Damage Me (Crystal Gulf Book 2) (2 page)

“I’ll be back to check on you at lunch. Anything else I can do for you?” she asked, pretending I hadn’t just screamed at her.

When I didn’t answer, she left me alone.

I wanted to get up and run away. I was losing my mind being stuck here. Months of this, sitting, staring, sitting and staring, had started to chip away at my sanity. When I slept, I was back in Afghanistan. There was sand, fear, and gunfire. The blood pooled around me. The screams were in my brain. I’d made it out when no one else had. When I was awake, there was my present, this dark, miserable frame of time without my ex, Harley, without my daughter, Aubrey. It was just me in this bed by myself rotting away.

I wanted out.

Thinking about Harley made my chest burn. My ex-girlfriend, the only woman I’ve ever loved. Within my darkness, the depression embraced the truth that on some level the reasons she was gone were my fault. I lied to her, to everyone, so she ran into the arms of my best friend Bach. How could I have been so stupid leaving them together when I went to war? I asked Bach to watch out for my girl because I trusted the dislike they had for each other would remain. But it hadn’t remained. And now they were in love. The fire in my chest blistered, burning so hot I clutched at it to stop the flames.

So I lied. I was a liar. I lied to myself, to everyone around me, and I doubted that would change any time soon. It was in my blood, in my DNA. I’d been born this way. I never told Harley I was a father or that I was in the army because I knew she’d want nothing to do with me. When I met her, I wanted to be the man she deserved, which meant I had to lie my ass off to keep her, because I was far from that man. But so was Bach. Bach and I came from the same neighborhood, had the same bruises; we’d escaped into the same women—we were the same people. I didn’t understand how she fell for him when falling for me was the lie.

Bach Bachmen stole the only woman I’ve ever loved, the only woman who’s ever loved me.

I would never forgive him for that.

The things we’d been through were erased. The struggles we endured together as children were forgotten.

I would never forgive Harley for that.

She took my heart and my best friend. I hadn’t lied to be a shithead. I kept Aubrey a secret because timing was everything. I hadn’t told her about the army because her father’s end had come because of the same thing. My lies became too big. I’d tried to pick times to reveal the truth, but I panicked, because the longer I sat on my lie, the larger it became. Those lies had blown up in my face, leaving me with the aftermath.

I was immersed in the wreckage of my deceit.

The mother of my child refused to bring Aubrey to see me. We were on shaky grounds. Okay, so I lied to her too. She’d known I was in the army, but she’d also thought Harley knew about my kid. I’d kept Aubrey a secret and Whitney wouldn’t let it go. After a particularly dark argument, Whitney took Aubrey with her and would not, under any circumstances, allow me to have contact with her until I
figured out who I was
.

Whoever that was.

The one person I hadn’t lied to was Aubrey. She was the only good thing my existence created. Just thinking of her chased the pain in my chest away. I envisioned her adorably chubby cheeks and her dark blue eyes, my eyes, and her messy brown hair, my hair. She looked just like me. I hadn’t even asked Whitney for a paternity test when she gave birth. The first time I laid eyes on my daughter, I knew she was mine.

The ground beneath my feet had gotten less unsteady. I had this purpose, where before I had nothing. A reason to do the right thing, instead of an excuse to run into the bad thing.

But even Aubrey wasn’t enough to erase the shit storm my life had become. I grabbed the control for my bed and eased it back until I was lying down. I was crammed into the corner but didn’t want to risk moving to make myself feel comfortable. I’d lie here, uncomfortable to feel comfortable. It was oddly fitting for my life. I wanted a beer, or a woman, something to make me feel alive, anything to make me forget.

Before I met Harley, this was who I was. A man who used whatever he wanted to use to forget the darkness of his past. A man who hurt to hide his hurt. And a man who lied to hide the truth. When I came home and woke up from surgery, Bach kept me in the dark for some time before he told me the truth. He’d taken my girl when he promised to watch out for her. Ever since that day, I’d let the lies go and slid back into my old skin.

This was Dylan Meyer.

Like him or not.

A man who had fallen too many times to bother trying to get up again. I’d lie there, on the floor, with gravel in my wounds and my eyes staring up at the midnight sky until I found this uncomfortable position comfortable again.

***

Hillary

My eyes burned.

I blinked at my computer screen and sat back, running a hand down my face.

It was almost midnight.
Just one thousand more words
. This paper would’ve already been written if I enjoyed the subject. If it had been on the pros and cons of choosing either Edward or Jacob, it would be an easy A. Instead it was on a subject I detested: animal insides. I swallowed hard and continued to describe the digestive tract of the rare and mysterious bovine. Words like
small intestine
and
rumen
were making me ill. I barely kept it down when I explained what cud was and its journey through the remaining three stomachs.

Not for the first time, a sense of displeasure moved over me as I typed, forcing out words that meant nothing for a degree that might mean the same.

I typed the last word feeling hollow, saved my paper, and then emailed it to my professor, washing my hands of it but knowing I was far from done. A couple more years of this and I feared who I’d become. An empty woman who scribbled prescriptions for flea meds and had no idea how to get out of it.

Before bed I decided to pull up my Facebook, scrolling through my notifications for anything from Piper. We’d been talking before I left our group chat to finish my homework. Unlike my best friend, I detested the degree I was working toward, and though I always got my work done, I barely stomached every word I wrote. She loved movies. Watched them, filmed them, lived in them—involving herself in that world made perfect sense to me. Animals made my skin crawl. House pets, wild animals, and rodents—if it was on all fours and could eat me I wanted nothing to do with it.

Memories of my one and only dog, Jud, a skinny little mutt with sharp teeth and a sharper bite, reminded me that my resolve was appreciated. I still had a scar on my calf, and it itched whenever I thought of him chasing me around the apartment.

The only reason I picked this career choice was because this is what my mother always wanted me to do. She grew up on a farm in North Texas and never forgot the hay in her hair and the horses whinnying in the summer. To her, it was a simpler, safer time. It was a pretty picture she painted, I had to admit, but it wasn’t a picture I’d taken. Like always my mother took my picture, she framed it and showed everyone how perfect I was.

“Not a red eye on her.”

“And look at that smile, it’s so pearly white.”

“Isn’t she about as perfect as perfect can be?”

I chastised myself when I felt my thoughts become ridiculing. My mother did everything for me. She sacrificed her life for me to have one. She bartended twelve-hour shifts at Gulfs most nights of the week, a bar she worked at my entire life. If being a veterinarian pleased her and made her feel better, then that’s what I would do. Even if sometimes when I thought about my future I felt nothing at all but an overwhelming sense of disappointment. I spent so much time being the Hillary my mother wanted me to be, that even if I could somehow be something other than who I was, I wouldn’t know who to be.

A sense of panic came over me. I felt empty, a vessel to be filled with whatever anyone pleased. A version of me I had not created.

Perhaps it was better my mom picked this for me. It wasn’t like I had a clue.

Guilt began to fill the free spaces in my brain. I sighed and was just about to sign off when I noticed something on my newsfeed. Harley Evans, my brother’s girlfriend, had just posted an adorable picture of herself with a toddler.

Uncle Bach bought ice cream,
read the caption beneath the picture.

I recognized the toddler as Aubrey. I’d met her when I’d had dinner at Bach’s beach house. She was covered in what looked like vanilla ice cream. It was all over her face and hands. Harley’s lips were stretched wide with an indulgent smile. Along with the guilt, sadness began to infiltrate my thoughts as well. I missed Bach. I knew it was silly of me. I’d gone my whole life without knowing my half-brother existed, but once I met him it was hard to simply forget him.

My mother forbade me from seeing Bach.

For my entire life, it had only been my mother and me. I knew I had a father, but Mom insisted he was someone I didn’t want to know and left it at that. She refused to go into detail, never told me one thing to calm the desire I had for him in my heart. It was one reason I was eager to please her. Raising a child on your own was difficult, but raising a child in Crystal Gulf, paying for cheer and volleyball in high school, for clothes, rent and food, and now paying for my college tuition, all on her own from a bartender’s salary was brutal. She busted her butt to give me what I needed, and there was no way I would deter from the path she saw me on.

However, I’d be lying if thoughts of my father didn’t plague me.

It’s been eighteen years. I should have found a way to exist without him. But the truth was I hadn’t.

All my life I’d wondered about him. Who was he? What was he like? Did he know about me? Did he think about me at all? I knew one thing about my father, and that was the fact that he was in prison. I hadn’t always believed it until Bach confirmed it. I accepted I would never know my father. I despised it, but it was the truth regardless of how I felt about it. Deep down inside I wanted to know the other half of me. I was thankful for the parent I had in my life, but I was also missing a part of me. How could I be exactly who I was without knowing who the other half of me had been?

When I met Bach, I thought I finally had a chance at knowing my father, knowing myself. That didn’t pan out for a number of reasons. The main one was my mother refused to allow me near him. She and Bach had an odd relationship. She wasn’t nice to him so much as she didn’t bark his head off the way she did everyone else. And Bach included her in things he hadn’t. I never even knew he existed and then one day a few months ago he showed up at our apartment, and things got weird, to say the least.

For one second my cheeks blazed.

The truth of how I really met Bach for the first time was something I liked to pretend was a lie. I kept it to myself. Piper had drug me to a frat party, and I’d been bored and uncomfortable. I didn’t party, drink, or partake in any kind of activities that were going down around me, so I’d been a wallflower. Staring at the chaos around me and wanting out of there. I was just about to find Piper and demand we leave when I saw him. Tall, handsome, and staring at me. He had a weird expression on his face. At the time, I thought it was attraction, but now I knew it was my eyes. Bach and I had the same eyes, a trait I learned was courtesy of our father. They were pale green, the color of jade, and identical.

I shook my head at myself for thinking he liked me. I hadn’t known he was my brother, mistaking his interest in me for actual interest. I’d been shocked that a guy that good-looking could be into a girl like me. He was so attentive. We’d talked for hours. I should’ve known something was off when he kept asking about my childhood. He’d been intoxicated though, and then a girl walked over and flirted, stealing him from me. My body heat flared presently, recalling how unhappy that had made me. When I saw Bach again that night, he was smashed. He was so drunk he couldn’t walk. I drove him home, and I didn’t see him again … until he showed up at my doorstep a couple weeks later.

Bach hadn’t been here to see me. He came over to talk to my mom. That’s when I found out the guy I’d been crushing on for weeks, the gorgeous man I thought liked me, was my half-brother. My stomach had fallen out of me, and I spent weeks afterward beating myself up for being so stupid. Even now I felt a twinge of nausea. It was shameful, gross, to have wanted my brother. I’d been so mad at my mother for keeping him from me, for inevitably putting me in that position. I hadn’t told her, of course not—she’d dismantle us both.

Thankfully I’d gotten past the attraction. He was just my brother. My older brother who I finally knew but couldn’t have because every time I mentioned his name Mom lost her ever-loving mind.

I glared at my computer screen and then clicked on Harley’s page, searching through her contacts for Bach’s name. I scrolled through her friends, but he didn’t appear to have a page. Of course he didn’t. He didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who concerned himself with social media. I settled for the pictures Harley had posted of them together. On the beach, her golden brown hair in the wind as Bach grinned happily at the camera. The happiness in his pale green eyes made my heart twinge.

I missed him. His overpowering height and tallness, the way he looked at me like I was someone worth knowing.

I missed my father.

And I had this new brother who might help me I couldn’t even have. I’d snuck out and saw him a few times, but Bach agreed with Mom and didn’t want to step on her toes. I didn’t get it. Bach wasn’t a bad guy. He was funny, protective, and when I was around him, it was like being around a part of my father. I wanted to know him.

My cell suddenly rang, startling me. I picked it up and saw that Mom was calling. “Hey,” I answered, taking a deep breath. “You scared me.”

“Sorry. I figured you’d still be up doing homework. I wanted to call and check on you.”