She took another step back—almost to the window—and shook her head again.
“Abby?” I asked, but she had disappeared. “Abby?”
The curtains swayed.
“Abby, come back! Abby, I love you!”
Something warm and soft and wet licked my cheek. I shook myself awake and sat up. Apollo whined and licked me again.
I looked around the library.
Empty.
It had been a dream.
A damn dream.
She hadn’t come back. She believed me, and she was never coming back.
I pushed Apollo away and reached for my glass. Where was it? I stood up, and my shoes crunched broken shards of glass. Fuck.
I left them and went to pour another glass of brandy. I took a long sip and dropped that glass to the floor too. Watched it shatter into hundreds of pieces.
Just like my life.
Just like my heart.
Just like I’d shattered Abby.
I poured a new glass and drained it within minutes. I looked again to the window—to where Abby had stood in my dream. Like I expected her to be there. To appear out of thin air. Like she’d just breeze into my house and make her way back into the library as if I hadn’t ripped her f**king heart out.
It was as if I looked at the library through a thick haze. Everything was blurred and distorted. My mind, though—my mind worked with the utmost clarity, for I remembered every second Abby and I had ever spent in the library.
There, on the floor, where we had our n**ed picnic.
There, on the couch, where she had stripped herself bare for me.
And there, on the piano bench, where she’d taken me after I played for her.
I grabbed my hair and pulled. Maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could rip the memories right out of my head. The pictures in my mind blurred together—Abby and me in the library, playing the piano for her, Abby reading, standing in the poetry section, the rose I gave her . . .
She had never asked me about the rose.
Why not?
Would it have mattered?
She had to have known something about the rose. She f**king knew everything. She knew about Melanie, for f**k’s sake.
My cell phone vibrated. I took it from my pocket and squinted at the screen.
Jackson?
I didn’t want to talk to him. I dropped the phone to the floor and my eyes scanned the library. The fireplace was empty.
I saw them all consumed.
The library needed a fire.
Fucking consume everything—the piano, the couches, the f**king poetry. Everything.
I laughed. Wouldn’t take much. The brandy on the floor would help.
Now. Where to get matches?
I staggered into the kitchen, not quite sure why the floor kept moving the way it did. Made it hard to walk. I yanked a drawer out and the contents poured onto the floor.
Something pounded in the other room.
I looked up from the mess. Abby?
No. Abby was gone and would never come back.
The ache in my heart would never get better. Had to fix it myself.
Ah, yes. My fingers wrapped around the matchbox. Just what I needed.
I took the matches and started walking back to the library. Just needed a little help from the wall so I could make it down the hall. I heard footsteps behind me.
“Nathaniel?” Jackson called.
I laughed. He could join me in the fire.
I pretended not to hear him and kept walking.
“Nathaniel?”
Damn, he was fast. How’d he make it to me so quickly? I turned. We were right outside the library.
“Con . . . congra . . .” I waved the matches in the air. “Besss wisssses on your . . .” What was the word? “Yeah.”
“Holy f**k,” the blob that was Jackson said. “You’re trashed.”
I turned and stepped into the library.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Burning.”
“Burning what?” He trotted along beside me.
“Lib . . . rary.”
He grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. “What the hell are you doing? What have you done to this place?”
I laughed.
“Nathaniel . . . f**k.” He shook me. “Stop laughing. You’re scaring me.”
I stopped laughing and tried to focus on his face. I had to get this next part out. “She . . . left . . . me.”
The pain in my heart exploded, and I stumbled toward the couch but ended up slipping on the brandy. The glass cut into my knees.
Yes. That was better. The pain in my knees. Not as bad as the pain in my heart, though.
I pressed my hand to the floor to help me stand, but that just jabbed glass into my palm.
I held my hand up to Jackson.
“Damn it, Nathaniel.”
I shook my head. “She’sss not ever coming back.” I watched as blood spilled out of my hand. “Never . . . coming . . . baccckkk.”
The room dissolved into darkness.
It was dark when I woke again. For a split second, all was well with my world, but then everything crashed down on me again.
Abby was gone. Forever.
I couldn’t decide which hurt more—my head or my heart.
“Nathaniel?” Jackson asked from somewhere.
My head hurt like the devil, but my heart was definitely injured worse.
I tried to sit up, but the room spun too fast and I lay back down. Where was I?
I turned my head. The living room. Jackson must have carried me into the living room.
“You awake?” he asked.
“I think that’s generally what it means when one has their eyes open.” It hurt to open my eyes, though, so I closed them again. “Where’s my drink?”
“I put it all away, and I—”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
I opened one eye. “Why did you put my drink away?”
“I think you’ve had enough.”
“I’ll decide when I’ve had enough.” I opened the other eye. Ah, yes. There he was—sitting in an armchair.
“When I came inside, you were trying to burn down the library.”
“And you stopped me?” Had I really tried to burn down the library? I didn’t remember that.
Abby was gone and there was a big gaping hole in my heart.
I remembered that.
“That’s why I’m not letting you drink anything else.” He picked up my remote and changed the channel on the television.
“You ever have a woman leave you?”
He looked out the side of his eye at me. “No more brandy.”
“I’ll alternate with red wine, then,” I said. “It’s heart healthy.”
He didn’t try to stop me. For the next few days, I spent most of my time in a drunken haze. It felt better that way. If I drank enough, I fell into such a deep stupor, Abby didn’t visit my dreams.
The worst was when I was awake. When I was awake, I saw her everywhere. Unlike my dreams, I knew she wasn’t really in the house, but I could sense her. Could sense her everywhere—in the kitchen, in the living room, in the foyer. She had left her imprint on nearly every room of my house.
I never set foot back in the library after that first day, and I refused to sleep in my bedroom. Since Jackson insisted on staying with me, I let him have my bedroom and I moved into the guest room across the hall from both my room and Abby’s room. At least there, I had no memories of Abby.
Jackson called Sara for me on Monday and told her I wouldn’t be in for a few days. I wasn’t sure what excuse he used. I didn’t really care. Fucking company could run itself. I knew he talked to Linda—I heard him sometimes. She never came by, so I could only imagine what he told her.
I hated it when he talked to Felicia in my presence. Hated it and loved it. Loved it because it was a connection to Abby. Hated it because it was a connection to Abby.
I wondered how she was doing. Jackson never said and I never asked. He never mentioned Abby’s name to me. When he saw me listening to his conversations, he walked out of the room or hung up.
I wished I could do it all over again.
Wished I could call Abby in on that first day and talk to her—tell her everything. If I had just been honest in the first place . . .
But whenever I started the “if I had just” game, I started drinking again and fell into the same never-ending circle.
One day that week, who knew which one, I woke in the living room and heard Jackson on the phone.
“I don’t know, man,” he was saying. “I thought he’d be better by now. He’s just . . . not.”
Silence as the other party on the phone spoke.
“I don’t want to bring Mom over; that would just make it worse,” he said. “And he won’t talk. I don’t know what to do, Todd. He just stares into space or drinks or sleeps.”
Silence again.
“Who?” he asked. “Hold on.” I heard him move to the table by the couch and pick up my cell phone. “Paul, you said?”
Fucking hell.
I reached for the glass I knew would be by my side and let the alcohol do its trick.
“Nathaniel Matthew West,” a fierce, strong voice said, hours, maybe days, later.
I pretended not to hear. I had been having the most wonderful dream. Abby had been there; she’d been—
“I know you heard me,” the voice said. “Wake up.”
I rolled over. I was in bed. Always good to know where you were. Bed was good. You could sleep in bed. “Go away.”
There was light when I woke up again. I didn’t like the light. The darkness was better.
“I told Jackson you’re not allowed any more alcohol.”
The voice was starting to piss me off. Why wouldn’t it leave me alone?
“Fuck off,” I told it.
“I have some nice coffee brewing downstairs—”
I pulled the sheets over my head. “Don’t want coffee.”
“Get your sorry, good-for-nothing ass out of that bed right this minute.”
Damn. He wouldn’t shut up. “You don’t tell me what to do, Paul.”
“Someone damn well better.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Then prove it,” he said. “And speaking of children, I left my newborn son and sleep-deprived wife to be here with you, so you better get out of that f**king bed before I drag you out of it.”
I thought about my options for less than five seconds and then sat up. “I don’t remember you being this much of a pain in the ass.”
Paul smiled. “Then you don’t remember me very well.”
Sitting in the kitchen over the next few hours, I told him everything. All about Abby and how I knew of her, had watched her, then lied to her. I even told him about the ridiculous safe word. He knew, of course, how I’d treated her badly after her first punishment, so I glossed over that part. I went on to tell him how I’d fallen in love with her. How she’d fallen in love with me.
He nodded solemnly as I detailed our final night and the fateful morning I pushed her away.
“Dug yourself quite a nice hole, didn’t you?” he asked finally.
I wrapped my hands around my coffee mug and let the warmth seep into my fingers. “Yes.”
“So, what are you going to do about it?”
I looked up at him. Was he serious?
“I mean it, Nathaniel. Are you going to sit here and moan and groan about everything you did wrong, or are you going to be a man and do something about it?”
“She’s gone. What else is there to do?”
“You’ve got bigger problems than Abby.”
“What?” What was he talking about? Abby was the center of everything.
“You’ve got to fix yourself before you can fix things with Abby.” He got up and washed his cup.
“There’s no fixing anything with Abby.” I glared at him. “I just told you she left me.”
“With good reason, too.” He turned away from the sink and faced me. “But the start of your Abby troubles wasn’t your deception. The start of your Abby troubles was you. How you feel about yourself.”