Page 19 of Salvaged Heart

19

ANDERS

I rolled the red, shiny plastic coin back and forth between my fingers. The reality of the accomplishment washed over me. Never in my life would I have thought I could have remained sober a whole month, but here I was, holding the evidence of it inside my palm.

I’d done it.

Today was cooler than much of July. Last night’s rain had killed some of the oppressive humidity, making it the perfect day to knock out the kitchen installation. The manor had AC, but it was old and tired, unable to keep up with the muggy North Carolina summers. Most days, we were lucky if there was a fifteen-degree difference between the inside and outside of the home.

I brought a cigarette to my lips, enjoying the dull burn in my lungs on the inhale and watching my smoke on the exhale dance away from my face and into the breeze that was blowing across the lake. I’d left Beck, lost to his work, some time ago. Honestly, I was a little shocked he hadn’t yet come looking for me, but perhaps he knew I needed some space. He always seemed to know what I needed when I didn’t even know it myself.

Things had felt strained between us lately. We’d both been awkward and quiet, dancing around each other, trying to avoid the heaviness of all the things we wanted to say to one another, but we hadn't. Just being in that room today. Working where, just days ago, I’d had him pressed against the floor beneath me, running my tongue over his warm skin—it was too much. My palms felt sweaty, and my mouth impossibly dry each time my eyes raked over that spot on the floor where small dollops of dry buttercream still peppered the wood.

My dick was thickening just at the memory of having him below me. But I couldn’t turn back time. I couldn’t change the way I'd flinched when he reached for me, how I’d run like a coward away from the pleasure we both mutually wanted. Fear had locked itself like a vice around my chest, and I'd been powerless to it. I was trying not to beat myself up about it. Trying to talk my spinning mind off the ledge of guilt and self-doubt. But the more I tried, the more I wound myself up with a million what-ifs and possibilities that jumbled up in my brain.

Not many people made me nervous these days—when you expect the worst in people, they rarely surprise you—but Beckham did. Not so much him as a person, but the raging cyclone of emotions that spun inside me at just the single mention of him. I wanted to give him everything so desperately, but there were things I couldn’t do, places I couldn’t let us go. Compartments of my life that were too shameful to open. So, I'd settled in this strange place between hopeless longing and pent-up frustration. Pining over a man who remained frustratingly unavailable.

Why had I kissed him? Why had he not pushed me away?

I shook loose the troubling thoughts that were stacking up. I couldn’t let my mind venture down that path again. I couldn’t continue to fantasize about saying fuck it, throwing all caution to the wind, pulling him to me, and kissing him stupid like we had done in that alleyway. Like we had done on that kitchen floor. I wouldn’t let myself consider whether this weird sexual tension between us could evolve into anything more.

This was so typical of me. For all the time I'd spent at rock bottom over the years, this was what I’d truly craved. Attention, affection, the feeling of being held by someone who gave a damn about me and my pathetic life. I’d chased it like I’d chased drugs, following strangers home and letting them use me just to feel another’s touch and kidding myself into believing that maybe they would ask me to stay. Maybe they would want to care for me. Maybe I could mean something to someone again. But it was never for longer than a night, and I would feel more hollow in the morning than I had the night before.

I wrapped my arms around myself, like the warmth of my own embrace could possibly dull the loneliness that was the pit in my chest, and shifted my focus from my internal spiral and back towards the lake. Two birds were squawking at one another in the tree that overhung the shoreline. Its big branches hung so low that the ends scraped the ground. I’d worried the storm that rolled through last night would have broken some of the smaller limbs off. The heavy claps of lightning from almost directly overhead had shaken the entire house, but come morning, the tree stood just as firm as it had the day before.

It was the kind of tree you’d tie a tire swing from, with a strong base and powerful limbs. I closed my eyes and pictured children running up and down the grassy lawn, giggling amongst one another, their father on their heels as they dove off the edge of the boat dock into the murky water while their mother laughed at the scene unfolding from where she stood on the deck.

The thought triggered something sour in my chest. Even before my dad left, he hadn’t been that kind of father. He was hard-working and present when he could be, and although travel pulled him all over the globe, he'd never had a playful bone in his body. He was all business, all about the appearance of things. If a family looked happy on paper and in photographs, then that was all that mattered. The truth that lay behind closed doors had no value.

My mother was different back then, nurturing and warm. She had been the kind of mother who baked cookies for every occasion and never missed a school event. She gave the best hugs a child could imagine and placed soft kisses on my head while whispering how wonderful I was. How smart. How kind. How loved.

She’d been happy. But the day my father left, my mother had too. Physically, she was still there, but the lighthearted woman who tended to my cuts with kisses and lollipops, who’d sing my favorite songs at the top of her lungs as she cooked, was gone. Instead, all that was left was a shell. A shell that looked and sounded like my mother but was cold, hollow, and empty.

She hadn’t told me at the time why my father left us. She barely acknowledged he’d left at all. One moment, he was there. The next, he was gone. The cloud of dust kicked up by his tires as he tore from the driveway was the last memory I'd ever have of him. The house was stripped of everything that hinted he had ever existed there. It was like my mother thought if she scrubbed hard enough, she could erase him from our lives completely. But there was one thing she could never escape from. I saw it in her eyes every time she looked at me. The heartbreak that overcame her face when she took in mine. Inherited features that would forever remind her of the man who’d torn the heart from her chest and left her to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes, I wondered if I'd done something to cause him to leave. Maybe I took up too much of her time. Maybe I hadn’t been a good enough son. Maybe, maybe, maybe. There were always a thousand maybes, but she finally told me the truth years later. Well, not so much told than screamed. She stood on the porch of the home we shared with my Stepfather and Laurel, throwing the few possessions I owned into the street.

“You’re just like him.” She had spat. “Just like that pathetic excuse for a man. I won’t let you do to me what he did. I don’t want to ever see your face again.”

She’d changed again when Thomas Benson entered the picture. By then, it had just been my mother and me for several years. Monthly checks arrived from somewhere, but they hadn’t been enough to keep us in the house I’d grown up in any longer, so she'd gotten a job at a large accounting firm in the city. Thomas was a wealthy wannabe congressman, a known playboy, and the son of Frank Benson of Benson, Samuel, and Moon—my mother’s new employer. Within six months of their meeting, he'd proposed to her. Four months later, in a disgustingly outrageous ceremony, they said I do, and I found myself with a new stepfather who seemed to share my mother’s grievances over how much I resembled my father and a stepbrother who…well, he would become my everything .

Jonah was two years older than me, with straight blonde hair and sorrow-filled dark green eyes. They were deep and endless, the color of Christmas trees—evergreen—and I was captivated by something I couldn’t quite grasp every time I looked into them. He didn’t like me at first, no one did, but I tried hard to be his friend. He seemed like he needed one. But the more I tried, the more he pulled away.

In the end, my efforts didn’t matter. Three months after the wedding, Thomas hit my mother, and we ran for the hills. My mother filed for divorce faster than you could say the word, and I was free of the pair of them. Or at least, I'd thought I was.

Weeks after Mom and I made our escape, Jonah showed up at our door clutching his ribs, bruises every color of the rainbow littering his chest and side of his boyishly handsome face. To this day, I have no idea how he found us, but he’d begged my mother to let him stay, to help protect him from the monster his father had turned into in her absence. To my horror, all she'd done was patch him up the best she could and then sent him back, promising she would give an anonymous tip to CPS. She either lied, or the tip was never looked into.

I’d thought about him daily for over a year. So much, in fact, that when I saw him standing in my new middle school cafeteria the following August, I'd been sure I’d imagined it. There was no way he would be attending the same school. But he’d beckoned me over to sit with him at the small table he’d claimed in the back of the room, and we became fast friends after that.

When I closed my eyes, I could still see him—moments in time caught like little movies over the years.

Jonah at thirteen, and fourteen, and fifteen…

“Have you ever kissed anyone before?” Jonah was sitting next to me, his hair tied in a messy knot at the nape of his neck. I loved it long, but his Dad had been on his case lately about cutting it.

“No. You?” Maybe I should have been embarrassed, but I wanted to hear his answer more.

“Chloe from my algebra class last year.” He scrunched his nose, almost like the idea of such a thing offended him.

“Not good?”

I wasn’t interested in girls yet, but Jonah was two years older than me, and that seemed to be all boys his age could talk about. I hoped this wouldn’t be something he felt the need to speak to me about. I didn’t like the thought of him kissing Chloe very much, but I wasn’t sure why.

“It wasn’t bad. But…” He didn’t continue the sentence for a long time. He just looked at me with a strange expression, almost like he was debating how I would receive the words he intended to say.

“But what?”

“I kind of want to try kissing a boy next.”

I choked on the water I had been sipping. “Why?” I managed to ask once I’d finally swallowed it down.

Jonah’s brow furrowed.“I think I might like it better.”

I considered for a moment, realizing, much to my shock, that I seemed to like that idea better, too. The thought made my underwear feel suddenly tighter in the front, a reaction I couldn’t say I’d had before when thinking about girls. I shifted my position, hoping Jonah wouldn’t notice the slight bulge in my pants.

“I’m a boy.” The words came out as a startled squeak instead of the offer I'd intended it to be, almost like I had just realized the fact. My cheeks heated, but Jonah never made fun of me, no matter how immature I must sometimes seem to him.

“Yes,” He chuckled. “You are.”

“And I’m your best friend.” I felt all tingly and nervous. However, something in Jonah’s expression spurred me on. “If you wanted to try with me, that would be okay.” I couldn’t believe I was saying this.

“Would it?”

“Yeah. That way, no one else would have to know if you didn’t like it.” I tried to sound calm and unbothered, but I was suddenly very invested in him saying yes, which was strange, considering today was the first time I’d ever contemplated kissing him.

His hand came to my cheek, and I leaned into him instinctively. He held me there for a moment, his eyes dipping down to my lips before he brushed his mouth against mine. It was just a whisper of a touch at first, barely there before he pulled away. I worried I'd messed it up somehow, or maybe that slightest brush had been enough for him to realize he didn’t like the idea of kissing boys anymore. The problem was that it had been enough for me to realize I liked the idea very much.

I opened my eyes, trying to shake the memory, but it was useless.

He was there again, this time sixteen and seventeen and…

“Do you think what we are doing is wrong?” My face was turned towards him as we lay in the bed of his truck. It was a birthday present from his Dad that had become our primary source of escape in the last few months.

“How could feeling this way ever be wrong?” He rolled onto his side, pulling me back towards him and kissing me softly. We had kissed a thousand times, but tonight, the air around us seemed to be charged with something more, something almost wild even, and I was dying to see where it might go. “I love you.” He whispered onto my lips.

“I love you,” I answered like my heart wasn’t jackhammering out of my chest as I said it. We hadn’t said those words to one another before, but I was determined to be cool about it.

He rolled me onto my back, putting his weight on his arm to the right of me and running his other hand down my chest and under the waistband of my jeans. The stars reflected off his golden hair. His kiss-bruised lips parted as we rocked into each other, the soft touch of his hand on my cock driving me wild. Frotting against one another with the awkward fumbling need of two horny teenagers who had no idea what they were doing but were desperately chasing that high.

I never wanted this moment to end.

I wanted to do this again and again and again.

Eighteen…

We were smoking a joint on the back deck of husband number three’s house, knowing full well that if he or my mother came out here and caught us, we’d be skinned alive. But I was past the point of caring what either of them thought. Jonah was too busy breaking my heart.

“This is my shot, babe. I’ll get out of this place and won’t have to deal with my Dad anymore.”

I sniffed, trying to hold back what were obviously tears. I’d known he would be leaving for college after graduating. That had always been the plan, but I hadn’t entertained the possibility that college might put him thousands of miles away. Why the West Coast? There were great schools a few hours from here.

“It’s just two years, and then you can apply.” His words meant nothing. Those two years would feel like an eternity. “And I’ll be back at Christmas, and in the summer…I promise we'll talk constantly…”

“Okay,” I nodded. There was nothing I could say to change his mind. I knew that. It would be selfish of me even to try. “I’ll apply there, too,” I promised.

Nineteen…

Jonah ran to me in the arrivals terminal, arms spread wide, scooping me up as he barreled into me and held me close. We kissed like we'd been separated for a lifetime—in many ways, it felt like we had—until a woman scoffed something homophobic off to our side, and we broke apart.

“I missed…”

“I know.” He teased, but I’d needed to hear at that moment how fiercely he missed me, too. I knew he had new friends in California. I knew he'd been sleeping around. But now that he was back home, he was mine. I’d hoped he could at least pretend being apart from me had hurt him as badly as it had hurt me. “Let’s drive out to our spot.”

“Okay.”

He was different. I hadn’t noticed earlier in the airport, but now he was sitting in front of me, legs stretched out, head tipped back, looking up to the stars, a cigarette between his lips, I could see it. He was skinnier, wired, overflowing with a restless energy I’d never seen in him. When we’d had sex earlier, it wasn’t like it had been before. It was rushed and impersonal, and it felt like I was just another body to him instead of the precious gift he’d made me feel like all those times before.

I didn’t like this version of him. I wanted the boy who’d sobbed into my shoulder as we’d said goodbye—the boy who had blown me kisses from the other side of airport security. The man who had come back to me was all wrong.

“You’re making a bigger deal out of this than you need to, Anders.” I couldn’t remember the last time he'd used my name instead of babe or baby or sweetheart… “When you come to college, you’ll learn everyone gets high. You’ll realize how stupid you’re being about this.”

“We get high all the time.” I bit back at him, but that was weed. Weed was safe. This was not.

“Exactly. I don’t see what the difference is.”

“That will kill you.”

“Anders.” He leveled me with a look that would have convinced me to do anything he asked. “Just try it once, that’s all I’m saying. You could use something to help you relax. You’re all bent out of shape.”

I was stressed. I was working my ass off to get into that stupid college he went to. There were only a few more months before I could apply for early admission, and if I lost focus now, all hope of us being at the same school together would be lost. However, I was starting to think he no longer wanted me to join him out there. He’d grown up. He’d changed. If I’d any hope of keeping him in my life, keeping him interested, I’d have to grow and change, too.

I took the pill.

If we only had the summer together, I’d do whatever he wanted.

If only I could turn back time.