“Why?” I ask.
She sighs and glances briefly at the floor.
“Because you were right all along,” she says. “I just didn’t want to believe it. And I meant what I said before, Elias, about you belonging here. More than my parents. More than me. You really are Brayelle’s family, and I know you always have been.” She wipes her finger underneath her left eye before the tear escapes. “Thank you for taking care of my sister. For being there for her when she didn’t have anyone else.”
Rian starts to step back out into the brightly lit hall, but I stop her.
“Rian.” She looks back at me, wiping more tears from her eyes. “Bray forgives you. You know that, right?”
She smiles a little underneath her pain and then nods. “I hope so,” she says. “But I still want that chance to prove to her that I love her.”
Then she turns and walks away, letting the tall wooden door close softly behind her, shutting off the light the room had been borrowing from the hall.
I take my seat next to Bray again, and I reach up and run my fingers through her tangled hair. I brush her long bangs back to keep them away from her face. I kiss her lips and I watch her sleep until my eyes get heavy again. The early morning sunrise begins to peek over the horizon, sending thin, dust-filled beams of light through the sliver in the thick curtains on the window.
And when I fall asleep, I sleep soundly with the knowledge that Bray, the love of my life, is going to be OK. She’s going to live and she’s going to grow and she’s going to get better.
Because I’m going to make sure of that.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Three months later…
Elias
“They’re here,” I call out to Bray from the living room of our new rental house just outside of Savannah. I let the curtain fall back over the window.
Bray hurries in from our bedroom wearing a sexy brown knit dress that stops just above her knees and a pair of black calf-high leather boots. Her hair is pulled into a ponytail with a few loose strands left to hang freely about her face.
I walk over and fit my hands on her hourglass waist and lean in to kiss her lips. She smells like freshly washed hair and coconut body wash.
“Damn, baby. I should bend you over the chair.” I kiss her again and grab two handfuls of her butt.
Bray’s face flushes, and she retaliates by hitting me playfully on the chest. “Stop it,” she teases. “We’ve got company.” Then she reaches up and squeezes my cheeks in her hand. Her tongue sneaks out and licks my pooched-out lips.
There’s a knock at the door.
“I’m so nervous,” she says.
I laugh lightly. “Why?”
She shrugs, and I take her hand as we approach the front door. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s just been so long since we’ve seen them.”
“Yeah, but they’re not snooty distance relatives or anything like that.” I twist the doorknob.
“Heeey! Long time, man!” Tate says when I open the door.
He shakes my hand and pulls me into a man-hug. He looks cleaner, a more approachable member of society than how he looked last year in Florida. His light-colored hair is actually styled, spiked up a little in the front. He’s wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a solid black, short-sleeved shirt and a pair of biker boots. And he decided to shave the stubble, just like I did.
“Yeah, it has been a long damn time,” I say and usher him and Jen inside. “Come on in.”
“Oh my God, you’re so gorgeous!” Jen says to Bray, and they do a sort of half hug, holding each other’s elbows but not pressing their bodies together, probably not wanting to wrinkle their outfits.
“You too, girl,” Bray says with a huge smile. “Look at you. Gah! I envy that long, blonde hair!”
Jen’s hair does seem to have gotten longer; now it tumbles down past her waist.
“Well, I want your silky chocolate hair,” Jen says with the same measure of smile. “So I say we trade.”
I decide to stay out of that conversation the more it begins to veer off into chick stuff. I turn back to Tate, who’s holding a six-pack of Coronas. He holds them out to me.
“You got a fridge?” he asks.
“No, I use an Igloo ice chest out back,” I joke, and take the cardboard six-pack dangling from his index finger. He follows me into the kitchen.
Before long, we’re all in the living room catching up.
“Yeah, Caleb is doin’ hard time now,” Tate says from the love seat, where he’s sitting with Jen. “He was sentenced to eighteen years, but we’re hopeful he’ll get out on parole long before that.”
“Damn, man, that’s a long time,” I say, and squeeze Bray’s knee next to me. I glance at her, testing the waters of the topic, but she’s OK with it, and I knew she would be. Because she’s been doing great in just about every aspect of her life since her attempted suicide.
Her soft blue eyes smile at me, then she looks at Tate and Jen. “That is really sad. I only served about a year, so I can’t imagine what’s Caleb’s going through.”
Tate shakes his head, clearly still dejected about his brother being back in prison. He always will be. “He’ll be all right. In fact, I think he’s probably doing better now than his first time around.” A faint smile appears.
“Why’s that?” I ask.
Tate’s smile gets bigger. “Well, three months after he went in, he got a visit from his ex-girlfriend, Cera.”
“No shit?” Bray says, unbelieving.
Tate nods. “Yep. She visits him every week.”
“They’re back together?” Bray asks.
I can see the happiness in her face over this news. She had told me about the conversation she had with Caleb outside the motel that night in Baton Rouge. I think it really hurt her to know that Caleb loved this girl so much that he would do anything for her, yet she didn’t seem to believe in his innocence after a five-year relationship.
Jen smiles hugely and winds her fingers through the back of Tate’s short hair, her arm propped on the back of the couch. “Yeah, they’re back together. I knew they would be eventually. She talked to me about him all the damn time.” She rolls her eyes as if it had annoyed her, but it’s obvious that it hadn’t much. “I just wanted to stay out of their problems. But I’m glad she came around. A little earlier and she could’ve spared him the prison sentence, but I guess better late than never.”
“That’s awesome,” Bray says, bright-eyed.
“Yeah, it is,” Tate says. “I think Caleb is going to be okay. At least for now. We’ll have to see how long she can keep this up with him being behind bars.”
“Well, don’t think about that,” Bray says. “Stay positive.”
Tate nods, having to agree that’s the best way to go about it.
“So anything new with you two?” I ask. “No babies or engagement rings?”
Jen’s nose wrinkles. “Uh, no,” she points. “And no,” she points again a little to the left.
Tate laughs and raises his back from the couch, resting his elbows on his knees. “We’ll never get married. Already established that. Babies, on the other hand”—he grins and Jen sneers—“I’d like to have one someday.”
“Well it’s not gonna be by me,” Jen comes back. “No babies are coming out of this body. Ever.”
Tate raises a brow and chews on the inside of his lip arrogantly and says, “Well as long as you’re okay with me stickin’ my dick in some other chick for the sole purpose of making a baby, then I’m good to go.”
Jen presses her front teeth together and smacks him across the arm.
Bray and I just laugh under our breaths. Some things never change.
Tate throws his head back, laughing, and then mumbles to me, “She’ll give in one day,” as if he was only halfway trying not to let Jen hear, but he knows she did.
Jen shakes her head and smiles.
“What about you?” Tate asks us, and I notice him glance at our hands, looking for rin
gs.
“Someday,” Bray answers. “We thought about getting married this year, but we’ve decided to wait. At least a couple more years.”
“Well when you do, I better get an invitation,” Tate says.
“Didn’t take you for the wedding type,” I say with laughter in my voice.
Jen pats him on the leg and purses her lips. “Anyone’s wedding but his own,” she says.
There’s another knock at the door. I get up to answer it.
“Elias!” Grace says with her arms held out for me.
I hug her as Bray, Tate, and Jen come up behind us.
“Oh my God, Grace, I’ve missed the shit out of you!” Bray says, squeezing her, apparently not worried about wrinkling her clothes this time.
“Me too!” Grace says, stepping back, clasping Bray’s hands with hers. She looks Bray up and down. “Damn, you are rockin’ that dress.”
More chick stuff. I step to the side and welcome the dark-haired guy taller than me by at least two inches with tattoos down both arms and one peeking from the collar of his shirt. He looks like a rocker guy who just walked out of an Abercrombie and Fitch store dressed in casual jeans and a light-gray collared shirt.
“Come on in,” I tell him, and he and Grace move farther into the room.
Grace turns to the guy and says, “This is my boyfriend, Knox.” Then she points to all of us. “Elias. Bray. Tate and Jen.”
Knox nods and smiles subtly, burying his hands in his pockets.
We spend the next half hour catching up (and we talk less about Caleb, since Grace doesn’t seem comfortable talking about him with Knox being here).
Finally, Bray’s sister arrives at the door solo. She’s dressed up much like Bray: wearing a long-sleeved knit dress and a pair of boots. And she looks nervous.
“Come in and meet everybody,” Bray says, looping her arm through Rian’s. Bray then introduces Rian to everyone.
“It’s great to finally meet you all,” Rian says. “Brayelle has talked a lot about you.”
Bray and I exchange looks across the room, and we’re probably thinking the same thing. These were the people we had been on the run with, so Rian doesn’t exactly think of them as innocent friends who we just met at the library or someplace. But Rian, staying true to her word to always be there for Bray, treats them all with respect and even seems to be enjoying herself.
We head out around nine to a fall party going on at a local nightclub. With Halloween just a couple weeks away, the town is gearing up for the many Halloween parties that will go on. Even the streetlights are decorated in orange and black.
Life is good, and every day it proves to be more so.
Tate and Jen went back to Miami the day after they visited, but we keep in touch and will be making a trip down to Florida next summer to spend a week with them. Grace and Bray talk all the time. On the phone. E-mail. Text messages. By the time spring rolled around, they had been back and forth to Norfolk and Savannah to visit each other three times. And I’ve even heard them discussing something about Grace and Knox moving to Savannah. I couldn’t be happier about news like that, especially since Grace is such a great friend to Bray. She knows all about the things that Bray has gone through, and while at first it made me nervous that Bray would open up to her so fast about such personal things, it didn’t take me long to fully accept it. She needed a best friend like Grace.
Aside from having me and Grace in Bray’s life, and even Mitchell and Bray making up and getting back to normal, Rian and Bray spend a lot of time together. Rian’s all right in my book. Sometimes she’ll try to be the big sister and piss Bray off, but it’s all perfectly harmless, your average sisterly squabbles that I think are pretty healthy to have.
And Bray has a better relationship with her mom now, too. Her dad is still a stubborn hard-ass, but I think even he is coming around.
But Bray and her illness has been the biggest turnaround of all.
Before we left the hospital that day back in July when I pulled her from Mr. Parson’s pond, I vowed to do everything in my power to help make her better. I set her up with a good psychiatrist—after I did a bit of research on the woman—whom Bray seems to love. She sees her once a week, and since I make good money at my roofing job, I pay for Bray’s health insurance. She argued about it in the beginning, but I won that argument. Dr. Ashley worked with Bray to help find her a medication to manage her bipolar disorder and that doesn’t make her feel catatonic or, worse, like killing herself. Bray has done really well, and I can feel it, that she’s a happier person.
Come to find out—and this is hard for me to think about—but before we left the convenience store that day in Baton Rouge, Bray had it set in her mind that she was going to commit suicide eventually. For a month after she got out of the hospital, I told myself that they must’ve put her on some kind of medication while she was locked up, which ultimately caused the suicide attempt. Just like back in South Carolina. It tore my heart out when she finally admitted to me one day that the only reason she didn’t pull that trigger was because I was sitting there. She couldn’t die knowing that she would put me through something like that. And she had contemplated ending it while she was locked away. But with limited means of pulling something like that off—though she claims she still could’ve done it—it helped to keep her alive.
Alive long enough until she could get out and die in the one place she had always found peace in her life. Mr. Parson’s land. Where we met. Where we spent our childhood.
But with my help, the love and support of her sister, and the right counseling and medication, Bray is a changed person. I see it in her every day. She’s happy. When I watch her smile or hear her laugh, I know that the darkness that lives inside of her—and it will always be there—is so small, so weak now, that it can’t hurt her anymore. I worried for a while if she was only better because I was with her. I couldn’t stand feeling that if we were to break up someday—not that I’d ever see that happening—that she might commit suicide. As much as I wanted to be her crutch, her rock, I didn’t want to be the only thread holding her life together.
Thankfully, I found out that I’m not.
We still fight but we always make up, and she’s never reverted back to that darkness. Not that far, anyway. She still has her moments, but she loves life and every day she shows me that. But yeah, life is good. And I know it’s only going to get better.
It has been a long road for Bray, but I’m helping her travel it every step of the way. And even though sometimes she still feels like she doesn’t deserve someone like me, she’s learning that she does.
Everyone deserves someone who loves and cares for them enough to see them through life’s obstacles. Especially people like Bray.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Bray
Three years later…
Today, I’m a very different person than I once was. It’s so strange looking back on my life, wondering how I managed to get through any of it in one piece. I truly am one of the luckiest people in the world. Not only because I have Elias in my life, but because I survived two and a half suicide attempts. Not many people can say that. I’m not sure what made me so special, what gave me the right to live when so many others who deserved a shot at life more than I ever did, lost their battle on the first try. But whatever it was, I’ll always be grateful.
I know that I never would’ve made it through anything if it weren’t for Elias and his unconditional and unwavering love for me. He, in every sense of the word, was everything to me. He was my parents, my sister, my friends, and the love of my life. He was my conscience, my will, and my direction.
Today, Elias is still all of those things. Even though I have a great relationship with my sister now and my father has finally started acting like one. I have the best friend in the world, Grace, who lives less than ten minutes from Elias and me. My mother calls me twice a week and we actually spend time together, doing things that mothers and daughters do. It took most of my life to fe
el like I had a family other than Elias, but now that I do, I couldn’t be happier.
But like I said, I really am a different person.
I wake up every morning next to Elias¸ thankful that the person I used to be, as damaged as she was, was never strong enough to chase him away. And when I crawl out of the bed in the mornings and stand in front of the bathroom mirror, I look at that girl staring back at me, and for the first time in my life, I like her. I understand her. I’m not ashamed of her.
I smile as I look at myself, then grab my toothbrush and get ready for the day. Elias has been marking the calendar for three weeks, counting down the days to something he refuses to tell me. I waltz into our tiny kitchen and spin around dramatically, modeling my new summer dress, white with little straps over my light sun-kissed shoulders.
“Overdressed? Underdressed? What do you think?” I ask, grinning at Elias, who is sitting at our small, round two-person kitchen table.
He shakes his head and gulps down the last of his orange juice. “Nope. Not gonna happen,” he says. “Quit trying to get hints out of me.”
“Oh come on,” I whine playfully and walk toward the refrigerator. “That’s not going to give anything away.”
“Give up, Bray.” He laughs and pushes his chair underneath the table.
“Fine,” I say, surrendering. “Did you talk to dad?”
Elias nods and rinses his plate off at the sink. “Yeah, he called while you were in the shower. He said your mom will be home about an hour after we get there. Not sure I like that.”
I roll my eyes and smile at him as I close the refrigerator. “Give him a chance, babe. He can handle it.”
“I dunno,” Elias says, shaking his head solemnly. “He always has that nervous look in his eye. The whole time we’re gone I’ll be worried your dad will be hiding in the closet when we get back.”
I laugh out loud and set the juice container back in the fridge. “He’ll be fine,” I say. “Mom will be back before it comes to that.”