I Call Him Brady (12 page)

             
“I think you’re seeing what you want to see. This isn’t one of your movies, Jack. This time the hero isn’t going to get the girl.” My voice wavered as I struggled to get the words out and I was petrified that he would call my bluff.

             
I waited for him to say something, anything, that would end this torturous state of limbo we were in, but he said nothing.

             
“What?”

“It’s just…you just called me Jack.” There was total devastation in his eyes. “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep going out of my mind trying to figure out how to get closer to you when everything I do just makes you pull farther away.”

And then it happened. He walked away.

The instant the door slammed into the frame, my knees hit the hard wooden floors as I broke down in silent sobs. Part of me was praying he would turn around and come flying back into the room to swoop me up into his arms, but the other part of me knew that it would never happen because I had successfully killed his instinct to do so.

I had taken the only man who had ever truly loved me in a pure and selfless way and I had forced him to go. Because I loved him too much to let him stay.

I
was biting down hard, tightening the bottom half of my face in an attempt to control the top half. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had cried. Really cried. Emotional crying. I had done it for films in the past, but that had merely been a physical action, completely baseless. This was physical too, but in an uncontrolled and almost frightening way that made me want to never feel anything ever again.

             
I fought the urge to punch the wall, but it wasn’t easy. I felt like the rage was ripping me apart from the inside out and if I didn’t unleash it soon, I was afraid of what I might be capable of.

             
When I walked back into the upstairs apartment, May was waiting for me.

             
“What happened? Where’s Embers?” She was trying to look past me as if I was hiding Embers behind me.

             
“She’s still downstairs.” I just kept going straight to the bedroom to collect my things. I had absolutely no desire to explain myself. All I wanted to do was get away and fast, before I lost all self-control and ran back down to Embers. I couldn’t allow myself to think of her, sitting down there alone, probably a heap on the floor. I couldn’t help her through this. I had tried and all it had done was make things worse.

             
May followed me into the room. She saw me throwing articles of clothing back into my bag and yanked a shirt straight from my hand.

             
“What the hell are you doing?”

             
I ripped the shirt back from her grasp. “Leaving.”

             
“No.” This time she went for the bag, but instead of trying to take it, she simply sat on top of it, making it impossible for me to put anything else in it. “You can’t leave. Not now that she’s in love with you. You promised me you wouldn’t hurt her!”

             
“Stop it, May. You honestly think this is what I want?”

             
“Then why?” She wouldn’t budge from the bag and I was tempted to just walk out without my stuff. But then I imagined Embers coming back into the room later, seeing all of my clothes here strewn about just the way we had left everything after the night before. I could feel my chest tighten and my throat clench up. The pain was so severe, I had to sit down on the bed and catch my breath.

             
“You shouldn’t be up here with me. You should be down there with her. She needs you.”

             
May stood up and came to stand directly in front of me. “No. She needs you.”

             
“Maybe. But she won’t let me stay.” The pain was still consistently shooting through me, but I was starting to go numb to it. I stood up again and continued packing.

             
This time May did nothing to stop me.

             
As I walked from the room, she called out one last time. “She loves you, Brady.”

             
“I know that.” I didn’t look back. I had one more goodbye to say.

             
Jessa looked up from her cartoon when I came in the room.

             
“Hi Brady.” She flew out of her chair and threw her arms around my waist, hugging me tightly. I hadn’t had a chance to see her the night before.

             
“Hey Jessa. Listen, I can’t stay, but I wanted to say thank you for inviting me to your tea parties while I was here and for letting me go surfing with you. You are by far the coolest little person I’ve ever met.”

             
Her face fell into a frown. “You’re going? But why?”

             
How did I answer that? “Because my life is back in LA. I had a great vacation here with you guys though.”

             
She was still trying to understand. “When will you be back?”

             
It took everything I had not to break down in front of her. “I won’t be back. But that doesn’t mean I won’t miss you and think about you and your mama all the time.”

             
I knelt down to hold her. “Listen, I need you to do me a favor okay? Every night and every morning, can you give your mama a hug from me? You don’t have to tell her who it’s from, it can be a secret hug and you can be my secret hug agent. Yeah?”

             
She nodded, a small smile coming through. “Okay.” She wrapped her little arms around my neck and kissed my cheek. “I love you, Brady.”

             
“I love you, too.”

             
Then, with my heart in my throat, I practically ran from the house.

I took one last look at the downstairs apartment. Embers hadn’t come out since I had slammed the door on her. Hopefully by now May had come down to be with her.

Twenty minutes after Embers had trashed the one thing of value in my life, a car arrived down at the gas station to pick me up. I was barely sitting in the backseat when I pulled out my phone and made a call.

              “Mason, it’s Jack.  I need a favor.”

             
Several minutes later and I was off the phone again. I leaned back into the seat and laid my head back. How the fuck had all this happened? How had I both received and lost the most amazing thing I’d ever had in my life within a twenty-four hour time span.

             
I kept my eyes closed trying to still my mind, trying to still everything, but it was pointless. There would be no escape from what I was feeling. The only thing I could do was use those feelings for something productive and I had something very specific in mind already.

             
It took my lawyer less than half an hour to get back to me with all of the information I had asked him for. We discussed my options and best plan of action until I arrived at my destination forty-five minutes later.

             
Austin’s townhouse was precisely the type of place I would have expected him to live. It was pretentious and perfectly ordinary at the same time. I climbed the steps to this door and knocked hard several times.

             
Then the door flew open, an unsuspecting Austin on the other side of it.

             
“What the fuck are you doing here? I should probably tell you I’ve already talked to my lawyer about the threats you made against my life earlier today. She thinks I should file a restraining order.” He puffed his chest out and stared down at me from the top step smugly. It was all I could do not to knock him out right then and there.

             
“I’m glad you’re seeking legal counsel. You’re going to need it.”

             
His face scrunched into an ugly frown and I could tell from the glazed over look in his eyes he had nothing to connect the dots with. “What the fuck for? That little incident today with Embers? That was an accident. No way she’s pressing charges. She knows better than that.”

             
I fucking hated him. Every last part of me wanted to ram his fucking face into the wall.

             
“I’m not here about that. I’m here about Jessa.”

             
I’d struck a chord with him, saying her name. He took another step toward me, this time getting in my face. Maybe he wanted me to hit him. “You don’t come to me about my daughter. You want to fuck my slut of an ex-wife, knock yourself out, but Jessa is none of your business.”

             
“She is now,” I said. “You think you have all the power because you have more money than Em does? I’ve got news for you asshole, my bank account is bigger than yours.”
And so is my dick
.

             
He backed up and stared at me with narrow eyes. “I guess you and Embers haven’t had a chance to talk yet.”

             
“You guessed wrong. We talked plenty. It’s over. She told me to get out. But if you think that means you’re getting what you wanted, you’re dead wrong.” I took the card I’d been holding in my hand and slapped it onto his chest hard. It fell as soon as I let go and Austin scrambled to catch it.

             
“What’s this?”

             
“That’s my lawyer’s card. He’ll be getting in touch with you shortly regarding your custody arrangement. I’m having him draw up some new papers and I suggest you sign them.”

             
He crumpled up the card. “Why the hell would I do that?”

             
“Because if you don’t, I’ll fucking bury you. I know you think you fly below the radar with all the shit you do, but all it would take is a couple of phone calls to have everyone from the IRS straight to the cops coming around knocking down your door. Don’t believe me? You should hear the stuff my lawyer came up with after digging for less than thirty minutes. Red fucking flags were popping up all over place. Starting with Embers’ food truck. I know it’s been repoed. You haven’t made a single fucking payment in almost half a year and yet you still kept coming around collecting money from Embers for it. If the bank had a fucking clue how to find it, she would have lost it months ago already.”

             
“So what. She owed me that money,” he spat.

             
“Come again?”

             
“She gets almost a third of my paycheck every fucking month. I was just trying to get some of that back.”

             
I shook my head in disgust. I didn’t even want to hit him anymore. I just wanted him gone.

             
“Sign the fucking papers. Leave Embers alone. End it. Or I’ll come back and do it myself.”

             
I heard the door slam shut behind me as I walked back to my car. At least I could leave now knowing Embers would find some peace at last.

I was lying on the floor curled up in the fetal position when I heard the front door shut and the sound of gravel crunching under the soles of Brady’s feet as he walked away. I felt light-headed and wished for sleep to come and take me so I could escape the agony at last, but it refused. While my body had wilted from the emotional exhaustion, my mind had vetoed any notions to slow down for even a second.

             
The tears had finally stopped as I lay there staring blankly at the dark crack between the floor and the bottom of May’s sofa. It wasn’t just that I had lost the man I was in love with. And I was. I was so in love with him. And not the Jack Cole version of him I had fantasized about all those times, but the Brady version. The one who had played with my daughter and taught her to surf. The one who had sat and laughed with my sister because he actually got her brash sense of humor. The Brady who had looked at me and really seen me. Seen the me that no one else had ever taken notice of, the me that I kept hidden because I was afraid of how ugly and pathetic it really was. Only when Brady saw it, it seemed suddenly beautiful.

             
He had done more to make me fall in love with him in one week than most men would do in a lifetime, and for one brief moment in time, I had foolishly thought I would have
my
lifetime to return the gesture.