Romance Me (Boxed Set) (45 page)

“Where are the cookies?” Ethan asked, grabbing a sandwich with one hand and an iced tea with another.

“Ungrateful beast.” Sadie’s lips pressed together and she faked a swat on his rear. He loved getting her riled up—she looked adorable, almost like how she did as a kid.

“Oh, I’m grateful, really I am. I just like cookies.”

This time she did swat him on the rear. Not quite how he wanted her hand on his rump, but he’d take it.

After going over the project for almost an hour, Jack gave Sadie a quick hug and walked to the door. On his way out, Jack handed Ethan a large cardboard cylinder containing a set of new blueprints. Sadie cleared off the conference table and motioned to him to lay the prints out.

Ethan reached inside. When he pulled out the bundle of papers, the toxic scent of freshly printed blueprints wafted out of the container, finding its way up to his face and inside his lungs.

He froze.

That smell—that horrible, fucking awful smell.

“What’s wrong?” Sadie’s concerned voice sounded through a dense roar in his head.

His gaze glued to the plans, he could still see out of the corner of his eye when Sadie moved toward him. He needed to shake himself out of this, but felt immobile, frozen, like a sheet of ice.

“Ethan.” Sadie rubbed a small circle on his back.

Through his shirt, he could feel the warmth of her body as she moved closer, standing steady behind him. The world swam back into focus, and he sucked in a deep breath. “It’s the smell,” he managed to get out. “My father always brought home blueprints from work to review. I hate the scent.”

Sadie met his statement with silence. She stopped her movement, but kept the flat of her hand pressed against his spine. “Was he a contractor?”

“Electrician. When he could keep the work, that is. He kept getting fired for drinking on the job.”

Wrapping her arm around his waist, Sadie pressed her head against his shoulder, staring at the specs alongside him.

“How bad was it, Ethan?”

He felt his whole body stiffen at Sadie’s soft question. With a fierce movement, he swept the plans off the table, into his hand. After rolling them up, he stuffed them back in the cardboard tube and tossed it aside.

“You know that scar on the back of my leg?” The scar was impossible to miss. At least a half inch thick in places, it started at the back of his upper thigh and continued down his calf.

With Sadie still at his side, he felt, rather than saw her nod. Her hand grabbing his gave him courage to continue.

“My mom had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—OCD. Only back then, my dad just thought she’d gone cuckoo. She’d count things, odd things like broken crayons, or would wash her hands all day long. She even started using a ruler to make sure the blinds were drawn evenly throughout the whole house. She always did compulsive things, but I think it got worse when I was about twelve. At least, that’s how old I was when I got the scar.”

He squeezed Sadie’s hand, so warm and soft in his. She stood next to him, her head leaning on his shoulder, her body curved in toward his. Her hair shone golden in the soft afternoon light that filtered through the windows. He loved how she’d been letting it go natural, with heavy ringlets framing her face.

“You don’t have to tell me, you know.”

But he did. He needed someone to open up to. Had never felt the need until now. Until Sadie. He cleared his throat, then continued. “Dad didn’t start off a raging drunk. When we were really little he could be a lot of fun. But when Mom’s illness got worse, he started drinking. Her obsessions fueled his anger, his anger fueled his drinking, and his drinking fueled his violence.”

He stopped, lost in his painful memory. He could never forgive his father for frightening his mother, for scaring him…
scarring
him. “One Saturday, Mom started counting each dish as she put them away. She’d done it before, but this time she was also counting each prong on each fork, and it was really driving Dad up the wall. He’d probably had a half-bottle of scotch by then and was already three sheets to the wind. He yelled at her to stop, but she couldn’t—just couldn’t. I was in the living room, and I knew he was going to blow. It’s like that eerie feeling of calm right before a storm hits, you know?”

Sadie tipped her face up to his, her blue eyes opened wide. He knew her home life hadn’t been perfect, knew how distant her parents were and how much they expected of her, but he also knew she’d never seen violence before—at least, not like what he had experienced at the hands of his father.

“Lia was outside, in the front yard. Whenever Dad got like this, I’d first make sure Lia was safe. I could have gone outside then, too, but something made me stay. It cost me, but it could have cost my mom even more.”

Sadie interrupted him. “If this is too painful, you can stop.”

He looked down, kicked the carpet, and shrugged his shoulders. He’d opened the bag—might as well let the cat out now. “Anyway, Dad started kicking things, then throwing furniture around. I could tell Mom was getting scared. I pulled her away from the kitchen and pushed her toward the front door. I wanted to get her outside, where she could be safe. But she couldn’t make herself turn the door handle until she counted to one hundred. Dad had just broken the glass coffee table and she stood there, just inches from safety, not able to open the damned door because she hadn’t yet counted to one hundred.”

“What did you do?” Sadie whispered.

Ethan swiped a hand across his face. The look of terror on his mother’s face remained burned in his memory. Her compulsion had been so great she couldn’t save herself. “I slid my hand around hers and grabbed the door handle, turned it, then shoved her outside. I saved her from danger, but I was too late to save myself. Dad threw half the broken coffee table at Mom, but hit me. It felt like a hot stick had been dragged down my leg. It wasn’t a stick, though. It was the sharp edge of the glass, slicing me.”

He shot a look down at Sadie, expecting to see horror on her face. Instead, he saw anger, raw fury as she glared at something unseen across the room.

“What happened after that?” she asked, her jaw clenched tight.

He let out a bitter laugh. “Well, Dad passed out, and a neighbor came over and drove me the emergency room.”

“What about your mom, didn’t she come?”

Her compassion touched him. Ethan kissed the top of her head. “She couldn’t, Sadie. There were germs in the neighbor’s car, and Mom couldn’t drive her own car. She hadn’t picked up the key in over a year. I think it was because she could never get the car to line up perfectly straight when she parked.”

“Did anyone ever come to the hospital?”

He pushed away from her then, went and stood by the window, looking down on the cobblestone street below. A pair of middle-aged tourists, cameras dangling from neck straps, quietly argued with one another. Arguments hadn’t happened at his house. His mom always remained silent during her husband’s rages, knowing that she triggered him, that she was responsible for the tension and fear permeating the house. She never stood up for herself. But until the day she died, she’d tried in the best way she could to protect Ethan and Lia from their father, usually at her own expense.

She just hadn’t tried the right way.

Ethan tipped his forehead against the cool glass, staring through the leaves at the couple, who had gone from raised voices to a tender hug in mere seconds. Normal. It looked like a normal, everyday disagreement, solved without whiskey, insults, or fists. He let out a sigh, attempting to release some of the pent-up anger inside.

“No one showed up. I ended up getting major surgery to repair a sliced tendon without either of my parents there. My dad showed up a day later, drunk.”

Sadie walked past him and opened the tall window. Placing her hands on the sill, she leaned forward, ringlets dangling around her face. He could see the anger still sketched in her face. He had told few people about the incident. Everyone else had responded with sorrow and pity, but not Sadie. She radiated fury.

“You know, you didn’t deserve being brutalized like that. Neither did your mom.” Her jaw clenched once, then again.

“Yes, but I can’t imagine being my dad, watching the woman he once loved sink further into her illness, watching her change so drastically.”

At the sight of Sadie’s furrowing brow, he continued in a rush. “I’m not excusing him, Sadie. I’m just saying that it had to have been tough, and I guess the only way he knew how to deal with it was through the bottle.”

Sadie twisted a bracelet around her wrist. “Your mom had something that she couldn’t control, and your father dealt with it like a weak man.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Out of the silence that followed, Sadie quietly asked the question he’d always dreaded and had rarely answered. “How did your mother die?”

Anger crashed into him, crushing him, wrapping him up and squeezing as if he were in a vice. Rage, and a pain that would never ebb pummeled his mind, his heart. He’d only been thirteen, just a child, really. No child should have to see what he’d seen.

No child should have to read their own mother’s suicide note.

“She killed herself. In her note, she said she did it because the OCD was ruining our family. She thought that by taking away her life, she’d be taking away the source of Dad’s anger. She thought he’d be a good dad after she left.”

“But he wasn’t, was he,” Sadie stated. “He wasn’t a good father.”

Ethan just shook his head.

“So she lost her life and you lost your mom, all for nothing.”

At that Ethan shot up, shoved his hands in his pockets, and stormed off. He had to get away from Sadie, needed to remove himself from her anger at his father, her attempts to understand, her compassion for his mom. He didn’t want compassion for his mom—not for that last stupid decision she’d made. She’d left him, left Lia, and he’d had to bear the burden the rest of his life.

Before he walked out the office door, he turned and shot Sadie a hard, cold look. “And Sadie, about OCD? It’s hereditary. I loved my mother. I hated her decision to kill herself, but I loved her anyway.” He clenched his hands into fists. “And I don’t blame her for her illness. But the OCD is why I won’t do relationships. There’s no way in hell I’ll ever risk subjecting anyone to the hell my family had to live through.”

No way in hell.

***

Ethan avoided Sadie the rest of the day. After leaving work, he returned to his rented one-bedroom cottage. He went for a long run, showered, then ate a steak and salad alone in the empty dining room. Finishing his meal, he leaned back in his chair, wondering why he dumped so much on Sadie earlier in the day. He’d spilled so many family secrets to her: his painful past, his mother’s illness, what could happen to him.

He placed the dinner dishes in the sink, vowing to wash them in the morning, and poured himself two fingers of single-malt scotch. His father’s alcoholism had taught him the tough way to respect alcohol, not abuse it. He turned on the dim hall light and fished out a leather-bound album from a trunk in the entry closet. After fingering the covering for a while, he carefully opened it up. The black and white photographs of his mother Krista and father Joe on their wedding day showed a sweet and simple life. His mother’s long black hair, so much like his sister’s, was swept back in an elegant knot, partially hidden behind her veil. With her arm tucked neatly in the crook of Ethan’s father’s, she looked at the camera with a serene and glowing smile.

“Not the smile I knew,” Ethan murmured. The smiles he remembered were forced and stilted—pasted on by a woman desperate to make her children believe all was well.

But all had not been well in the Sawyer house.

The psychiatrist had given his mother’s issues a name: OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, mixed with a severe anxiety disorder. Although the psychiatrist held out hope for a medical breakthrough, at the time, little besides exposure therapy was available to help. And his mother wouldn’t go to exposure therapy. She’d been held hostage by a disease she didn’t understand, and Ethan’s father had grown more frustrated, taking his frustration out on his wife and their children.

Ethan swiped a hand over his face. He hadn’t been able to tell Sadie about the day his mother had died. About what he’d seen. He and Lia were supposed to spend the weekend away, camping with another family for Memorial Day weekend. He remembered how excited Lia had been while packing, competing with him for space for her sweatshirts and jeans in their shared ragged red duffle bag. They had both been thrilled to have three days away from their darkened house and even darker mood of their father.

But Ethan had come down with a bug right before they were to leave. He remembered feeling achy all over, hot and cranky, his throat sore. Instead of heading out of town with the others, Ethan had walked back to his house.

And walked straight into hell.

He supposed his mother had planned to have him and Lia out of the house so their father would be the one to discover her lifeless body, floating in the bath, surrounded by a pool of red water. A note had been placed on the bathroom sink, leaning against a cup filled with wildflowers picked by Lia earlier in the day. His mother hadn’t written much, but the words she had chosen remained burned in Ethan’s memory, seared there as if they’d been branded: “I’m sorry I failed. You’ll be better off without me.”