Page 31 of Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
“No,” Caleb says simply. “He just…wasn’t. Wasn’t anything. When we met her in college, Ben was still that sensitive boy, but after each tour, it was like less and less of him came back. When he came back home the final time, he was sealed off so tight he could barely breathe. Mackenna always was an impatient kind of person, and it only took a few months of trying to bring him back before she gave up. She moved to the city, and that was that.”
Even though he was a dick earlier, my heart still twists a little for Ben, the sensitive boy who went to war and came back a shell. “Has Ben…you know. Seen anyone? About what happened to him?”
“He’s been going to a therapist weekly for five years now,” Caleb says, a touch of pride in his voice. “He sees a psychiatrist too—meds for his panic attacks and sleeping problems—and he’s in a community support group with other veterans. He’s been working on himself for years, Ireland, so he hasn’t just been lying around broken waiting for someone to fix him.”
“I never said he was,” I shoot back, ruffled. “Just that today he seemed awfully sealed off. And a lot like an asshole.”
I watch as a certain kind of defeat scrawls itself across Caleb’s face. “I know. I think—I think seeing the town gutted like that brought back some hard memories. And I think when that ceiling fell on you—well, fuck, Ireland, even I thought you were dead for a moment, and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”
I want to cling to the maybes his words raise in my mind—I want to cling to them too much, I can already feel it. Just like I can feel the tears burning at my eyelids when I ask, “If that’s true, then how can you say goodbye?”
He rubs at his beard, his jaw tight and his eyes shining. “Because we start things together, and we finish them together. I’m sorry, Ireland, I really am, but that’s the way it has to be.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m in my Prius, bumping toward the interstate. In my rearview, I still see Caleb’s truck and him standing outside it. He refuses to leave until he sees me safely on my way. I know that’s what he’s doing, and it’s the final straw.
I finally let the tears flow now. Now, when it won’t be awkward. Now, when I can save my pride.
Everywhere there are signs of the storm and the destruction it scattered around the countryside. Branches down, big green road signs crumpled as if by a giant fist. Leaves and twigs everywhere, along with a scattering of things that are far, far from their homes. An Easy Bake oven lodged in a tree. A mattress blown against a fence.
And yet nothing the storm has left even comes close to matching how messy and broken I feel right now.
I think I fell in love. I think I fell in love in a single night. I think I fell in love with two people instead of one, and all of it is ridiculous, so fucking ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop it from being true.
Doesn’t stop it one bit.
Soon, Caleb’s truck is out of sight, and I’m turning onto t
he paved county road that will take me back to the highway. Across the junction is a grassy field, but through the plot of knee-high grass waving in the sunny breeze is a meandering swath of flattened stalks, bent and speckled with flung mud. It’s a near perfect depiction of the path of the tornado, and there’s something singularly striking about it.
Possibly the lonely destruction matches my mood.
I reach automatically for my camera in the bag on the passenger seat, shoving my hand through my clothes in search of its reassuring shape, its familiar heft. But even as I riffle through the bag, a vision suddenly comes to me of my camera on the bed in the farmhouse’s guest room. I put it there while Caleb was telling me about Ben and him, and I got so caught up in the story that I completely forgot to shove it into the bag before I left.
Which means it’s still at the farmhouse.
Fuck.
I pointlessly and stupidly smack the steering wheel with my palm, which only hurts my hand and makes me feel childish. And childish is not something I can afford to feel right now—not when I’m already the awkward sausage who couldn’t take a hint and had to be told to leave.
Humiliation and anger burn at me as I yank on the wheel of the car to make a vicious U-turn back to the farm. The humiliation is for obvious reasons, I suppose, but even I don’t entirely understand the anger. I’m not an angry person normally; in fact, I’m always the first to say sorry, the first to make peace. I usually do everything I can to avoid conflict, to keep people liking me.
You’re done with that now. No more apologizing just because you’re scared of people walking away.
I straighten in my seat as I drive back to the farmhouse, and I allow the anger to wash away the humiliation. I allow myself, for the first time in my life, to hang on to my anger, to feed it and embrace it. Even with Brian and my sister, I never gave myself permission to be angry. Escaping those relationships were acts of desperate survival and retreat, not blazing righteousness. But it’s like the storm—and what happened in Caleb’s bed as it raged around us—has finally unlocked some new store of pride I’ve never had before.
I’m furious that these men made me feel any doubt or embarrassment about the night we spent together. I’m furious that the way Ben treated me made me feel like a stereotype. I’m furious that the whole thing made me feel ugly and unlovable.
And mostly, I’m furious that I live in a world that has the power to make me feel ugly and unlovable because of my body.
I’m very aware that Ben is still scowling and prowling his way around his wrecked business, that Caleb is off playing Farmer Do-Gooder, and that the farmhouse will be empty. All the same, I find myself rehearsing triumphant speeches and searing retorts all the way back to the Carpenter farm. For the first time in my life, I feel emboldened to defend my body. I feel proud of it, and I almost want someone to be at the house so I can tell them exactly how I feel. So I can hear my words scorching the air as I stand in my own skin and assert my right to be treated with dignity and to be loved. My right to live as everyone else lives.
In fucking peace.
Since the storm broke up this morning, the sun has been baking down on the prairie, and even the gloppy mud of the road has hardened enough for the Prius to wobble over it without issue. It wobbles back to the farm, and as I pull into the driveway, I see with a surge of excitement, dismay—and yes, lust—that it seems like I’ll be getting my wish.
Ben is here.
Chapter Twelve
