Twisted Vows

CHAPTER4

Leah

I heard the door open.

I was already sitting up, the sheet pulled tight beneath my arms, staring at the jacket he had left over the chair as if it could tell me what kind of morning this was going to be.

For one stupid second, hope lifted.

Then I looked at Jacob.

He stood in the doorway with his shirt buttoned, his hair still a little messy, and his face cold in a way I had never seen before.

Or maybe I had.

Maybe I just hadn’t wanted to believe it could ever be aimed at me.

He crossed the room without saying good morning, took the jacket from the chair, and pulled it on.

Just like that, the hope was gone.

Morning light came thin and gray through the curtains. Somewhere downstairs, the house was waking up like nothing had happened. Someone moved around in the kitchen. A door closed. The Lockhart house kept going.

Of course it did.

Jacob stood at the foot of the bed with his hands clenched at his sides, fully dressed now, like he had been getting ready to leave long before he came back for the jacket.

He had already decided what happened.

I could see it on his face.

Something flickered in his eyes.

Regret.

There and gone.

Then he swallowed it.

What replaced it was worse.

“You knew,” Jacob said.

His voice was low. Rough. Too controlled.

“I never would’ve done this sober.”

The words landed harder than a shout.

What hurt most wasn’t his anger.

It was how easily everyone would believe him.

I knew how blame worked in my family. It always found me first. It didn’t matter what really happened. By the time people were finished telling the story, I was always standing in the wrong place, saying the wrong thing, wanting too much.

He was doing it now.

And he was good at it.

The people downstairs loved him.

They did not love me.

They would hear him and nod.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” Jacob said. “And you knew that.”

“Jacob.”

“What did you think?” he snapped.

The control cracked at the edges.

“That if I was drunk enough, I’d forget who I was supposed to want? That I’d wake up and choose you?”

“I was drinking too,” I said.

My voice came out quieter than I wanted.

“I didn’t get you drunk.”

He heard me.

I know he did.

He just didn’t want it to matter.

“That because Lizzie said no, I’d settle?” he said.

Settle.

He said it like the word belonged to me.

Like I was something less before he ever looked at me.

I thought about the library.

The two hours on the floor.

The way he had moved from the chair to sit beside me without making a show of it.

The way he had asked what I wanted and waited for the answer.

I hadn’t imagined that.

I was not imagining this either.

He looked at me then.

Really looked at me.

The contempt in his eyes made my stomach drop.

“You’ve always wanted what she has,” Jacob said. “Trailing after her. Watching.”

His jaw flexed.

“Last night, you saw your chance.”

None of it was true.

That was what made it hurt.

He was using real pieces. Just not the whole truth.

I had wanted him. That was real.

I had watched him for years and kept it locked down because he was not mine to want. That was real too.

But last night, he had come to me.

He had sat on the floor beside me.

He had asked about my life.

His version took the first part and erased everything else.

Without everything else, it sounded almost true.

I couldn’t get the words out.

“You think I’d choose you,” he said, quieter now, which somehow made it colder, “if I were in my right mind?”

Something dropped out of my chest.

I don’t have a better way to describe it.

Something just went.

Some small, stubborn thing I hadn’t known I was holding on to. The last piece of last night, maybe. The warmth of his arm across my waist. His mouth against my temple. The feeling of being the person someone had turned toward in the dark.

All of it gone in the time it took him to say if I were in my right mind.

Like he could just decide it hadn’t meant anything.

“This was a mistake,” Jacob said. “A huge one.”

He turned away.

His gaze flicked to the bed.

Then he stopped.

I followed his eyes.

Dread moved through me before I understood why.

The stain on the sheets was impossible to miss.

Jacob went very still.

For a second, he didn’t look angry.

He looked like someone had taken the floor out from under him and he was trying not to show it.

He knew.

He had known last night too. I had told him. He had stopped and looked at me and said then we go slow, and he had.

He had been careful.

He had asked if I was okay.

He had waited for me to answer.

Nothing in that room had felt like what he was saying now.

The proof was on the sheets, and he was looking at it, and he knew.

“You were a virgin,” Jacob said.

It wasn’t a question.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

I didn’t move.

I didn’t look away.

I hadn’t planned to give that part of myself away like this. Not in a room that wasn’t mine. Not on a night that would become something ugly by morning. Not to someone who would look at the evidence of it and make it about himself.

But there it was.

And Jacob Fairfax was staring at it like it was something that had happened to him.

A short, disbelieving sound left him.

Not quite a laugh.

Worse.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered.

He said it to the floor, not to me.

His story didn’t fit anymore.

Not enough to stop him.

Somehow, it only made him angrier.

He knew.

He just chose not to care.

He turned toward the door.

“Jacob.”

My voice came out clear.

Steadier than I felt.

He stopped.

He did not turn around.

“You came to me,” I said. “You know that. Whatever you tell yourself later, you know that.”

Silence.

His shoulders moved a little.

Almost nothing.

I have thought about it since, and I still don’t know what it meant.

Maybe it was the last piece of the man from the library.

Maybe it was just what a person did when he heard the truth and refused to let it in.

Then he walked out.

The door closed behind him with a sound that was almost quiet.

That was the worst part.

I had expected a slam. Something final. Something loud enough to match what had just happened.

Instead, it was just a door closing.

Like nothing had ended.

I sat there for a long moment.

Then I moved, because sitting still felt like drowning.

I gathered my clothes from the floor with hands that shook but did not stop. I pulled the dress on because I could not walk through the hallway wrapped in a sheet, and I slipped out before I could think too hard about what I looked like.

The bathroom was empty.

I ran the shower as hot as it would go and stood under it until my skin stung.

My arms wrapped around myself.

Steam filled the room, but it did nothing for the place inside me that hurt.

I had read somewhere that this was what people did after something bad happened.

Showers.

Hot water.

Scrubbing.

As if heat could reach the part of you that felt wrong.

It couldn’t.

I stayed until the water started to cool. Then I turned it off and stood in the silence with a towel around me, staring at my own face in the fogged mirror.

I barely recognized her.

She looked younger than I felt.

I dried off and put the same dress back on.

It felt different now.

Not ruined exactly.

Just no longer mine.

I didn’t know what I had expected.

Not this.

Not how careful he had been about hurting me.

Like he had picked the sharpest pieces and left the rest.

I knew that kind of cruelty.

My mother did it all the time. She took something real, turned it sideways, and used it like proof. I had spent my whole life knowing when it happened and never knowing how to stop it.

I just hadn’t expected it from him.

That was the part I couldn’t make sense of.

Not that he was cruel.

I knew cruelty.

I knew how to take it and keep my face still.

But he had been the one person in that house who had not treated me like an extra place setting. He had asked about my life. He had sat on the floor with me. He had said I deserved more and sounded like he meant it.

Then he woke up and decided none of that counted.

I dressed.

I moved through it like my body belonged to someone else.

The kitchen was empty but recently used.

Coffee smell.

A mug on the counter.

Someone else’s normal morning.

I poured water and tried to drink it.

Mostly, I failed.

Then I heard his voice.

Not words. I couldn’t make out words. Just the tone of it somewhere down the hall, calm and even and already composed.

Jacob talking to someone as if last night had been handled and put away.

He sounded warm.

Controlled.

At ease in a house that had never made room for me.

The sound landed somewhere specific and stayed there.

Then Lizzie laughed.

Bright and easy and entirely herself.

My vision went white at the edges.

I set the glass down on the counter very carefully.

I did not want to break anything.

I did not want to make any sound that would bring either of them into the room with me.

I walked back to my room.

Not fast.

Not running.

Just careful and quiet, like I was carrying something I could not afford to drop.

In my room, I closed the door.

On the desk, still sealed in its envelope, was the letter from UT Austin.

Dear Ms. Lockhart, we are pleased to welcome you.

I had read it so many times the crease was soft at the fold. I had looked at it last night, before the party, before the library, before everything, and felt something that might have been hope.

Two weeks.

I had been two weeks away from a city where no one knew my name. Two weeks away from being more than the girl people forgot to include. Two weeks away from the version of myself I had been building in secret, carefully and alone, in the spaces between everyone else’s lives.

I thought about what I would have to do now.

Go downstairs.

Face whatever story was already forming.

Keep my face still while everyone looked at me and decided what kind of girl I was.

Carry the whole night inside me.

His words.

His hands.

The way he had kissed my knuckles.

The fact that I had hoped.

Somehow the hoping made it worse.

I was good at keeping things off my face.

I had been practicing since I was seven years old, standing in a kitchen doorway, watching laughter stop.

I looked at the letter.

I put it in my bag.

Then I slid down the back of the door until I was sitting on the floor, my knees to my chest.

I tried to think practically.

That was what I did when things got too big.

I found the smallest piece and held on.

I had my bag.

I had the letter.

I had Olivia’s number in my phone and her grandmother, Maggie, who made tea for people in trouble and never asked stupid questions before the kettle boiled.

I had a deferral process and a scholarship that might survive one difficult summer.

I had a degree I had wanted since I was fifteen, sitting in the back of a car and hearing myself be heard for the first time.

I had things.

I had a plan.

Even if the plan had a hole in it now.

Thinking practically helped for maybe three minutes.

Then the floor beneath me was still cold, and Jacob’s voice was still stuck somewhere in my chest, and the practical thinking ran out.

I thought about his hands.

How careful they had been.

I thought about the way he had asked if I was okay and waited for the answer. I thought about his arm across my waist afterward, the warmth of him, the feeling of having been, for one night, the right person in the right place.

Then I thought about this morning.

Last night had been real.

So had this morning.

That was the awful part.

The man who had been careful with me and the man who had stood at the foot of the bed and called me a w***e without using the word were the same man.

I did not know what to do with that.

That was when the shaking started.

I stayed there.

Eventually, it stopped.

My breathing evened out.

What was left behind felt worse than the shaking.

Hollow.

Quiet.

Like something had been moved out of me and I could still feel the place where it used to be.

I was not going to cry.

Not here.

Not in this house.

Not where any of them might hear it and feel right.

I would figure out the rest when I was somewhere else.

Somewhere deep inside, something settled.

Not comfort.

Not peace.

Just the hard little knowledge that some things could not be undone.

Only survived.

Silence, I learned, was safer.