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Claire
My entire life, I’ve been left behind.
Our mother left us when Bri and I were eleven. I remember standing in the doorway of my parent's bedroom, dry-eyed, watching her move from closet to dresser, dresser to suitcase while Bri cried, begging her not to go between each hiccupping sob while our dad sat on the edge of the bed, his back turned toward us all while he stared out the window.
Our mother never said a word. Never promised to come back. Never said she loved us. She just closed her suitcase and walked out the door.
We never saw her again.
While Bri went off after high school, attending Fashion school and snagging her dream job as assistant editor of a hot, new fashion magazine, I stayed here. Got my pharmacy tech license and took a job at the only pharmacy in town. I stayed, not because that’s what was expected or demanded of me but because everyone just assumed that’s what I wanted. When Bri loaded her suitcase into the back of the zippy little convertible Dad bought her for graduation, I watched her go, watched her leave me, with the same sort of detached acceptance I watched our mother walk away.
“No My Fair Lady without me,” she whispered in my ear before pulling away from me to look me in the eye, searching my face for the pain she felt when our mother left. Like she’s been waiting years for some sort of sign that I’m finally feeling what she felt, watching her leave us. Not because she wants me to hurt. Because she wants to feel less alone in her loss. She wants me to feel, period.
“Okay.” I remember smiling. Squeezing my hands around her arms before letting her go. Waving and blowing kisses as she started her car and drove away. I always expected the loss of her to hurt. But the truth is, it didn’t.
Not even a little bit.
I like to think it would’ve, if not for Jaxon.
What happened between us.
What he did to me.
What I begged him to do to me.
Waking up the morning after to find him gone confused me. The unanswered texts I sent him in the days that followed worried me. Chipped away at the paper-thin shell that held me together until I was covered in cracks, just waiting to break.
I was supposed to sit for Simon on Friday. I’d wait. Talk to him then. There had to be a reasonable explanation for why he wasn’t answering me.
Friday would come, and Jaxon would apologize. Explain. Even if it was something I didn’t want to hear, he’d give me a reason. I’d understand why he left without saying goodbye.
But when I got to his house to sit for Simon, Jaxon wasn’t there. It was just his mother and Simon, watching cartoons in the living room.
There were moving boxes everywhere.
That’s when I knew. Understood.
Jaxon was gone, and he wasn’t coming back.
Simon and his mom were leaving too.
I went numb after that.
Been numb ever since.
I’d been infatuated with Jaxon Bennett from the first moment I saw him. Over the years, watching him with Simon, the patient, thoughtful way he spoke to him. The way he read to him. Took care of him without complaint. The way he smiled at me like we shared some sort of secret, the silly infatuation I felt grew intosomething more. Something deeper.
I can say I fell for Jaxon fast, or that what I felt wasn’t love at all. It was lust. Crazy, hormonal, hard-bitten lust. I could say that.
But it would be a lie. The fact is, it took me years to fall in love with Jaxon Bennet but it only took a single night for that fall to break me.
My mother left me behind.
My sister left me behind.
The boy I fell in love with left me behind.
It’s strange that the loss of him, the one that should hardly matter, is the one that matters most.