Page 11 of Salvaged Heart

11

BECKHAM

S aturday night, I found myself hovering in the doorway of Anders’ room, watching him sketch furiously in his notepad. He had been spending a lot more time drawing recently. He even asked me to pose while working on something around the house so he could quickly flesh out a rough draft, capturing the way my body was angled and how the light entered the space. I knocked once on the frame of the open bedroom door, and his eyes rose slowly to meet mine.

“You lost?” He grinned.

He had been doing a lot more of that, too. Happy, content Anders was quickly becoming one of my favorite people, and while it might have been a little self-absorbed to think I had contributed to this change in character, it warmed something in my soul nonetheless.

“Nah, I just got off the phone with Laurel. Wanted to stop by on the way upstairs and see how that ankle was doing.”

He had landed on it awkwardly earlier that day by stepping backward from what he thought was the bottom run of the ladder, which was actually the third. But the way his ankle was tucked underneath him instead of propped up on the pillow like I had told him to, let me know it was fine.

“It’s good. Thank you for checking in.” There was a slightly awkward silence before he added, “Come in, stay awhile.”

The way he said it sounded more like an order than a suggestion, but I floated across the threshold anyway, perching on the edge of his bed.

“How was Laurel?”

“The same as always, busy.”

When she first left, exactly a week ago, she’d texted constantly, updating me on her progress in finding a last-minute place to stay, looking for updates on the house, and checking to ensure Anders and I hadn’t killed each other. I’d sent her a picture that Monday of me holding a hammer menacingly inches from his skull while he pretended to be focused on installing new outlet covers. This Laurel had not found amusing. At night, she would call, and we would talk for an hour about our days before one of us inevitably drifted off mid-sentence.

Now, the texts came through less often, and yesterday, she'd skipped our nightly call altogether. But she was busy, I got that, and I was running out of interesting ways to describe fixing and painting things to her, which took up most of my day. Sure, there was my budding friendship with Anders, which I could have discussed, but that felt private, almost like a secret only the two of us shared. Plus, every conversation Laurel and I had contained some version of the same overplayed warning about not trusting Anders, keeping one eye on him, and being careful about getting too friendly. I wasn’t ready for her judgment, so I didn’t bring it up.

“Laurel is the only person I have had sex with.” I don’t know why I said that, and the look of disgust mixed with what the fuck that was written all over Anders’ face told me he felt the same. “That was my last truth for the day. I still owed you one.”

He sighed, setting his sketch pad down. I noted the drawing he was working on was one of me instead of the home’s interior. “That was a truth I probably could have lived without.” He chuckled. “But thank you for paying your debt.”

I nodded. “You still owe me one. I think you keep hoping that if you stay quiet, I’ll let it slide, but we had an agreement.”

He looked around the room as if looking for inspiration, or perhaps he was looking for an escape. “To be honest, I got nothing.”

“Nothing.” I echoed blandly. “Anders closed book Carmichael,” I left out ‘the third’ but held three fingers up in its place, “has told me every deep dark secret in his heart and has nothing left to share?”

I would bet my life that we'd barely made a dent in all the secrets he'd built up. For the last week, he had been feeding me the bare minimum, truths just below the surface to pass under the feeble guidelines of our pact, but still kept the bulk of who he was close to his chest.

“No, I’m just lacking inspiration at this particular moment.” He sat up straight on his bed, the action closing some of the space between us. I was suddenly aware I was sitting closer than we ever had before, on his bed, in his room. “Ask me a question. Whatever you want. I’ll answer, scouts honor.”

“You were a scout?” I huffed, earning me a cocked brow.

“Is that the question?”

“No! No, hold on. Let me think.”

I stood and walked the room’s circumference, biding some time. A million questions I wanted to ask Anders circled my head at all times of day, but I wasn’t sure when I’d be presented with this sort of opportunity again. I didn’t want to squander it.

I wanted to know more about his parents. Specifically, his dad, having already met his mother on multiple occasions. She never spoke about his father, and Laurel had never met him. I wasn’t even sure he was still alive. I opened my mouth to form the question, but then my gaze snagged on the photo of Anders looking longingly at the unidentified boy I’d seen the night I crept around his room in the dark. At the time, the photo seemed pretty innocent, but now, knowing the few truths Anders had allowed me to have, I realized there was something significantly deeper there.

“Who is this?” I picked up the photo off his shelf and brought it to where he sat on the bed. He took it carefully from me, laying the picture on his lap and sweeping a finger over the boy's face affectionately.

“Off limits.” He nudged the photo back towards me.

“That’s not how this works.”

I thought he would put up more of a fight, the image clearly distressed him, but he relented with a sigh and whispered, “Jonah, my stepbrother.”

Stepbrother? “I hadn’t realized you had other step-siblings, Laurel never said.”

He met my eyes. “I would think by now you would have caught on to the fact that Laurel knows very little about me, at all.”

I didn’t have an adequate response for that. I knew better than anyone that Laurel didn’t have much of a desire to get to know her stepbrother, and this didn’t seem like information Anders was going to volunteer freely. “Will you tell me about him?”

Anders took a long time to drag the words out. He gazed at the photo, memories flashing in his eyes for several minutes before he let loose one of the most broken-sounding noises I’d ever heard from him.

“He was the son of my mother’s second husband. We only shared a home for three months but were close for many years after.”

“You loved him? As more than a brother, I mean?”

He nodded somberly, eyes still locked on the picture, a tear running slowly down his left cheek. I had seen him cry before–the day he lost it in Laurel’s car on the way back from picking up breakfast. But that was different. Anders was trying very hard to hold the pieces of his heart together, and that one tear was all he was willing to allow through the cracks.

“Are you still in touch?”

He shook his head. “No, he died seven years ago.”

Oh, Anders, my heart ached for him. I didn’t know much about his life before he came to live with Laurel's family, but the fact that he had gone through this while living with her and she had no idea was devastating. How did he stand the weight of navigating something like this alone? “Can…can I hug you?”

“I would rather you didn’t.” He cleared his throat, trying to break up the lump of emotion sitting there. “I’ve committed to telling you this story, and I will fall apart completely if you hug me. You’d never hear the end of it.”

“Okay,” I whispered in understanding. “How did he die?”

“He overdosed the night things broke between Laurel and me. That’s why I couldn’t get to her.” He inhaled deeply, his hand tapping restlessly on his knee. He had done that right before his panic attack in the car as well. I got the impression he didn’t know he was doing it, so I reached across the space between us and took it in mine to soothe it. “She didn’t know certain things about me back then, things she still doesn’t fully understand, so I let her think the worst of me instead of telling her the truth.”

“And the truth is?”

He studied me for a second, “This is the part where I tell you something really fucking honest about me, and you decide you're no longer interested in my friendship.”

“That won’t happen.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Try me.”

He clung to my hand like a lifeline while he gathered the words he needed to give me this part of himself. I waited patiently, a small part of me happy that I was finally making progress, the rest of me breaking for him.

“Jonah gave me many things. The best of which was my sexual awakening,” he laughed, but it was all nerves, no humor. “The worst was a ruthless addiction to opiates.”

“As in painkillers?”

“Yeah, the good kind they give you after surgery.” His words echoed in my brain, clicking a piece of the arduous puzzle that was Anders Carmichael into place. I said clean, not sober—which I am trying my darn hardest to be… words he’d said to Laurel the day we arrived, but I’d dismissed them as sibling sparing.

“You were high, too, that night.” Not a question.

“Yes, but watching the boy I was deeply in love with convulse and turn blue in my arms while I tried to call 911 sobered me up real fast.”

If the police had come, he would have been arrested, right? The second they arrived on the scene, they would have tested him for the drugs. He was complicit in Jonah’s death.

As if reading my train of thought, “I don’t know who my stepdad paid off, but he made it all disappear. The charges, the police reports, and every connection I had to Jonah except this photo right here. He wiped him from my life like he never even existed. I don’t even know where he was buried.” Anders let out an uncontrolled sob. It shook his entire body as he let it go. “Sometimes, I think all those years we spent together were some sort of drug-induced dream.”

Everything Laurel has told you about me is true…

“You got help, right? After, I mean. You got sober?”

He dropped my gaze, shaking his head with a sigh. “I’m trying, Beck, I really am.”

The confession hit me like a freight train. All these little bits I knew about Anders suddenly slotted into place like one of those sliding tile puzzles. When all the individual parts were jumbled, none of it made sense, but now they were beginning to slide about, and each piece clicked into place.

The image was clear as fucking day.

I jumped up from his bed and stormed over to his backpack, which lay on the seat of the bay window, yanking the top zipper open. It had been the only bag Anders had arrived with.

“Beckham, don’t.”

He was on his feet beside me in the blink of an eye, trying to wrestle the bag from my hands but, in doing so, caused the entire thing to shift sideways, dislodging the evidence he’d been desperately trying to hide. Three orange pill bottles crashed to the floor, one after the other, drugs rattling like maracas as they rolled under the bed. But it was the next item to fall that caught my attention.

A heavy diamond-covered broach slipped from under some clothes shoved in the bottom of the bag, right into my open palm. I recognized it immediately. Margery had shown Laurel and me a picture of it the morning of Anders’ panic attack while we were still waiting for him to come inside, estimating it was worth almost a hundred thousand dollars. They had discovered it in the primary bedroom closet, along with several other pieces from Aunt Millie’s extensive jewelry collection.

“I can explain.” He murmured. “Please just let me…”

“Were you planning to sell this to buy drugs?”

He shook his head. “No, no, I promise. I was going to sell it, but not for that.” His eyes pleaded with me to let him go on. He seemed like he was being earnest, but hadn’t that been what Laurel had warned me of to begin with?

He will have you thinking you're best of friends and then screw you over when you least expect it.

I had been such a damn fool.

“Then what for?” I grit out.

He pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “For rehab.”

“For rehab?” I parroted. “You expect me to believe an addict was stealing his dead aunt's jewelry to pay for rehab. Don’t you have access to a ridiculous inheritance?”

“Not anymore. My mother put restrictions on it the day after Jonah died. I was able to access it for a while in limited amounts, but I burnt through my reserves too quickly, and they cut me off completely three years ago.”

“I’m sure if you were honest with them and told them you needed help, they would have paid for it without question. Why resort to this?”

He hung his head, rubbing the back of his neck. “Because I asked them once for help already, and I broke their trust.” He stared at the space between our feet like the ground would melt away from under him at any minute, and he would slip willingly through it. “Back then, I wasn’t ready. I spent the money on booze and drugs, and my bike. But things are different now.”

“Different? How?”

“I’m ready. I’m tired of hurting the people who love me, not that I have many left. I’m tired of falling asleep so messed up that I don’t know if I will wake up in the morning. I’m tired of not having a consistent, safe place to stay at night. Beck, I’m so fucking tired.”

I reached for his chin, tilting his face and forcing his eyes to meet mine. I needed to see them when he answered my next question so I would know if the words he was saying were true. His tears made them a glittering hazel, green seeping around the edges. Fat drops clung to his long lashes before they unstuck and slipped down his cheeks. To give him credit, he didn’t look away. He met my stare face-on, laying every single one of his truths bare at my feet.

“There’s something else. What are you still not telling me?”

He sighed, knowing we were on a precipice. The following words that left his mouth would determine whether I helped or exposed him.

“Aunt Millie was the only person who saw me for who I am, an addict. Everyone else just thinks I am a fuck up—I guess they aren’t that wrong either—but the stipulation in her will was that I not be given the money from this house until I have been sober a full year.” My lips parted to speak, but he forged ahead, “The problem is, I can’t do that on my own. I am in too deep to get over this without professional help.”

“So it is for money, then?” I scoffed. I couldn’t believe the audacity of this guy. Of course, the only reason he would be willing to get sober now after all these years was to gain back access to his wealth, and the second he did, he would turn right back to his vices and blow through all that money as well. I was sure of it, or at least the voice in my head that sounded an awful lot like Laurel was.

“No, that’s not it at all. Beck, you must believe me when I say I did not have to come here. I could have stayed in Atlanta, doing the same shit I did every day. Getting by, sleeping on couches, picking up odd jobs to fuel this monster living inside of me.” His hands were shaking again. I wasn’t sure when I had grabbed hold of them both. “Coming here meant facing a past I’ve tried hard to avoid. Coming here meant having to see the look of disdain and judgment on Laurel’s face every day, knowing how fucking badly I hurt her and that she might never forgive me. It meant separating from the people who sell me this shit and forcing myself to walk the line of withdrawal until I got the money to check into rehab.”

“I trusted you,” I whispered, my voice hoarse with emotion. “Despite everything Laurel told me about you, every single warning, I chose to give you the benefit of the doubt, and you betrayed me.”

“I know. I’m so sorry, Beckham. I’m so fucking sorry.”

The silence between us was as thick and heavy as the breaths we were desperately trying to gulp down. My head spun with all the information I had been given. Had I truly been that blind? My mind snagged on all the little moments I’d shared with Anders. The mood swings, the not eating, his withdrawing from the group to hide up in his room, the day on the dock when he told me straight up that he was hungover despite me not seeing him take a single drink the night before. It was all there now, plain as day. But what was also there were all the other moments. He showed up every morning bright and early, asked me to teach him skills to help with the renovation, worked hard, long hours beside me, and did not complain once. And then there was the way he was slowly coming out of himself, the smiles he sent me, the easy and casual way he now joked with me that hadn’t been there three weeks ago when this all began.His new-found willingness to be open and let me see under the false bravado he wore like a thick skin around the thoughtful, intelligent, and charismatic man hidden inside.

“When did you plan to leave?” When did you plan to leave me?

“I’ve had that for over a week now. I could have been long gone already.” His voice was as delicate as broken glass now. “But this place has been healing me, you Beckham, have been healing me.”