Sever (Closer Book 2) Read online

  “What, Teller?” She doesn’t turn around to face me. “What do you want?”

  “I want you back,” I admit with what oxygen I have left in me. “I—”

  Fire and rage meet me head-on, but her glossy eyes don’t match the defeat in her tone when she says, “Then you shouldn’t have lied to me.”

  There are no words because I have no air left to speak them with.

  “Did you come here expecting me to forget everything and take you back?” she asks. She wears a spot of paint on her ear like an earring. “We’re not good together. I think we’ve proven that.”

  Laughing out, I run my hand through my hair and take a step away. “Get real, Ella. Our breakup has nothing to do with Joe and Kristi, and everything to do with you.”

  The sprinklers turn on, raining down on my bright orange tent. There’s a hint of satisfaction in my girl’s scoff—one I return when a sprinkler head breaks, shooting an Old Faithful-like stream six feet in the air.

  “Let me help around here,” I say in a last-ditch effort to salvage what little chance I have of getting her back. She’s not ready for a conversation, and I can be patient. I can try. “I won’t bother you.”

  Ella lingers in the doorway, glancing over her shoulder at the flood on her lawn before shifting her wet lashes and reddened eyes toward me. “There isn’t a day when you’ve left me alone since we met, Teller. You won’t start now.”

  “Probably not,” I reply. “But you need me. For this.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she mutters and closes the door behind her.

  I sit on the steps and smoke a cigarette, waiting for the sprinklers to turn off. The sun falls behind the house across the street, taking the edge off the temperature and the pressure in my chest. I’m here—camping out on Ella’s front lawn like a fucking stalker—but I’m here, and for two smokes, everything’s okay in the world.

  The next morning, I open my eyes and expect to feel the weight of devastation pressing me toward the center of the Earth. But I’m only met with grogginess as I unzip my tent and step onto the lawn, shirtless and rested. The authorities weren’t called during the night to haul my ass away, so I take it as a good sign and stretch my arms above my head, ready to start the day.

  Addiction scratches the back of my throat, so I slip a Marlboro between my teeth and trot to the side of the house and take a piss.

  Tilting my head back, I inhale toxins through my mouth and exhale through my nose, moaning in pleasure.

  “Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh!” a woman’s voice shrieks behind me.

  I pull up my shorts and turn to meet a fifty-something-year-old brunette lady with a gardening shovel in one hand and hose in the other, open-mouthed and hopping from foot-to- foot.

  “Hey,” I say, blowing smoke over my shoulder. “I’m here with Ella.”

  Who the fuck tends their garden at five thirty in the morning on a Saturday? This town’s weird. And I know what this looks like: shirtless, tattooed, chain-smoking male pissing on the neighbor’s house, but if this lady kept her ass in bed, there wouldn’t be a problem.

  “It’s okay, Carol,” Ella’s voice chimes in from behind me. “He’s only here to torture me.”

  I wink at Carol. She scurries away.

  Ella posts at the end of the porch with a mug of coffee in each hand. She’s all bare feet and sleep lines, and I need her back. My life depends on it.

  “She seemed nice,” I say.

  Sleeping Beauty blinks slowly, not entertained with Carol’s outburst.

  Carol’s, not mine.

  Carol’s.

  She sighs, but it doesn’t hide the smile curving her lips. “Teller, get your ass in the house before I change my mind.”

  Now

  “Can I take a shower, or do I need to use the hose again?” I ask, giving the house a quick once-over now that she’s invited me inside. Not much has changed since I was here last weekend. Ella started projects, but she didn’t complete anything. There are a hammer and nails on the floor, buckets of paint in the corner, and the doors are removed from the cabinets.

  Ella slides a mug across the kitchen counter for me, setting boundaries. Don’t come close, her dim expression says.

  “I seem to remember you walked your happy ass to town and rented a room to shower, right?” Steam from her coffee drifts across her lips before she takes a sip, veering her look away from mine.

  Ella’s boundaries feel like a prison, and I’m sentenced to solitary confinement. She’s given me the cold shoulder before, she’s refused to see me for weeks at a time, and she was in a committed relationship with someone else. But she’s never been this … absent.

  “Should I go?” I jab my thumb over my shoulder to the door.

  “I didn’t invite you here in the first place, Teller,” she reminds me, pushing the distance between us.

  I grab a shirt from my bag and pull it over my head. I slept in a fucking tent in her front yard just to be next to her, to prove that we’re worth fighting for. I can’t make this work on my own, and she’s not giving me anything to hold on to. All because I didn’t mention that her dead boyfriend was cheating with my dead girlfriend?

  “What are you so afraid of?” I can handle humiliation, but her indifference kills me. She acts like we haven’t craved each other for years, as if we haven’t battled to be together, as if we never happened at all. “You keep calling me a liar, Gabriella, but you’re the only one in this fucking house who’s lying.”

  Ella turns away to look out the window, throwing the early morning sun across her blank look. I want to kiss and kill her at the same time, but I settle for picking up my backpack to leave.

  I haven’t decided if it’s for good or for now when she calls my name.

  “How can I trust you?” she asks.

  “How can you not?” I reply, letting the strap of my bag fall from my shoulder to my hand. “You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted, Smella. I’m far from perfect, but I love—”

  She holds her hand up to keep the word from coming too close. “Don’t do that, okay? Don’t leave, but don’t do that either. I can’t hear it right now.”

  Pressing my lips together, I trap the confessions and pleas in my lungs and nod.

  “I don’t know why I came here,” she confesses, drinking another sip of caffeine. “I hoped that by selling this place I’d find closure or the answers to why I’m not loveable. But I’m terrified to let it go. That’s why I can’t get a single thing done. Self-sabotage.”

  “You’re good at that,” I say.

  Brown eyes swimming with tears move my way, and she says, “Don’t go, Teller.”

  You dumb girl, I want to roar. Are you fucking blind? You must be, because I’m right here.

  I chew on the confession between gritted teeth.

  Ella waves her hand around the room. “There’s no going back now.”

  “Don’t sell it if you don’t want to,” I offer carefully.

  She pushes a lock of hair behind her ear. “My realtor’s hosting an open house next weekend, so I can use some help cleaning up. I need you, Tell, but I don’t need the other shit, you know?”

  I nod.

  “We can talk about it—us—later, but right now, I’d appreciate it if you can fix that stupid sprinkler head before I flood the entire neighborhood.”

  There are plenty of places I’d rather be than trapped in my head. Doubts plague me. Questions poke my skull until it splits. Confusion rides my back like a fucking child, holding too tight around my throat. I catch glimpses of Ella roaming from room to room, dressed in cut-off shorts and a shirt that shows her navel, and it helps ease the conflict. But her silence whispers nonsense in my ear.

  She doesn’t love you.

  She’s laughing behind your back.

  Why did you ever think she was different from everyone else in your life?

  I consider gouging the anchors from the tent into my feet to keep from kicking the motherfucking door down and rage unt
il she gives me a straight answer about us—about anything. It would be counterproductive because I’d have to fix the door. So, I clean the gutters once the irrigation system is up and running, keeping the anchors in sight just in case.

  People walk, run, stumble by all morning long, unashamed as they stare at the tent and the hooligan perched on a ladder, pulling leaves from the roof. They judge me like everyone else does, unaware of my life-saving abilities. I smoke a cigarette and light another one once it’s gone, puffing and clearing decayed vegetation from the roof. When the sun rises to the top of the sky, I take my shirt off, exposing the neighborhood Ella grew up in to the full force of their arrogance.

  Carol spies on me from her window and makes four trips to the mailbox. Trever rides by with a friend, flipping me the bird. When they come back around twenty minutes later, I soak them with the hose. I laugh, but the man across the street comes out of his front door with his hands jammed in his Dockers, shaking his head.

  I’m about to send a shot of water over to his side of the road when Ella approaches with a cold bottle of water.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she says, passing me the Aquafina.

  “Did you grow up around these people?” I ask. “They’re assholes.”

  “Trever’s a new addition,” she replies jokingly, leaning her forearms on the porch railing. “But most of them have been around since I was a kid. Carol used to be in love with my dad.”

  “She’s in love with me, too.” Cool water touches my lips then fills my mouth, and I wink over the plastic bottle.

  Ella’s softer than she was when she left L.A., wider in the hips and thicker in the thighs. A touch of stomach hangs over the waistband of her shorts, and there’s a roundness in her face that wasn’t there before. She isn’t wearing a bra under her shirt, and her toes are unpainted.

  I’ve never been more attracted to her than I am right now.

  “Carol baked him cookies and made him the most disgusting casseroles. She was shameless.” Ella smiles at the memory. “My mom was so mad, but there was nothing she could do after she left her family.”

  The smile disappears.

  Lowering the plastic bottle from my mouth, I ask, “Have you seen your mother since you’ve been back?”

  Ella stands straight and walks past me. “No, and I don’t want to.”

  She goes back to wandering from one room to another with no real focus, and I walk a mile into town and buy a six-pack of beer and a couple of sandwiches. She doesn’t acknowledge my absence when I return, but she gladly accepts my offering of alcohol and nutrition.

  We sit against the wall in the dining room under the light streaming through the sliding glass door. The mixture of sun and turkey on wheat brings soul to Ella’s features, warming her cheeks and broadcasting the gold in her eyes. There are a million things left unsaid, but it doesn’t bother me, and she isn’t kicking me out. We drink one, two, three beers each, and we’re as full and as happy as two people can be at a time like this.

  “What can I do for you?” I ask, collecting our empties for the trash. The girl weighs one fifty at the most, and while she’s high-minded, I don’t think she’s worked on her muscle mass in our time apart. I can demolish walls and lift heavy things for her since she hasn’t had a man around.

  She better not have.

  Ella stays on the floor while I throw out our garbage. The grin on her lips is laid-back, and the color in her cheeks glows. I stay still and quiet, and for one second, it’s like nothing has changed. Tension disappears with sobriety, and possibility beams like the light covering her body.

  We’re happy, tipsy, and just okay.

  Compassion’s gone as fast as it arrived. I look away first, or she does, and friction slams down between us like a cement wall.

  “I’m going to paint the kitchen cabinets.” She stands to her feet and claps breadcrumbs from her hands. “Do you want to help?”

  “Sure,” I answer. It would be easier to replace them, but that’s another thing that goes left unsaid.

  By the end of the night, our fingers are raw from sandpaper, sawdust covers us, and we haven’t painted anything. But we worked together without spilling blood or tears, and she hasn’t cut my throat with the sharpness in her eyes. Progress.

  “Why didn’t I just order new cabinets?” Ella breaks the silence, dropping her face into the palms of her hands. “This is a disaster.”

  “Nostalgia makes you do crazy things.” I wash my hands at the sink, watching debris flow down the drain so I don’t have to look at her.

  “Because these cabinets played such a huge part in my childhood,” she states sarcastically. Ella leaves footprints on the floors as she crosses the kitchen for the broom. She collects a small pile of dust and gives up. “I shouldn’t have left you the way I did.”

  Sucker punched by her admission, I fall into the corner between countertops and wait for her to say more.

  “You didn’t deserve that, Tell.” She presses her lips together and blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “We didn’t deserve that. But I thought things were going to be different, and then you lied—”

  “It was different,” I say. I keep my tone even so she doesn’t put her guard back up. “We are different, Gabriella. We were engaged. We were living together. It had never been that way.”

  The small shake of her head rocks me to the core. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Mentally, we were the same idiots who terrorized everyone we love because we couldn’t get it together. The only difference is our families stopped refereeing our bullshit.”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose until my eyes water, determined not to lose my temper and prove her right. Outrage shoves restraint out of the way, swamping my veins with sludgy resentment. The muscles in my jaw constrict, and I clench my teeth until they feel like they’ll break. I close my eyes and breathe through my nose, trying but failing to ease the pressure behind my eyes.

  It’s not sadness.

  This is madness.

  “We were grieving,” she says, challenging my self-control. “We did it the only way we know how, and that was together. The chaos we create—people like us thrive on it. We get off on the power to destroy the people we care about. It did feel different for a while, Teller. But it was a lie.”

  “It wasn’t,” I whisper, but her words ring true.

  “You took a bat to my car,” Ella reminds me. “You’re sleeping in a tent on my front lawn.”

  “And what about you?” I snap like brittle bones, immediately dosed as adrenaline taps into my circulatory system. A flash of heat slices through my skin, peeling back what’s left of my self-control. I pick up her mug from this morning and chuck it across the room, painting the wall in cold coffee. “I didn’t force you to fuck me. I didn’t force you to move in. I didn’t force you to wear my ring on your finger.”

  “But you did force me to leave by lying to me,” she shouts. Her eyes dilate, drugged with hostility just like me. “It’s the same story, Tell. We faked it for a while, but the moment I found out you didn’t trust me—trust us—enough to be honest with me about Joe and Kristi, I knew we were headed down the same gutter we stomped through for years. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to turn out like my parents. I don’t want to hate you.”

  And there it is.

  Born into chaos, raised on dysfunction, we are the sins of our fathers.

  “I know,” I say.

  When a family is wealthy like mine or rocked by a tragedy like Ella’s, it’s easy to hide trauma behind money and condolences. People like us play the part everyone wants to see: the prince to an empire and the unlikely success story. We fall through the cracks of assumed togetherness, silently swollen with damage and bitterness.

  She’s the abandoned child, and I don’t fit the mold.

  It’s behavior taught by good intentions. My parents forced me into a box I was too big for because they believed it was best. Ella’s mom was hooked on something she needed more
than family, and her dad died of cancer before he told her it wasn’t her fault.

  When two fuck-ups come together, chances are it’ll end badly.

  Like a bat shattering a windshield.

  My parents are nothing without their money, Maby is depressed and impulsive, and I’m sick and fucking tired of pretending like I didn’t see this coming.

  “I don’t know how to be without you, Ella,” I say.

  “Neither do I,” she admits.

  I wasn’t going to come back.

  It’s been a week since I was in St. Helena last. I left Ella after our conversation that went nowhere fast, determined to give havoc the space she asked for.

  Fuck that.

  Apart from the last month, Ella’s the only person on the face of the planet who’s taken me as I am. I won’t let her stop because she’s temporarily insane. Shit happens. People die. Relationships shift. We ran from our problems across California, but they caught up with us. We can be better than the people who raised us. We can prove them wrong by being different.

  “Smella, I’m home,” I call through the open window.

  She opens the door, letting it slam against the wall. The scent of lavender and coconut stretches from her skin to my lungs, comforting me from the inside out. Ella’s lips are red, her hair is curled, and she’s dressed in clean clothes.

  “Going somewhere?” I hold the bouquet of flowers out for her.

  “Teller, you can’t put the tent up in the front yard,” she says over sage and asters.

  “Can I sleep inside?” I ask, smiling over them, too.

  She rolls her eyes. “No, you can’t.”

  “Then I have no choice…”

  Ella takes the flowers, turns for the kitchen, and looks for a vase. She doesn’t have one, but she does have an empty bucket that gets the job done. “Put it up in the backyard.”

  “Why?” I ask playfully. “How can I scare Trever away if I’m in the back?”