Page 88 of Forever Finds Us
“Thanks,” I said as she dragged Roxanne’s suitcase and my backpack behind her to stow before takeoff.
As soon as she was out of hearing range, Roxanne turned toward me. Her beautiful brown eyes flashed with hurt, and I wanted to fix it. I wanted to tell her what she wanted to hear but?—
“I’ll answer your question,” she said, “but not because you expect me to or demand it of me.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t trust you, Brand. Not in this moment, because you’re choosin’ to put your faith in someone who has repeatedly lied to you and taken advantage of you. You have no faith in me, in my knowledge of this kind of situation, and you’re settin’ yourself up to fail and stay miserable.”
“Roxanne, he’s my brother.”
“Yeah, he is. Your baby brother, and you love him, and you want everything to be okay, but he’s also an addict. You have this idea in your head that you have some kind of control over the situation. Hear me when I say you do not. You can’t control Dixon any more than you can control the change of seasons.
“What you can control is how the rest of this flight is going to go. The next three months. I’m your girlfriend, or I was twenty minutes ago, but just like every other man I’ve ever dated and my family, what I want doesn’t matter to you. What I need doesn’t matter. Because I need to not be tangled up in this lie with you, but now I am. And you don’t care.”
“You’re puttin’ me in an impossible position, R?—”
“No, actually, I’m not. You’ve put yourself in an impossible situation, and no one can get you out of it but you. It seems so obvious now, but all this time, you thought you’d tell your brother what you wanted him to do and he’d just do it. But there’s a lot of work you both need to do in your relationship. You can’t just ‘man up’ and expect things to be hunky dory.
“I’m so stupid. It wasn’t another woman or an ex I needed to be worried about. It was you. Your entitled belief that everything should just go the way you want it to. You can control me in bed. It’s fun and sexy, but out here in the real world, things just don’t work that way.
“And you need to learn the difference.”
My mouth gaped open. She’d put me in my place, just like when she bit me and I bled for her.
Roxanne was absolutely right, but I had no idea how to bridge the divide between what I needed and what she did.
A chasm grew between us on the plane. I felt her icy distance now and it burned me inside.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re right. I hear you, Roxanne, but I need to believe in my brother. I need to have hope. If I betray him now, what was it all for?”
“That’s for you to figure out,” she retorted. “When we get back to Jackson, please drive me home, and then you can be on your way. Bein’ with you these last few weeks has taught me somethin’ about myself. I am worthy of love and I deserve it. But not just from you. From myself, too, so you can go be miserable over the holidays without Dixon, but I won’t be around to watch. I cannot and will not lie to your sister again, not about this. It’s way too important.”
“Are you… breakin’ up with me?”
“Yep. How you like them apples? Mr. Important Rich Guy who can snap his fingers and demand whatever he wants gets dumped by the weird, small-town cop.” She laughed, but there was no humor in her eyes. “Forty years it took me to find what I wanted. Who I wanted, and I lost him before I ever even had him. It fuckin’ figures.”
The pain in my chest squeezed around my broken pieces. They shattered further into jagged shards, and if I wasn’t sitting upright, breathing and feeling my heart pound, I would’ve thought those shards had sliced up my lungs and cut all my arteries. It felt like I was bleeding out right in front of the woman I loved, but she refused to see it.
I whispered, “What will you do?”
“That’s none of your business anymore.”
“Will you— Can you just give me a little time?”
“Time’s up,” she said, looking away and trying so hard to keep up her bravado, but it was killing her just like it was me. It was clear in the way she held herself, trying to hold her hurt inside, trying not to let me see her shaking. “Even if you walked into a therapist’s office the second we stepped off this plane, you can’t process twenty years of co-dependency and trauma in five minutes. And I’m too damn old to wait around until you do.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Roxanne
My sister’s name and her kids’ faces flashed on my phone. It was a picture her husband Drew had taken of them at Disney World. She said the kids had pooped out after that picture, and all hell had broken loose in the middle of the “Happiest Place on Earth” with meltdowns and tantrums and blood sugar plunges.
She wasn’t the oldest of my sisters, but Maureen had always tried to mother me. She was only two years older than me, but it was just her nature.
Answering the call, I tried to put on my usual chipper, happy front. “Hey, sis. How are you?”
“What’s wrong? We haven’t heard from you in the group chat for a while. Are you okay?”
