Page 4 of Carver
Her eyes flare with hope. I watch her try to pull it back and contain it, but this is Bronte, so of course she gives up on that and lets her elation shine through.
She’s so breathtakingly beautiful that my soul starts bleeding out and my stomach crashes down to the floor. “Let me come with you,” she breathes. “Let me be there, Dom. Please.”
I knew she’d ask this and the only way I can think to get her to back down is to push and push and push. Cruelly. I hate being like that, being an asshole, but it’s the only way. “I don’t want you there. Not because I don’t want you to see me like that,or I don’t want you to have to waste days of your life on me, but because I just don’t love you. You keep clinging to what we had, but it’s gone. You’re throwing away your time and your hopes and your dreams so stupidly. You’re better than this, Bronte. I’ve been telling you that since the day your family moved here and I saw you in first period English class.”
I’ll always remember the first moment I ever saw Bronte. I was struck by her beauty. Struck dumb and literally so intimidated I couldn’t talk to her. I was fourteen years old, and it was immediate lust. I didn’t fall hard and fast. It was straight ass over tits. The crazy thing? She fell just as hard. For me. They say first love never dies… that might be true, but sometimes you just have to put it out of its misery.
Bronte’s response? She rolls her eyes and clicks her tongue like I’m being silly.
“If you’re not going to give up on this place, then at least stop throwing your life away waiting for me. Pining isn’t romantic. It’s pathetic. Life isn’t a novel, even though your mom named you that way.”
She puts one hand on her hip and juts it out. “The Bronte’s wrote gothic fiction. Their characters’ love stories were hard won, and their heroes were more than flawed.”
Christ.
I try to formulate a good argument, but I have nothing. Bronte’s seen me scared, sick, bleeding, damaged, broken over the years, all before the accident.
I’ve tried everything to convince her to just move the fuck on. I’ve used the wholeyou deserve bettercliched as fuck argument every which way I know how. Bronte sees rightthrough all of that shit. She knows that in my heart, there’s only grief. She’s patient. She’ll wait a thousand years if that’s what it takes. Find me in another lifetime. Dance with me as ghosts. Carve out an alternate reality, and all of that other poetic bullshit.
It wasn’t the accident that broke us. It wasme. I couldn’t give her hope. Couldn’t let her down gently. She’s still refused to be parted from me.
She can’t leave me here to die.
She’s all soft and I’m all hard edges and she just keeps breaking up on me over and over again. I shove and wrench and scream into the wind, coming at life in a flurry of agonized punches and what does she do? She understands.
Knowing Bronte gave me a reason to live. She taught me how to see myself and how to do what I thought was impossible—fall in love with myself. Before her, life was a silent scream. All I’d known was my father and uncles’ drunken binges, the violence, and the abuse.
“Don’t,” I plead. “Just… I can’t right now. Not ever again. Don’t you understand that you being here, you with your bleeding heart—that’s what’s killing me? You’re torturing me. It’s too much. You’re harming me, not healing me. I need you to hear me. I need you to stop.”
Hurt flickers across her face, white hot bright and blinding. I’ve just branded her with that same pain that festers inside of me. I wanted to spare her ever having to feel what I’ve felt. I wanted to protect her. It kills me that I have to cut her to try to keep her safe.
Bronte never needed me to shield her. Nothing can diminish her fire.
She closes in on me. I can’t bring myself to dodge away. I’ve fired the last of the shots I have and there’s nothing left. No shields, no ammunition, no defenses.
It’s just me and the raw minefield of my soul when Bronte’s hand reaches out and strokes the right side of my face. Her fingers graze over the scars.
It’s the first time she’s touched me sinceithappened.
It’s the first time I’veallowedher to get this close.
Her palm is fire, scalding me, the pain so brutal and joyous that my eyes tear ducts fill and threaten to spill over.
Honey brown eyes with enchanting green spokes and whiskey soft flecks trace my face, caressing, softening,gentling. I’m a pillar of fire, about to combust until there’s nothing but ash, and she’s cool, still waters that run deeper than I can comprehend.
The agony of her bleeds into every cell. My lungs collapse, drawing thin, wheezing breaths. I’ve kept her away because I knew what would happen if I didn’t. I compartmentalized, folding her up and tucking her neatly into a box that I shoved to the furthest reaches of the black pit of my mind, where I stuck all the other shit that it hurt too much to unpack.
“I’m coming to Hart,” she says softly, her hand still burning, burning through me. “If you don’t tell me where you are, I’ll figure it out. I’ll camp out on the doorstep of that clubhouse if I have to.”
I open my mouth to protest, but she shushes me, pressing her fingers to my bottom lip. I want to open my mouth and lick them. Drink her in. Surge forward and devour her mouth, even though it wouldn’t be like before. Even though I’m repulsive and she’d taste it.
“I’ve reached my limit on letting you assume that you know what’s best for me. I’ve given you time. I’ve tried to be here for you when you were struggling. I thought that there was only so much I could do. That you had to save yourself. You had to decide for yourself that you wanted to live again, but fuck that. It was sweet for a day, that you loved me so much you didn’t want me to suffer with you, but it’s been patronizing ever since. You’re not the only one strong enough to carry the weight of this.”
She’s always been the stronger one. I’ve never once debated that. What she doesn’t understand or refuses to see is that she’s wrong. I need to break. Fully. I need to put myself back together.
“I want to be there,” she reiterates, her voice firm and rough, harder than I’ve ever heard it. “You need friends and family, even if you don’t need a lover. I’m not letting you go, and neither is my family. We’re always going to be there for you, even if you’ve got blinders on to the whole world.”
“You’re so utterly exhausting,” I groan, finally finding the self-preservation I need to jerk away. I stumble across the kitchen like I’m drunk—which I certainly never fucking am, not after seeing what it did to my dad and uncles.
