Page 27 of Salvaged Heart

27

ANDERS

“ E rm, what the fuck is going on here.” My sister stood frozen in the kitchen doorway, wide eyes ping-ponging between myself and Beck, wildly taking in the scene before her. “What. The. Actual. Fuck!”

“Laurel?” I said, not wanting to believe she was standing right in front of me.

At the same time, Beck said, “Shit.”

I found myself stepping back from him quickly, no, not stepping. I wasn’t moving of my own accord. Beck had both palms pressed to my chest, and he was pushing me backward away from him, desperately trying to remove every point of contact between the two of us. I studied his face, trying to read whatever thoughts were crashing into him, but his gaze was fixed on Laurel, lips parting and closing, fumbling for words.

Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Please don’t say…

“It’s not what it looks like.”

Well, fuck, he said it.

Not sure what else the two of us half naked, pressed into one another and making out furiously against the cabinet, was supposed to look like, but I suddenly felt no desire to be around for the explanation. I bent down and grabbed our shirts off the floor, thrusting his at him before slipping mine on and turning to storm away.

“No, Anders.” Laurel’s voice came from behind me.

It was calm but fierce, a terrible storm brewing beneath the surface of her well-polished exterior, so incredibly like her father that it stopped me in my tracks.

“I let you run from me once before without demanding any explanation from you, but I won’t do it again.” She breathed in sharply, spitting the following words through what sounded like gritted teeth. “You need to tell me what the hell I just walked in on.”

I snapped back around, glaring at Beck, who remained frozen, still wearing only his boxer briefs, shirt half pulled up his arms, but he hadn’t managed to get it over his head. He just stood there like a statue, hair messy from where my fingers had been pulling at it, lips puffy and kissed raw, eyes trained on the blank space between my sister and me. He was no doubt trying to come up with a buyable excuse for why the two of us might have been tongue-fucking the other’s mouth only moments earlier.

“I think Beckham was about to explain that to the both of us.” I deflected.

He'd been so quick to deny what had been very obviously happening, and I, sure as hell, wouldn’t be the one to come up with the lies for him. The second she'd made her presence known, he'd put as much distance as he possibly could between the two of us and shut down like I was some shameful secret.

Damnit, I deserved better than that.

After several minutes that stretched like hours, he finally seemed to kick his tongue into motion, but all he managed to produce was an unintelligible garble of, “I…we…You see. Anders…and.”

For the love of God.

“This is so freaking typical.” Laurel was talking again, eyes drilled on me, seeming not even to register the stuttering mess of words coming from Beck beside me. “You can’t ever help yourself, can you?”

“Excuse me?”

“I should have known you'd pull something like this.” She spat the words, each laced with deadly venom.

“Look, Laurel,” I held my hands up in my best attempt of surrender. I probably looked like I was trying to calm a rabid animal, and if I was being honest, she didn’t look much different from one. Her eyes were practically on fire with hatred, and at that moment, if she had started frothing at the mouth, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“I’m not sure what you think you’re talking about, but I can assure you that it is not the case.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.”

I'd changed more than she would ever understand, but her being able to recognize that in me would take longer than a five-minute yelled conversation and rely on her ever knowing me in the first place. Still, the words cut deep. All those negative voices I'd finally put to rest were once again rising in my head.

Useless, failure, good for nothing, addict.

“I don’t know why I thought it would be different this time. I don’t know why I thought in the years I hadn’t seen or heard from you that maybe you had grown up. Maybe you had stopped taking what belonged to everybody else and using it for your fucking benefit. All you do is take, take, take, Anders. Use, use, use.”

She was fully up to steam now. It was practically rupturing from her ears. She threw her purse on the counter and stormed over to me, pressing a manicured fingernail into my chest. “I knew when they read the contents of Aunt Millie’s will that if you came back, it would only be for your own gain. I knew your involvement would only last long enough to get a paycheck, and then you'd slip back out of my life again like you were never even here.

“Then you showed up, and you actually seemed to be making an effort to patch things up between us. You actually seemed to give a damn about me.” She scoffed as if the idea of such a thing was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. “But now it all makes sense. I saw it in your eyes the first time you saw him. I saw how you looked at him, like he was a shiny new toy, and I told myself I was seeing things. I forced myself to believe that I was the one in the wrong. That it was me who was the problem, me who needed to try harder. Me who needed to be more trusting.”

I glanced over to the still mute Beck, who was staring at the floor like he was wishing it would open up and swallow him whole. Laurel just shook her head in disbelief.

“As usual, you just wanted another thing for yourself.”

“Laurel…”

“I’m done with you.” She dismissed me, but I was fired up now.

Like hell, I would back down after she'd just stood there throwing insults at me as if she even had the slightest insight into my life. “No, it’s my turn. You are jumping to all these conclusions over here, but I don’t get a chance to defend myself?”

“Why bother when all that comes out of your mouth is self-serving lies anyway?”

Now would be a really good time for Beck to open his mouth and support me, but of course, he seemed to have nothing to add.

“It’s not like that between us.” I gestured between me and him. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I fought these feelings growing between us for months. I tried to deny what was happening, but it was hopeless. We care about each other, Laurel. We care about each other deeply.”

I had believed that statement to be true with every fiber of my being less than thirty minutes ago, and I believed he cared about me as deeply as I cared about him. Heck, the words I love you had been on the tip of my tongue, and there hadn’t been a single part of me that doubted if I let them slip, he would say them back. I’d been such a fool. If he cared, he would say something. If he cared, he would come to my damn defense instead of standing there looking ready to bolt.

“Anders, you've never cared about another person a day in your damn life.” The words sounded rehearsed, and in a way, they were. I’m sure my mother told Laurel this about me at every available opportunity since I left.

“That’s not true,” I protested.

She just stared back blankly at me as if awaiting evidence.

So I pushed on, but the heat coursing through my blood was cracking the calm demeanor I was desperately trying to maintain. “For one, I care about you. Well, I used to care about you, until you started ripping me a new one like I am worth less than the gum beneath your shoe.”

Fuck her , fuck every indoctrinated opinion of me that our parents had pumped into her head. She leveled me with a look so sharp it could have broken glass.

“Then why didn’t you come, Anders?”

What the fuck?

“Come? Come where?”

“I was fifteen, Anders. Fifteen. You promised to pick me up from cheer camp, but you never fucking showed.”

I rolled my eyes, trying to play it off as if we weren’t on the precipice of uncovering the absolute truth of the matter. I knew why Laurel hated me. Knew why she didn’t trust me. She didn’t have to say it. But she didn’t know the truth of that night, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to share it with her now. So I shrugged it off, dismissing her like she'd dismissed me.

“Really, Laurel? I didn’t pick you up from cheer practice seven years ago. That’s my big transgression.”

“Don’t play dumb, Anders. We both know it’s not. Have you even told him what happened that night? Ever bothered to bring that up while you were busy sucking each other’s dicks?”

She glanced over at him, likely looking for any sign that he had a single clue of what she was talking about.

He did.

I'd told him about where I was that night and what happened, but it was unlikely he’d connected the dots yet.

Beckham made the slightest of moves, and for a hopeful second, I thought he was finally coming to my aid, to position himself between me and my fire-breathing sister.

But he just shifted his weight.

“No? Well, that’s not a surprise. Didn’t want to tell him you were busy getting high with your lousy, good-for-nothing stoner friends.”

Fury raged inside me. She didn’t know I’d been with Jonah that night, didn’t know what happened to him. He went to college the year earlier and never came home for all she knew. That was the lie my parents had spun for everyone who'd known what we meant to one another.

“Didn’t want to tell him that because you didn’t show up, I had to get a ride home with one of the seniors on the football team? Didn’t want to tell him how that asshole stuck his hands down my pants, then kicked me out on the side of the road in a bad neighborhood and called me a fucking prude when I told him to stop? I called you twelve times, but you didn’t answer a single one of them. You were so high out of your goddamn mind you probably didn’t even hear your phone, did you?”

I’d heard every single ring. Three of those calls rang through as I shook a convulsing Jonah while he choked on his own tongue. Another two while I begged the 911 operator to send help. Four more while I pumped furiously at his chest, following their instructions on how to perform CPR. One while an officer cuffed me. One while they loaded Jonah’s lifeless body onto a stretcher. And the final call became the soundtrack to the last time I would ever see Jonah’s face. The ring, ring, ring as they closed the ambulance doors, blocking the love of my life from my sight forever. The memory was so fresh I could still taste the vomit on his lips as I frantically tried to breathe life back into him.

“I bet you didn’t tell him that whatever trouble you were busy raising had Dad and Linda so wound up they didn’t answer my calls either. I walked almost ten miles, getting catcalled, and crept on to get back home. I'd already been assaulted once that night. I could have easily been raped or, worse, killed by some junkie trying to get cash for a fix.” She spat the word junkie at me because that’s what I was in her eyes. In the world’s eyes.

“You didn’t even say sorry, Anders. You didn’t even look me in the eye. You shut yourself in your room for four weeks until you turned eighteen, then took off, and I didn’t hear from you again for seven fucking years.

“Did you even think what it would be like for me once you were gone? You know how my dad is. You know how he treated your mom. It became so much worse after you walked out. Neither of us could breathe without him lashing out verbally, sometimes physically.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and the sight of them split me in two. I’d known. My mother told me of the violence at home. Laurel had also texted me almost continually the first year I'd been gone. They’d begged me to come back. They both knew when I was in the house he didn’t dare treat them that way because I was bigger, quicker, stronger than him. I hadn’t once put him on his ass, but if he'd raised a hand to either of them in my presence, I wouldn’t have thought twice. But instead, I just stopped taking my mother’s calls, and I left Laurel on read.

“He kept me trapped in that house, under his thumb, my entire last three years of high school. I had to quit cheer and wasn’t allowed to see any friends other than those he hand-picked. Every second of every day was micromanaged and scheduled. It was suffocating, Anders.

“He almost didn’t let me go off to college, did you know that? He was so scared I would turn out like you that he almost took away my chance to prove him differently. In the end, he only let me go because, for some strange reason, he approved of Beck.”

Of course, he approved of Beck. He was the all-American guy-next-door type, destined to be an MLB star fresh out of college. He’d never stepped outside the lines of what was expected of him a day in his life. He had a good head on his shoulders and came from a good, hard-working family. He was safe and dependable, perfect for daddy’s little girl.

“You didn’t give a fuck. It took Aunt Millie dying for you to come back into my life, and now you’re here, but I’ve changed. I’ve grown, but you have remained exactly the same as you always were. Completely selfish.”

That might have been the most words I'd heard my sister string together at any time. She was red-faced, with tears running in uncontrolled streaks down her cheeks, her whole body shaking with anger. But there was nothing for me to say. Every single word she'd fired at me was true. Beck had bore witness to every single vile thing she'd dragged up about my character, and the look on his face was one of pure disgust.

Laurel turned on her heels and bolted from the room.

Beck glanced between where I stood in shock and the door she'd just disappeared from as if he was trying to decide who he should follow.

The decision didn’t take him long.

Without so much as a word towards me, he pulled his sweats from the floor, slipped them on, and ran after her.

He’d made his choice.

It hadn’t been me.