ROYAL (3 page)

“Bad things can happen to anyone.” I fold my arms. “And I
am
thankful for everything I have, just
so you know.”

He shakes his head, biting the inside of his lip. “Saying
that doesn’t make it true.”

My lips button. I can’t tell him that my entire life, I’ve
had this weighted feeling in the pit of my stomach that the second I reach my
pinnacle of happiness, it’s all going to be swept away without any kind of
warning.

I’ve never told anyone that. It makes me sound crazy.
They’ll chalk it up to anxiety. Mom will ask me to see a shrink. I don’t need
talk therapy. It’s just a feeling I’ve always had. Like I was born with it.
It’s always been there, like an invisible cloud of darkness lurking over my
shoulder.

“Whatever, Royal.” I move away from him and eye the stairs.
“I’m going upstairs now. Don’t forget to ask my dad if you can take me on a
date. He’s old-fashioned like that.”

“Done.”

I stop, turning back toward him. “Excuse me? When?”

“Don’t worry about it. But Robert’s cool with it. Laid down
some rules, but we’re good.”

“What did he say?” My curiosity is alive and well. Growing
up, Dad always said we couldn’t wear makeup, swear, or date until we were out
of the house. I’m sure he was exaggerating, but I can’t imagine that he gave
Royal his blessing without making it into a big thing.

“He basically made me promise to marry you someday.” Royal
smirks. “More or less. Maybe not in so many words. But the threat was there.
Implied, really.”

I roll my eyes. I can see my dad putting the fear of God
into Royal.

“He won’t have to worry about that.” I chuckle and amble
toward the landing of the stairs. With my hand on the railing, I look back at
Royal, standing in the middle of the dark living room bathed in moonlight. For
a fraction of a second, he looks older, wiser, more worldly. I blink, and he’s
back.

“Won’t he, though?” Royal winks.

“Night, Royal.”

“Night, Demi.”

***

Demi, Age 18

{18 months later}

I love him.

I love him, I love him, I love him, I love him.

The curtains to my bedroom window are pulled, and I’ve been
watching the driveway for hours. Royal had to head upstate to visit some
family. I didn’t even know he had family. He never really mentioned anyone,
never really talked about his past in any kind of detail. But apparently,
someone needed him, because he left in a hurry late last night with a backpack
and a half-charged phone. Said he’d be back by dinner Sunday night.

I roll to my stomach, propping my head in my hands and
tapping my fingers along my cheek to the beat of the song pumping through my
ear buds.

Every song reminds me of Royal. I can’t listen to the radio
anymore without feeling all the feels, every emotion magnified, every sensation
intensified. Nobody ever warned me that being in love was like a constant Dopamine
high.

I’m addicted. Obsessed. Consumed.

And so is he.

He is mine, and I am his.

We’re going to be together forever.

Never thought I’d be almost nineteen years old and already
head over heels in love with my soul mate. And I think I always knew it would
be him. I just didn’t want to admit it.

The clock on my dresser reads eight. He should’ve been back hours
ago.

I try his cell again, but it goes straight to voicemail. I
send a text I know he’ll never read because his phone is obviously dead. The irrationally
optimistic notion that maybe he’s home, and I missed him, creeps through my
mind, so I tiptoe to the basement, where he’s been staying since he was kicked
out of foster care last year when he turned eighteen.

His room is empty, but I linger for a moment because it
smells like him, and I need my fix.

I crash on his bed and bury my face in his pillow. A smile
creeps across my lips when I remember all the naughty things we’ve done in this
private little corner of the basement. Thank God for locks on the door, because
my parents would flip their shit if they ever walked in on us.

But we can’t help it.

We can’t keep our hands to ourselves, and why would we want
to when being together feels stupid amazing? The cheesy smile on my face has
become a permanent fixture in the last year and a half because of that boy.

And I hope it
never
fades.

I pull myself off of Royal’s bed when I hear Mom calling out
that dinner’s ready. We’re eating late tonight. Apparently, I wasn’t the only
one waiting for Royal to come home.

Selfishly, I hate that he had to run off and help someone.
Every hour apart is torture. We’ve spent every waking moment together this
summer, woefully counting down the days on the calendar as we get closer to the
weekend my parents move me to my dorm at Hargrove College.

We’re staying together. Royal promised. But we’ll be a
couple of hours apart for a while. He’s going to try to find a job closer to
me, but until then, we’re soaking in these carefree summer nights like they’re
going out of style.

Climbing the stairs, I amble down the hall and see Mom
removing an extra place-setting at the end of the table.

My heart drops and my hands weaken. I take another step and
grab onto the back of Delilah’s chair.

“Why’d you do that?” I ask Mom. “Why’d you take Royal’s
plate away?”

She turns to me, her expression sullen. “He’s not coming.”

“He’s not coming . . . for
dinner
?” I need clarification. I need context.

Mom’s gaze lifts across the room to meet my father’s. His
lips straighten, and his chest rises and falls with one loaded breath. And then
he nods.

They know something I don’t.

My chest flutters, opposite my churning stomach.

“He’s not coming back, Demi.” Mom’s shoulders fall and she
turns away, returning his plate and a handful of flatware to their rightful
places in her meticulously organized kitchen.

I laugh. This is a joke. It has to be. Royal’s always
messing with people. He’s going to pop around the corner and surprise me with a
dozen red roses and two surprise tickets to see the traveling Broadway
rendition of
Les Mis
in the city.
He’s random like that. It’s why I love him so.

“What do you mean,
he’s
not coming back
?” I stumble back until I hit a wall.

No one’s smiling. No one’s laughing.

Delilah and Derek stare at their empty plates. Daphne twirls
a fork between two fingers.

“What happened? Is he okay? Did something happen to him?” My
words come so fast my lips feel like Jell-O. “Where is he?”

Dad clears his throat and rises. “You and Royal are through,
Demi. That’s all you need to know. He’s not to come back here. And you’re not
to see him again. Is that understood?”

“Robert.” Mom’s voice breaks. From where I stand, I see her
clutch her hand across her heart and shake her head, though her back is toward
all of us. I’m sure she’s wishing Dad would’ve delivered his message with a
little more compassion, but there’s no delicate way to drop a bomb like that.

“No. No, no, no, no . . .” My voice escalates. I repeat the
same word over and over, until the back of my throat is raw and it hurts to
swallow.

Thick tears trail my cheeks, and I find myself on the floor
after a minute, my knees pulled up against my chest and my face buried.
Someone’s arms are around me. Delilah maybe? No, feels like Daphne. I don’t
bother looking up. I don’t have the energy.

“No . . .”

I close my eyes for just a second, and when I open them, I’m
alone in my dark bedroom. Buried under a mountain of covers.

Alone.

Broken.

Abandoned by the only man I’m ever going to love.

Demi

{Present Day}

“You’re a saint, Demi. You really are. Brooks is so lucky to
have you.” Brenda Abbott kisses the top of my head as I sit at the foot of her
son’s hospital bed, massaging lotion into his dry, unmoving legs. “He’s going
to wake up soon. I just know it.”

She pouts her thin lips, and I realize I’ve never seen my
future mother-in-law without lipstick until now. Brenda wears mascara though.
Layers of it. Thick and waterproof. Dark black that makes the green of her
irises glow.

The gaudy, five-carat cushion diamond on my left ring finger
glimmers beneath the low light above Brooks’s bed, catching my eye. I still
think it looks fake, though I know it’s very much real and very much certified
and very much insured. I thought Brooks was insane for buying it. I told him no
one in Rixton Falls has a ring like this. I’d have been happy with a stone a
fraction of this size, but he insisted.

Forty-eight hours ago, I took this paperweight off, returned
it to its robin’s egg blue box, and tucked it in the bottom of a drawer. Forty-eight
hours ago, I called the caterer, cancelled the band, and begged the
photographer for at least some of our deposit back. Forty-eight hours ago, life
as I knew it came to a screeching halt for the second time in seven short
years.

Guess I have a penchant for picking the love ‘em and leave
‘em type.

Brooks called off our wedding the other night with some
bullshit excuse about not being ready and peeled out of the driveway in his red
C-Class. The one he crumpled and shredded when he ran off the road and hit a
guardrail. The one currently reduced to a pile of scrap metal in some junkyard
on the outside of town.

It was late. I still don’t know where he was going, but clearly
he was in a hurry to get there.

I poured myself a glass of wine after he left and went to
bed wearing an old t-shirt of an ex-boyfriend’s out of spite. Couldn’t sleep.
Just laid awake beating myself up for feeling relief over anguish. I couldn’t
understand why I wasn’t more upset about him leaving. I even tried to make
myself cry. The tears wouldn’t come.

“He’s going to be fine,” I assure his mom, though I’m not
exactly qualified to give that kind of hope. I went to school to teach
kindergarteners, not to diagnose the uncertain futures of trauma patients.

The steady gush and hiss of a machine that breathes for
Brooks fills the tiny room.

A nurse knocks on the door. “So sorry, folks. Visiting hours
are over. You can come back in the morning.”

Brenda slips a Prada handbag over her shoulder, refusing to
take her eyes off her swollen and mangled son, as if she might miss a hint of a
twitch. I don’t remind her that his coma is medically induced, and she’s not
going to miss a thing until they try and bring him out of it.

“You going to be okay tonight, sweetie?” Brenda rubs a knot
between my shoulder blades. Small, hurried circles. Comforting yet detached.
I’ve been with Brooks since our senior year at Hargrove, so I’ve known Brenda
for years. I always thought she was strong, but now I’m beginning to see that she
just sucks at showing emotion deeper than surface level.

Like mother, like son.

In the early days, it took Brooks the better part of a year
to tell me he loved me, and after that, he reserved those words solely for
special events. Birthdays. Valentine’s Day cards. The occasional breathless
declaration after an earth-shattering orgasm.

“I’ll be fine,” I say. Brenda doesn’t need to worry about
anything other than her son. What happens to me is insignificant compared to
everything he’s going to be dealing with when he wakes up.

If
he wakes up.

The doctors say he might not be able to walk or talk.
They’re unsure about the amount of brain damage he’ll have to contend with.
Every organ and bone in his body is swollen, broken, or extensively damaged.

“We need to postpone the wedding.” Brenda lifts her eyebrows,
shoulders slumping. “Obviously.”

My gaze snaps into hers. Now is not the time to say
anything, but I feel the words right there, on the tip of my tongue, tingling
and threatening to bring the truth to life.

“I’m not even thinking about the wedding right now.” It’s
not a lie.

“This is nothing more than a setback. He’s going to wake up
and get back on his feet. My son’s as stubborn as a mule. He wants to marry
you, and when Brooks sets his mind to something, there’s no stopping him.
Wouldn’t be surprised if he wakes up tomorrow and marches on out of here just
to prove he can.”

I snort through my nose. Brooks
is
stubborn. He’d proposed to me on four separate occasions, refusing
to take ‘no’ for an answer. The first three times I declined, telling him I
wasn’t ready, begging him to wait another six months, then another, and
another. The truth was that I was still in love with someone else, and I needed
more time to get over him. You can’t love one man and marry another. It isn’t
right.

And maybe . . .

Maybe a teeny, tiny, microscopic part of me hoped that Royal
would . . .

No.

I hate thinking about it, because I know how completely
ridiculous and unrealistic it sounds.

I said yes the fourth time Brooks proposed because I
realized exactly why I was with him in the first place: he was the antidote to
Royal Lockhart. The antithesis of the one man who shattered my heart and
crippled my ability to feel a shred of the happiness I’d once known.

Brooks Abbott was the only thing that could cure me of the
obsessive love sickness I’ve been plagued with since the day Royal left and
never came back.

“I’ll make sure he knows you never left his side,” she says.
“I’ll remind him every damn day for the rest of his life.”

Brooks lies lifeless in his bed, his back propped up against
pillows and his chest rising and falling in sync with the machines. His
beautiful, electric green eyes are swollen shut, his strong, square jaw broken
in four places. Flecks of dried blood cling to his thick, blond mane.

Gone are his pressed white polo shirts, crisp khakis, and
navy dinner jackets. Gone are his fancy watches and money clips and Gucci
loafers. You strip Brooks Abbott down to a hospital gown, and he’s no more
special than any other person in this hospital building.

Royal would detest Brooks if they ever met. And maybe a
small part of me is secretly pleased by that.

I almost wish Brooks could see himself like this. He was
always so obsessed with crafting this perfect image to the rest of the world.

Perfect house.

Perfect fiancé.

Perfect smile, perfect cars, perfect friends . . .

The list went on and on.

He had it all, and nothing ever kept him satisfied for very
long.

I wish I could ask him where he was going that night. He
sure as hell wasn’t upset about calling off the wedding. The man didn’t shed a
single tear. Kept the entire exchange short and sweet. I should’ve suspected
something was up when I came home from work and saw a packed bag next to the
front door. His keys dangled from steady hands, and the laces of his boat shoes
were tightly tied.

Brooks’s nurse clears her throat from the corner of his room.
I cover his legs with a white flannel blanket, place the lotion aside, and
gather my things. I need a shower. I need a hot meal. I need a full night’s
rest. I need to organize my thoughts. Maybe have a good cry.

Brenda slips her phone from her pocket and leaves. She’s
been doing that all day, taking phone calls and spreading the word. One of his
aunts started a Go Fund Me page for the “lengthy recovery and medical bills
he’s going to face” despite the fact that Brooks is a very successful financial
planner, and the Abbotts are one of the wealthiest families in Rixton County.

And despite the fact that we don’t even know if he’s going
to pull through.

On at least four occasions, I caught Brenda taking
screenshots of various headlines from online news articles discussing the
accident. She claimed she pinned them to a Pinterest board to make a “digital
scrapbook” for Brooks to see when he wakes up.

I guess we all deal with things differently.

Twelve hours I spent with that woman today, and I still
didn’t have the courage to tell her that Brooks and I broke up the night of his
accident. I imagine the way her face might fall when I tell her. I imagine that
half of Rixton Falls will hear within hours. And I imagine the snickers and
stares I’ll face from locals who balk at my timing.

“
Yeah, sure
,”
they’ll say. “
How convenient
.”

No one will believe me. I’ll be branded a shitty human
being, my reputation forever tarnished.

The pads of my shoes make soft, sticky noises as I leave the
hospital. Outside, an early November snow begins to fall. The flakes are huge,
but they don’t stick.

Nothing ever really sticks around Rixton Falls.

Except for idiots like me.

I climb into my old Subaru and crank the ignition. Cold air
blows through the vents, and I shove my fingers up against them as if that
might possibly make the air warm any faster.

Brooks tried to get me to trade it in last year for
something flashier, even offering to make the down payment for me. I told him I
didn’t need a BMW when the school I teach for is five blocks away from our house,
and my Subaru shows absolutely no signs of biting the dust in the very near
future.

Five minutes later, I’m coasting down the quiet streets of
my hometown, past the green-roofed library with the iron frog-and-toad
sculpture. Past the Ice Cream Queen. Past the rich people nursing home and the two-screen
movie house. Past the hill we used to sled down as kids every winter. Down the
avenues we used to cruise when there was nothing better to do on a small town
Friday night.

They all blur together like a messy streak of memories, and
they all silently whisper his name.

Royal
.

In the still, small hours, every single day, my mind always
finds a way to wander to him. He’s long gone, and I’m stuck treading these same
dark waters. Day in. Day out. Going nowhere. Feeling it all.

Everything reminds me of him.

Of
us
.

Everywhere I go.

Everything I see.

Everything looks exactly the way it did when he was around.

He left me to live this life without him, in a town that
makes me feel like he’s still here.

If I ever run into Royal again, I’m going to shove a fistful
of my hurt down his throat so hard. I want him to feel the way I do, because
maybe then he’ll understand what he’s done to me.

How he’s
broken
me.

How he’s made it impossible for me to feel for anyone else
the things I once felt for him.

My fingers squeeze the life from my steering wheel as I jerk
the car into an empty parking spot in front of an empty convention center hotel.
The stoplights in the distance change from green to yellow to red, performing for
a dead intersection.

I blink over and over until the sting in my eyes dissipates,
and my mind wanders to Brooks and the graveness of his situation. Can’t help
but feel responsible in a fucked-up way. I should’ve stopped him from leaving.
Had I made him sit down and explain exactly why he wanted out, maybe he
wouldn’t be sitting in a hospital bed, fighting for his life.

Instead, I basked in my sudden liberation and told him not
to let the door hit him on the way out.

The image of his packed bags, jangling keys, and solemn
expression comes to mind.

The only thing I know for certain, in this moment, is that
Brooks Abbott did not want to be with me anymore.
He
left me
.

He did not want to marry me.

He didn’t even suggest trying to make it work.

He just wanted . . . out.

And now, it appears as though I might be spending the rest
of my life taking care of a man who, at zero hour, changed his mind about
loving me.

And couldn’t get away fast enough.

I pull back onto the road and stop at a fluorescent liquor
store on my way home. Maybe I can drown out some of these thoughts tonight,
because they’re not doing me a damn bit of good. If anyone so much as stares at
me sideways when I buy my fifth of vodka, I swear to God, I’ll bite their fucking
head off. Tonight, I’m not a sweet kindergarten teacher. I’m not a picture-perfect
Rosewood daughter. I’m not planning my wedding to one of the most eligible bachelors
in the tri-county area.

I’m just trying to get through this.

My thoughts go to Royal for the twentieth time today, and
guilt seeps into my bones, weighing me down into my worn leather seat. I
shouldn’t be thinking of him right now, but I lack the energy it takes to stop
myself.