Tapped (Totaled Book 2) (20 page)

            Thoughts of Bree drifted into my mind. She loved it here. She always spoke of the peace that it brought her, like it was where she could come to be closest to God.

            Maybe I could try to talk to Him. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Couldn’t He hear my thoughts anyway? But I tried. I asked Him what to do with this mess I had made for myself. I begged Him to show me some sort of sign that I shouldn’t abandon everything I had built with Bree. I pleaded for answers on how to clean it all up and salvage anything that was left of my new family.

            Granted, I wasn’t really sure how this prayer thing worked, but I certainly didn’t feel any different. No one spoke from the heavens and directed my next course of action. I heard nothing. I felt nothing. I sat and listened for a few minutes, shaking my head at how ridiculous it all was, before I got up to go back inside.

            I brushed as much sand off of my jeans as I could, glancing to my left down the beach to see a girl…running.

            She was still pretty far away and I didn’t have my sunglasses on, but I could swear that it looked like…no…it couldn’t be Bree. But it looked just like her. The way her hair swung from side to side as she jogged, the shape of her legs, her pace. I stood completely still, facing her head on and blinking in hopes that my vision would clear up, come into focus. Then suddenly, still at least a hundred yards away from me, she stopped running.

BREE

            I ran to get lost—in my thoughts, in my emotions—pushing my body to its physical limits. What better place to do that than the beach, where the scenery is nothing short of heaven on Earth?

            I had hit my stride and was most definitely lost in my own head, clarity seeping into me more and more with each and every step. But when I looked up to see someone standing directly in front of me down the beach, the clarity became clouded. My peace became a fiery unsettling in my core.

            It was him. It had to be. I’d know his frame anywhere. And he was right in front of his house, just standing on the beach.

            I stopped running, abruptly halting any forward steps, and just stood there.

            Staring. For one second. Thinking, what should I do?

            Two seconds. Panicking. I wasn’t ready to face him. I didn’t plan on seeing him.

            Three seconds. I felt so conflicted, but didn’t have time to think about this decision.

            Four seconds. God, help me. What do I do?

            No. This isn’t supposed to happen.

            I turned around and ran away. I ran in the other direction as if my life depended on it. Because as dramatic as
that
thought may be, perhaps it did.

Chapter Twenty-Five

DREW

            It wasn’t her.  It couldn’t have been her. Why would Bree run away?

            I walked back up the stairs and into my house, unable to get the image out of my mind, and it suddenly occurred to me that if
I
were Bree, I would’ve turned around and run away too. I’m not supposed to be here. I just replied to her letter with basically a breakup on a post-it, like a complete coward. I ran away from her first. If I were her, I’d be pissed and hurt and wouldn’t dare give me the satisfaction of a face to face interaction. Fuck me!

            Feeling awful, I finished packing my bags and went in to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water for the road. Right next to the refrigerator on the countertop was an empty juice glass that hadn’t made it over to the sink in the few days of my post-Bree-beating funk. But what I noticed specifically about this glass was that it was Bree’s. I never used these smaller, eight-ounce glasses because I never understood what the point of three sips was. But right on the edge of the glass was the waxy residue of her lip gloss, like a fingerprint of her bottom lip.

            The last little bit of resolve fractured in a flash. I picked the cup up and flung it across the kitchen, the glass shattering the second it made contact with the wall. Broken shards scattered all over the kitchen floor, the sharp splinters flying every which way so accurately depicting how I felt. I walked away, leaving the mess that was me to be dealt with another time.

            I drove like a bat out of hell, ignoring all speed limits and stop signs. I no longer gave a flying fuck and although I was aware of how reckless I was acting, I just couldn’t find it in myself to care. If I didn’t have Bree to get back to, what was the point of it all? I had successfully extinguished any hope of us finding our way back to each other and I did so on a whim. Acting on an impulse and driven from a place of rage, I crushed us. With a Goddamned post-it note.

            Sickened by what I had done and desperate for a lifeline, I reached for my phone and dialed Dr. Greiner.

            “Drew! So, you got my message?”

            Shit!

             “Oh, no. I mean, yeah, I got it but I didn’t listen to it…yet. I just saw that you called and I actually really need to talk to you.”

            Blubbering idiot.

            “Okay, great. That’s basically what my message said. I was hoping you could come in today. We need to do a follow up as soon as possible after the first treatment to reinfor—”

            “Listen, Doc,” I interrupted. “I’m in kind of a bad way today. I don’t think I wanna do that eye movement thing again. It didn’t work. And then I got pissed and went and did something stupid and…”

            “Drew, slow down. Are you okay?” he questioned with concern. “What did you do?”

            I hesitated but remembered that I’m supposed to tell him everything. Full disclosure or he can’t help me. “I think I just made the biggest mistake of my life,” I confessed, my voice cracking subtly at the end of my statement.

            “All right, Drew. I want you to come on in to talk to me. Can you do that or do I need to come to you?” he suggested.

            I should’ve been grateful for having such a considerate therapist. Feigning concern off the clock and offering to make a house call based on the sound of desperation in my voice seemed above and beyond.

            “No, that’s okay. I’m driving now. I’ll come to you.”

            “Are you okay to be driving right now? Where are you?” he demanded.

            “I’m coming from F-fernandina,” I faltered, hearing the exhale on his end after I said it. “I can be at your office in about half an hour.”

            “Take your time and drive safely. We’ll talk about everything when you get here.”

            I ended the call and tried to calm myself down, but the more my thoughts ran rampant, the more I felt like I had a bag of bricks tied to my ankles and I was running out of breath. I was drowning an arduous and slow death and I really needed to get my shit together. Fast.

            The parking lot was empty when I arrived at Dr. Greiner’s building and it was a good thing because I didn’t have any regard for parking my vehicle evenly within the two painted lines. I almost felt drunk with frenzy.

            “Come in!” he called when I knocked. “You made it. And in one piece. Good, have a seat and let’s talk.”

            I did as he asked and he looked back to me expectantly, the both of us seated and facing each other. I wanted to just unload it all, just blurt it all out, and the opening was there. So I did.

            “It didn’t work, that eye movement shit. I mean, I thought it did, but when I slept last night I still had nightmares. They were different, though. Way the fuck worse! I couldn’t stop him. It was like I wasn’t even there. But I
was
there, just watching. Forced to watch him kill her and then sit and have a drink like he was fucking proud of himself.”

            He listened attentively, hardly making a movement or grunt. At least he wasn’t going to interrupt.

            “Goddamn it, Doc! It was horrific. I’ve never seen that before, never had that dream. And I never want to have it again.”

            “What did you do?” he asked, almost in a whisper. “When you woke up from the dream, what did you do?”

            “I freaked out. I woke up crying and crazy—completely out of my mind. I felt like there really was no hope for me. So I wrote Bree back. I scribbled some chicken shit response to her on a fucking scratch pad of paper and torched any hope of her ever speaking to me again.”

            “Why? What did you write?”

            I hung my head and rested my face in my palms in shame. “I wrote that I couldn’t be glued back together like some shattered vase. I’m too broken. There are too many pieces. Too many cracks. I told her I wasn’t any good for her and that I was sorry.”

            He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, long enough to prompt me to look up from the floor to see his expression. Stoic. Revealing nothing. I replied to his lack of expression with one of bewilderment, as if to say, “Well?”

            “Did you mean that?” he finally countered. “Is that really how you feel?”

            “It was at the time. I just don’t see how I’m ever going to be able to dig myself out of this hole. I’ll never be the kind of guy she deserves.” My whiny tone annoyed the piss out of me. “And now I
feel
like a fucking coward for breaking up with the love of my life through a covert note instead of a face to face discussion. We have no closure…neither of us! We haven’t spoken since that night.”

            “Do you really need closure? I mean, right now. Is that door really closed?”

            “I’m pretty sure I just slammed it and tossed the key into the ocean. And speaking of the ocean, I could’ve sworn I saw her on the beach earlier,” I hissed. “But I guess it wasn’t her.”

            “Why were you in Fernandina? Let’s get into that a little.” He reached in his familiar way for my manila file folder of crazy talk details to jot down whatever it was that he jotted.

            “I needed more clothes and to check on my place. I should be able to go home whenever I want, dammit!” I exclaimed defensively. “I ended up walking down to the water to think about stuff and I think I saw her running. The girl was far away and wearing a hat. I didn’t get a good look at her face before she stopped and turned around to run in the other direction.”

            “How did it make you feel to think you were about to see her?” he queried in the most stereotypical therapist’s voice yet.

            How did that make me feel? Really, Doc?

            “It made me
feel
like shit. Like the worst kind of shit,” I muttered softly. “I felt like the horrible person that I am. I don’t even know what I would’ve said to her.”

            “Well, luckily you have a little more time to figure that out, since it wasn’t her.”

            I knew in the deep recesses of my soul that it was her, though. It was her and she saw that it was me, and she ran away. She left me. I pushed her away and she left.

            A few seconds of awkward silence passed; I needed to get up. I needed to do…something…anything. “Can we play foosball?” I proposed, garnering a puzzled look from Dr. Greiner. “We can keep talking, I just need to do something. I feel like I have ants in my pants, but in my brain, if that even makes any sense.”

            “All right. We can try it as long as it’s productive,” he acquiesced.

            I picked the black team to match my current mood. He “served” or whatever it’s called and we both commenced spinning the poles to try to defend or score. He began talking first.

            “So, you said earlier that you didn’t want to attempt the EMDR again.”

            “That’s right,” I asserted, flicking my wrist to score my first goal on his red team. 

            He retrieved the silver ball from below the table and put it into position to start the game again. “I think that’s a mistake.” He watched me shaking my head no, all the while both of us focused on playing the game at the same time. “Hear me out. I can’t just put a Band-Aid on this issue. You can’t do one session and be cured. It, like most therapies, is a process.”

            “I don’t care what kind of process it is, I’m not doing it again. It was hell, Doc. Whatever you brainwashed me to think with those eye movements backfired. And it was absolute hell.”

            “I didn’t brainwash you!” he echoed, scoring aggressively. He looked up and exhaled, realizing that he had raised his voice. “I only tried to allow you to remember without having to relive the trauma to the degree that you have been in your nightmares. There’s more work to be done.”

            We resumed playing and I actually felt like it was helping take me out of my head a little bit. “Can we try something else? I seriously didn’t like it and now I have a bad taste in my mouth about the whole thing, so it’s not likely to work anyway.”

            “We can try every therapy in the book, but it’s my professional opinion that this is going to be the most effective for you.” He wasn’t requesting, but trying to almost order me—however tactfully—to do things his way. I respected him more for it, and prior to my gruesome and heinous dream last night, I did trust the man. He continued to fire shot after shot, scoring again and aggravating me. Foosball wasn’t my chosen sport, but I didn’t like to lose. At anything.

            “We don’t have to do it today, although that would be my recommendation. But we need to try it again and I need you to be open to it,” he reminded me. “Nothing’s going to be a quick fix when there’s this much pain to kill. You can’t give up hope this soon.”

            With that, I felt myself snap. I shoved away from the table and screamed, “You can take your hope and go fuck yourself!”

            He stepped back, shocked at my sudden outburst.

            “Hope is a liar! Hope has been teasing me all this time just to kick me when I’m down. I’m
done
being hopeful,” I ranted, walking away from the foosball table.