She was right. My actions were on me, but she influenced them. She made me act out of sorts. She had my head flipped. I wanted her, my body wanted her, but my heart was another story. I couldn’t let her get close. Not like before. If she ever got that close again, I knew there would be no coming back from that.
I sighed. “Look, this won’t happen again. It was just a slip-up and a moment of weakness.”
“Weakness?” She laughed humorlessly. “You can’t even admit it, can you?”
“Admit what, Jade?”
“That you want me as much as I want you. That our pull never went away. That we are still tethered to one another.” She stepped forward. “I see it. I see it in your eyes. You still care about me. Hell, I think you still love me, Grayson.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“See.” She took another step toward me. “You love me, Grayson, the same way I know I still love you. I don’t think I ever stopped loving you.”
Silence fell upon us. I stared at her. Her walls were down, and she was showing me every last piece of herself. I could see the vulnerability in her eyes. How much it took for her to admit that.
I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. I was rendered speechless. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to even do.
Did I still love her? I thought back to our past; all the anguish and hurt I had felt. The brokenness that had felt like a knife twisting in my chest. I thought back to the sleepless nights, dreaming of her, only to find out it was nothing but a lie. All those dreams of a baby in my hands—smiling, laughing, and alive.
All that pain. All that despair. All that brokenness. It brought a new wave of anger to my body. The ice froze over my heart once more, and I was reminded of what this woman had done to me.
“You’re wrong, Jade. I don’t love, and I will never love again.” I stared her dead in the eyes. “Your body may get mine going, but that is where I draw the line. I won’t ever touch you again. I have Astrid for that now.”
“You can have sex with her, but you will forever think of me, Grayson.” She stepped forward with a look of rage flaming behind her eyes. “You may try to erase whatever we had. You may try to deny it, but I see it in your eyes, Grayson. Your eyes can never lie to me.”
I closed the distance between us and glared down at her. “You killed our unborn baby, and I will never forgive you for that. You were selfish. You were cruel, and you were a coward. You abandoned me like I meant nothing. You cut off every single tether we had.
For months, I remained a shell of a man. I let life slip past me while I tried to piece myself together. And when I was done, I realized I could never be whole or complete again because you killed a part of me, Jade. And I hate you for that.”
She winced at my words. She stared at me with unshed tears in her eyes. She was trying to hold it together. I should have stopped but for some reason, I just kept going.
“It’s best if you leave Riverroad, Jade. No one wants you here. Your brother hates you. Your mother gave up on you before she died, and everyone in town knows the real you. The ugly you that you spent years trying to hide. You think you are suddenly so great and wonderful now that you are some big shot lawyer? Guess again. We see Jade in all her evil glory.”
The first tear dropped, but she brushed it away quickly. She rushed past me and headed for the exit of the bathroom. I watched her grab the doorknob to unlock it, but then she stopped.
She turned around slowly to face me. “You had no idea what it was like for me, Grayson. What I had to go through. I took care of my drug-addict mother since I was twelve. I had grown men feeling me up at home. I had a bully who made my life a living hell at school for dating you, and I took it all because I had hope. I had hope that, one day, I would leave this place. We would leave together to start a new life somewhere else. And then, I got pregnant.”
She brushed away some of the tears that fell from her eyes.
“I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like the walls were closing in on me. I came to you, and all you talked about was how we would raise our child here and we would plant our roots here, in Riverroad, a place that had been so toxic for me. All you talked about was the plan YOU had for us. Not once did you ask me if I wanted it. Not once did you ask me what I wanted to do. It was all about YOU.”
What? She was wrong. I did ask her.
“I felt suffocated and trapped, and all this anxiety came crashing down on me. I was seventeen, but you were about to graduate college. You had seen the world. You had lived, and I hadn’t. For years, my life wasn’t my own. I took care of everyone else before myself and graduation was my time to finally be free. To finally decide what my life looked like. But then it slowly started looking like it was fading away.I needed out, so I took the out and went away. You can call me selfish for choosing me, you can call me a coward for running. But don’t you dare call me a killer. I never killed our baby. I loved her with my whole heart and soul. She was created from love and deserved to live.”
She closed her eyes, and tears streamed down her face. She clutched the necklace that I saw her wear every day. She breathed in a few times and then looked up to stare at me.
“I didn’t kill her. She was taken from me.” She turned and twisted the knob to leave but then she looked over her shoulder. “At least I’m not the coward who refuses to face his real feelings.”
And then she left me alone in the bathroom, staring at the space where she had stood.
The world stilled and turned on its axis. What the hell had just happened?