With His Protection (For His Pleasure, Book 15) (6 page)

“So was that the end of it?” she asked him, genuinely curious.

“No, it wasn’t,” Bryson said. “We continued seeing each other. Of course, I wasn’t willing to be publicly associated with her. Sure, we talked a little bit at school, but I essentially hid my involvement with her from everyone. We were in a secret relationship for months. And because my feelings for her were growing, I was experiencing emotions that I hadn’t even realized were possible. The thing was, I couldn’t handle those feelings—they were at odds with everything I’d been planning to do with my life. I could never square my relationship with Carrie and my neatly ordered future that included an ivy league education, and law school, and prim and proper parties with my debutante girl friend that would make my parents proud.”

Scarlett was growing depressed as she sensed where this was headed. “When did you break it off?” she asked.

Bryson sighed deeply. It sounded like the sigh of an old man, recounting regrets from a long distant past. “I sensed that Carrie was depressed, that she was dealing with the kind of trouble at home that was out of my realm of understanding. She hinted at something dark—maybe it was abuse, sexual abuse, I don’t know. I do know that one night, she was drunk and maybe had taken pills or something. She was erratic, moody, and upset. We’d met late at night after one of my football games and she started demanding that I bring her to meet my family the next day—that I essentially come clean about my involvement with her. Carrie was tired of feeling like I was ashamed of her, and I knew she was right to feel that way. But I wasn’t willing to put my neck on the line for her—I was scared. And what made it worse was that she was so troubled. I wasn’t sure that she could handle the scrutiny any more than I could.”

“Do you still wonder if she could have handled it?” Scarlett said.

He looked at Scarlett, surprised by the question. “Oh, she absolutely could have handled it. I was the coward.”

“You’re not a coward, Bryson.”

He waved her off, needing to continue his confession, it seemed. “That night, I had plenty of opportunities. I could have asked Carrie about what was really going on at home. I could have asked her if she was doing drugs. I could have told her I loved her and that I was willing to put my ass on the line for her. But I did none of those things.

Instead, I picked a fight with her at one of her lowest moments. We argued and then I told her I didn’t think we should see each other anymore. Carrie was devastated. Here, she’d been asking for me to prove that my feelings were real, and instead I’d rejected her yet again. Eventually, I dropped her off at her house and went my merry way, relieved to have dodged another bullet. Only this time, I couldn’t escape so cleanly. I found myself unable to sleep that night, tossing and turning as I thought about her. But I told myself that it needed to be done. She wasn’t right for me, I couldn’t fit her into my real life.”

“I sounds like you had a lot of pressure to be perfect,” Scarlett said.

“Maybe, or maybe I was just more attuned to whatever pressure there was,” he replied. “Whatever the case, we were back to pretending we’d never known each other.

At least, we did that for about a week. One night, she called me and asked if I would see her again, that she needed to talk to me. But I was afraid,” Bryson said. “I was afraid because I knew that my feelings for her were strong and she might convince me to get back together, and I’d be forced to face my demons. It wasn’t just the fact that people would judge our relationship. It was the fact that deep down I knew I didn’t want to be a lawyer like everyone else in my family, and that I didn’t care that much about football or getting good grades. I already knew that I loved movies, and I dreamed of writing screenplays. But in my world, that stuff didn’t exist. Women like Carrie didn’t exist either, and to bring her into my world would be an act of war.”

“That sounds kind of dramatic. Do you really think it would have been received that badly?”

“Yes,” he said. “I know it would have been. Because when I finally did follow my own path, everyone reacted just as I thought they would.”

“So the night that she called you,” Scarlett said. “You didn’t talk to her, did you?”

Bryson shook his head, and now he really did look positively sick to his stomach.

“I made up some stupid excuse. I promised her that I’d call her the next day, but of course I never did.” Tears glimmered in his eyes. “I knew, deep down, that I’d made a huge mistake. I knew it instantly, but I was too much of a coward to make things right.

So I went on with my life, and when I didn’t see or hear from Carrie over the next few days, I was actually relieved.” He paused and finally walked from the window to where Scarlett was sitting on the bed.

She looked at his face, and suddenly he appeared older, worn down and tired. She was worried for him, in that moment. She felt that perhaps Bryson was more troubled than she possibly could have imagined. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

“I just need to get this out.”

“Keep going. I’m listening.”

He licked his lips, instantly picking up where he left off. “It was towards the end of that week when I first heard the rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?” Scarlett asked.

“Rumors that Carrie had left for good. Nobody knew where she was, but the whispers around school were that she’d run away. My temporary relief changed to fear and guilt. They said her parents had gone to the police and reported her as a runaway. I thought about going to the school and telling them about my relationship with Carrie, and I even thought about going to talk to her parents. But I knew she’d been miserable at home and very estranged from her folks. Eventually, I went down to the police station and told them about my relationship with her.”

“That must have been terrible,” Scarlett said.

“Not really,” Bryson replied. “In actuality, it was a pretty big relief to unburden myself. The police were a little suspicious of me in the beginning, until they found out that I was a football player and an honor student. They seemed to quickly decide that I was just an upstanding guy who screwed the wrong girl. Carrie was considered nothing more than a runaway with a history of emotional problems and academic issues. The police told me to enjoy the rest of my year and not to worry about the case, which they considered typical of an unhappy girl with family problems and little to no support in the community.”

“That’s disgusting,” Scarlett said. She had had enough experience with cops in her past to know that it was a common attitude, however. Most cops were men, and they tended to look at everything from a typical male perspective. So a girl like Carrie was just a nobody, a piece of malfunctioning equipment that would turn up sooner or later.

She could have been murdered for all they knew, but their attitudes prevented them from caring.

“It was disgusting,” Bryson agreed. “I’d tried to present the other side of her, but the police seemed to think that I was just suffering from a case of overinflated responsibility for her actions. And maybe I was.” He paused and shook his head again.

“But in that moment when I told the police about us, and about her, I realized that I loved Carrie, and I was willing to take a stand. I wanted to find her and tell her the truth, and bring her back. The problem was that I had no idea where she was, and neither did anybody else.”

“Did your friends and family find out about your relationship with her?”

“I told everyone,” he said. “The strange thing was, nobody wanted to hear it.

Everyone reacted kind of like the police had reacted. They treated me like some little boy who had a case of puppy love. My parents listened with fake patience and then told me that I should move on and just thank my lucky stars I hadn’t impregnated her.”

Scarlett made a face. “That was nice of them.”

“My friends thought I was acting weird. They told me that it was okay to screw a hot chick, even if she was a little nuts. But they didn’t think it was normal to be out looking for her, proclaiming my love from the rooftops.”

“So you actually went looking for her?”

“I did,” he admitted grimly. “I found some of her friends and asked them where they thought she might go, I tried to see if she’d contacted anybody since she’d disappeared. Her friends all agreed that she’d often talked about San Francisco. That’s also when I found out that she’d started doing hard drugs—heroin.”

“She was a heroin addict?”

“I suppose so.” He closed his eyes. “I had no idea that she’d gone down so far, that her depression and alienation had reached such depths. But it didn’t stop me from trying to find her. On weekends, I drove to San Francisco and cruised the beaches, went to the worst areas where it was thought that the homeless kids and heroin addicts hung out. I showed a picture of Carrie and asked people if they’d ever seen her.”

“And did you ever come up with anything?”

“No. Nothing.” Bryson wiped his eyes with his thumb. “Eventually, my trips started dwindling. My parents refused to let me take the car for anything longer than a few hours and because my grades had suffered, I was forced to hit the books hard. I hadn’t forgotten about Carrie, but I simply didn’t know what to do next. I dreamt about her, I wrote letters to her that I planned to show her when she returned. In my heart, I knew I’d get eventually the chance to tell her how wrong I’d been when she resurfaced.”

“Did she ever resurface?” Scarlett asked, dreading the answer.

Bryson looked as if the wind had been knocked out of him, as if he’d been punched repeatedly in the stomach. “She did. Unfortunately, when she resurfaced about six months later, it was because she’d died.”

“Oh my God.” Scarlett put a hand to her mouth. It was strange, but somehow through the course of Bryson talking about Carrie, Scarlett felt like someone she’d known had died. It didn’t make sense, but that’s how it felt.

“She was found alone in a seedy motel room in Los Angeles, dead of a heroin overdose,” Bryson said flatly. “The maids found her when they went in to clean the room, and from the investigation, it seemed as though she’d likely died hours previously.”

“Bryson, I’m so sorry.”

He nodded, but she could see that he was unable to take any comfort from her words. “She died and I never got my chance to tell her the truth. I let her go.” He looked at Scarlett now, with eyes that were tortured. “She needed me, and I used her. I used her and left her to fend for herself in the wilderness.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself. You were a kid.”

Bryson’s jaw set. “I was old enough to know better. She was a beautiful person, and my best friend. And I let her die because I wanted to live my perfect life.”

Scarlett took a deep breath. She wanted to take his hand, but from the way he was holding his shoulders, the tightness of him, like a coiled wire—she knew he wouldn’t accept any affection right then. “You’ve been beating yourself up for years. It’s the past.

You made a mistake but you didn’t know any better.”

“I did know better.”

“Maybe you did. But her death wasn’t your fault.”

“When I found out she died,” he said, as if his story had never been interrupted, “I immediately went and got the tattoo. The butterfly tattoo. I chose that because I knew that Carrie had a butterfly necklace that she always wore, and I wanted to remember her.

I wanted to remember what I’d lost, what I threw away.” He took a deep breath, as if he was about to jump into deep water. Finally, he looked at Scarlett. “I’ll never forget her.”

They were silent for a time. She wasn’t sure what to say anymore. The whole thing was so confusing—to be told of his past love and the heartache he still had for this girl…especially when Scarlett was still hurt about him letting Eliza Johnson stay over in his bed. Even if he hadn’t slept in bed with her and nothing had happened between them, it was a betrayal.

“I don’t think you need to forget Carrie,” she said softly.

Bryson looked at her again, surprised. “You don’t?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t. What you felt about her was important, and it changed you.”

“It did,” he acknowledged. “Although I tried to continue on as if everything was the same, nothing ever really was. I went to college and kept on with the program, so to speak. I even started law school. But I remember, one day I was studying case law and I just realized that I wasn’t living my own life. It hit me like a thunderbolt out of the blue.

Maybe it was Carrie’s spirit, guiding me.” He grinned, embarrassed. “I know how silly that sounds.”

“It doesn’t sound silly at all.”

“I felt like I owed it to her to really live my life, for me. So I quit law school and told my family I was going to write screenplays.”

“How did that news go over?”

“Like a lead balloon,” he laughed. “But I didn’t really care. I was finally free.”

“So now you’ve told me,” Scarlett said, her voice a sigh. “And even though I really appreciate your story, and even though what you went through was heartbreaking—I don’t see how that changes anything about what you did with Eliza Johnson.”

Bryson’s smile turned to a frown. “I know. And that’s because I haven’t explained that part of it just yet.”

“There’s more?”

“Just a little bit more.” He stared in Scarlett’s eyes. “Eliza has a drug problem.”

“She what?”

“She has a drug problem.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s not something she wants people to know, but she confided in me that she’s been struggling. She’s depressed, lonely, and she’s having a hard time staying clean and sober. Obviously, when she asked for my help, given my history, it was impossible to turn her away.”

Scarlett groaned. She didn’t want to feel any kind of sympathy for Bryson, and certainly not for Eliza Johnson. But here she was, feeling sympathy for that obnoxious woman--and guilt for assuming the worst of Bryson. “Oh, shit,” she said, finally.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means, I’m pissed that I can’t stay angry at you anymore.”

He grinned again. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard you say in a long time.”