CHAPTER 3
1535 Words
Jacob
I left the jacket on purpose.
I know that now.
I didn’t let myself know it then.
There had been a moment, standing beside the chair by the door with my shirt half-buttoned and the room quiet behind me, when I looked at the jacket and then looked at her.
Leah was asleep, or close enough to it. Her copper hair was loose across the pillow. Her face was turned slightly toward me. One hand was open near her shoulder, soft and unguarded, like she had trusted the room not to hurt her.
Trusted me not to hurt her.
I looked away.
The jacket stayed.
I left.
The hallway was dark and cool. I moved through it quietly, one step and then the next, not letting myself think any farther than the guest room at the end of the hall.
The same guest room I had used in the Lockhart house since I was seventeen.
I closed the door behind me, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared at the wall.
The ring was still in my jacket pocket.
Back in her room.
I pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes.
Lizzie and I had been together for five years.
Five years was not a small thing. It was dinners and holidays and lake weekends and photographs on mantels. It was our mothers smiling across charity tables like the future had already been signed. It was Daniel clapping me on the shoulder and calling me practically family. It was my father asking when I planned to make things official, as if marriage was a board vote everyone had already counted.
It was Lizzie.
Smart. Beautiful. Untouchable when she wanted to be. She understood the world I moved in, the specific demands of old Dallas money and the Fairfax name. She fit. She had always fit.
That was supposed to mean something.
The conversation had lasted twelve minutes.
I had counted, because apparently that was what a man did when his future broke in half.
Twelve minutes to dissolve five years.
She had done it cleanly. Of course she had. Lizzie did everything cleanly.
I had stood there with a ring in my jacket pocket while she told me she was leaving for Los Angeles.
Not someday.
Not eventually.
This weekend.
She told me she loved me, but not enough to stay. She told me she couldn’t build her life around what everyone else expected.
Everyone else.
As if I were part of the furniture. As if I were one more thing arranged for her convenience.
I lay back on the bed without taking off my shoes.
The ceiling was white and still and useless.
Leah had always been there, on some level.
Daniel’s younger sister. Lizzie’s shadow. The girl with copper hair who said interesting things when people gave her enough room to speak, then went quiet when they didn’t.
There had been a car ride once, when she was fifteen and I was twenty-three, coming back from a Lockhart-Fairfax ski trip. Everyone else had been asleep or wearing headphones, and the two of us had talked for almost three hours.
She had told me about a book she loved. About wanting to study social work. About how strange it was to live in a family where everyone knew their place except her.
She had been sharp.
Honest.
Too unguarded.
I had thought about her the whole drive home. I had not let myself know that then either.
I had gone home and told myself the only thing worth telling myself.
Daniel’s sister. Fifteen. She has a crush on you. You are with Lizzie. Stop.
So I stopped.
I was good at stopping.
For three years, through dinners and holidays and the way she sometimes looked at me before she remembered not to, I stopped. I told myself it was because she was too young. Because she was Lizzie’s sister. Because I loved Lizzie. Because there were lines decent men did not cross.
Tonight, I had crossed every one of them.
I stared at the ceiling and tried to make the night smaller.
Alcohol.
Proximity.
A bad evening.
A worse decision.
That was all.
It had to be all.
Because if it wasn’t, then I had a problem I didn’t know how to solve.
What happened in that room had not felt like nothing.
That was the trouble with it. If it had felt cheap, if it had felt like any ordinary mistake made after too much whiskey and humiliation, I could have put it somewhere. Regretted it. Contained it. Moved on.
But Leah had looked at me like I had finally become visible at the same time she had.
Better, she had said.
Right now I’m better.
I heard it again in the dark, her voice quiet and honest, and something in my chest pulled tight.
I had kissed her knuckles.
Christ.
I had kissed her knuckles like a man who meant something by it.
I sat up and dragged a hand over my face.
No.
No, that was not what this was.
Lizzie was the love of my life. Lizzie had rejected me. Lizzie had walked away from the future I had built around her, and I had been drunk and humiliated and angry enough not to know what to do with my hands.
Leah was eighteen.
Leah was Daniel’s little sister.
Leah had looked at me like that for years, and I had ignored it because that was what a decent man did.
I had ignored it.
Until I hadn’t.
The room felt too still around me.
I stood, then sat again, because my balance was not as steady as I wanted it to be. The whiskey was still in my blood, not enough to excuse anything, enough to make every thought come in with teeth.
She had been drinking too.
For the first time, from the sound of it.
I remembered her on the library floor, cheeks flushed, eyes too bright, holding that glass like it was proof she could do one reckless thing and survive it. I remembered the photo album on the table. The empty place where she should have been. I remembered the way my anger had risen when she told me no one had mentioned UT.
I had wanted to fix it.
That was the hook.
The thought came so fast I almost missed it.
I had wanted to fix something, and she had let me.
I went very still.
She was eighteen, and I was twenty-six, and she had wanted me for years.
Everyone knew it.
I knew it.
She had been drinking. I had been drunk and wrecked and humiliated, standing there with Lizzie’s no still ringing in my ears.
And Leah had been waiting.
The thought arrived clean and sharp, and once it did, everything else started arranging itself around it.
She had waited until I was weak.
She had known exactly where to press.
She had looked at me with those wide, wounded eyes and let me feel like I was saving her from something.
I stood so fast the room shifted.
No.
No, that was not happening.
I was not going to be made a fool of twice in one night.
The two hours on the library floor had not felt like a trap.
That was what made it worse.
Traps did not feel like traps when you were already bleeding.
I paced once across the room, then back again.
My jacket was still in her room.
My ring was still in the pocket.
She would wake up and see it. She would sit there in that bed with the sheets pulled around her and my jacket over the chair, and she would think it meant something.
Maybe she already did.
Something mean and terrified moved through me.
Of course she would think that. Of course she would take the one thing I had left behind and turn it into a promise.
I could see it so clearly that it made me angry before it had even happened.
Leah with those eyes.
Leah with that soft, bruised hope.
Leah looking at me like I had chosen her.
I had not chosen her.
I had made a mistake.
I had failed to stop.
There was a difference.
There had to be a difference.
By the time the light changed outside the window, I knew what I had to do.
I got up.
I went down the hall.
The house was no longer dark enough to be forgiving. Morning had started to thin the shadows, turning the marble pale and the framed family photographs flat and cold along the walls.
At her door, I stopped.
For one second, with my hand on the knob, I remembered her mouth against mine. Her breath catching. Her hand in my hair. The way she had said my name like she had never expected to be allowed to say it that way.
I shut that down too.
Then I opened the door.
Leah was sitting up in the bed, wrapped in the sheet, looking at my jacket like it had promised her something.
And all I could think was, of course she was.
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