Page 145 of Broken Brothers

“Chance, I know you’re stressed, but don’t play dodgeball with me, you know what I mean.”

I could see that, at best, Layla would stay right by my side, keeping me away for a good few more hours, before she’d eventually give up. Actually, that wasn’t best case, because Layla didn’t have much of anything to get up for at that moment. She didn’t have a job; at most, she had some fitness classes that she didn’t have to go to.

“Tell me what you’re talking about,” I said. “Seriously. There were a lot of things said.”

Layla bit her lip, looked down at the couch, as if the green would enlighten her mind on how to best frame her words to me, and then looked up to me with intensity that seemed to come from nowhere.

“I asked you to make a promise,” she said sternly. “I asked you ‘promise me you’ll love me no matter what happens.’”

A long pause came as I knew what the follow up question was. I was already bringing my legs up, putting my feet between me and Layla.

“Do you still believe that?”

The instinctive answer was no. That was the easy answer, the one that would push her away, perhaps forever, and allow me to focus on getting myself back up to level ground. That was the one that would give me what I wanted in that moment—solitude.

But was it fair?

And for that matter? Was it true?

“Honestly?” I said, using the silence that followed to stall.

I didn’t get much, though, because Layla’s lean forward and her wide eyes told me I had to hurry the hell up.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I really don’t know. I’m not trying to bullshit you, but I lost my house and my company today, Layla. The company’s going down in the tubes as soon as the sale from Morgan to Edwin becomes official. It’s just a matter of when, not if, on that one. And… well, is that any time to figure out if you love someone?”

“Is there ever a good time?”

Fair enough. But for me, right now, this really isn’t, it really, really isn’t.

“What about for you?” I said. “Do you still love me?”

She bit her lip.

“Yeah.”

Well, shit.

“I know what I did to you was bad. I know that the fact that I’m even here right now, able to have this conversation, is nothing short of miraculous. But yeah, through it all, I love you. Still do.”

As sweet as those words were, and as promising as that might have made the future look, it was for precisely this exact reason that I was here on the couch. It clearly would take no effort to go to her bed, make the kind of love that would go down in the history books as the best ever, and then do it all in the morning. Frankly, with the way I was getting hard, this was something that I was giving more thought to in the moment.

But that specific feeling wasn’t love. It was lust.

And more than that, for all of the self-talk I’d just given about having better self-control, about being a better individual, about not letting my emotions and feelings dictate everything I did, it sure would look really shitty if I went through all of these thoughts and then fucked Layla right after thinking it was a bad idea.

“Layla…” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m grateful for your love, and there may come a day very soon in which I realize I feel the same way. But right now? What I just said is proof that I need to sleep out here. I don’t want to go in there and make you feel a certain way when I’m not sure I feel that way, especially given our history. I’m… I’m sorry.”

Layla just shook her head, her voice becoming tight, soft, and annoyed.

“There’s nothing preventing you from coming to me,” she said. “I know where you stand. You’re honest with me. You don’t think I can handle your honesty?”

I decided against answering that, thinking that it was designed to be an explosive question, the kind of thing that could get her to lash out at me.

“Chance…”

But she couldn’t say anything else. She leaned toward me for a second, but I scooted back, as if to make the point. Admittedly, the feeling of just saying “fuck it” and going to her was extraordinarily strong.

You know what was stronger, though? The desire to prove that I was a changed man and that I controlled myself at the appropriate times; the desire to prove that to myself.