Slowly We Trust (20 page)

“We’ll call your parents,” Lottie said, getting up and grabbing Audrey’s new phone that she’d bought on her shopping trip with Trish. Brilliant move, Lot.

“NO!” Audrey struggled to get out of my arms and take the phone from Lottie, but I held on tight. “No, please don’t! Please!”

She clawed at me and it was a struggle to hold onto her.

“Just tell me, Aud. What’s wrong?”

“Everything! Everything is wrong, Will!” she screamed and finally stopped fighting me. “You think I’m perfect and you put me on this pedestal, but I’m not perfect. I’m not!”

I had no idea what she was talking about. I adored her, but that didn’t mean I thought she was perfect. But I must have made her feel that way.

“I don’t think you’re perfect. Well, maybe a little. I just know that I love you, which means I love everything about you. Everything, including your flaws and your imperfections and all the things you hate about yourself. That’s what love is, and what makes it unconditional. I wish I could make you believe that.” What more could I do? I’d said it so many times, I’d tried to show her, but I was out of ideas.

“Do you need me to declare it in front of a bunch of people? Hire a skywriter? Surprise you with a flash mob? Whatever you need me to do to prove to you that nothing,
nothing
would change how I see you right now, at this moment, I’ll do. Just tell me what you want.”

“I want you to leave me alone, Will. I need you to go. I need to be alone. Please.”

The words hit me deep in the chest, burrowed in and started tearing me apart. I’d worked so hard,
so hard
to get us to where we were and now she wanted to end it.

“No,” I said. “I don’t accept that. I’m not letting you run away again. You’re going to have to physically remove me from this room to get rid of me.” Sure, that might be a childish, but it was a last resort. It was the kind of thing I’d pull with Lottie.

“You can’t do that,” she said.

“Yes, I damn well can. Lottie, back me up.” I turned toward her and she bit her lip, conflicted. “Come on, you know I’m right.”

“I know you’re right, but this is hard for me, Will. I hate it when you put me in this position. I knew this was going to happen.”

Audrey started struggling again, but not as hard as before.

“Why did you have to come into my life? I was fine and then you had to show up and I had to fall in love with you. You’re such an asshole.” This was definitely not a laughing moment, but I laughed anyway.

“Shut up,” she said, and stopped fighting me again. “It’s not funny. This is so far from funny, William. So far.”

“Okay, it seems like the situation is in control now and I need to get . . . somewhere else. Call if you need anything.” Lottie scampered out of the room, sensing that we needed some privacy. Not that she wouldn’t find out later, or just know, like she always did.

The door closed behind her and I put all my attention back on Aud.

“Can you give me anything? You don’t have to say names, or anything. Can you even give me a hypothetical situation?”

She licked her lips.

“Can you get me a bottle of water out of the fridge?” If she’d asked me to travel to Hoth and bring her back a tauntaun, I would have done it.

I got the water and brought it back to her, hoping that this meant she was finally going to tell me at least something.

She sipped the water slowly, staring at something far away that I couldn’t see.

“Okay. Hypothetically, my relationship with Eddie wasn’t just a crush. We, um, had sex. Just once. I think he might have been too drunk to remember it. I might also have been drunk, but I remember all thirty uncomfortable seconds of it. It was stupid, and I regretted it afterwards.”

Really? That was the big secret?

I started laughing.

“This isn’t funny, Will.” She was pissed, but that didn’t stop me from laughing.

“You thought that I’d be upset about you having sex with a three pump drunk chump? Why in the hell would I care about that?”

“I was with someone else when I had sex with Eddie. My boyfriend at the time, he didn’t believe in sex before marriage. He barely even believed in kissing before marriage. I dated him to make my parents happy, but then we had a fight at the party and he left and I had sex with Eddie. I cheated, Will.” Okay, that was a little less funny. But still, all this hoopla for that?

“Okay. You cheated. So have I.” Her eyes went wide and she finally came back from whatever memory she’d been trapped in.

“You did?”

“Yeah. It obviously wasn’t my proudest moment. Once again, I was pissed with my girlfriend and there was this little sister of one of my buddies and she’d been flirting with me forever. So we made out a little. I was going to have sex with her, but then she told me she was a virgin and I didn’t feel right about it. So you see, both of us have fucked up. It doesn’t matter. Does what I just told you change how you feel about me?”

“No,” she said in a small voice.

“Then what’s the problem?” I yelled. It might have been a little dramatic, but this was so lame. No it went beyond fucking lame. I wanted to strangle her and kiss her at the same time. Yeah, I was definitely in love with her.

I was definitely going to hell this time. I’d thought about spilling the entire story, about what had happened after I’d had sex with Eddie and how those thirty seconds of terrible sex had effectively destroyed my life.

But then I couldn’t. I told him about Eddie and the cheating and I couldn’t keep going. He just seemed so relieved that was all it was, I couldn’t tell him the rest.

This was even worse than keeping him completely in the dark. Now I was
really
lying to him. As far as I could see, this was the only way right now. I’d dug myself into a hole, and I was going to have to wait and see how things would go.

I told Will I needed to go take a shower, mostly so I could be alone with my thoughts. I loved him, but I needed some time to think.

He told me not to take too long or he’d come in and find me, but I knew he had to get back to his own classes.

The bathroom was empty, for now, so I knew no one would hear me sobbing over the sound of the water.

As soon as I got naked and stepped under the spray, the wounds that my mom had cut with the words form the phone call opened and I hurt so bad that I could barely breathe.

My baby was sick. Really sick.

That was why my aunt had called. My baby needed a bone marrow transplant and they needed to test me to see if I was a match.

I had to hold onto the wall of the shower so my knees didn’t give out on me. I cried like I cried when she was born. When they asked me if I wanted to see her and I shook my head. I cried like I did the first few times I looked down at my scar. The only mark on my body I had left of her.

I should have known Maria wouldn’t call for anything less than a life or death situation. This was both. My daughter’s life could depend on me. I might have given her up, but she was still my daughter and she needed me.

The door on the bathroom banged against the frame. Someone must have come in. I tried to muffle my sobs by biting my hand. I sunk my teeth into my knuckle and drew blood. I watched it mix with the water from the shower, turning pink by the time it went down the drain.

I had to call Maria and figure out what I had to do. Above all, I couldn’t tell Will. I couldn’t. He could never know.

Aud went to take a shower and I sat on her bed and tried to understand the twisted workings of her brain. Sure, it didn’t thrill me that she’d cheated on her boyfriend, but from what she’d told me about him, he was a dick. She’d only been dating him to make her parents happy, so it barely counted as a relationship anyway. And she’d been drunk. People made bad decisions when they were drunk. Shit, I’d made plenty of them.

The way she’d been acting, I expected her to say that she’d killed someone or something.

I loved Aud. She could have screwed an entire football team’s worth of guys and I’d just smile and ask her if I was the best she’d had.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

Her face was blotchy and red when she got back from the shower, and not just from the hot water. She’d been crying. Probably from the relief of knowing I didn’t give a shit about her big secret.

I scooped her up in my arms the second she closed the door.

“Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?” The water from her hair dripped down my arm and onto the floor.

“That’s the silence of there being no secrets between us. Nothing more that’s going to keep us apart. You’re stuck with me now, Aud. I’m not leaving your side.” She smiled a little.

“What about when I have to pee?”

“I’ll hold your hand and help you wipe.”

“Will! That’s disgusting.” I tossed her on the bed and then dived on top of her.

“I don’t care. I’m never leaving you. Not even if you take out a restraining order.” Her smile widened and she laughed.

“Then I guess I’ll just be stuck with you. I could imagine worse things in life than being stuck with you, Will Anders.” I pushed her hair back.

“Good.” I peeled the towel from her body and then there was nothing between us for a while.

“How is it possible that I want you all the time? We finish and all I want to do is start again. I never knew sex could be like this,” Audrey said. Her hair was still damp, but I combed it with my fingers so it would dry.

“I didn’t either. Not that my previous sexual encounters were bad, but with you it’s . . . indescribable,” I said.

“Ditto. My parents would say that our relationship is sinful. They’re big believers that youths are just bundles of hormones and if you didn’t watch them every second, they’d be off screwing each other like rabbits. Gave me a weird complex when I was younger.”

I knew what it was like having strict parents.

“If my mother knew I was here with you right now, I’d be in so much trouble. I’m over 18, but that doesn’t matter to her. I’ll always be her little boy, and I’m sure that she’ll still be punishing me and sending me to my room when I’m forty. And forcing a book in my hands. That’s always her most effective means of punishment. Forcing us to read something and then tell her what it was about. And if we didn’t read it and tried to pretend, she would know and make us do it over again.” I couldn’t count how many times I’d tried to get away with not reading one of my punishment books. Lottie almost never got punishment books. She just got books whenever she asked Mom for advice on anything. I got those books too, but the punishment books were more frequent. My parents were weird.

“So I have to go home this weekend,” Aud said, out of the blue. “It’s no big deal, but you can’t come with me. There’s no way my parents would let you stay. There’s no place for you to sleep, and they barely let me stay in my own room” She didn’t look at me when she said it.

“What do you have to go home for? You were just there.” It seemed odd that there would be something she’d have to brave seeing her parents for this soon after seeing them.

“I just do. My parents are starting another business and I have to be there for the opening. Get my picture in the paper. It’s one of my family obligations, like you with books. So I have to go.”

Well, that sucked ass.

“Are you sure I can’t come? If I promise to sleep on the couch? Hell, I’ll sleep on the floor as long as it means I get to be near you. And mothers have a tendency to love me.” Kandy’s mother sure did. But then, she was divorced and I could never tell if she liked me as a kid, or if she was hitting on me. It went both ways sometimes. Kandy never seemed to notice.

She shook her head.

“I’m sorry. I wish. It would make things so much more bearable if you were there, but that’s the rule. No boys allowed in the house. Except my brother and his nasty friends, but that doesn’t count. If he wanted to have a girl over, they’d never allow it. They don’t want any of their kids to date, which is why my sister got married so young. But she’s happy.”

“Are you happy?”

This time I got a full smile that made my heart feel as if it was going to explode out of my chest. “Very.”

“Then I guess I’ll just be here all weekend. Missing you.” I rolled on top of her, hard again at the thought that I wasn’t going to be able to get inside her for a whole weekend.

“We should definitely make up for the lost time now.”

“Oh, really?” She pretended to be neutral, but her hands skimmed down my back and pulled me closer before her legs wrapped around me.

“Definitely.”

“Are you sure you have to go?” I whined on Friday when she got into Trish’s car. I had a test, so I couldn’t be the one to drive her home, and she said I couldn’t do it even if I was free. “You’ll barge your way in the house,” she said and I told her that I wouldn’t dare do that, but actually, that had totally been my plan if I’d driven her home.

“Yes, I have to go. I’ll miss you. I’ll think about you all the time.” She kissed me quickly.

“All the time?”

“All of it,” she said, blowing me a kiss out the window as Trish fired up the half-rusted truck. I worried about her driving Aud in the thing, but if she got stranded anywhere, she’d picked up enough auto maintenance from Stryker to know how to fix anything that might go wrong.

This was the first time we’d been separated since the reveal of Aud’s secret and I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. This girl had consumed almost my entire life, and everything reminded me of her.