The Reason I Stay (33 page)

I
t’s a little past midnight when I finally arrive home. But still, when I kill Rosie’s engine and look at our house, lights shine from the living room window. As always, it makes me smile.

Unless Lexie is working an evening shift, every Thursday when I arrive home from Wes’s she’s waiting for me on the couch, in her pajamas, watching some romantic comedy on TV. Every time, before opening the door, I stand outside and look at her through the window for a few moments. It’s been eight months since we started dating, and I still get the feeling that I’m the luckiest S.O.B. in the world because she’s gorgeous, kind, sexy as hell, and all mine.

Despite the cooler temperature that has everyone in this town but me freezing, today is not an exception. I stand by the window and peek inside, but to my disappointment, Cash and Snow are the only occupants of the couch.

As I open the door and walk in, the feeling that something is not right only deepens.

The first thing I notice is that Lexie’s purse, which is always neatly stored over the dresser in our bedroom, is carelessly lying on the floor by the door. A frown forms on my face as I pick it up, and go greet our pets.

“Where’s Lexie, guys?”

As if they understand my question, Cash lifts his head from the cushion to look somewhere behind me. As Snow jumps up and run to the hallway, I glance behind me and see an open cupboard door in the kitchen.
Weird.

I scratch Cash’s ears one final time, and I go close it. Things become even stranger when I see that my half-empty bottle of whiskey is missing. “What the fuck?” I mumble, and close the cabinet door.

My heart races as I make my way to our bedroom. Through the half-opened door I see Lexie’s coat lying on the floor, and that makes me race toward the room. The only time her clothes scattered everywhere is when I’m the one doing the removal, which makes me officially worried. Once I reach the room, I pick the garment from the floor and push the door the rest of the way open.

Her dress, boots, stockings and bra are also scattered on the floor, but I don’t pay much attention to them. All my focus is on Lexie, sitting beneath the covers with her eyes closed as she hugs a mostly empty bottle of Jack.

Breathless—and not in a good way—I put her stuff over the dresser, and take careful steps toward her, so as not to wake her. Her breathing is heavy with sleep and too much alcohol. I pry the bottle from her hand, and place it on the side table, before sitting down at the edge of the bed. I push a few locks of her hair aside to see her face. As soon as I do, I wish I hadn’t.

Thick black lines run from her eyes to her mouth and chin. Black circles of smeared makeup rim her puffy eyelids. Lexie is the most positive and the happiest person I know. I don’t even want to imagine what has her so upset.

Everything inside me compresses and twists with dread, pain, and horror. Worry that something happened with Kodee, Greg, or another one of our loved ones makes me want to shake her awake so I can ask her what went wrong. But I can’t bring myself to do that. I want her to rest and heal. I also want her to be comfortable, something she doesn’t look at the moment.

I pull the covers back from her body to rearrange her in the bed, but before I get to it, I see a brown folder trapped between her chest and arm. My brows pull together at the odd sight. Carefully, I take it and look at it. It’s a simple paper file, similar to the ones they used at the firm to organize each case, only skinnier. I look at the white tab on top and see my name written in a scrawny script.

“The hell?” With brows tightly knit together, I open it.

The first page I see is a police background check that points the finger at the loser responsible for this mess: Kyle. An uncontrollable desire to run to his house and punch his bulldog face in washes over me, but then I start turning pages, and the cool air around me suddenly feels so hot it’s hard to breathe. All thoughts of violence become self-directed.

Years of reading endless lawsuits have made my eyes expert in speed-reading. I use that skill to go through twenty-something pages of all the skeletons I spent eight months working hard to keep from Lexie in only a few minutes. My stomach sinks lower as Lexie’s odd behavior, and the splotchy makeup, finally makes sense.

In that moment of horror, my mind drifts to the cosmos and my favorite cosmic event:
supernovas
.

Looking at images of supernovas can make a person a breathless. They’re full of color and amazingly beautiful to anyone seeing it through the lens of a telescope. For the actual star going through the process, however, it’s a whole other story. Supernovas happen for one of two reasons: one, a dwarf star steals enough energy from another star, or surrounding star remains, to raise its core temperature and cause a nuclear fusion; or two, the core of a massive star becomes too unstable due to excess energy, causing it to suffer a gravitational collapse. Either way, it’s an inevitable event that has only one possible result: a massive explosion that rips the star apart and turns it into a black hole.

It’s safe to say that if I were a star, I’d be a greedy dwarf about to go supernova.

I close my eyes, and hang my head as I search for a way out, for something that can stop my own decaying process, even though I know that I’m the one responsible for my own inescapable fate. I find nothing.

Then a low, cold voice that bears little resemblance to the sound I love comes from my right. “Are all those things true?”

And the nuclear fusion begins.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Lexie takes an audible breath. In my mind I see her lips parting, and her pulling air into her chest. It’s one of my favorite things she does. “Is Lea why you left Seattle?”

Shame and guilt I repressed comes back. It chokes me, like a hand gripping my throat, not allowing words to form. A slow nod is my reply.

She stays quiet for a while, and when she speaks again, disappointment and disgust are clear in her voice. “Tell me about her.”

I turn my face to look at her. Those gorgeous green eyes that made me live again, look dead in contrast to the pink background. Seeing the sadness in the face I love so much is so excruciating that I want to close my eyes and lie. But I can’t. Not to her. Not anymore. “Lea was a friend with benefits. She’s also the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.”

“Do you mean because she lost a leg, and it was your fault?”

Something about the way she looks at me tells me she’s holding onto hope that I’ll say no, and by God I want to. “Yes.”

“Oh, my God.” The words pass her lips as quiet as a breath.

I can’t help remembering all the other times she’s said those three words to me in the past. All of those memories belong to happy, sexy and passionate days that filled my heart with so much joy I could barely hold it in. All of those other times made me feel alive. This time they don’t. This time, those words make me feel hollow.

I open my mouth to try to explain. I have no fucking clue of what I could say to make this better, but I sure as hell want to try. However, as soon as the first word comes out of my mouth—“Love . . .”— Lexie brings a hand up to halt me. I shut right up, waiting for her to speak.

She doesn’t. Minutes of silence and sighs go by, before I hear her voice again.

“Why does the report say the accident happened because of snow?”

The hand continues to choke me. But she needs words, so I manage to push some out. “Because the truth would put me in jail, so my father bribed people to keep things quiet.”

That’s the first time I’ve admitted that out loud, and quite honestly, I don’t think I’d feel more embarrassed if I were standing naked in the middle of a stadium filled with people.

Lexie’s eyes close, and she shakes her head. I wonder if she’s making a parallel between me the good-for-nothing coward who killed her best friend and ran to cover his ass. I sure am. A moment later a single tear rolls down her cheek, confirming my suspicion.

It crushes me from the inside. I toss the papers in my hands over the bed, and reach forward to touch her, comfort her, but as soon as the tips of my fingers touch her arm, she recoils. Her back presses against the bed-frame, as if she’d rather become one with the wood than feel me.

“If you feel anything for me, Mathew, please don’t touch me.”

My arms fall limp to the mattress. My breaking heart beats inside my throat and water pool in my eyes. It’s like we’re back to that first Saturday at The Jukebox, when all I wanted was to be close to her and all she wanted was my head on a platter. The difference, however, is that after eight months of touching her at will, the lack of contact is physically painful.

“Feel
anything
, Lexie? I feel
everything
for you.”

Emotionless eyes open, and stare straight at me. “Everything except the need for honesty and openness, right?”

I run a hand through my hair, and attempt the impossible task of breathing. “I didn’t tell you about Lea, but I’ve never lied.”

She laughs, a fake and hysterical laugh. “Do you have so little respect for me that you’re gonna try to lawyer bullshit your way out of this? Seriously? Omission is the coward’s lie, Mathew.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

I stand up, and pace back and forth. I search my brain, trying to find some words that will make sense and won’t make me sound like an ass, but I’ve got nothing. Lexie, however, has plenty.

She goes on her knees and picks up the folder. She points it at me and screams. “Then what are you trying to do? Because all the pages in this file say that you’ve been lying to me for the past eight fucking months. So please explain, because I’m dying here.”

I comb a hand through my hair. “I didn’t mean to lie. I just really didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to forget my past, okay?”

Lexie lets go of the file, and brings her hands to cover her face. Her chest goes up and down in fast, labored breaths. She stays like that for a few minutes, and then she sits on her heels, and from the middle of the bed, looks at me. Her watery eyes seem tired and sad as she shakes her head.

“Do you think I
wanted
to talk about my mother?” Lexie’s voice doesn’t feel like it belongs to her. There’s no life, or light, or
Lexie
in it. It makes me feel as small as dust. “Do you think I
wanted
to talk about Leigh? What about Kyle beating the shit out of me? Do you think I
wanted
to talk about any of that, Mathew?”

I have nothing to say. I know that I fucked up. I fucked up bad, and I can feel the first spark of the supernova explosion happening in my core.

Broken, I kneel in front of the bed and shake my head. A tear falls from my eye at the same time as one falls from hers. “I’m just . . . I’m not that person you read about. I stopped being that guy the day we met. I didn’t want to bring that into us. I wanted a clean slate with you.”

Lexie looks at me, her breathtaking eyes cold like I’ve never seen before. She locks her jaw, and angrily wipes the tears from her eyes.

“You don’t get a clean slate here,” she yells so loud and with so much anger that it knocks my breath away. “Out there you can be Matt, the gardener with the unknown past. But here . . . here you had to be
you
. Here you had to be honest. Here you had to be different than all of the liars, and cheaters, and the fucking cowards I’ve known.”

I pull at my hair in frustration. “But that’s the point. The only way I could be different was by actually being different. I was a liar, a cheater, and a fucking coward. I was all of those things until the exact moment when I met you. And I was honest about that. I told you about wrecking bars, and being no good. I told you about being an asshole and never caring about anyone until you. But then you changed me.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not. Love allows us to be who we really are, and you did that for me.”

I bring my hands up on the bed and place them near Lexie’s. It kills me, but I don’t touch her because she asked me not to. I beg for whatever force guides the universe to help her see the honesty in my eyes.

“Loving you gave me strength to be who I wanted to be. And I wanted to be the guy who loves you more than life itself. I don’t care about all the shit I cared about before, and I took responsibility for my past. I’m better because of you.”