boxer briefs over his ass. “When we get like this, I feel like I could just talk all night. It’s so…
weird.
”

I laughed but I knew exactly what he meant. This was the ‘best friends’ side of us. There was no one else I’d rather sit around talking about the universe with. We could talk about nothing or everything. I just wanted to hear him talk.

I reached into the same drawer and pulled out an identical white t-shirt. Jake basically lived here: he had a dresser full of clothes, a sizeable section of my closet, he slept here every night. And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t lived together in the past. Jake and I lived together for nearly three years in college. Something was holding me back. There was something specific that felt like a wall between Jake and forever.

“What about your father?” I asked.

Jake was still standing right beside me. He was frozen; the muscles in his body all stiffening. “He’s not an issue, we’ve talked about this babe.”

I raised my eyebrow and looked at him skeptically, “Seriously?”

His lips turned down in a grimace, “He is not an issue,” he repeated.

“He’s still alive and living in the same house with your mom. He’s an issue, Jake.”

“He is not an issue because I say he isn’t an issue. He will never in any way be a part of my life ever again. I have a private investigator on my payroll whose sole job—his one and only responsibility— is to keep tabs on my father.”

Whoa.
Talk about a news flash. “What if he just shows up?”

“I will send him away.” Jake said firmly.

“When was the last time you spoke with him?” I asked, needing to know these answers. Yes, it was Jake’s life and Jake’s demons, but they affected my life completely.

“Graduation night.”

That couldn’t be healthy. “You haven’t spoken to him since, yet you claim he won’t bother you?”

“He’s been appropriately warned. I have no intention of ever speaking to him ever again.”

I swallowed, the panic growing inside me, “But what if he does. We live miles apart. There is a very good chance…”

Jake stared at me, but he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking through me. “If he does, it will be fine, Eve.
I
will be fine.” His eyes finally focused back on me. He was doing that thing where he looked into my soul. I could feel him inside me, connecting with me on a completely different level.

But my mind was running wild with a thousand scenarios that did not end in
fine.
I knew somewhere in the back of my head I was worried Jake Sr. would pop up one day, as angry and horrible as ever, and ruin everything. One bad night with Jake’s father had changed the course of a decade. I didn’t want to take a chance on him ruining anything else in our lives. “When I told you about Sebastian I lost you for a couple of weeks,” I finally said.

Jake looked confused for a moment and I expected him to agree with me. But that wasn’t what happened. “That was my first real world test, and I am ashamed to say I did not perform to my expectations.” He cocked his head and smiled at me, brushing my damp hair back behind my ear. The gentle contact of his fingertips tingled against my skin. “I have all the tools and I know how to use them, but Sebastian was the first time I’d had to actually do it. I couldn’t get my tools out fast enough and my insecurities got a chance to take over. I fell back on bad habits to survive.” His eyes focused on me and their intensity sent a shiver through me. “I’ve evaluated what happened and now that I’ve lived through it, it will not happen again. I won’t let it happen again.”

“Not even with your father? Don’t you think that’s expecting a bit much out of yourself?”

He shook his head and cupped my chin, moving his body closer to mine so that we were almost touching. “No, I really do believe I’ll be fine if I’m ever forced to see my father and I’ll tell you why…” he paused, waiting for my nod. “I have you. And I’m not saying that to put any responsibility or pressure on you. It’s a simple fact. You make me stronger. I think Sebastian was a bigger mountain for me to climb than my father for that specific reason. Jake Sr. doesn’t have the power to crush my world anymore; I took that away from him. He’s just a shitty asshole who ruined the first thirty years of my life because he couldn’t deal with his own problems. He means nothing to me anymore. Despite him, I have everything I ever wanted and I worked hard for it. Even if it were all stripped away from me tomorrow, I know I have that power within me to recreate it. But if I didn’t have
you
to share it with, it wouldn’t have meaning. You give my world meaning, Eve. My father is a footnote; he’s something I can deal with. But anything that might take you away from me—those are the things that can hurt me.”