Necessary Restorations (The Walsh Series) (A) (40 page)

“And how does that prove anything?” I asked. “Aside from the fact I was a shallow teenager with a low threshold for affection?”

“You were friends first, and it seems like you authentically cared about Sam,” she said.

I nodded in confirmation.

“And . . . don’t hate me when I say this, but it sounds like you were convinced Sam was just like Dillon, even from the start, and you made that fit the circumstances?”

The comments about his sex life.
I
was the one who instigated those conversations.

The questions about his whereabouts.
I
was the one who didn’t accept his word.

The reactions to his relationships with Andy and Lauren.
I
was the one who couldn’t handle it.

The refusal to hear him out even when what’s-her-name admitted fault.
I
was the one who broke us up.

“Oh, fuck,” I groaned, and buried my head in the sofa. If I stayed hidden there, I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that I destroyed the most loving relationship of my life because I refused to believe someone was worth trusting.

“Let’s say Dillon never cheated on you. It still wouldn’t have worked out,” she said. “You would have realized that you were wrong for each other eventually, and while I don’t condone his methods, Dillon just figured it out sooner.”

“Okay, but—” I stopped myself because I didn’t have an argument to defend. Ellie was right.

“Again, don’t hate me but . . . Your real issue is that you’ve never been loved the way you deserve, and I think Sam might have done that for you. And maybe you didn’t know how to handle it. I don’t think Dillon hurt you when he cheated. You didn’t care enough to be hurt. He was just another in a long line of assholes who thought it was okay to fuck you over and abandon you.” I peeked out from behind a pillow, glancing at her in question. “Yes, I’m talking about your family. They’re assholes and you know it as well as I do.”

I finished the other half of the bagel without responding because once again, Ellie was right.

“Will you tell me stories about the tour now?” I asked. Her accounts from the road were my preferred fairy tales, and though I never saw myself playing with a band and traveling from city to city, I loved the vicarious experience. It was a sweet little escape, and that was what I needed at this moment.

Later, I sat on the floor of the shower while water rushed over me. I felt hollow and fragile, like I’d snap if I moved the wrong way. The lighthearted joy that usually came so easily to me was buried deep below the surface, in a spot I couldn’t access.

I wanted to find Sam, to explain everything, but I was all out of words . . . and there were too many old, tender wounds obscuring my thoughts. I needed the music to tell me what I was feeling, how to make sense of it all, how to go forward. This was the sort of thing I processed by myself, bleeding it out every time I brought my fingers back to the strings. I didn’t know whether I was built that way or I made myself that way, but it was my operating system.

And I knew where I had to go.

“ARE YOU COMING?”

Riley was standing in the doorway to my office, his fly unzipped and a coffee stain resembling Argentina down his leg.

“RISD. Put your dick away.”

I was in rough shape after giving Tiel six days of ‘space’ and let’s be honest: she hadn’t been asking for a couple days of space. She never wanted to see me again.

I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t convince myself to eat much. I was hitting the treadmill in the dead of night, running for hours and pretending there was something normal about that.

“My bad, my bad,” he mumbled as he righted his trousers. “As I was saying, are you coming?”

Irritated, I scrolled through my calendar but couldn’t find an appointment. “Coming where? I’m free all morning, and I was looking forward to feeling sorry for myself during that time.”

That last comment earned me a lifted eyebrow from Riley. He was squarely in the camp of me calling Tiel and groveling my ass off. I was more interested in hating the world for the foreseeable future and not making a fool of myself again. “It’s the walk-through at Wellesley. Shannon said you wanted to be there.”

Fuuuuck.

“Shannon, Patrick, and Andy are meeting us there. Matt’s driving. You can come with us, or I can catch a ride with him if you’re out.”

“No,” I groaned, and shoved my things into my messenger bag. “I’m not in the mood to talk to Shannon, and she’s going to come in here, guns blazing, if I bail. I don’t have the patience for her dramatics today.”

I slumped in the back seat of Matt’s car—an exact replica of mine—and ignored the conversation he carried on with Riley about basketball. The traffic was heavy this morning, and after another endless night spent jogging on a road to nowhere, I fell asleep as soon as we hit Storrow Drive.

The crunch of gravel under tires woke me, and as I set eyes on the one-hundred-and-thirty-year-old Arts and Crafts mansion for the first time in years, I knew I should have stayed at the office. There were only so many hits a man could take.

Cold lead sank in my stomach but I followed Matt and Riley up the circular drive. They were pointing out the work in progress, but I couldn’t hear them over the pounding in my head.

We joined the group in the kitchen, and Shannon wasted no time offering her commentary. “I didn’t believe you’d actually show up. Let’s commemorate this moment,” she said, gesturing toward me. “I’d suggest a selfie but you look like shit.”

“Play nice, Shan,” Riley warned. They made eye contact, but I was too miserable to care about their exchange of grimaces and eyebrows and stares.

“Right, so . . . let’s get back to the agenda,” Andy said.

While I should have been listening to the updates and dilemmas, I started wandering through the rooms. It looked different with protective tarps on the floors, and scaffolding and construction equipment everywhere. Almost sterile. With all the furniture and home goods removed, it was the same as any other jobsite.

Just about.

There were some memories that lingered even when everything else was gone.

The small linen closet beside the window seat where I’d hidden whenever Angus was on a bender and looking to unleash some rage.

The back staircase he threw Erin down when she was thirteen, breaking her arm in three places.

The alcove in Shannon’s room where I’d camped when it was too scary to sleep alone.

The room where my mother died.

And because my brain enjoyed fucking with me, I found myself in the middle of the nursery, thinking about the child Tiel and I weren’t expecting.

Of course she wasn’t pregnant. It was my fault, that much I knew. I wasn’t putting a baby in her any more than I was proving string theory. Either my sperm didn’t swim or the ones that did were dysfunctional, or the universe knew I was too fucked up to reproduce.

Or maybe—probably—Angus was right all along. I was a mistake, an accident, a fucking mulligan. I shouldn’t have been born, and the only course correction was ensuring my genetic material never poisoned another generation.

He was right, and so was Tiel. I couldn’t fool anyone into thinking I was capable of keeping anything good.

There wasn’t a single moment of my life that wasn’t a fucking disaster. As an adult, I knew how to cover it up with trendy clothes and professional expertise, but when those pieces were stripped away, I was still the excessively anxious kid who couldn’t go anywhere without a crate of prescriptions and medical supplies. I was wildly risk averse—I stuck to my playbook and kept everyone at a safe distance—and for years, I had been just fine.

Tiel was perhaps my one uncalculated risk. Those girls—the ones at the bars? There was no risk there. I had enough emotional distance and condoms to guarantee it.

She was a gamble. A noisy, colorful, gorgeous gamble, and it was clear that I lost.

I lost it all.

I was on a mission to obliterate everything. That’s what sitting in an empty nursery in the most haunted house in Massachusetts did to a guy. It made him want to erase memories and kill brain cells.

“You should not be here. This is a terrible choice, and you should not be here,” Riley said from a few steps behind me. “Girls claim they want space, but they want you chasing them. Yeah, they want some time to cool off, but for the most part, they want to take a deep breath and see you right there—not here, but there, wherever she is—with chocolate and flowers and shit like that.”

I ignored him. I was exactly where I needed to be, and it was long overdue. He’d been bitching at me since I announced I was hitting the bars when we got back from the visit to Wellesley but I’d had enough of his mother hen routine. I couldn’t take a piss without him asking where I was going and offering to hold my dick, and of course he appointed himself as my chaperone tonight.

“Have you called her? Texted? Sent a carrier pigeon?”

Fuck space.

Fuck time.

Fuck room to breathe.

Fuck everything.

Heading toward my regular red velvet booth, I waved at Alibi’s manager and gestured for drinks. I was swallowing whatever she brought my way. “No. Why? She told me to fuck off, or something like that.”

Riley’s hand landed on my shoulder, stopped me in my tracks, and spun me around. That kid was built like a tight end. I wouldn’t put it past him to sack me, and part of me was hoping for it. I wanted to hit something, but more than that, I wanted something to hit me. I wanted to focus on a different form of pain.

“All right, grasshopper. Listen. Couples fight all the time. Like, constantly. Matt and Lauren spend more time debating things and making up than doing anything else, and trust me, I’ve witnessed all of it.”

He rolled his eyes and shuddered.

“But here’s the secret—it’s always your fault. Whatever it is, your fault. Even if she’s being an asshole, it’s your fault. Just apologize and do nice things, and it’s better.”

He shrugged as if it was that fucking simple.

“Call her. Apologize. Say something sweet, and you’ll have some good old-fashioned make-up sex all night.”

The manager appeared with a gin martini, and I sent her a wink. “You remembered,” I said. She shrugged as if she remembered everyone’s drink orders, and tossed her wavy blonde hair over her shoulder. “Good girl.”

As she turned to leave, I smacked her ass.

“No, no, no. That’s enough. We are leaving now,” Riley said. I knocked back the martini in one gulp. “You have lost your fucking mind, son.”

“Yeah, I have.” I crossed my arms over my chest and rocked back on my heels. “And I’m not interested in looking for it. What’s the point?”

Riley brought his fingers to his temples in obvious frustration. “The point,” he bit out, “is that you love Tiel, and you need to fix things with Tiel. You should not be here right now. You should not be inventing ways to self-destruct. Why is this so complicated for you to understand?”

I handed my glass to another blonde. I didn’t think she worked at Alibi, but she took it nonetheless. She must have spent everything on the breast implants because those grapefruits were busting out of her dress. She wasn’t a natural blonde, either.