Waking Charley Vaughan (19 page)

“Do you really think I hit you on purpose?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I mean all of it.”

“Why did you lie? Why did you cheat on me? Why did you ask me to marry you if you didn’t want to be with me? Why did you ruin my chance at opening the bakery after you’d already ruined everything else?” 

It felt good to finally ask these questions out loud. Even if he had no answer to them.

He sat for a moment, seeming to think. “ The bakery was never going to happen, Charley. We both know that.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him. “It’s been my dream since I was a kid.”

“Charley,” he said, condescension strong in his tone, “you were always going to come up with another reason not to do it. You can blame me all you want, but just don’t have any follow through. You wanted to be with me so that you didn’t have to succeed with your bakery. You’d have my success to fall back on.”

“What?” I said, stunned that he could say something so harsh…so untrue.

“I never wanted your money,” I began.

“No, you didn’t want my money,” he said, “you just wanted any reason not to fully commit to the bakery. If anything, I probably did you a favor by cheating. It gave you the chance to over react, and call of the wedding. Now, it’s not your fault that you failed.”

I couldn’t even look at him. My entire body felt hot with rage. First my mother, and now him.

A small tear ran down my cheek “How could you say that?” I asked. “What is wrong with you?”

“I’m the bad guy, Charley,” he said.

I stood up to leave.

“Why did you even ask me to come?!” I yelled, “So you could put me down? Your car didn’t do that enough for you?!” That hurt him, but I didn’t care. 

“I wanted to apologize,” he said quietly. “I know I’m not doing a great job of it,” he said.

“No, you’re not.” I said.

“I just needed you to know that I did love you, Charley. It just got really hard to deal with everyone liking you more than they liked me. I could never win. Not with my family. My own family didn’t think I was good enough for you. How was I supposed to spend the rest of my life like that?”

“I’m sorry people didn’t like you enough,” I said bitterly. “But I liked you. I thought you were good enough. You were the one who constantly put me down.”

“You shouldn’t have let me. Again, Charley, you had no follow through. How many times did you let me hurt you and you did nothing about it? How many times did my sister jump in to warn me that I was going to lose you if I didn’t shape up?”

I didn’t answer him. He was right, and it hurt.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about this lately,” he said. “I pushed you around because I knew that I could. You never would have left me if I hadn’t gotten caught. I didn’t mean to get caught. I really did plan on marrying you, Charley. But now that I think about it, I can’t imagine what kind of mess our marriage would have been.”

“Guess it’s a good thing we’ll never have to find out,” I said. Then, I turned from him and walked toward the doorway.

“If you really think about it, I think you’ll agree with me,” he called after me.

I didn’t want to think about it. It had been a mistake, talking to Matt. How was that supposed to have helped?

CHAPTER 14 - BRENNAN

It was two days before I got to see Charley again. I had to get caught up with paper work at the bar, and caught up on laundry at home. I hadn’t realized how little I’d been home until I saw the huge mound of clothes flowing over the basket next to my bed.

She texted me two days ago to tell me she was going to call her mom, and that she was going to talk to Matt, too. I told her to call me if she needed anything, and she still hadn’t. I didn’t know if that was a good sign, meaning things went well, or a bad sign. It was also entirely possible that she just hadn’t called either of them yet.

I’d been trying to call her all morning, and I wasn’t getting anything. That wasn’t like her. At least, it wasn’t what I was used to from her. I had the day off from work, so at around three o’clock, I decided to just stop by her apartment.

I walked up the steps to Charley’s building, hoping she would answer. I was anxious to hear about how her conversation with Matt had gone, and to see how she was taking things.  When I knocked on her door, she called for me to come in.

“Hey, Brennan,” she said, forcing a smile. “What’s up?” she didn’t exactly look happy to see me. I wondered silently if I should just go.

“I tried to call you. Is everything OK?”

‘I’m not answering the phone,” she said, cutting me off. “I broke my old one, and the new one won’t stop ringing. My mother has called a million times today, and our last talk was horrible, so I just shut it off.”

“Oh,” I said, confused. “I thought it had something to do with Matt.”

“No,” she sighed. “Although that conversation was a shit fest as well.” She laughed bitterly.

“Why?” I said, probably too concerned. “What did he say to you?”

“Nothing that wasn’t true,” she said sadly. “He and my mother both apparently know everything about me. According to both of them, I have no ‘follow through’,” she said, making air quotes around the words.

“What the hell are they talking about?” I asked her, searching my head for an example to the contrary, and temporarily coming up blank. That was only because I hadn’t known her very long. It had to be.

“The worst part,” she said with quiet sadness, “is that I think they’re right.”

She seemed so different from the girl I’d left in the doorway of this exact apartment only two days ago.

She walked into the kitchen, going back to what I assumed she had been doing before I got there. She was putting things into a large box.  When I got closer, I realized all of her bakery things were in it: sketches, recipe ideas, even her mixer, which I thought was kind of overkill, but didn’t say anything about.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Not following through on my dreams,” she said as she threw more items into the box.

“So, you’re just going to give up?” I asked her, not understanding.

“That’s what I do, Brennan.,” she sighed.

“So, no bakery just because it’s not going to be easy to do? Don’t let their perception of you drive who you are.”

“Brennan, let’s be real for a second. Do you have any idea how difficult it will be for me to get a loan big enough to open my shop? I have no collateral, unless you count a longboard and bicycle. Plus, I don’t even have the recipes I need.” She looked down at her hands. “My mother was right! Matt was right! This whole thing was just a stupid pipe dream.”

“Of course it’s a pipe dream,” I told her. “That’s all the more reason for you to make it happen.”

“Brennan, it’s just not going to work. I might as well just accept that now, and move on to some kind of job that’s more practical.”

“Practical?” I said, stunned. “You’re quitting!” I accused her.

‘I’m not quitting. Don’t judge me,” she was getting frustrated.

“I’m not judging, Charley, I’m observing. You. Are. Quitting,” I said.

“What do you want from me, Brennan?” She asked, sounding sick of the conversation. “I can’t do it on my own. I just can’t. I’m alone, and I can’t make it work. So I’m going to stop trying.”

“To stop trying,” I started, “you would have to have started trying. Just one plan fell through. Try plan b. You can do this, Charley,” I pushed back.

“Look,” she snapped, “I really appreciate what you’re trying to do, but I just don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“I don’t get you, Charley!” My voice gave away all the frustration I was trying to hold in. “You’ve spent all this time talking about the accident, and how it changed you…but look at you!” Her eyes narrowed at this, but I still had her attention. “The girl you were before—the one I never knew—you talk about how she let fear dictate everything she did. It was why you put up with Matt and your family, and let everyone push you around.” I swallowed. I shouldn’t have said the next thing, and I knew it. I said it anyway “You’re still acting like that chicken shit who ran into the bar that night to hide—running because you are too scared to fight for what you deserve!”

“You don’t know anything about what I deserve,” she said, looking down. I could tell I’d gotten to her. “And I don’t really need another person butting their nose into my business today. If you don’t like it, tough. It’s not exactly like you’re speaking from experience,” she said hostilely.

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” I asked her.

“It means,” she spat, “that you work at a bar and you are too smart to spend the rest of your life as someone else’s employee, but it’s not exactly like you’ve made any steps to change that. And yet you’re standing here getting all high and mighty on me, like you’re better than me!”

“Charley, I don’t think I’m better than you. Believe it or not, I care about you, and I’d like to see you do something with your life that you’re going to enjoy. That’s all. I’m trying to be your friend!”

I was yelling again, “I’ve done everything I can think of to show you that I’m not like Matt, or your family. You can accept that Sara is really your friend, but you can’t accept the same thing about me, when all I’ve done is try to look out for you!”

“No one asked you to! I don’t need another person’s favors to have to repay,” she shouted at me.

I threw my hands up, wishing instead I could have used them to shake the stupid out of her. “That’s my freakin’ point, Charley! That’s my point! I’m not after anything, and yet you treat me like I’m just waiting for the opportunity to hold something over you or find some way to hurt you! WAKE UP, Charley! Instead of believing what I show you, you believe that what is true about everyone else is also true about me. I don’t know what else to do to show you that I just care about you. That’s why I’m here.” I was fuming.

“And, while we’re yelling,” I added, “Why on EARTH would you be listening to what your asshole, EX-Fiance, who—by the way—
hit you with his freaking car—
has to say about your choices?”

Her eyes narrowed as I got up and headed toward the door. I thought for a minute, still angry, before turning around and adding, “Did you ever stop to think of why you ended up with an asshole like Matt in the first place? If you’re going to treat everyone like they’re a jerk, regardless of whether they are or not, you might as well just be with a jerk. Save decent people the trouble,” her eyes widened as I hit my mark., “Too bad Sara isn’t an asshole, too. You guys would have made the perfect trio.”

I walked out the door of her apartment, careful not to slam it, even though I wanted to.

***

Work that night was slow. I kept hoping I’d see Charley, or at least hear from her. I thought she called at one point, but when I looked down at my phone, the screen was blank. Must have been wishful thinking. I thought about calling her, but then decided to just leave things alone. I’d been a jerk and I needed to apologize. I just wasn’t sure how.

The guys that Charley had called “the douche crew” the first night I met her walked into the pub a little while before closing. That made me think of her even more. It was so strange. The first night I’d met her, I remembered thinking she was damaged goods, and trying to convince myself to stop checking her out. Now, she was all I could think about. I’d kissed her, I’d been on dates with her, Hell, she’d been a major part of my life for the past few weeks until I’d blown it. As I made the douche crew their drinks, I wondered if a few weeks was enough for me to feel what I was feeling. More importantly, I wondered if it was enough for her to truly recover from all that had happened to her. The way I felt about Charley, I  wasn’t down to just be a rebound guy. The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t think she was ready for what I was ready for. That thought didn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it made the rest of the night even worse.

As I was locking up the pub door, I heard my phone ring. I pulled it out of my pocket. It was Charley. I took a deep breath and answered.

“Hey Charley,” I said into the receiver.

“Brennan!” she said, sounding excited. “I’m glad I got you. I think we need to talk.”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, cutting her off. “I was way out of line. It wasn’t my place…none of that was.”

“No, Brennan,” she said softly. “You were right. I should be apologizing to you. I
was
treating you like you said I was. It was just hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that you’re being so great. And you have been. And you haven’t asked for anything in return. I just…I’m not used to that,” she was talking fast enough to compete with Sara. I cut in.