Shredded

Chapter 27 Z

I must have fallen asleep, because it’s pitch dark in my room when I jolt awake, my heart pounding and a nightmare running through my head.

“It’s okay. You’re okay.” A soft hand strokes my hair, cups my cheek, and I figure I must still be dreaming. Except the fingers playing with my hair feel pretty damn real. They’re too cold to be anything else.

I force my eyes open, and there she is, sitting next to the bed. Ophelia. “You came.”

She nods, bites her lip. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“Yeah,” she tells me. “I do.”

“No.” I reach out to her with my uninjured hand. “You don’t. I understood.”

“Did you? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I barely understand myself.”

“Remi—”

“This isn’t about Remi,” she tells me forcefully. “This is about me and you. He has no business being in here with us.”

“That’s not true,” I tell her, squeezing her hand. “I get it. He’s your past—”

“And you’re my future.”

I freeze, drop my eyes from hers. It feels like I’ve waited my whole life to hear those four words, yet I’ve only known Ophelia a few weeks.

“You don’t believe me,” she says.

“It’s not that.”

“Sure it is. That’s the second thing this is all about. The injuries. The daredevil stuff. You don’t think you have a future, and even if you do, you don’t think you deserve to have anyone of your own in that future.”

“That’s not true.”

“Really?” She holds my eyes with her own, and tonight I’m staring into a color I’ve never seen before. A cool, clear jade that is as resolute as it is beautiful. “Prove it.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, prove it.”

“How am I even supposed to do that?” I gesture to the hospital bed and my injured shoulder even as my heart starts to pound hard against my ribs.

“You know very well how.”

Panic wells up inside me as I finally get what she’s asking. No, what she’s demanding. “You don’t understand—”

“You’re right. I don’t. So make me understand.”

I shake my head. “It’s not that easy.” I can’t tell her. I can’t say the words.

“Will it help if I tell you I already know?”

Fuck. “Do you?”

She nods. “Yes.”

Double fuck. “Cam?”

“No. Your friends would never betray your confidence like that.”

“Then how?”

She sighs, rests her head on the railing on the side of my bed. I take advantage of her position to run my fingers through her curls. Part of me thinks she’s going to move her head away, that she won’t want me to touch her now that she knows just what a fuck-up I am, but she doesn’t. She just sits there and lets me pet her for as long as I want. I can’t believe how good it feels just to touch her even as what little is left of my world falls down around me.

“I came to the hospital this afternoon, got here right after you did.”

“I didn’t know that. They said—”

“Shh.” She rests gentle fingers against my lips. “I didn’t stay. I was … I was pretty messed up. And I’m sorry about that. Sorry you had to go through all that without me.”

“It’s fine. I don’t expect—”

“See, that’s the thing. You don’t even get how awful that is. How terrible it is that you don’t expect anyone to be there for you, ever. That you don’t think you deserve it. And I just reinforced that belief this afternoon. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for being such a selfish bitch.”

“I don’t need your apology, Ophelia. And I don’t need your pity.” Pity is the last thing I want from her.

“Is that what you think this is? Really? Pity?”

“What the hell else would it be?” Suddenly I’m angry. Really angry, and I don’t even know why. “You walked out because of what I did, and now, suddenly, you find out about my past and you’re back. What is that if it isn’t pity?”

“Understanding. Empathy. Love. I get that you don’t recognize them, since it seems no one has ever really given them to you before.”

I shake my head. “That’s not true. You said you loved me before, and you still …”

“I still walked away. I know. But trust me when I say I had to get some things straight in my head. If I’d come in earlier, when I was so messed up, it wouldn’t have gone well for either one of us. I would have hurt you more—”

“You think I give a shit? Pain I can take.” I push myself up to a sitting position, refusing to have this conversation lounging around like an invalid no matter how much my shoulder hurts. “I’m a fucking expert at taking that shit. But you walking away to protect me? That’s not okay. If you’re messed up, you come to me. If you’re hurt, you talk to me. You let me help you—”

“Why should I?”

Excuse me? “What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means you don’t come to me when you’re messed up. You don’t talk to me. You let me find out about the past that is still haunting you from old newspaper articles.” She’s right in my face now, her sweetness gone as quickly as it came. “Why the hell should I trust you with my mindfucks if you don’t trust me with yours?”

I flop back against the bed, then regret it when my currently numb shoulder starts to throb. Damn it. I walked right into that one. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same and you know it, or you wouldn’t be lying there pouting right now.”

“I don’t pout.”

“Sorry. It’s just that that brooding expression looks an awful lot like pouting from here.”

I glare at her, and she glares back like the total badass she is. God, it’s sexy. And God, do I love her.

It’s that thought more than any other that gets me talking. Because I do love her and I don’t want to lose her like I’ve lost almost everything else in my life. I didn’t think she’d stick if she knew, but here she is. She knows everything and she’s sitting right here across from me, all but daring me to try to cut her out of my life again.

I wouldn’t even know how to try. Still, it’s not nearly as easy to talk to her as I wish it was. I’ve locked this shit down deep for eleven years. Spewing it back out now feels about like I imagine swallowing razor blades would.

“Her name was April.” I finally manage to get the first sentence out, then I close my eyes, rest my head back against the bed. “My sister. She was seven years old when she was—” My voice breaks when I try to say it, so I clear my throat. Try to start again.

“When she was kidnapped and murdered.” Ophelia says it for me, her voice strong and steady as she gives voice to the words I’ve never been able to say.

“Yes.” I clutch her hand in mine. “My dad had a business call, and he thought we were making too much noise—thought I was making too much noise—so he sent us to the park down the street for an hour. Told me I was in charge, which I totally rubbed her nose in like the obnoxious older brother I was.

“For a long time it was fine. We played on the jungle gym, ran around, all that stuff. But then I had to pee, so I told her to wait by the water fountains next to the bathroom and I would be right back. I made her promise not to go anywhere, but she was only seven, and …

“I was only in there a couple of minutes. Two. Maybe three. But when I got back, she was gone. At first I thought she was hiding from me, so I looked for her. And I got madder and madder the longer I looked. I told her—I called to her that I gave up a bunch of times, but she never came out.

“Finally my dad came looking for us, and when he realized she wasn’t there, he flipped out. Screamed at me for being stupid. For not understanding. And then he called the police and they came and they talked to me. For a long time I was the number one suspect. They thought I’d hurt April and then hidden her body somewhere. My parents never said it, but I think they thought so, too.”

Hot tears leak from the corner of my eyes at that admission, and I turn my face away, not wanting Ophelia to see what a pussy I really am. That’s why I never talk about this, never even think about this. Because I’m too fucking weak to handle it.

Ophelia leans over, brushes kisses over the tear tracks on my face. “It’s okay, baby,” she tells me. “You don’t ever have to be embarrassed in front of me. Ever. For any reason.”

“I would never hurt—”

“I know. I know.” She squeezes my hand.

I nod, then continue, because if I don’t say it now, I know I never will. “They found her six weeks later, about a hundred miles away. She’d been—He raped her. That bastard raped and murdered a seven-year-old little girl and then threw her away like she was garbage. Like she was nothing.

“And she wasn’t. She was everything. She was smart and silly and she told the most awful knock-knock jokes in the whole world. It used to drive me crazy having to listen to those ridiculous punch lines all the time.” My voice breaks again. “She wore ribbons in her shoes instead of shoelaces, and always matched them to the bows in her hair. She—” My voice fails altogether, and this time Ophelia doesn’t just rub me comfortingly. She actually climbs into the bed with me, snuggles in against my uninjured side.

“I think I would have liked her.”

I run my fingers through her hair, loving the sweet peach scent of her. “You would have loved her. She was sassy, just like you.”

“You think I’m sassy?”

“Baby, I was trying to be polite. I think you’re a lot more than sassy.”

She laughs. “I don’t know if I should be insulted or not.”

“Never.” I want to kiss her, but my shoulder makes it difficult to move around, so I settle for squeezing her more tightly against me. “I think you’re amazing.”

She squeezes back. “I think you’re pretty amazing, too.” She waits for a minute or two, just lying there against me, before she asks, “What about your mom?”

“Fuck. You really are ripping open every fucking wound I’ve got.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t find anything on her in the paper, so—”

“My mom killed herself exactly one year after my sister disappeared. She climbed into the bathtub and slit her wrists while my dad was on a business trip. I found her when I got home from school.”

“Jesus Christ, Z.”

I don’t say anything else. Neither does she. At least not for a while. There doesn’t seem to be anything to say.

Finally, when I can’t take the silence any longer, I tell her, “I’m sorry about the competition. It was a stupid thing to do.”

She nods, doesn’t even pretend to disagree. In fact, she doesn’t say anything else for a long time, so long that I think she might have fallen asleep. I’m starting to drift myself, high on painkillers, when she whispers, “It wasn’t your fault.”

Suddenly I’m wide awake again. “Don’t,” I tell her.

“Why not? Somebody has to. What happened to April wasn’t your fault. It just happened, Z. The way terrible shit sometimes happens. There are all kinds of psychos in the world. You aren’t responsible for what they do.”

“My mother—”

“Your mother was lost. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine how devastating April’s death was to her. She was lost and sad and miserable after April and she made a selfish, selfish decision. She let herself drown in the pain. That’s all. Still not your fault.”

“If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom—”

“If you hadn’t gone to the bathroom, that bastard might have gotten you, too. Then you’d be dead right along with April. Is that what you really want?”

“I wish it had been me,” I whisper, voicing the words I’ve never dared to say out loud before. The words that have been my mantra, the words that for so long have been my reason for being. I wish with everything inside me that it had been me that day in November and not April.

“I know. But it wasn’t.” She burrows into me, kisses my neck. “It wasn’t, and I will thank God every day that it wasn’t. I love you, Z. I love everything about you, and the idea that you might have died, that you might not exist in this world—I can’t even imagine it.”

It’s her turn to cry, my turn to comfort. Except it turns out I’m still crying a little, too. Eleven years I didn’t cry, and now that I have this beautiful, beautiful girl in my arms, I can’t seem to stop.

She doesn’t seem to care, though, as she runs her lips over my cheeks and jaw and nose and forehead. “Promise me,” she tells me in between kisses.

“Anything.”

She stops, looks me in the eye. “You don’t even know what I’m going to ask yet.”

“It doesn’t matter. Don’t you know I’d do anything for you?”

“Promise me that when you start to feel like this again, you’ll talk to me. That you’ll tell me what you’re feeling so we can work through it together.”

“I’m not—I’m not very good at the together thing, in case you haven’t noticed. Or the talking thing.”

“Believe me,” she says with a fake glare, “I’ve noticed. But I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt if you promise never to shut me out again. Whatever you’re feeling, whatever you need to do to cope with it, I’ll deal with, too. I swear, I will. But you have to talk to me. You have to trust me to be there for you the way you are for me.”

I don’t jump in with a rash promise again, but I think that’s okay. I think she wants me to think about what she’s asking. Because we both know she’s asking a lot. And I don’t know if I’m strong enough to give it to her. I really don’t. But I know I want to try. She’s my everything, and if hurting myself means hurting her, then I’m going to have to find another way to cope. Because I never want to hurt her like this again.

“You’ll probably have to drag it out of me sometimes.”

“I know.”

“And I’ll probably be grumpy as fuck about it. I don’t like being vulnerable, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“And I’ll probably never be completely normal.”

She laughs. “Baby, that possibility was never even on the table.”

“And yet you’re still here.”

“That’s what you don’t get, Z. As long as you try, as long as you don’t shut me out, I will never not be here. No matter how bad or how good it gets, I will always be right here next to you.”

It’s a big promise—a huge one, really—but for the first time in over a decade, I’ve found someone to believe in. Someone to believe. It’s more than I ever thought I’d have, and for now … for now, it’s more than enough.