Sometimes, I wondered if I was living in a dream. That maybe I hadn’t attended my mother’s funeral just the day before. After a week of living in the Stonewood’s home, I wondered if I would ever wake up.
At first, no one bothered me other than Jay and Katie.
Katie’s demons influenced her reaction to my hell. A few days ago, she’d pushed the door open without knocking, and without saying a word, crawled under the blankets with me. When I didn’t move away or closer to her, she wrapped her thin arms around me and whispered, “It doesn’t really get better for a while.”
My throat constricted and my eyes watered a little.
She smoothed my hair and followed up with, “It doesn’t really get worse, either.”
I gasped, laughed, and then cried.
She held me until I calmed down and mumbled, “Don’t hole up too much longer. Call me when you’re ready.”
She flew out of the room as quickly as she’d come in. I didn’t see her after for a long time, but I knew she’d done that to give me the space she would have wanted.
Jay, on the other hand, came to my door every day and tried to get me out of their guest room.
One day, he stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame and looking at me with such pain in his eyes that I almost comforted him. My body wouldn’t move though. It seemed every part of me had been drained of energy. I just stared back at him as I lay on my side, trying to will myself to look less depressed than I felt.
“How are you?” he asked and then winced. “Shit, don’t answer that.”
I just kept staring at him, despite his discomfort. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed how my best friend wore his emotions on his sleeve for everyone to see. He was so easy to read, so open and transparent. So normal.
“Why don’t you come downstairs with me and I’ll make you something to eat?”
He had to know that his mother placed food on the nightstand for me every couple of hours, she came in to buzz about and talk even though I only nodded along as I ate.
I didn’t taste any of the meals she brought to my room. I went through the motions. I thanked her, listened to a story, and chewed the food. She asked how the room was, I answered that it was great. She asked how I felt, I said tired. My responses were automatic. Controlled. Control was, like my mother had always said, my best friend.
I shook my head at Jay and mustered up the strength to at least answer him today. “I just can’t, Jay.”
He rushed to the bed, needing just the inch I’d given him to take a mile. “You have to, Brey. You’re going to go insane in here.”
I stared ahead.
He sat down on the bed and squeezed my hip. “You’re losing weight and you barely move. That means you aren’t eating enough or the paint in here is such a shitty shade that it’s eating you alive.”
His attempt at a joke for some reason brought tears to my eyes. This terrible dream had me featured in it as the unstable, crazy girl. Nothing made sense. Not my emotions, not my thoughts, not my life.
“Shit, Brey. Don’t cry. That was supposed to be funny.” He ran a hand through his hair, uncomfortable. “I’m saying all the wrong things today.”
I wanted to comfort him, tell him he was my best friend and that it wasn’t his fault. But it felt like everyone’s fault. No one understood.
Everyone was normal.
And normalcy was suffocating me.
I jumped when I heard another voice in the doorway. “You’re saying all the right things, Jay. She’s just acting like a child, and you’re treating her like one.”
Jay whipped around to look at Jax. His body went rigid and his hand squeezed my hip again. I couldn’t see how Jay looked at his older brother, but I knew what his expression would be. “Come on, Jax.” His voice came out strained and mixed with a plea.
Jax’s family had no idea how to act around him. Or me, for that matter. We were an enigma to everyone who hadn’t been through our trauma.
Jax handled what he went through differently from me though. He didn’t flinch when someone mentioned the fire like I did. He didn’t shy away from confrontation. When the police asked us to come to the station to give our statements, I imagine he’d handled the interrogation as if he were giving an interview, showing every single expression everyone expected to see.
When they asked him those difficult questions about that night, I had a feeling that he’d been sad when they’d asked him about my parents, scared when they’d asked him about the fire, and humble when they’d asked about his bravery. He emerged smiling and patting one of the officers on the back.
Our stories must have corroborated because after they asked me a few questions they let Mrs. Stonewood take us home.
When we reached the car, Jax didn’t slide into the front seat like he had on the way there. He opened the other back door and folded in right next to me. When he turned to look at me, for the first time since I’d known him, he stared at me like there was something he couldn’t read about me.
His hand went to my thigh and squeezed.
It was the worst time for my body to react. We’d just been in the station telling the police how my father burned down my family home. In that room, my statement of how he’d beaten my mother and me before saying he was burning the whole place to the ground would be the statement that solidified his guilt. That along with evidence of lighter fluid and a match found in our home. They’d moved quickly on pressing charges against him so that my mother’s reservation would feel they did her justice. They wanted me to feel justice too, or so the investigator told me.
Yet, I wasn’t worried about any of that. I was a lover seeking her first thrill. Exhilaration shot through every one of my veins from where his hand laid. When he squeezed, it was like he injected me with a stimulant. My breathing picked up, my heart pounded faster, the hairs on my arms seemed to sway toward him.
He stared at me, his eyes shifting back and forth like he was trying to see through me. Typically, he could but I wasn’t usually this guarded.
Then he sighed as if in defeat. He raked his gaze up and down my body. When his eyes met mine again, he mouthed, “Okay?”
For the first time, the man couldn’t seem to read what I was thinking. He couldn’t see through the mask I’d made after being questioned by the cops. It was the first time I thought he cared about me.
And right there, in that car, I fell tragically in love with him.
I thinned my lips, pulling them between my teeth and nodded.
The whole way home, his thumb rubbed a circle on the inner seam of my thigh. The movement was slow, soothing, and reassuring. We were in this together, I thought.
I was mistaken. I didn’t see him for a whole week after that.
Jay and Mrs. Stonewood would come to my room throughout the week, but he never would. I thought he forgot about me and that twisted the knife deeper in my nightmare of a life that week. I mourned the loss of my mother and him.
Like I’d had him. As if he’d been mine.
When I wasn’t contemplating my hell, I was overthinking how stupid I’d been for thinking he’d ever been interested.
So, when he stood in the doorway calling me a child, something different shot through my veins. It was better than being numb and feeling like I was in a nightmare. I let it course through me and fill my heart, making it beat faster and faster.
“I need to talk to Aubrey, Jaydon,” he commanded his little brother, never one to ask. “Give us a minute.”
Jay hesitated, for the first time, unsure of what to do with Jax and me. Before, it’d been Jay and me against the world, and now this new dynamic created instability. He looked to me for guidance and I had a new fire that he probably saw in my gaze. I nodded and he conceded, leaving us alone.
“The family’s worried about you,” Jax said, once he closed the door behind his brother. He seemed bigger in the enclosed room, like he was taking up all the damn room in there. I sat up, trying to embody just as much space and power as he exuded.
“I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will,” he stated matter-of-factly.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“But, they don’t.” He pointed toward the closed door. “You need to start acting like you’ll be fine, Whitfield.” His words cut through the air, loud and deep. He strode toward me, like he wanted to shake me and then paced back. With his back to me, I saw him pull at his hair before he turned back around.
“I can’t!” I yelled at him, waving my hands around the room. “You think this is easy for me? You think you can relate? I just lost both of my parents.”
He stepped up close to me and bent down, putting a hand on either side of my hips. “That man never deserved to be called your parent, and he’ll rot in prison thinking just that. Let’s be real, Peaches. You lost one parent. And at least you fought me to save her.”
He whispered the last words. I saw the change in his eyes. The blue in them lightened like they had iced over and froze all his emotions in.
I couldn’t help it. My hand went to his jaw to soothe him. I rubbed over the ticking muscle.
He looked right through me as if he was haunted by something from that night.
“Jax,” I whispered because we were so close. I felt his breath on my lips, I could practically taste the mint he’d just had. I knew that if he didn’t back away, I’d make a fool of myself.
He seemed to know it too, because he snapped back out of my touch and focused a steely, determined gaze on me. “Mom’s in shambles because she thinks you’re suicidal or some shit.”
The callousness of his words shot me out of bed. I got up in his face. “Fuck you. That isn’t what she’s thinking.”
“You got a mouth on you all of a sudden, huh?”
I just glared at him.
His eyes shifted back and forth, reading every line on me as if he was putting it all together. That look, I started to realize, was the way he looked at me when he needed to know where we stood, when he needed to know everything about me.
The slow smile that followed his assessment had me putting my hands up to his chest to shove him out of the room. He caught them, as if he’d read my next move already.
“Go for a jog with me, Peaches.” His voice was like sugar granules, sweet and rough at the same time.
“I’m not going anywhere with you, L.P.” I tried to yank my hands away, but he held them on his chest with little effort.
“Come on,” he coaxed, but he wasn’t looking me in the eyes. He was looking at our struggling hands.
“Jax, let me go.”
“Not until you agree to come for a jog with me. It’s the least you can do after shoving and swearing at me.”
My anger subsided quickly with his words as my embarrassment set in. What had gotten into me?
He pushed further. “If we stay here any longer, you know I’ll make you swear more. Just a jog?” It was the closest to a plea I would get from him.
For the first time since coming into that bedroom, I wanted out of it.
I conceded, and he left the room so I could change. I put on compression leggings and a sports bra that I covered with a T-shirt. I didn’t have many clothes that I exercised in because, truth be told, I didn’t exercise much.
When I met him downstairs, he just nodded. We walked past a gaping Jay and Mrs. Stonewood toward the back of the house. No news stations had access to the acres of land behind the Stonewood estate and we could run there freely.
Our first run together, and most every run we’d shared that summer, started quietly.
The crunch under our feet, our rhythmic breathing, and the nature around us allowed me to meditate. I thought about life without my parents on that first run. I thought about my well mapped out plan for college. I thought about my mother.
My beautiful, sweet mother. She loved her family and my father so much and said we’d been fortunate to have him. She saw him as a good man. It blinded her to all of his flaws and to what our future held. Maybe my father loved her too, in his own brutal, vicious way.
My breathing quickened, but I didn’t care. I picked up the pace and pushed myself harder.
My father—that man—had been, and still was, a monster. Controlling, vindictive, and mean, he only cared about three things: his business, his appearance, and himself. How many times had he locked us in that room because we’d said the wrong thing or his business’s stocks didn’t do well enough or my mother donated too much to her charity? How many nights did we spend in there, locked away?
Locked away.
I stopped like I’d crashed into the steel door that kept us prisoners. I gulped for air but couldn’t seem to take any in. I bent over, trying hard to breathe, but I felt smothered, like I was in that room suffocating all over again.
God, I was all alone now. All alone and for some reason, I couldn’t think of any other word, everything disappeared except me.
“Alone.” I choked it out, trying to find other words, other things, trying to grasp at anything else.
“Alone. Alone. Alone. I’m all alone.” I sounded pathetic even to myself.
I heard Jax telling me to breathe, but he was so far away. I crumbled down onto the dirt of the path, and then Jax was kneeling in front of me, holding my face and making me look in his eyes. “Fucking breathe, Whitfield. Watch me.” He pulled in a breath and pushed it back out. He did it again, and I followed his lead.
I shook my head. No air was coming in.
He must have realized it wasn’t working because his blue eyes flared. His jaw clenched. I knew he was trying to read me, but I was starting to fade. All I saw was the tunnel vision narrowing in on just him.
Then, he crashed his lips onto mine.
Hard.
No apologies and no coaxing. He took my lips like he owned them, and I gasped, forgetting my panic. His hands threaded into my hair, loosening it from the ponytail. I didn’t care how it might look, because my intake of air was euphoric. My head swirled. The dizziness, I knew, wasn’t from lack of oxygen.
Later in life, I’d attribute it to that.
But in that moment, Jax Stonewood’s lips tasted mine, explored them, breathed life back into them. I tasted his usual mint in a whole new way, and I clung to that taste, to him.
To us.
Like he’d given me mouth-to-mouth, like he was my lifeline, I finally gasped in air.
He moved back to let me breathe and get a handle on the situation. He pulled my hair fully loose and then gripped my upper arm.
He leaned in to whisper into my hair, “You’re not alone.”
I looked out at the woods we’d found ourselves in. My vision blurred with tears. “Please don’t baby me, Jax.”
He stood up and lowered his chin. His tongue ran along the teeth of his closed mouth. “You’re beautiful when you’re sad, Peaches.” Then, he spun and started to go down the path. “Let’s finish our run.”
Much later that night, I muddled through trying to figure out our relationship, wondering if he wanted me, if we were more than friends, if we were even friends at all.
Every morning after, he came to my room around the same time every day.
First it was, “Get ready. We’re going running.”
The next morning, he asked, “Why aren’t you dressed? We gotta go running.”
Then, he didn’t have to say much at all. I would meet him in the hall.
Some runs, we talked about our lives. Other days, we’d run and then he’d grab his guitar from his room to take me down to the lake in his backyard. There, he’d sing songs for me that he’d written and claimed to have never shared with anyone else. Those days, I wondered if I was as special to him as he was to me.
One day, he found out I loved watching Disney movies. By that night, he’d gotten ahold of Beauty and the Beast and watched me while I watched it. Another day, I found out he hated everything about school, that all of it bored him to death except his music and business classes.
Some runs we talked about how we were coping. My confessions would come in spurts. I’d slow to a walk and just tell him I hated how normal everyone was. He’d smile sadly at me like he just got it. It was all I needed.
Some runs we didn’t talk at all. We just absorbed each other, because that’s what you do when you fall in love with someone.
Every run, he kissed me senseless.
I didn’t ask him what we were. I didn’t even mention the kisses. I just took what Jax Stonewood was willing to give.
I fell madly in love with him.
The night he took my virginity, he let me be awkward. He soothed every imperfection and worry I had, like he knew every one of them. He’d found every weakness of mine and made me feel like it was a strength.
That night, he told me he needed me. There was a rarity in Jax Stonewood needing anything from anyone. I naively thought that would keep us together.
