Trouble (Orsen Brothers #1) (8 page)

“Happy anniversary,” he said with a nod.

I swallowed hard and licked my lips. “You didn’t have to—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I wanted to. Open it up. Tell me if you like it.”

I gingerly picked up the box and eased it open. A diamond bracelet stared back at me, shimmering almost mockingly. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I didn’t wear bracelets or diamonds or really any jewelry at all. It didn’t matter that it would end up in my dresser alongside the dozens of other gratuitous gifts he had thrown at me.

This was what he thought he needed to do to repair us.

“Wow,” I breathed, meeting eyes with him. “It’s…beautiful. Thank you.”

He smiled at me and waved a hand in the air. “You’re welcome. I saw it and I thought you might like it. Here, I’ll help you try it on.”

I held out my arm to him and he lifted the bracelet from the box, undoing the tiny clasp and securing it around my small wrist. His touch did nothing for me and he seemed to feel it too. A wave of sadness flooded through me. I turned to look out the window and he did the same, furrowing his brows.

“I—” I licked my lips and stood up. “I need to use the restroom.”

He nodded up at me and I sped walked past him, easing through a maze of tables and chairs as a few people looked up at me from their meals. There was a woman inside the bathroom applying her lipstick in front of the mirror with an unsteady hand. I stepped past her and entered an empty stall, taking a seat on the toilet and dropping my head in my hands.

I willed myself not to cry as I rubbed my temples. A few moments later, the door slammed shut—signaling the woman’s exit—and I exhaled a deep breath. The stillness was comforting.

When I returned to the booth Stephen barely noticed me. He was staring out the window, wrapped up in a world of his own making. “Venus,” he said after a few minutes, clenching his jaw and raking a hand through his dark hair.

The way he said my name made me sit up straighter. “Stephen…” I said, mimicking his somber tone. I knew what was coming—of course—but that didn’t make it any easier.

“We need to talk,” he said, “It doesn’t matter how many dates we go on or how many gifts I give you. You’re never going to forgive me are you? This isn’t working is it?”

“No,” I whispered, studying my hands. “It isn’t…”

I met eyes with him—briefly—and everything he wanted to say but couldn’t washed over his face all at once. “I know,” he said instead, releasing a deep breath and standing up.

He paused in front of the table and smiled down at me sadly.

“I think I should go,” he whispered, bending down to kiss me on the cheek. “I’m sorry. About everything.”

I frowned at him as he squared his shoulders and walked away. “But what about our food!” I called after him, gathering the attention of a few other diners. “You’re my ride! And the bracelet! I can’t keep it…”

“You can,” he said before walking out the door. “I want you to have it.”

And just like that he was gone.

A sad sense of finality crept its way through my veins. A few people gave me strained looks of pity and my cheeks flushed a bright shade of red. I had to get out of here. I pulled on my jacket and grabbed my clutch, stepping out into the foggy night.

Chapter 10

—

S
oft jazz poured from a dimly lit lounge and followed me down the street. I walked until my feet hurt—until the tentative loneliness in my chest dissolved into something just a little more bearable.

Poulsbo wasn’t a large town by any means—but this part was new to me—and the night seemed to be stacked against my favor. This was the fourth time I circled this neighborhood. But I learned my lesson about asking for directions. Earlier, when my journey was still fresh, I stopped in front of a heavy rusted gated to ask a homeless man where the nearest bus stop was.

He wasn’t any help. “You’re like Alice,” he laughed, petting his matted dog. “Lost down the rabbit hole.”

And maybe I was—but now I just wanted to go home—and I began to relinquish myself to the reality that I had
no fucking idea
where that was. Unfamiliar street signs cited the names of members of the royal court and I stopped to lean against a flaking building on an uneven patch of concrete, appreciating the irony of it all. Fluorescent streetlights—faux beacons of direction—stared down at me mockingly—offering me a little less insecurity as I clenched a cigarette between my lips and lit it.

I caught a glimpse of my wedding ring and the bracelet and I sighed as I removed them both, stuffing them deep into the bottom of my clutch. Resplendent artifacts of my marriage; that’s all they were. If Stephen were true to form I would have the divorce papers in my mailbox by the end of the week.

A deep melancholy settled into the pit of my stomach. I willed myself not to cry and exhaled a bout of smoke from my lungs, waving my hand in the air to dissipate it.

My phone rang in my purse and I fished it out.

“Hello?” I answered, sounding more hostile than intended.

“Venus?”

I raked my fingers through my hair and sighed, slouching back against the building. It was my sister. “What’s up, Lu?”

“You said you would call me after dinner,” she said, ignoring the question, “are you alright? How did it go?”

“Right.” I twirled a strand of hair around my finger and looked around. “Sorry…honestly I just forgot. It’s been a pretty crazy night.”

“Really?” There was some commotion on the other end of the line, then the sound of a car door dinging and slamming shut. “So how did it go? I’m guessing I shouldn’t be expecting Stephen on our breakfast date?”

Breakfast date…

Right—I promised her I would meet her new boyfriend. We were going to do a double date. My mental note-to-self bank was getting fuller and fuller by the minute.

“Yeah,” I answered vaguely, ashing my cigarette, “probably not.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” I breathed, “shit.”

“That
prick
.”

A small smile etched its way across my face. Luna always knew exactly what to say to make me feel better. “No…it’s fine really. It was a pretty mutual agreement.”

“You’re still upset though.”

It was an observation—not a question—and I nodded even though she couldn’t see me. Sometimes I swore she knew me better than I knew myself.

“Do you need me to come over?”

My phone beeped and I looked down at it. The ‘low battery’
message flashed across the screen.  “Nah,” I answered. “I appreciate it but I kind of just want to be alone right now. Do me a favor though…don’t tell mom about this. God, I definitely can’t deal with her right now.”

“I won’t. But are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

“Positive. I’ll call you tomorrow alright?”

“Wait—” she interrupted before I could hang up. “I know it might be awkward now…considering…but are we still on for breakfast on Monday?”

“Of course,” I said, “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Great!” I could practically hear the smile in her voice. “Love you.”

“Love you too.”

With that—I pressed ‘end call’—exhaling a deep breath as I continued down the sidewalk. I still didn’t know where the hell I was going but remaining stagnant was making me restless.

T H E N

Our backyard was packed with guests; some of them family, some of them neighbors and a few of them people my mother and Jeff worked with at the University. Claiming she still felt down in the dumps in the wake of my father’s death, my mother wanted to throw a party, and her and Jeff’s looming three-year anniversary gave her as good a reason to as any…

It might not have been a very good reason, sure, but no one was about to turn down the free booze and food.

This wasn’t just the year my father died. It was the year I turned fourteen. The year my mother started writing about me. The year my body shot up by six inches. The year I got my braces. And the year I started to notice boys more than just objectively. These events, all of them in close succession, would later be what I would come to know as “the birth of my depression.”

Fiona and I were sitting in the grass overlooking the impromptu festivities “You’ve really never tried it?” she questioned, raising an eyebrow at me.

I shook my head and eyed the bottle of dripping peach schnapps between her legs. She nicked it from my mothers vast collection when she wasn’t looking, running into the field behind our house with it hidden in the band of her skirt and a plate of hors d'oeuvres balanced between her hands.

“Gross!” she exclaimed, spitting a wad of caviar into the grass. She washed down the taste with the schnapps, offering the bottle to me.

“I don’t know…”

“Oh come on,” she urged, taking another drink as the cigarette we were sharing wavered between her fingers. Nicotine I could handle. Drinking was something I forever associated with my father. But I didn’t tell effortlessly-cool Fiona that. “It’s not that bad, I promise.”

“Just don’t hold it for too long in your mouth,” she instructed, stretching out in the grass limb by limb. Her crop top rode further up her torso, revealing a patch of bare skin. “It’s almost like juice or something.”

I took the bottle from her with unsteady hands and lifted it to my mouth, taking a slow drink. She was right of course. It wasn’t so bad at all. It was actually pretty damn good.

The second time I ever drank was shortly after.

My mother and Jeff were going skiing in Colorado to celebrate their anniversary (as if they hadn’t enough already) and much to me, Fiona, and Luna’s joint excitement, they were leaving us home alone to fend for ourselves for the weekend.

My mother left the house that morning wearing a large fuzzy hat that resembled polar bear fur. I called it ridiculous and she waved a perfectly filed nail at all of us, warning us of the repercussions that would come if we threw a party.

So naturally we did, or Fiona did at least. If nothing else, it gave her a reason to make-out with her latest boyfriend, an older boy (or man I suppose) whose name I never learned.

Students from both high schools in Poulsbo flooded through our front door in hoards. Someone brought a keg and planted it in our living room. Luna went tooth to nail with Fiona in protest of the whole thing, but eventually she gave up and disappeared into her bedroom with Minx tucked under one arm and a book under the other.

A beautiful girl with red hair and freckles, one of Fiona’s friends, shoved a drink in my hand and smiled at me before sauntering away. I shifted against the wall I was leaning on and stared down at the Styrofoam cup, sloshing around the unidentified substance before chugging it. Three drinks later and I was a people person; the light of the party; the one making everyone laugh.

Did anyone in attendance that night realize I was only fourteen? That my father just died? That I was hurting?

My mother and Jeff returned from their weekend to find a trashed house and two very inebriated daughters; but it paled in comparison to their own drama. Apparently Jeff got drunk and made the moves on another woman on the slopes and my mother realized, in a brief moment of clarity, that maybe he “wasn’t the one after all.”

The divorce papers were filed two months later and “irreconcilable differences” were scribbled down as the reason. I sat on Fiona’s bed as she packed, moving around her room like a cyclone and tearing clothing off hangers as a cigarette dangled from her mouth.

“You promise you’ll write?” I asked her for the fifth or sixth time.

She stuffed a bunch of jeans in her suitcase and looked up at me briefly, ashing the end of her cigarette. “Yeah, kid,” she said as she zipped the overflowing bag and hauled it out the door. “Scouts honor.”

She never did of course. But it was true what they said. When one door swung shut another swung open. Soon, my braces came off, my body filled out, and the grief that took shelter inside of me after my fathers death dulled into something just a little more like teenage angst.

I fell in love with alcohol before I even knew what love was. It made every situation better. It got me through sessions with therapists who tried to pick apart my brain, through my mothers drawn out psychobabble on why I was so “detached from reality,” and most importantly of all, through high school.

When sticky-sweet beverages like peach schnapps no longer satisfied me, I experimented. Tequila was an old friend whose presence was always appreciated at parties. Whiskey was the crush I stared at longingly from my locker. And Vodka…well…how do you really describe your first real heartbreak?

My mother did what she did best. She ignored the problem, if she even thought of it as one. She was just happy to have found a muse. A subject to write about that would make people actually stop and listen; the woes of adolescent drinking as told by her eldest daughter. It was only when I threw it in her face that she would react with any sense of chagrin.