Page 44 of Love At Peace

She nodded, still not making eye contact as she moved her hands to her back pockets. “Yeah, I do.” Then she switched her hands back to the front pocket, fidgeting. “Or I feel like I need to.”

“No. No, no, no.” I shook my head, staying right where I was instead of walking up to her and hugging her. I was itching to hold her, to steady and comfort her with this obvious show of nervousness, but I wouldn’t. She’d told me too damn loudly and sternly that she was done with me that I now had to tread cautiously. “None of that. Do you want to talk to me?”

She lifted her face to frown at me.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re forced to talk to me. I want you to want to talk to me.” To open up willingly.

She nodded. “Yeah. But maybe not...here.” Leaning to the side, she emphasized the return of the realtor, who walked in through the back door, phone still to his ear as he waved at us indifferently.

“Yeah. We can go outside.”

“Maybe somewhere less exposed than that,” she said, turning toward the front door.

“The bar? The diner? Café?” If she wanted to go somewhere more public, that was fine by me.

“How about my cabin? I’d prefer to have this conversation somewhere private.”

Because you’d feel safer there? I hated that she had ever gotten to this point of fear. “Whatever you want, Heather.”

At the door, she paused and glanced in the direction of the realtor. “Do you need to tell him that you’re leaving?”

I huffed. “Nah. Besides, I think I saw enough for this first look.”

“First look?” she asked as we exited.

“Yeah.”

“You want a second look?” She went down the porch’s steps, tucking her coat around her tighter against the wind.

“Heather, don’t play games. You didn’t come find me to talk about houses, did you?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t. But I’d prefer that topic of the one I need to address with you any day.”

I let her words roll over in my mind as we got into our cars. She drove ahead of me, and the fifteen minutes it took to reach her cabin felt like they were four times as long. While I didn’t want to come across as too eager to finally hear her “clear the air” with me, I hated the sliver of hurt that I wanted her to soothe. It stung when she dismissed me. It pained my heart to hear her make it sound like she hadn’t valued any of the time we’d spent together.

But I didn’t need to lick my wounds. I could roll with the punches. This conversation wouldn’t be about me. And the second we were both in her cabin and seated facing each other at the high-top table, I fought back the memories of what else we’d done here.

“I left Chicago to get away from David. Hold on. I need to back up. I left Burton to go to Chicago for a job. I was excited to strike out on my own and start a new job at a marketing firm.”

I nodded, trying not to move too rashly or make too much noise as I took my coat off. She had the heat on higher than I did at the smaller cabin. As if my motions prompted her, she took her coat off too, perhaps suffering from tunnel vision with this need to talk to me that she didn’t stop to remove it when she walked in.

“I was excited to leave town because everyone judged me. My parents were mooches. Lowlife people who never should’ve been parents. They expected everything handed to them, counted on using any loophole possible out of any situation that didn’t favor them, and complained when others ‘wronged’ them. They took every opportunity to take charity, to demand retribution, and to skate through life without ever doing anything for themselves. That reputation rolled onto me, by association, and it was the start of why I wanted to be independent. To move away and have an identity from of them. And also why I never wanted to ask for help or consider taking help.”

I nodded. This was making sense, but it had to be only the tip of the iceberg.

“When I got to Chicago, I did a little sightseeing and such in my neighborhood before I would’ve started my job. That’s when David noticed me. He saw me at a restaurant near my building, and I think he probably overheard me talking to the waitress. Because the night before I was supposed to start my job, a ‘homeless’ man approached me, asking me for money. I had mixed feelings about people soliciting for money because my parents used to. They were too lazy to get a job, fully able to get jobs, but they didn’t want to. I was nervous and tried to get around the homeless man because I was scared. He was big and tall and looked drugged up. When he chased me, I thought that was it. I thought I was going to die and be raped. Before he could do much more than shove me against the wall, there was David. He came in, telling him to leave me alone. A knight in shining armor. My hero.”

She shook her head and glared at the table.

“He got the guy to go away and then insisted on seeing me home. Then he wanted to help me get checked out. And then he wanted to make sure that I felt safe. We were strangers, but with his act of being my hero on the streets, we became friends and then dated, and then...I was trapped before I knew it.”

“How?” So far, nothing sounded crazy. With the little she’d shared, David would’ve been a good guy.

“He staged it. He saw me, he wanted me, and he set it all up. The ‘homeless’ man was a friend of his, one I met a year later and he tried to gaslight me into thinking I was crazy and confused. He wanted to have a way into my life, and he did. Any time I wanted to set a boundary, he’d remind me of how I owed him. Because he ‘saved’ me when I arrived in town, I had to stay his girlfriend. Because he was such a great boyfriend, I had to live with him and not have my own place. Because he was the sole provider after he orchestrated me to be fired, I had to eat healthy and not get fat.

“He planned to control me—every aspect of my life—until I was trapped. The marketing job I was supposed to start? He contacted the owners and persuaded them that I was no longer interested. When he got me an administrative job at the legal firm he worked at? He manipulated every relationship I had with everyone there. Because I ‘owed’ him for when he ‘saved’ me from a false danger he set up, I was stuck. At first, he seemed too good to be true. He was doting and charming. Persuasive and generous. But every time he ‘gave’ me something, it was an obligation or expectation to pay him back, to stay, to do as he bade.”

“Fuck, Heather.” I ran my hand through my hair. This was terrible. I hated that this had happened to her.