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With a pounding heart and erection, I sought out the last page of the article, tracing a finger down its length until reaching the journalist’s last question.
“So, this question is more of a two-fer. Is there anyone special in your life? Someone who’s snagged your heart?—asking for a friend,”she’d clarified, flirtation leaking off the page currently tearing under my grip.“And why is creating a viable heart so important to you?”
“There’s no one, at the moment. Metaphorically speaking, I lost my heart, and in many ways I’ve been dead without it. I don’t want that to be a literal reality for anyone, if I can help it.”
Jasper
I SHUFFLED UNDERthe spray of water, shutting my eyes and pretending it was rain, remembering when I stood naked and sated at Cole’s balcony doors one night watching the ensuing rainstorm hungrily.
“One day, when the weather changes, when it’s warmer,”he’d said, sneaking in behind me and lacing our fingers together before pressing them against the glass doors.“I’ll fuck you in the rain, angel. I promise.”He’d proceeded to tap my ankle with his foot, asking me to widen my stance, and then taking me again while standing.
“The first day of summer,”I’d said as he moved inside me. For no other reason than it was our favorite season, and the first day of any season had always felt symbolic to me. The act of leaving things behind as we moved on to something new. And nothing beat fucking under summer rain.
Slamming back into my body, leaving the recollection behind, I got to my toes like I had that night, one hand thrown out to the shower wall as I worked my cock with purpose, trying to recreate the feeling I always got with him. I yelled his name freely as I orgasmed. It was something, yet still unsatisfying.
Toweled off, I heedlessly blow dried my hair before dressing in dark jeans and a matching t-shirt, then headed downstairs to make my third cup of coffee for the day.
Sliding onto a stool at the island, I sipped cautiously as I waited for my laptop to start up, trying hard not to revisit the pity party I’d thrown last night. It had been a whole forty-eight hours since my evening on the couch with Sofia by then, and after burning the midnight oil the night prior to get my closing argument nailed down, I was left with free time to think and obsess over my mother’s journal entry.
I’d given in. With Cole’s favorite gin taking over my system, making me warm and soft and easily affected, I’d tackled the last of what I had of her.
“I can’t sleep—and that’s never been a problem for me. I’m ashamed of how things were left between Jasper and me tonight. Of how I handled the news about him and Cole. If I’ve learned anything from this bad heart of mine, it’s that the last interaction is the one that counts, because another isn’t promised. The last thing I said to him is what he’ll remember most.
I’ve worked hard at motherhood. It wasn’t always easy, but it was my most important and most prized job, and I wanted to get it right. Iwantto get it right. And now I’m lying here, unable to help but wonder if the thing I’d done last, the hurtful words I’d said last, will overshadow all the times I’d said and done the right things.
For the last twenty-two years I’ve been on the bench watching the game, waiting to be called onto the field to prove myself, waiting for some moment when I’d need to show them in a real way that when it mattered most, I’d have their backs. And when the time came, I failed them.
They’re my children, and my children are in love with one another. There’s no rule book for this. There’s so many things that can go wrong, and I won’t be here to help fix it. Where will that leave Jasper?
Death is coming for me. I feel it. No matter how much I smile and try to hide my physical pain. I see it in my dreams. I feel it waiting in my chest. But after tonight, death isn’t the thing I’m most afraid of. I’m afraid of not getting the chance to say I’m scared for all of you, but I’m sorry anyway. I am so very sorry.
The flood gates hadn’t only opened, they’d been torn from their hinges and washed away with the stream of pain, anger, betrayal, and the sense of unworthiness I’d spent six years fortifying. And then I’d thought back to the night she died, to the words she’d mouthed to me.
“I’m sorry.”
I’d smothered my scream into my fist as it hit me. She hadn’t been sorry she didn’t save me from Cole. She hadn’t died believing he’d hurt me. She was sorry she hadn’t handled the news better. Sorry she hadn’t been what I needed when it mattered most. And she’d died trying to tell me that.
“I’ll love and support you through anything, Jasper. Or die trying.”
And then a brand-new pain attempted to creep into the space left behind from the flood, from the purging of the lies I’d told myself. I was finally getting what I needed, but she’d died without ever getting what she needed. I never got to tell her it was okay. That I loved her, that I understood her feelings on the subject of me and Cole, and that she and I were more than fine.
She could barely walk by then. The desperation she must have felt to get to me right away… Had she tried to call me first? I wouldn’t have known. I was too overtaken by Cole.
Poisonous thoughts had begun to swell in my head then, stabbing like a hot poker.
It must have taken her forever to get to me.
It must have takeneverythingfor her to get to me.
It was my fault.
In the end, it wasstillall my fault.
The yo-yoing of relief, release, blame, and the intake of fresh pain became dizzying, intoxicating in an unhealthy way.
“Stop it!” I’d shouted at the toxic voice in my head, but it remained vigilant, trying and trying to press against the barrier of affirmations I’d been slowly building up over the last month or so, destroying everything I thought I’d been working on.
I couldn’t do this alone, I’d concluded, then. There were too many years of me beating myself into a bloody pulp to get over this on my own.
