Fall Out (Against the Tides #1) (3 page)

Before I know what I’m doing, I’m at the one place I’ve been avoiding since I got back home. Every time I’ve been here before the house has always been full of life and laughter, but now Brett and Ariana’s house looks as if it’s been sitting empty for a while. The grass is overgrown, weeds litter what used to be Ari’s colorful gardens, and all the shades are drawn. If it weren’t for the cars in the driveway, I would think I was in the wrong place. It takes me a few minutes to work up the courage to slip out of my truck and every step I take feels like my feet are weighted down with cinder blocks. 

I finally manage to get up the front stairs, but instead of reaching up and knocking I rest my forehead against the bright red door. Ari and her fucking colors. Brett and I both knew that if he had told her to do anything she wanted, the entire house would probably be a fucking rainbow. It wouldn’t have bothered anyone though. Ariana has always been the girl that could light up your world. She took the darkest days overseas and made them feel like some of the best day of your life just by talking to her. Her personality, the light that she carried inside… it was enough to make you believe that everything was going to be fine. I didn’t see that when I looked at her earlier. I saw a broken shell of the girl that was once there. 

Finally, I reach up and pound my knuckles against wood. I wait a minute, listening for any inclination that she’s going to answer the door, and when I don’t hear movement, I bang again. Still nothing and I swear I hear crickets mocking me and the silence I’m getting from her.

“Ariana,” I yell at the door. “I’m not a fuckin’ idiot. I know damn well you’re home, now answer the door.”

In the years that I’ve known her, both while she was with Brett and without, I’ve never yelled anything at her. It was always the other way around. She’s always been the one yelling at me for stupid shit. Shit that never should have happened to begin with. She’s always been the one cleaning up my messes and now she needs someone to be there for her and the hell if I’m going to let anyone but me be the one to do it. 

“You should know by now that I’m one hell of a patient bastard. I can, and will wait here for as long as it takes for you to open this damn door. I will stand here all fuckin’ day and night if that’s what it takes.”

I’m just about to open my mouth again, fully prepared to spout off some shit about being able to wait her out like a terrorist, but the door swings open. Her clothes hang off her, looking to be two sizes too big, and the red blotchy face and puffy eyes tell me all I need to know. She’s just as broken as the rest of us, probably more, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. I want to reach out, to pull her into me, but I don’t even move. As much as I want to, I know she won’t handle it well. 

“What?” she snaps, pulling me from my thoughts. She tries to cover the emotion in her voice by forcing herself to be angry. “What the hell do you want, Knox?”

“I. I…um.” Everything that I had thought about from the second I stepped foot on the plane and knew I was actually going to see her again, to the second before she opened the door, disappears and I’m left looking like a fool.

“You what? You just wanted to check on me? To make sure I was doing all right? To see that everything was peachy keen?”

Ariana’s fingers tighten around the doorknob to the point that they turn white and I know I’m straddling a fine line between breakdown and being hit. Finally, I find my voice. “You ran before I had a chance to say anything. I wanted to let you know that I’m here if you need me.”

“You wanna know what I need, Knox?” she asks, her voice shaking with every word until I can barely understand her through the tears. “I need my husband! Instead of you standing here giving me your sorry speech, you should be knocking to have a beer with Brett. The only way you could help me right now is if you can wake me up from this fucking nightmare and give me the other half of my heart back. But since you can’t, I suppose there isn’t a damn thing you can do for me!”

The door slams back in my face, the sound of it rattling the hinges resonates around me. I stand there for a few minutes, part of me hoping that she’ll open the door and let me in, but the other part knows that it won’t happen. A piece of me, my heart maybe, cracks as I give up and turn away from the door. I can hope she comes around, but only time will tell. The only problem with time is that it can either heal the deepest wounds, or make them worse, and you won’t know which until it happens.

MY FEET POUND against the pavement, each strike slapping so loud that I can hear them over my headphones. Maybe. For all I know it might all be in my head. Sweat drips down my face, my chest, and my back, but I don’t stop. I can’t. It’s hot as fuck today, but this is minor compared to the hell I’ve been in. 

I’ve been home for over a month. It’s been two weeks since Brett’s funeral and getting the door slammed in my face by Ariana. Two weeks of running this same five mile loop every day. It’s all I can do lately. My mind won’t let me focus on anything else but my feet eating up the pavement in front of me. It’s like it knows that if I let myself move on, to go out and get a civilian job, that it will make this real. If I keep running, keep my routine the same, maybe I can push the inevitable heartbreak away. Brett wasn’t just a friend, he was my brother, even though there was no blood between us. One thing we knew was that family isn’t only blood.

Brotherhood and loyalty. Those can overshadow a blood bond any day. That’s what we had—that’s what I lost. 

All I want to focus on is breathing as I pound away, but the traffic backed up and horns honking pull me from my haze. When I finally look up, I stumble, tripping over my own feet. In the middle of the road, completely disrupting traffic, is Ariana. It’s the first time I’ve seen her since she slammed the door in my face, despite the numerous amount of times I’ve run by the house. Still dressed in a baggy shirt and shorts with her hair knotted up on top of her head, she stands in the center of the road. I see the vacant look in her eyes as I get closer, and it’s like she doesn’t even realize where she is. I yank the headphones out of my ears, throw my iPod into the grass, and rush toward her, dodging cars as I go.

“Ariana!” I shout as I get closer, but it doesn’t even faze her. When I finally reach her, I grab her shoulders and shake her. The blank stares vanishes as she focuses in on me. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Um.” Her tear-filled eyes dart around like she doesn’t realize where she is.

“Are you fuckin’ crazy? You can’t just stand in the middle of the road!” The asshole behind me honks again so I pull her toward the side of the road so the traffic can finally get moving again. “Someone could have hit you, Ari.”

Her arms hang limply by her sides when I let go of them. Staring straight at my chest, she mumbles incoherently until a sob bubbles out from between her lips. I grab her, pulling her into me without giving a second thought to the fact that I’m drenched in sweat.

“He promised me he was coming home. He told me he was always going to be there. We had plans for our future, Knox. I don’t know what to do.” Her body hangs loosely in my arms as she cries. “Two days and he was supposed to come home and I would’ve been able to touch him again. He promised me forever. Tell me what to do? How do I do this without him? How can I go on without him?”

The sound of her voice and the words she says break my heart and I have no clue how to answer her. How the hell am I supposed to help her move on, when I myself can’t even deal with losing Brett yet? She’s right, though, he did promise her every time they talked that he was coming home. The sappy shit that came out of his mouth made me want to vomit most of the time, but if I’m being honest, it’s probably just because I was jealous of what they had.

It doesn’t take long for her to regain her composure and push away from me. The teary eyed woman is gone, replaced by the hardass that slammed the door in my face that day. Her eyes drop from mine to the tattoo scripted across my ribs.

“So others may live,” Ari mumbles as she scans the words. “It should have been you,” she spews. “Brett should be the one standing here. It should have been him walking off that plane, not you. You have these words inked into your skin that are supposed to mean something, but they’re nothing more than an empty promise. What the hell did you do to earn the right to have those words tattooed on you? You’re still breathing while Brett is six feet under! It should have been you.”

I can’t breathe as the words she spit at me keep playing on repeat. They’re the same words that I’ve been trying to ignore running through my head since it happened. Every word she says is a thought that crosses my mind more than once a day. My fingers drift over the ink, one half of the tattoo that will now never be whole again. The other half,
I lay my life on the line
, sits on the inside of Brett’s arm. No one will ever complete it again now that he’s gone. There were so many times that we got made fun of because we each had half a tattoo and it’s deemed a chick thing, but we didn’t care. We were both drunk when we got them, and each part is uniquely its own saying, so if people didn’t know the story behind it, they would never know that it was one in the same.

She mutters the words again and I snap. “You don’t think I know it should have been me? I fuckin’ know it, Ari! Every time I take a fuckin’ breath, I know it’s one that Brett doesn’t get. Every time I close my eyes, I wish I could go back in time and change places with him so he could come home to you. Because you deserve to be happy! The only thing I want is for you to be happy, but I can’t fuckin’ change what happened and I’m so sorry for that!”

“I hate you,” she bites out. Turning away from me, she finally gets a grip on herself and heads back toward her house. Since I can't seem to get myself to move, I’m left standing there wondering how the hell I can fix this. I know deep down that she doesn’t mean anything she said, and it’s only because she’s hurting, but it still cuts deep. The fact that she said the words that scream through my head on a daily basis make them hurt that much more.

THE DOOR SLAMS behind me and I engage the lock as quickly as I can. It’s not that I’m afraid that Knox will come screaming up the steps— OK, yes, that’s a damn good possibility and I know it too. I’m also afraid if he pushes his way in that I’m going to spout off more stupid hurtful shit.

Everything that was just said, all the bitchy comments about how it should have been him, they weren’t supposed to come out. I didn’t even realize those thoughts were in my head until I saw that fucking tattoo and they just tumbled out of my mouth. With word vomit like that there’s no getting the spiteful comments back.

I rush toward the stereo system and jam my finger down on the power button, cranking the volume as high as it will go at the same time. It’s the first time there has been noise in the house since I kicked Emerson out that night so I don’t know what is going to play until it comes blaring out of the speakers. “Nightmare” by Avenged Sevenfold screams out at me. Dropping back against the wall, I slide down until I’m on the floor. My head drops back against the wall as I scream through the words while choking back sobs.

I don’t stop until my voice is hoarse and it feels like I’ve swallowed razor blades. Even then the music continues to blare around me, and my tears continue to roll down my cheeks. Not only did I lose my husband, but I’ve pushed both of my best friends away and closed myself off from everyone that wants to help me. After what I said to Knox I’m not sure there’s any fix for what I’ve just torn down.

I’m not even sure he would want to. 

I HATE IT when inanimate objects mock me. For weeks it was everything in the house, now it’s this damn marina sign.  It stands tall, laughing and calling me a chicken because I can’t get out of the car. This makes hour number two of me just sitting in the parking lot staring at that damn sign.

When I got in the car this morning I wasn’t sure where I would end up, I just knew I had to go. I needed to get away from the house and all the memories it holds. I guess part of me realized that if I didn’t get back to my life sometime I’d never heal.