Authors: Julie Johnson
I’d been home all of five minutes when the pounding on the front door began, loud enough that it could be heard behind the closed door of my bedroom. Lexi stared at me with a bewildered expression when I walked into the kitchen and told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t allowed to let him in. I didn’t care what he said, what he did – under no circumstances did I want to see or talk to him.
“Bee!” he yelled, his fists slamming against the wooden door so hard it shook in its frame. “What the hell is going on?”
I leaned against the kitchen counter for support.
“Tell me what I
did.” His voice was desperate, shattered. Lexi stared from me to the door and back, a horrified look on her face.
“Brooklyn! Please!”
I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see her judgmental expression.
“Princess, just talk to me. We can fix this, please, just don’
t shut me out.”
It
went on like that for nearly an hour, until his voice grew hoarse and he’d run out of air. When he finally gave up, I opened my eyes, took one look at Lexi, and hightailed it from the room.
“Not so fast!” she yelled, racing after me and throwing out her arms to stop me from shutting my bedroom door in her face. “You owe me one hell of an explanation. First, you make me pick you up from the fair, in tears and barely breathing, and now Finn is here, banging on our door like a lunatic, and I can’t let him in?” She stared at me, eyes wide. “W
hat. The. Fuck. Happened. Today?”
“He’s not who I thought he was, okay?” My voice sounded like a stranger’s.
“Uh, no.
Not
okay,” Lexi said, pushing my door all the way open and forcing me to back up from the doorway as she stormed into my room. She sat on the bed, crossed her arms over her chest menacingly, and leveled me with her best glare. “Now explain, or I’m not helping you anymore. Which means, I can answer the door for
whoever
comes a’knocking.”
I glared at her.
She tapped her foot impatiently.
“He lied to me. About how we knew each other, about how we’d met.
About everything. He’s been lying to me since that day I tripped over the fire hydrant, Lex. And I can’t talk about it,” I said, my voice cracking as I pleaded with her to understand. “Not because I’m being a bitch, and not because I want to shut you out. Because I literally
cannot
talk about it. It hurts too damn much.” I took a deep breath and tilted my head upwards to fend off the building tears.
“Oh, Brooklyn,” Lexi whispered, tears filling her own eyes. “Come here.” She pulle
d me down into a bone-crushing hug, and suddenly, I was weeping in her arms, gasping for breath as I swam upstream in a tidal wave of grief and heartbreak and betrayal.
I don’t know how long we sat there on my bed, both crying our eyes out, but when I eventually ran out of tears it was pitch black outside my
windows; full night had fallen hours ago. Lexi kissed my cheek and said goodnight, wiping her eyes as she headed out into the hallway. When the door closed behind her, I collapsed on my bed, curling up in a ball of misery.
I must have drifted off to sleep at some point, exhausted from my crying jag.
I jolted awake at the sound of my window sliding open. Sitting up on my bed, I grabbed for my cellphone on the nightstand and frantically pressed the button to turn it back on. I could hear someone maneuvering through the window just as my phone blinked alive.
I was halfway through
dialing 911 when I saw that the feet descending through my open window were stuffed into familiar black motorcycle boots, their scuffed toes apparent even in the dark room.
Resignedly, I switched off my phone screen and stowed it back on my bedside table. I sat on the bed, arms crossed, and watched as Finn tumbled through the window, losing his balance and nearly face-planting in the process.
When he righted himself, his eyes instantly cut across the room and locked on mine.
“Hi,” he said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans, and making no move to approach me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, my tone unwelcoming and my demeanor frigid.
“Well I climbed the tree–” he began.
“I asked
what
not
how
,” I said, cutting him off.
“I had to see you, Bee,” he said, staring at me with a desperate look in his eyes. “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s not fair that you’re clearly
so angry, when you haven’t even told me what I did to piss you off.”
“Not fair?
Not fair?
” I asked, my voice scathing. “That’s rich –
you
talking about what’s fair.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb, Finn. If you’re going to be here, wasting my time, the very least you can do is be honest.”
“Brooklyn…” He held his hands out in surrender, as if he was trying to calm me.
As if I could be calmed, at this point.
Is he freaking kidding me?
I’d thought I had it under control, thought I could get through this confrontation without losing it, but it was just too much. Seeing him here like this…still lying to me, still pretending…
I snapped.
“
Tell me a story
, Finn,” I said, my voice bleak. His face drained of color as the familiar words registered with him, and he realized that I knew.
That
I’d remembered.
I walked across the room, approaching him where he stood
utterly still. I could see the vein in his neck throbbing with each heartbeat, his neck and shoulders straining with tension as he held himself immobilized. His eyes were slightly narrowed, filled with wariness, indecision, and what looked a lot like fear as he waited to see what I would do.
When I reached him
I got right up into his face, pushing aside my pain and channeling every swirling emotion inside me into one singular feeling: betrayal.
“
TELL ME A STORY
,” I screamed in his face, my control shattering to pieces.
He flinched, but otherwise remained still and silent,
with his gaze locked on mine.
“Fine,” I said,
my breathing labored as I looked into his dark eyes. They were heavily guarded, concealing whatever he was feeling from me. “Then I’ll tell
you
a story. It’s about a little girl who lost everything, who had nothing left. Nothing and nobody to call her own. Until she met a boy, and for a while
he
became her everything.” My voice broke on the last word and I cursed inwardly, determined to hold myself together through this.
There were things that needed to be said, and since he
’d forced this confrontation, they were going to be said right freaking now.
Hauling a breath into my lungs, I forged on. “But that boy, the one who gave her back a piece of herself? He’s a liar. He’s a manipulator. So even though that little girl, who wasn’t so little anymore, had trusted him to glue back together
her broken fragments…even though she thought he could make her believe in happy endings again…even though she thought he would be the one to erase all her scars…”
Tears were leaking from my eyes now, and my voice grew
shakier with each sentence I forced out.
“
The little girl was wrong. The boy couldn’t be trusted, any more than all the other men in her life who’d let her down. He’d spun deceit and deception until she couldn’t tell reality from the lies anymore; until she knew there would be no happily ever afters for her. Not ever.
“
Because she was broken, irreparably, for the second time in her life. That glue the boy had used to piece her back together wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t true enough, to hold her together. It slipped and crumbled, and all her pieces fell and shattered worse than they’d been in the first place.”
I’d lost
all control by this point; tears were streaming down my face and Finn looked like a shadow of the man I’d come to know; he looked as haunted as I felt inside.
“I suppose I should thank you,” I said, a bitter laugh slipping through my lips.
He held his silence for a beat, then whispered, “Thank me?” His voice was rougher than I’d ever heard it, devastated and lacking any of his typical self-assurance.
Good. He should be broken too.
“I thought that I was strong, that my walls were impenetrable, until you came into my life and proved just how weak I really was. I actually thought I was safe with you,” I laughed mirthlessly, looking up at the stars painted across my ceiling. “So
thank you
, Finn, for showing me my own fragility. I’ll be sure not to make the same mistakes in the future.”
“Bee–” he started.
I cut him off. “Don’t. You don’t get to call me that anymore.”
His eyes
were glassy with unshed tears, full of hopeless resignation.
Nodding, he took a step back, out of my space, and turned his eyes to stare at the floor.
“I’m sorry, Brooklyn,” he whispered. “You have no idea how many times I tried to tell you…how close I came–”
“Close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes, Finn.”
“I know that,” he said, reaching up to run his hands through his hair. “But how do you find the words for something like that? How do you tell someone that you’ve spent your whole life looking for them?” He laughed, a bitter sound escaping his lips. “Brooklyn, since we were separated as kids, I’ve been trying to track you down. I begged my adoptive parents to go back for you, to let me call you or even write to you. By the time they relented and I called the group home, you were already gone. Eva wouldn’t tell me anything. Your adoption files were sealed; I never thought I’d actually find you. And then, one random Tuesday afternoon two years ago, I typed your name into a Facebook search engine and
bam
! There you were.”
I thought about the long-dormant social media account Lexi had insisted on setting up for me when we’d been accepted to the university
. She’d posted a photo of the two of us wearing new matching college sweatshirts that advertised the university logo in proud orange across the front. I wondered if that was how Finn had tracked me down.
Since
I’d never really used the site, I’d assumed it would deactivate after such a long period of inactivity. Apparently, all that preaching my professors did about permanent Internet footprints really was true after all; Facebook is forever.
“I knew it was you immediately – you were beautiful as a little girl, and you’re even more gorgeous
now… those eyes, that smile. There was no denying it was you.” Finn continued. “But I still needed to see that you were okay, Brooklyn. I’ve worried about you for years. You have to understand, when I got adopted, when I left you…I felt like I’d abandoned you. And I knew I’d never put that to rest until I’d seen you again, face to face.”
“So, when you found me, what then? Was the plan to screw me back to normal? To fix me with the shee
r will of your penis?” I bit out. “You could have checked on me and walked away, without speaking one single word to me. I was
fine
before I met you. The only thing you’ve done is fuck me up even worse than I was before.”
“It wasn’t like that, Brooklyn,” Finn said, anger infusing his tone. “I never planned on this – on us. I didn’t
want to fall in love with you, any more than you expected to fall for me. I transferred here when I learned you’d be attending last fall. But did you see me at all, your entire freshman year? No. I didn’t approach you. I didn’t mess with your life. I was just there, in the off chance that one day you’d need help – that you’d need
me
. I wasn’t about to fail you again, regardless of whether you even knew I existed.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He’d transferred here
for me
? That was crazy. Not the good crazy either – the stalkery, obsessive kind of crazy I wanted nothing to do with.
“I think you should leave now,” I said, backing away from him.
“Bee…Fuck!” He buried his hands in his hair. “Please don’t be scared of me. I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I tried, so many times. I just couldn’t find the words. That day, when you fell over that hydrant and hit your head – it seemed like fate. You were right there in front of me, injured and needing help. I thought maybe I could get close to you, just to be your friend. I swear my intentions never went further than that.
“But I fell in love with you
, Brooklyn. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I realized that you were everything that was missing in my life, but I knew – just like I had when I was a ten year old kid – that I couldn’t be without you anymore. Still, I tried to push you away, tried to keep boundaries between us when I realized that you didn’t remember me...But I just couldn’t stay away from you.”
“Finn, this…it’s just so messed up,” I whispered, at a loss.
I was way, way out of my emotional depth. I wasn’t just swimming in the deep end, here – this was the freaking Mariana Trench.