AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Behaved.
Caved.
My strength sapped away and my legs refused to hold me. I dropped to my knees, letting the weeds and dirt cradle me. The last of the dam of ice that had been keeping me from falling apart broke. What was the point in surrendering my voice, my decisions, if no one else was willing to compromise? “What’s wrong with me?”
Nigel knelt across from me. “Nothing is wrong with you. What happened isn’t your fault.” His voice was still low. Sympathetic. Exactly what I needed but also what I didn’t want.
“But it is.” Not in the way I’d convinced myself, as I watched my engagement fall apart over the last several months. As I refused to admit what was happening.
I’d told myself as long as I played along, was the perfect girlfriend, the perfect wife-to-be, that things would get better. Instead, I’d denialed myself into another scenario where my fiancé cheated on me.
It was my fault, because I didn’t know how to be me. How to be enough. How to make someone love me. I wanted to explain this all to Nigel, but I’d spent so long not saying out loud when I was bothered that if I opened my mouth, nothing would come out but gibberish, and then I’d break more.
“Come here.” Nigel moved to sit next to me and wrapped an arm around me.
I leaned into his shoulder, wanting to lose myself in the closeness and never emerge. We sat in silence long enough that the sun moved away from the roof, casting us in shadows and leaving me cold.
“Do you want to scream?” Nigel asked.
“No. I don’t want to scream.” I wanted to scream for all I was worth, but even now I couldn’t let myself give up that last piece of self-control.
“You sure? It’ll help.”
I shook my head. “I’m good. We should probably get out of here.”
“All right.” Nigel unfolded himself from his spot on the ground, looking as lanky and graceful and sexy as ever. He offered me a hand up and tugged me to my feet.
We walked back to his bike in silence, and I fluctuated between grief, shame, and rage. I didn’t know where any of it was directed, except myself. Nigel stashed his camera in its bag and grabbed his phone.
I wanted to ask who he was calling, but I couldn’t find my voice. I was such an idiot. A compliant, gullible—what had Easton called me? Childish? A compliant, gullible, childish idiot.
“Hey.” Nigel’s voice hovered at the edge of my thoughts rather than penetrating them. He wasn’t talking to me. “Yeah, she’s here… About like you’d expect? I need a favor… Bring her some shoes, purse, stuff like that… Uh…” He pulled the phone from his mouth and looked at me. “Do you think you can eat?”
Never again. I was going to waste away into nothing. That sounded melodramatic, but I was allowed to be today. “I coulddrinka whole hell of a lot.”
Nigel put the phone back to his ear. “There’s that place in Woods Cross. The one where we did that thing that one time with the DM guys?… That’s the one. Can you meet us there?”
DM was Digital Media, a massive video game company. Their employees tended to see themselves as rivals to anyone local in the industry who they didn’t work with, and Nigel and Jeremy had made more than one bet in the past with their counterparts at DM. Nigel had probably called Jeremy, which made sense, seeing how they were best friends and all.
As Nigel hung up, I realized I’d missed the end of the conversation.
“There’s a bar, good food, decent drinks, where we shouldn’t run into anyone,” he said to me. “Jeremy’s going to meet us there with your stuff as soon as he can, but it may be a little while. In the meantime, let’s go eat.”
“Okay.” I shouldn’t be okay with someone else making my decisions for me, but that was what I’d done all my life, wasn’t it? I did what I thought other people wanted, because that was how I got love. Carly was the smart, aggressive oldest child. The one who had a brilliant career and got paid to see the world now. Jeremy was the creative fucking genius who worked for top notch video game companies.
And as long as I was well-behaved, and good, and polite, I could be sweet little Megan who never caused any problems.
Wrapping myself around Nigel felt as natural as anything, despite the awkward gnawing over the fact that I’d just broken up with someone else. Dumped? Been dumped? It didn’t matter, because it was easy to press into Nigel’s back, inhale his scent, and feel the shift of his body against mine as he navigated roads with practiced ease.
A short while later, we pulled into the parking lot of a small building pronouncing they’d been serving their famous garlic burgers for “50” years. I didn’t know why the number was in quotes, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to, but the suggestion of food made my stomach growl.
We headed into the nearly deserted dining room—thank God for that—and were seated at a table near the bar.
“You look like you’ve had an interesting morning.” Our waiter wore a faded concert T-shirt and jeans, and was still more neatly dressed than me.
“You don’t know the half of it.” I could crawl into a hole and hide because of my appearance, or I could sit up straight and own the fact that I was wearing a butchered wedding dress. The latter didn’t come naturally, but I was determined to fake it.
“Let’s leave it at that,” Nigel said. “Bring us a couple of those garlic burgers and…” He looked at me.
