Lana slowly turned her head and met my gaze. “It means that I love you, Drake. And I know that I’m not supposed to. All you want from me is to be your friend. And I am, but I can’t turn off my emotions. I can’t hide how I feel. I’ve tried.”
Her confession gutted me. I knew that her feelings were strong for me, but I had just brushed it off as a teenaged infatuation. Now, I could see the truth shining at me from those whiskey eyes. Lana loved me.
My heart jumped for joy in my chest. That was all I had ever wanted, and I hadn’t really realized it until this moment. “Lana...” I started to tell her I loved her too, but she went on.
“Maybe I could have kept hiding my love for you. I don’t know. But last Saturday night showed me that I couldn’t keep hiding it. I can’t be just your friend anymore. Especially…” She closed her eyes, swallowing hard. “You brought a girl back to the hotel with you, and I realized that I can’t keep doing this and keep all of myself intact.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. Lana knew about the one-night stand in Vegas…Oh fuck. Our rooms had had connecting doors! Of course she would have known. She probably heard the whole damned thing. Nausea rolled in my stomach as I realized that I had no one to blame but myself.
“I’m sorry, Angel,” I whispered. “I was drunk…” I knew being drunk didn’t excuse any of it, yet drinking had always been my excuse. Now I was going to lose my best friend…
“I know, Drake,” Lana murmured. “I know that you were drunk. And I know that you probably don’t remember much from that night.” Something flashed across her face, but I couldn’t read the emotions in her eyes. “I still love you anyway. I wish I didn’t. I wish I could turn it off and continue being just your friend…but I can’t and that kills me.”
I felt my eyes burn with tears. “Angel…”
“Remember that I told you about the early acceptances? Jesse promised me that I could go anywhere I wanted, and I was still undecided before he married my sister. But…” she swiped at the tears on her cheeks “...but I realized as I tried to drown out the sound of your moans as you… I realized that I couldn’t stay here.”
I went numb. I didn’t feel the blow as Lana said she was going to NYU. I wasn’t sure how deep the cut went, but I knew that when the numbness wore off it would be deep enough that I’d bleed to death. Three thousand miles. My angel was moving three thousand miles away from me, and it was all my fault…
Lana
I was miserable all week as I waited for my sister to come home from her honeymoon. I buried myself in studying, taking care of Lucy, and anything else that kept my mind off of Drake and the many texts he had sent.
Wednesday, I couldn’t take being in the guesthouse a minute longer. For the first time in two years, I put on a pair of sweats and my running shoes. I had been on the track team back at my old school before my mother had died. It had been a requirement that everyone pick an after school sport, but I had loved track. Running had been my outlet to clear my mind when things were so bad at home.
I took solace in it again.
Lucy was asleep on our shared bed as I shut the front door behind me. I headed down the beach, determined to keep all thoughts of Drake out of my head, but it was no use. With every step I took, he was all I could think about. All our time together, all the fun we had shared together, even the arguments replayed in my head.
I ran faster, trying to excise him from my mind by putting unused muscles through a brutal workout. Two miles later, I was out of breath and lying on the beach, staring up at the night sky. Sweat soaked through my shirt and made the cool night air a little uncomfortable, but I welcomed it. The stars above mocked me, and I let the tears fall freely.
I didn’t notice the other runner until he was almost over top of me. Shane stopped with his hands on his knees as he looked down at me. “Lana?”
I sighed. “Hey, Shane.”
He dropped down beside me without asking if I wanted company, which I didn’t. “Are you crying, Lana?”
“Looks like it,” I muttered, sitting up and dusting the sand off my back. I had some in my hair, but I didn’t care. Right now, I didn’t give a flying fuck about anything.
“Did you and Drake have another fight?” he asked, both amused and concerned.
I shook my head, my eyes focused on the waves as the surf hit the beach. “I haven’t seen your brother since Sunday.” I had been able to avoid him but knew that my luck was running out. When Jesse and Layla got home, everyone would know what I had done. There was no way Drake wouldn’t hunt me down then.
“Okay, you don’t want to talk about it.” Shane nodded. “I can understand that. Just know that if you need a shoulder, I have two strong ones to lean on.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
I had hoped that he would get up and continue with his run. Instead, he just sat there with me for the next hour. Neither of us spoke, not a sound uttered, but for some reason it eased some of the pain around my heart. Maybe it was because he was Drake’s brother. We both loved Drake, after all. Or maybe it was just because Shane was Shane.
“I love him,” I whispered, not sure why I was confessing my feelings.
“Yeah, I know.”
“But he doesn’t love me. Not the way I want.”
“I don’t know. Drake keeps a part of himself closed off, a part that not even I can reach, but I know that he does care about you, Lana.” He draped his arm across my shoulders. “Especially after Friday night… Sorry, I heard you guys when I came home…”
I blushed. “He doesn’t remember.”
“Yeah, I figured.” He grimaced. “I guess Saturday night was hard for you. I’m sorry, Lana. I shouldn’t have taken him out with me. Maybe…”
“No. It wasn’t your fault. It’s no one’s fault. Drake didn’t really do anything wrong. I’m not his girlfriend. He’s free to screw anyone he wants.” That didn’t mean I had to stick around to witness it.
“I’m still sorry. This can’t be easy for you. Have you talked to him at all?”
I shrugged. “A text or two.”
We were quiet for a while longer. It was getting late, but I wasn’t sure I could sleep. Shane stood and offered me his hand. “Come on, sweetheart. You have school in the morning.”
We walked side by side back toward home. A mile from the house, I confessed what I had done. Shane stopped, his face a mixture of emotions that I couldn’t decipher in the moonlight. “Lana…”
I bit my lip. “I have to do this, Shane. I know it’s going to hurt him, but right now I have to do what is best for me. That must sound selfish, and I’m sorry.”
After a long pause he finally nodded. “Yeah, I understand.”
He walked with me to the patio and asked if I wanted to go for a run with him the next evening. I knew he was just being nice, but I really needed someone right then. My chin trembled and I nodded. Shane sighed and pulled me into his arms. “It’s going to be okay, Lana. Everything will work itself out.”
Our run Thursday night was almost relaxing, and it left me looking forward to Friday evening since he had asked me to run with him again. After the stress of the last week, the running helped me relax, and I ended up falling into a deep sleep for the first time Friday night.
Saturday wasn’t pretty. Layla was home earlier than I expected, and Jesse was already talking to Emmie about my college plans since she had left him a message that she needed to talk to him about it as soon as he got back. I wanted to be mad at her when Jesse stormed into the new house with rage in his eyes, but I couldn’t. She was just looking out for Jesse after all.
“Lana, why?” Layla demanded, tears in her eyes as she turned to confront me. “I don’t understand why you would do this.”
With Jesse shouting and Layla crying, I couldn’t handle the situation like I had wanted to. Unable to deal with it, I ran up to my new room. Of course Jesse followed me, wanting answers, and Layla joined the party, trying to diffuse the tension but wanting answers too. I
could see that my sister suspected the truth; it was there in her eyes. She couldn’t possibly know all of it, but she could guess, and knowing her, she would guess right.
I wasn’t ready to face Drake when he stormed into my room. I wasn’t ready for any of it, actually. Confessing everything—that I loved him, that I had heard him having sex against the hotel room door—hadn’t been part of my plan, but I had to tell him. He deserved to know where I stood. That even though he had shattered my heart, I still loved him. Would always love him.
It nearly killed me when I saw his face as I told him I was leaving. Three thousand miles. I didn’t know if it was far enough away to get over him, but I knew it was hurting him. His best friend was abandoning him.
“I’m sorry, Drake,” I whispered.
He didn’t say a word as he turned and walked away. As the door shut quietly behind him, I crumbled to the floor, shattered all over again.
Chapter 9
Drake
Over the last three weeks, I had heard them all. Excuse after excuse, and they all ended with the same phrase: “…and then I hit rock bottom and ended up here.” Here was the best rehab in the country. The one place I hoped to find solace after the mess I had made of my life because I had hit rock bottom, and now I was free falling toward Hell.
In the three weeks, I had been here, I hadn’t had one drink. I was shaky, fingers trembling just at the thought of a bottle of any kind of alcohol. Depression was a painful thing. It made your entire body ache for no good reason. My chest constantly felt like there was someone standing on it. Sometimes at night I couldn’t sleep from the sheer pain of not having my angel close. There was nothing—not one damned thing—that I could do about it.
The staff, from the nurses to the psychiatrists, all said I was doing well. I thought they were full of shit. I was a mess. Without the alcohol I was haunted day and night, not only by nightmares of the day I had beaten my stepdad half to death, but now I had one more torment to add to all the others.
Lana’s face as she told me she loved me, but that I had ruined everything.
Emmie had called me the night before and asked if I was coming home next week, when my thirty days was up. I wanted to see her so badly. I had never spent this long away from her, but I knew that if I really wanted to get through this I needed to stay another thirty days…
Today, I was having a one-on-one session with my psychiatrist. It was the first time I had ever sought the guy out instead of him having to seek me out. He said that step alone was progress, but I thought he was delusional. I spent ten minutes just staring out his window at the lake off in the distance before I even started talking about what was on my mind, but he give me time and space.
Finally, I blew out a long breath and raked a hand through my hair in frustration. “I was sixteen when I opened the first bottle. The first swallow was like swallowing a mouthful of fire, but the burn was a good one. It took my mind off of what I wanted to forget. The second swallow was a little easier to get down, and by the third I was out of it.”
The doctor, a skinny man with long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail and eyes that looked like he had seen it all in his profession, simply nodded. “How did you feel later, after the effects wore off?”
“Worst headache of my life,” I assured him. “My mom…” I swallowed hard. I rarely talked about my mother. It was just too painful to think about her. “My mom thought I had the flu and stayed home from work to take care of me.”
“Do you want to talk about your mom, Drake?” Dr. Kent asked, having seen me flinch at the mention of my mother.
I sighed and locked my fingers together behind my head. “Not really,” I muttered.
Kent was quiet for a long moment, as if he were giving me time to rethink my answer. When he finally did speak, he surprised me. “Your brother has come to visit you a few times, but he never stays long. Why is that?”
Pain sliced through my chest thinking about Shane and his last visit, just the day before. Lana was gone. She was in New York now, three thousand miles away. I hadn’t gotten to tell her goodbye or that I loved her. She was just gone, off starting a new life that I had no place in.
“He just wants to see how I am,” I told the doctor, “but he knows that I will want to leave with him if he stays too long.” Yesterday had been one of those days when I had nearly begged my little brother to get me the hell out of this place. I wanted to get on a plane and follow Lana across the country!
The only thing stopping me was the knowledge that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be with Lana just now. First, I had to become a man that was deserving of my angel. The man I had been three weeks ago, when I had walked through the front doors of this place that was so private it didn’t even have a name, didn’t deserve Lana. I was working toward being one that did.
“Maybe we should sit down and have a group session. Me, you, and your brother. Perhaps, the only way to sort out your past is to face it head on. Do you think he would be open to that?”
I glared at the doctor. “I don’t want to put Shane through that.”
The doctor let it go, and I spent the rest of the session just staring out the window again…
When I walked into Kent’s office the next morning, after a nurse had informed me that I was to have a session with the doctor again, I wasn’t pleased to find my brother sitting on the long sofa in front of the doctor’s usual chair.
“What the fuck?” I exploded and faced the doctor, who was sitting calmly behind his desk. “I told you I didn’t want to do this!”
“Dray, I want to be here,” Shane said, and I turned around to look at him. He looked pale, and I could see that his hands were fisted at his sides, but there was determination in his blue-gray eyes.
“I don’t want to put you through this,” I told my little brother, the urge to protect him still eating at me. “You don’t have to…”
Shane was already shaking his head. “I think it will be good for both of us, bro. Just give it a chance.”
I frowned at him for a long moment. It went against everything that was inside of me, but I finally sat down beside him. The doctor stood and moved to his chair across from us, his iPad in hand. “I agree with you, Shane. I think this will be a good thing for you both.”
“Emmie thinks so too, or I wouldn’t be here,” Shane assured the man who grinned at the mention of Em.
“Well, I’m sure if she agrees then we can’t go wrong.” He typed something into the iPad and then put it on the table between us. “Let’s start off simply by talking about your mother.”
Even as my whole body tensed, I could sense Shane’s doing the same. “Our mom was one of the best women I have ever known,” Shane began after a static filled minute. “I always like to remember her as the saving grace to everything else that was bad in the world.”
It hurt to hear Shane talking about the woman that had been everything to us both. She had been a great mom, working hard to support my brother and me to make sure that we never wanted for anything. Our dad had been a decent enough guy, when he was around, but once he had gotten married again, and that marriage had produced a few more kids, we might as well not have existed for all the attention he showed us.
“How did your mother die?” Kent asked after Shane had told him all about the wonderful woman that had given us both life.
I watched Shane’s throat work a few times before he whispered out the answer. “She killed herself… It was all my fault.”
I jumped to my feet, already fighting tears but also angry. “What?” I exploded. “How can you say that? It wasn’t your fault, Shane. It was mine.”
My brother scrubbed a hand over his damp eyes and got to his feet to face me. “No. You didn’t do anything wrong. You saved Emmie. You avenged me and yourself. I’m the one who told Mom what Rusty did. I’m the one who stood by and did nothing while she grabbed the cop’s gun and killed him. I didn’t stop her when she turned the gun on herself!”
The te
ars poured down both our faces now, but I didn’t care. It was tearing me apart inside to hear those words coming from Shane. That he had blamed himself all these years was just wrong on so many levels. “No one knew she was going to do that, Shane. She…She just…” My voice broke when Shane started sobbing. “No, Shane. Please.” I pulled him into my arms, holding onto the man that was still the boy trapped in the past. “I’m sorry, little brother. It was all my fault. If I had just told someone, then none of it would ever have happened.”
“You were just trying to protect me, Dray,” Shane managed through his sobs, “like you always do, and I love you for that.” He pulled back a little to meet my gaze. “You have to stop blaming yourself, brother. Let it all go, man. Let it go.”
Chapter 10
July
Lana
My cellphone was buzzing from my back pocket with Jesse’s text tone that I had assigned months ago. It was an annoying sound that I had thought was appropriate because he only ever texted me with annoying news. Still, I loved him and I knew that he loved me, so I fished the cell from my hip pocket and opened the text.
Picking you up @ 6. Be ready.
I frowned. What was he doing in New York? I knew for a fact that Demon’s Wings didn’t have a concert. The band only did small tours, and they didn’t have an East Coast tour scheduled until next spring. My brother-in-law being in New York out of the blue startled me and made me wonder if everything was okay back home.
Is everything ok? I rushed to ask.
Need to see you. Be ready.
“Fuck,” I muttered, stepping into my apartment building. Normally, I would have greeted the doorman, but I was just too preoccupied to even notice him. The ride up to the twelfth floor felt like it took forever, and by the time I stepped through the door of the three bedroom corner apartment, I was biting my nails to the quick.
I tossed my shoulder bag on the sofa and flopped down, glaring at the TV that was already on some sports show. Looked like Linc was already home from the gym. “Are you in the kitchen?” I called out.