Page 21 of Salvaged Heart

21

BECKHAM

A nders curled back into my chest, going so still that it was hard to tell if he'd fallen asleep. The soft rise and fall of his chest against mine, along with the slight dampness of my shirt caused by his silent tears, was the only evidence he was still with me. I didn’t attempt to comfort him. He needed to experience all the emotions he had been running from for so long. He needed to expel them. So I sat sentinel, guarding him while he worked through them.

We sat for so long, the sunset disappearing behind the house, cast long shadows across the yard and down to the water’s edge. My mind was running a mile a minute. Processing everything he'd confessed. Processing what an honor it was that he'd felt comfortable enough to share all that with me in the first place. I couldn’t fix Anders, but I could listen. I could be a safe space. I could love him. And, I could be brave enough for both of us.

Being brave meant finally facing something I had been avoiding for weeks, maybe even years, if I was being honest with myself. I needed to talk to Laurel. If Anders was facing his demons, then I could face mine.

I shook his shoulder gently, whispering his name against his ear, but he was fast asleep, so I changed tactics and wriggled out from beneath him. He flopped awkwardly against the arm of the chair, still sleeping but looking uncomfortable as fuck.

I couldn’t leave him like that.

Disappearing for a moment to prop the back door open with a half-empty paint can, I returned and scooped him up. Well, scooped wasn’t the word. It was more of a fumble followed by a half-drag as I pulled him up my body. He clung to me like a Koala, wrapping his arms around my neck and nuzzling his face into my collarbone. He couldn’t weigh twenty pounds more than his sister, who I carried all the time, but his extra half-foot in height made him unwieldy to manage.

Somehow, I got him through the house, up the stairs, and lowered onto the bed. I maneuvered the blankets from under him and pulled them over, going to tuck him in. A slight grin turned the corner of his lips.

“You were awake the whole time, weren’t you?”

He chuckled sleepily. Asshole.

“I’ll be back in a little bit. There’s something I need to do.” I kissed his forehead before grabbing my phone off the charger and heading downstairs.

I hadn’t touched it in days. There were several missed calls and messages from Laurel, all saying some variation of “Call me.” I sighed and tapped her name. It rang twice before she sent it to voicemail, but a FaceTime call immediately rang back. I took a deep breath and answered it. Her pretty face filled the screen.

“So your phone isn’t broken then?” Yeah, I deserved that. It had probably been a week since we last spoke, at least four days since I’d responded to one of her texts. She'd even sent me an email yesterday, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a letter arrived in the mail a few days from now.

“Sorry, babe, we’ve been swamped.” It wasn’t a lie, but I couldn’t pretend there wasn’t plenty of downtime as well.

“So busy you couldn’t send a simple sign of life. I was tempted to drive over there this weekend to make sure you and Anders hadn’t killed one another.”

I laughed. “Believe me, he is very much alive.”

“Driving you crazy, then?”

That statement was more accurate than I would ever tell her, but not in the way she’d meant it. Anders was all I thought about these days: how to make him happy, what he was thinking, how to coax just one more smile out of his perfect face. I was all spun up. “Something like that.”

Silence fell between us. My mind had been made up for days, but now the time had come to take that final plunge, I was scared. I knew what I was doing was right. Even taking Anders out of the equation, I knew our relationship had run its course. This wasn’t me trading her in for him, but boy, it felt like that. If I even wanted the possibility of exploring what Anders and I could be, I had to do this. If I wanted to know what I could make of my life without her telling me what my dreams were, I had to rip the bandaid off, once and for all.

“Laurel, there’s something I need to tell you.” I started right as she said, “Beck, we need to talk.”

‘Well, that doesn’t sound good.”

“Neither did that.” She laughed nervously. “Look, Beck. I don’t know how to say this, so I will just come out with it.”

Was she breaking up with me?

“Things have felt off between us for a while now, and I hoped spending the summer together would fix some of it, but being forced to spend time apart has been eye-opening.”

“Eye-opening…” I parroted.

“This is bad timing, I know, but… I met someone else.”

Oh.

I couldn’t deny that her confession didn’t hurt a little, but I had done the same. I’d kissed Anders–her brother of all people–on multiple occasions, let him touch me, tried to touch him. There wasn’t a lot of ground for me to stand on.

“Nothing’s happened. We've hardly talked, but there’s a mutual attraction there, and it’s made me realize that you and I have grown a lot since high school. But, um, I’m not sure we have been growing in the same direction.” She sighed, glancing down. “I think maybe you’ve felt it, too?”

I felt disorientated looking at her say all the words I'd intended to say myself.

“I spoke to Margery a few days ago. She agreed to help me pay you out for all the work you’ve done on the manor. We can get a contractor in to finish the rest.”

I cleared my throat to speak, but she was still talking a mile a minute.

“I don’t want you to think I used you, Beck. I hadn’t planned any of this when we made plans to spend the summer there. Life just happened, and it’s not fair to either of us for me to drag things on. I hope we can eventually remain friends, but I understand if that’s impossible.” She finished, finally catching her breath.

“Can I talk now?”

She nodded.

“You’re right. I’ve felt it, too. When I called, I'd planned on being the one to say all that.” I tried not to latch on to how typical of her it was to beat me to the punch. “So, I guess… no hard feelings. But I’d like to stay and finish the project. There are only a few weeks of work left anyway, and I think I’ve decided to follow in my Dad’s footsteps. This renovation will look great on my resume. Plus, this is what friends do, right?”

“Large-scale renovation projects for free?” She chuckled before her face turned serious again. “Was that just the easiest breakup ever?”

“Yeah, I think it was.”

We chatted a little longer, and I took her on a FaceTime tour of the house and showed her all the various upgrades that had been made. She ooed and ahhed over the changes, praising me for the job I’d done. It felt good to hear her compliment me. So often in our relationship, I’d felt not good enough in comparison to her.

“You’ve done an amazing job, Beck. You should be incredibly proud.”

“I am,” I answered, walking her to the back deck to show her the window planters. I promised to send her pictures of the repaired and freshly painted siding in the morning. It was the only job in the entire house Anders and I hadn’t done ourselves. Kara recommended a friend of a friend who was starting his own siding business and would give us a good deal if we were willing to let him post the before and after pictures on his social media. He had done an incredible job.

“Anders has been a great help, too. He seems to be enjoying the work. I couldn’t have completed half of this without his eye for design.”

Her face dropped at the mention of his name. I hated she always had this reaction when I brought him up in conversation. I wanted to tell her what a fantastic guy he was and how she should take the time to get to know him again now so many years had passed. How much that would mean to him. But I knew it would be disregarded. Laurel had made up her mind about Anders a long time ago, and if there was one thing I knew about Laurel Mitchell, it was that once she'd decided something, it might as well be gospel.

I wouldn’t give up that easily, but today was not the day to wage that battle. Our relationship, while mutually over romantically, still felt raw and new. One wrong step, one push too far, and the whole thing could come crashing down before it ever got started. It amused me how similar Laurel and her brother were in that regard.

“Will you be honest with me about something?” She was looking down again, fussing with something in her lap.

“Of course.”

“You wanting to break up with me, it didn’t have anything to do with Anders, right?”

My heart skipped a beat. Had I been that transparent? Could she have caught on to what had transpired between us?

“Huh?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “Did he say something about me that influenced your decision?”

She was always so quick to presume he was running his mouth about her. But I couldn’t remember a single instance where he'd spoken ill of her. Something had happened between them years ago, the details of which I still didn’t know, and the years since they'd been completely out of contact, but that didn’t explain why her first reaction was always to think he was bad-mouthing her. I imagined Laurel’s father and stepmother probably had something to do with that.

“No, Laurel. I told you months ago. Anders wants to have a relationship with you. You need to give him a chance.”

She considered my words for a moment before glancing over her shoulder to have a silent conversation with her seemingly empty apartment.

“That’s my roommate. I got to go.”

Without waiting for me to say goodbye or point out she didn’t have a roommate, she hung up with a click.

I locked up and made my way back upstairs to Anders’ room. Not that we could call it just his anymore. I hadn’t spent more than a few minutes at a time in the third-floor room I’d been originally camped out in since the night I found Anders’ drugs. The only time I went up there was to check the stash I'd hidden, was undisturbed, and even those trips were becoming less frequent. Anders seemed fully committed to his recovery. Even over the last few days, which had been incredibly difficult, he'd held strong.

I’m going to keep getting these for him. One for every year I got to live, and he didn’t.

He was doing this for Jonah, and he would succeed for him, too.

I pulled back the top sheet and slipped under. The summer was so warm we hardly ever slept with anything else. Plus, Anders, who was usually cooler in the day, seemed to turn into a radiator the second he fell asleep. He had his back to me now, so I scooted up to him, tucking my front to every inch of his back. Our few inches of height difference made him the perfect little spoon, and I clung to him tightly.

“How’d it go with Laurel?” His voice was scratchy from the outpouring of emotions earlier.

“Were you eavesdropping?”

“I was deducing. You took your phone. Who else would you be calling?”

“She broke up with me.”

“No shit.”

I laughed into his neck, placing gentle kisses against his nape. “Is this okay?” I whispered, running my hand around his chest to hold him tightly.

“It’s perfect.”