Page 49 of Falling Backwards (The Edge of Us #1)

I feel so settled in the quiet darkness of my bedroom with Maggie lying beside me, her hand in mine, her head resting on my shoulder. Feel like I’m finally in command of my little place in the world—and in command of myself.

Thanks to her, I’ve met the best and worst parts of myself, found them piece by piece in the mess that my head and heart have been. I wasn’t ready to make a whole man out of them at sixteen, but that’s not true anymore. I’m as ready, willing, and resolved to embrace it all, to feel and enjoy and learn from it all, as she is.

So I’m ready to stop poorly ignoring the last blade stuck in my back.

I turn my head and touch a kiss to her hair. She responds with a nuzzle and a slip of her free hand around my arm that’s trapped between us; I love that it makes it so she’s holding on to me the best she can with us lying this way.

I need her to hold on to me.

“Maggie?”

I whisper.

“Hm?” she hums.

“Do I feel like it again—your soul’s safe place?”

Her nod is instant and light.

“Yeah, you do.”

I squeeze her hand.

“You feel like mine again too.”

She doesn’t squeeze as hard as I do, but she does it for longer, and I find there to be just as much strength in that.

I ask.

“Can I tell you about my dad?”

Now her hand does tighten around mine more intensely. She shifts so that her head is off my shoulder, but I can tell she has turned her face towards me on the pillow; even in the dark, I know I have her direct attention.

“Yes,”

she says softly.

“I would love it if you did.”

I know I would too.

I take a breath, hold it…let it out.

And I get ready to face all that has happened with him lately.

To start, I decide to talk about my dad trying to get me to go to the family reunion that’s coming up and him not respecting for a minute that I don’t want to go.

I tell her that even when my parents were still married, I never felt love from his side of the family during holidays and get-togethers, except for Aunt Joni; maybe no one else liked me because they didn’t care for my mom much, or maybe they all drank from the same fountain of assholery that my dad did, but either way, I always felt like I didn’t belong.

None of my other aunts and uncles paid attention to me the way they did my cousins.

My cousins didn’t include me in fun or conversations the way they included each other.

I didn’t get invited to birthday parties, and no one except Aunt Joni came to mine.

Even my grandparents seemed to favor their other grandchildren over me.

I can remember not being allowed to play with toys that belonged to my cousins even if I was the only one there, because I was told I’d break something.

I was always put at the edges of kid groups for family photos.

It was never my turn to choose what played on the TV—if I told an adult that my cousins wouldn’t share TV time, either I was ordered to stop complaining or our TV time was ended entirely and I got blamed by my cousins for ruining it.

“And I haven’t heard from any of them a single time as I’ve gotten older,”

I say to Maggie.

“Why would I wanna go around any of them? Why would I wanna travel for hours to spend time with them? But my dad won’t listen. He insists family is important, even though they never really felt like family to me. He thinks I’m being immature and selfish.”

Her voice comes gently through the darkness, so comfortingly close.

“You aren’t. I wouldn’t wanna go either. It sounds like a huge waste of time and mental energy, and what would you be wasting that for? Just to play the part of a good family member when they were never welcoming to you even when you were little? No, it’s neither immature nor selfish to not wanna do that.”

With the hand she’s not holding, I reach to find some other purchase on her like she has on me. I end up loosely grasping her wrist. “Yeah.”

Gulping, I face the other reason I don’t want to go.

“I also….

They will be at the reunion too.

My stepmom, stepbrother, stepsister, and half-brother.

They’ll be there and my dad said I need to grow up and get over my anger with him so I can get to know them properly. But I’m still not ready to do that.”

There’s no helping what this facet of my divulgences is doing to my voice; I can’t help that my words are weakening just from the thought of my dad’s new family.

It occurs to me that I’ve been thinking of them as his ‘new’ family for years.

I’ve never gotten over the shock of being left or of Ryan and Wendy taking my place or of my dad and Suzanna having Reese together.

All this time, they have been his shiny, better, more exciting, brand-new family while Mom and I have just been two people he left in the dust.

Maggie has been waiting patiently for me to continue, so I tell her about Wendy’s message about my dad on Thanksgiving.

She clings to me in silent support while I recount the good things Wendy said about my dad and her saying it’s painful to watch such a great parent suffer because his eldest son won’t let go of the past.

“As if I’m the one who brought all this on,”

I say.

“As if I’m making too big a deal out of how much his actions have hurt me. As if I’m the one with the responsibility to apologize and start behaving differently.”

The group chat for Ryan comes into my mind. My throat tightens.

In the darkness I’m staring into, I can see the texts between him and my dad.

In the quiet, I can hear the ranting voicemail my dad left me.

This is the hardest part.

I hate thinking about this part.

I don’t know why, but it’s true.

Except of course I know why.

Voice weakening even more, I start telling Maggie about all of that. How it rubbed me the wrong way to be included in the group text in the first place because it felt braggy and like some kind of slight, the same way being mailed the family holiday card did. I tell her how my dad called Ryan ‘son’ and said he’s never been more proud than he is of Ryan’s accomplishment. How he has never told me he’s proud of me for anything, how I can’t recall him reaching out to say it even when I graduated high school—and how he didn’t attend the ceremony because Wendy had some kind of dance event.

It takes me many long seconds to be able to get out.

“That…hurts.”

Maggie releases my arm and gingerly starts rolling to face me. I hear her hiss in discomfort and I want to tell her not to agitate her knee, but then she’s still and her hand is carefully skipping up my chest, my neck, until she can fit it to the side of my face.

“Oh, Luke.”

It’s barely a whisper, but I can still hear the heaviness of her heart in it. She rubs her thumb beneath my eye as if to swipe away a teardrop.

The sweet motion undoes something in my chest that I hadn’t realized was wound up; the way I feel about these things I’ve said, as well as about the ones that are still to come and the ones that remain true from years ago, prick at my eyes.

The words come spilling out.

“I was here before them,”

I say in a waver.

“I’m his biological child. And he just shoved me off to the side and found some kids he likes better, kids who make him proud and who call him ‘Dad’ because he fills that role for them and who he’s happy to spend all the fucking time in the world with. And I know he has Reese, so that’s his biological child, too, but it just feels like now he’s found two sons to replace me. Nothing about how he always treated me has changed. Nothing has gotten better after all this time.”

I sniff.

“In the group chat, he called Ryan his son and said, ‘That’s my boy!’ and talked like he’s never had another son do anything special basically right in front of me. And it hurt because it—it wasn’t the first time he’s acted that way, you know? He’s found me unimpressive for so long.”

I turn my face into Maggie’s hand. I can hear her trembling breaths, can feel the tremble in her thumb still swiping beneath my eye.

I don’t wanna cry over him, I think, trying to blink back the tearfulness climbing up in me.

“Is that the problem? Me not being good enough?”

I ask.

“Not mature and accomplished and smart and wonderful enough? Or not having anything in common with him? Do the others like things he likes and so it’s easy for him to wanna be around them? Is Ryan’s award something my dad rooted for because he and Ryan bonded over it and they like the same stuff and Ryan hasn’t been a disappointment the whole time my dad has known him and—?”

“You are not a disappointment,”

Maggie cuts in.

“All the things he’s done…leaving you, not respecting your wishes about things, not supporting you the way he supports the others…all of that is what he has done. It’s what he is doing. It’s not what you deserve. He’s the disappointment. He’s the letdown. You are amazing and so worth knowing that if I had his phone number, I would call him right now and tell him how enormously he has messed up by not including you in his life.”

I don’t wanna cry. I don’t. I won’t.

Between what she has said, her soothing touch, and the thought of a phone call, it’s happening.

A hot teardrop escapes my eye and slides right down to her hand. Her thumb takes care of it and then her knuckles go across its wet path, and her exhalation is a fragile puff that only brings more of my tears on.

That, and….

“He called me. After the group chat thing. Because I never said anything to congratulate Ryan. And I didn’t answer the call, so he left a voicemail, and he was…so mad. He was so mad at me for ignoring the chat. He yelled so much.”

Where our hands are still clasped between our bodies, her fingers clench mine, and mine clench back.

My chest aches.

My eyes do, too, and my throat.

I try to arrange the words that will describe all the things he said, the things he accused me of, but the only one blaring in my memory is what came right before he ended the voicemail.

“He said he’s ashamed of me.”

It has been stuck in me like the sharpest splinter and now it is all but wrenched out of me, too quickly to prepare for, too ruthlessly to be able to breathe around.

And yet I find enough air to choke out.

“He said it out loud. He didn’t just make me feel that way. He said it.”

I can’t tell if Maggie’s whimper is more from that or from her knee protesting her sudden move to gather me into a hug. As I turn and wind my arms around her, too, I’m hit with both a sense of being rescued and of worried guilt.

I tell her.

“I don’t want you to hurt your knee trying to—”

She shushes me.

“It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

I also can’t tell whether she’s saying that more about her knee or my heartache.

I only know I can’t avoid the weight of what my dad said sending me into weeping.

Maggie holds me while it happens, her sniffles and tight breaths matching mine.

“I’m so sorry,”

she tells me.

“He’s an asshole, Luke. It’s not you, it’s him. I’m so sorry for everything he’s put you through.”

“Is it me, though?”

I have to ask in my cracking voice, his talk of immaturity ringing in my head.

“A l-little bit?”

“No.”

“Not in terms of being good enough for him, but—but in terms of trying? Am I supposed to be tr-trying harder? I still don’t feel like I belong in his life, but what if it really is ’cause I can’t get over how I feel?”

I feel Maggie shake her head. “No.”

“Should I be sucking it up like he says? Is he right to say not everything revolves around how I feel? Should I fake being oka-ay until one day I just feel okay? Should I at least be trying to be the bigger man and trying to do the right thing by being nice to the others and—?”

“No, Luke.”

She unravels her embrace of me and finds my face with both of her hands. She wipes at my tears again, though it doesn’t really do anything to dry my cheeks.

What it does do is interrupt my nervous babbling better than her words have.

I take a few seconds to focus on her touch, her warmth, her series of nos. Then I echo, “No?”

“No,”

she repeats with soft earnestness.

“Your feelings are valid and they’re yours to work through. He can tell you it’s time to get over it all he wants, can try to make it seem like you’ve been throwing a years-long fit, but at the end of the day, it’s his fault you’re in this place and it’s not up to him when you get out of it. These are the consequences for choices he made. You didn’t ask for any of what has happened.”

My brain soaks that up while it hangs on each new word she says.

“I’m so angry that he would make you feel like this, as if it wasn’t bad enough for him to have cheated and then walked out on you and your mom—and God, what that did to you breaks my heart. I don’t have divorced parents, but it makes all the sense in the world to me that that pain would stick around for a long, long time. That it would be layered and hard to shake. Maybe he didn’t have trouble moving on, but he can’t demand that you grow up about it. There isn’t even any growing up to do. It doesn’t matter how old you are when it comes to dealing with this. You’re not being immature. And you would not be doing the right thing if you were to betray yourself and ignore how you feel just to shut him up or earn his approval or appease the others.”

I sigh thickly, shakily. Tune in to how one of my hands has been grasping her shirt in a fist like I’m holding on to her for dear life.

The wounded parts of me kind of are.

They’re also kind of calming down, though. Their pangs are lessening, allowing what she’s saying to soothe them.

She and I are quiet for a little while. We, too, work on calming out of the tearfulness and the unsteady breathing.

Then I scrape out.

“What if I never really can move on? I know he’s my dad, and he’s said before that it hurts the others for me to not be in their life, but what if I never feel ready? What if I never feel like I can try to forgive him or be a part of his family?”

Fingers drift up into my hair, the touch of their tips delicate.

“Then that’ll just be your path. There isn’t a rule saying you have to eventually try to get along with someone who has hurt you, especially if they haven’t apologized or tried to be better to you. He is your dad, so I think part of you will always love him…I think that’s a big reason why you’re hurt, you know, because you’ve always loved him and never felt the love in return…but he’s also just a person. If you never decide you wanna be friendly to him or spend time with him or get to know his new family, then, Luke, you don’t have to. You never have to do anything you don’t wanna do or don’t feel right about.”

Now her fingertips trace down the side of my face.

“You know that.”

I find myself nodding.

“It’s all up to you,”

she murmurs.

“Maybe you’ll never be ready. Or maybe someday you’ll be ready for some things, like knowing your little brother or texting your stepsiblings but not having a relationship with your dad. Maybe you’ll always hold a grudge against him and your stepmom for having that affair. Or maybe one day you’ll wake up and think letting go doesn’t feel impossible anymore.”

I nod some more. She’s right.

“But you don’t have to worry about any of that right now. You don’t have to play the what-if game or try to map out different ways to navigate this. Just honor how you feel. You’re allowed to do that for as long as you need to.”

Her fingers curl against my cheek.

“And remember to be nice to yourself while you do it, because you…earlier, you said I was golden, and I want you to know you are too. It doesn’t matter how anyone else tries to make you feel. Not even your own dad. You’re golden. You’re—you’re beautiful, Luke.”

Her voice falls to a whisper.

“You’re beautiful to me.”

With my heart swelling fast in my chest, I wrap her up in my arms again, pulling her into as tight a hug as I dare to give her.

“You’re beautiful,”

I whisper back.

“God, you are, Maggie.”

She coils her arms around me, too, her face burrowing against my neck.

I don’t know how long we stay like this.

The only movements we make are a slight adjustment for her knee and a shift of our faces so we can breathe a little better.

Sanctuary.

That’s what her arms feel like to me.

I never want to leave—and yet I know that when I inevitably do have to pull away and let little bits of the world between us again, it won’t be for long. Her doors won’t shut me out again. I will never again be unwelcome in the space next to her heart. And I will never go back to feeling as if I’d be safer away from her.

This is where I fucking belong.

My voice still isn’t going to be substantial, but I speak again anyway.

“Thank you. For everything you’ve said. And done.”

She nods, but before she can respond aloud, I realize I have one more thing to confess to her.

“And I shouldn’t have gone with Jayden tonight. I’m sorry I did. You were right to question what I was doing and to be upset. I’ve felt weird about him for a while now and I wish I’d listened to that and to you, instead of meeting up with him and harming you in the process. I shouldn’t have picked that fucker over you in any way, and it’ll never happen again.”

One of her hands stops clutching me so securely and takes up a tender rub at that place on me.

“It’s okay.”

“Forgive me?”

“Yes.”

She finds a way to snuggle into our hug a little bit more.

“You weren’t out with him for as long as I thought you’d be. Did you have a bad time?”

I shift so I’m able to hold her and mess with her hair at the same time.

“Yeah. Before I went in, I had this feeling that I shouldn’t even bother, but I thought I’d give him a chance to be different from how he’s always been. I…honestly, I wanted to know if he was sorry for the bet. He wasn’t, though. He was the same person as ever. Worse, in some ways. So I didn’t even…. I don’t think I was with him for fifteen minutes before I wanted to leave—before I left. I had ordered a beer and then never even took a drink of it. I just threw some money on the table and walked out.”

She sighs lightly, but I can feel the weight underneath.

Damn it, I’m pissed at him for the things he said at Merritt’s.

Maggie says lightly, too.

“I’m glad you left.”

“So am I.”

I dwell on everything Jayden said, plus the way he acted…

…and damn if I don’t realize how similar he is to my dad.

Never caring if his behavior hurts anyone. Insulting people when they stand up to him. Not apologizing for things he’s done wrong.

I don’t care to dwell on why I’ve put up with one person like that and not another. From here on out, I’m not putting up with it at all.

Maggie says.

“I’m sorry I accused you last night of not caring about me and how I felt. It seemed like you didn’t care how I felt, but…but I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think past how shocked and hurt I was.”

“I understand,”

I murmur.

“It’s all right.”

Shifting again, I feel for her forehead, then slip my fingers beneath her bangs so I can brush at her scar.

“I cared, though. Always have, always will.”

She turns her face and clumsily presses two kisses to my wrist.

Pulse skipping, I add.

“I’m so fucking crazy for you that I feel like I could fly when I make you happy and like I’m being buried alive when you’re upset.”

“Me, too, for you,”

she says against my skin, the hum of her words reaching right into my fluttering veins.

“God, me, too, for you.”

I love that feeling and also can’t stand it being there instead of on my lips. I fumble to tilt her face up, then seek out her mouth with mine.

I also love the cling of this kiss. The steadiness. The simplicity. The softness.

And I love that it ends with her smile.

It makes me smile through the lingering rawness of what we’ve been talking about.

Thinking back to how settled I felt before this last big talk has me realizing I was really only most of the way there. Now I am there. Not all the dark spots in my life have been worked out, but I’ve stopped running from them—I’ve faced them with Maggie’s help, been outright freed from some of them, been taught how to fight the others.

Everything is gonna be okay.

I hear the thought in both her voice and my own; she told me earlier, ‘It’s all okay,’ and I know that’s right.

Except actually, I know everything won’t be just okay—it’ll be good, great, the best.

Not just because I really, finally have Maggie, but also because I really, finally have myself.