Ugly Love

I cry with her. I cry and I cry and I cry and I cry and we cry and we cry and we cry.

Ruined.

The water is everything now.

I look at Rachel. I only see water.

I close my eyes. I only see water.

I look up at the sky. I only see water.

It hurts so much. I never knew a heart could hold the weight of the entire world.

I don’t make Rachel’s life better anymore.

I ruined you, Rachel.

My family.

Me and you and Clayton.

RUINED.

You can’t love me after this, Rachel.

Chapter thirty-three

TATE

My hands are on him, rubbing his back, touching his hair. He’s crying, and the only thing I can do is tell him never mind. I want to tell him to forget everything I said tonight. I want to do whatever I can to take this pain away from him, because whatever happened shouldn’t matter. Whatever happened, no one deserves to feel the way he’s feeling right now.

I move his arms from his face, then slide onto his lap. I hold his face in my hands and tilt it to mine. He keeps his eyes closed. “I don’t have to know, Miles.”

His arms wrap around my back, and he buries his face against my chest. His labored breaths come faster as he tries to push back his emotions. My arms are wrapped around his head, and I kiss his hair, then trail kisses down the side of his head until he pulls back and looks up at me.

No amount of armor in the world and no wall no matter how thick could hide the devastation in his eyes right now. It’s so prominent, and there’s so much of it, I have to hold my breath so I don’t cry with him.

What happened to you, Miles?

“I don’t have to know,” I whisper again, shaking my head.

His hands move to the back of my head, and he presses his mouth to mine, hard and painfully. He moves forward until my back is against the floor. His hands pull at my shirt, and he’s kissing me desperately, furiously, filling my mouth with the taste of his tears.

I let him use me to get rid of his pain.

I’ll do whatever he wants me to do as long as he stops hurting like he’s hurting.

He slips his hand beneath my skirt and begins to pull down my underwear at the same time as I hook my thumbs onto the hips of his jeans and push them down. My panties make it to my ankles, and I kick them off, just as he takes both my hands and pushes them above my head, pressing them to the floor.

He drops his forehead to mine but doesn’t kiss me. He closes his eyes, but I keep mine open. He wastes no time pushing himself between my legs, spreading them wider. He moves his forehead to the side of my head, then slides into me slowly. When he’s all the way inside me, he exhales, releasing some of his pain. Taking his mind away from whatever horror he just went through.

He pulls out, then thrusts inside me again, this time with all his strength.

It hurts.

Give me your pain, Miles.

“My God, Rachel,” he whispers.

My God, Rachel …

Rachel, Rachel, Rachel.

That word gets put on repeat inside my head.

My.

God.

Rachel.

I turn my head away from his. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt. The absolute worst.

His body immediately stills inside mine when he realizes what he said. The only thing moving between us right now are the tears falling from my eyes.

“Tate,” he whispers, shattering the silence between us. “Tate, I’m so sorry.”

I shake my head, but the tears won’t stop. Somewhere deep inside me, I feel something harden. Something that was once liquid completely freezes, and it’s in this moment that I know this is it.

That name.

It said it all. I’ll never have his past, because she has it.

I’ll never have his future, because he refuses to give it to anyone who isn’t her.

And I’ll never know why, because he’ll never tell me.

He begins to pull out of me, but I tighten my legs around his. He sighs heavily against my cheek. “I swear to God, Tate. I wasn’t thinking about—”

“Stop,” I whisper. I don’t want to hear him defend what just happened. “Just finish, Miles.”

He lifts his head and looks down at me. I see the apology, clear as day, hiding behind fresh tears. I don’t know if it’s my words that have just cut him again or the fact that we both know this is it, but it looks like his heart just broke again.

If that’s even possible.

A tear falls from his eyes and lands on my cheek. I feel it roll down and combine with one of my own.

I just want this to be over.

I wrap my hand around the back of his head and pull his mouth to mine. He’s not moving inside me anymore, so I arch my back, pressing my hips harder against him. He moans in my mouth and moves against me once, then stops again. “Tate,” he says against my lips.

“Just finish, Miles,” I say to him through my tears. “Just finish.”

He places a palm against my cheek and he presses his lips to my ear. We’re both crying harder now, and I can see that I’m more than this to him. I know I am. I feel how much he wants to love me, but whatever is stopping him is more than I’m able to conquer. I wrap my arms around his neck. “Please,” I beg him. “Please, Miles.” I’m crying, begging for something, but I don’t even know what it is anymore.

He thrusts against me. Hard this time. So hard I scoot away from him, so he wraps his arms under my shoulders and cups his hands upward, holding me in place against him as he repeatedly pushes into me. Hard, long, deep thrusts that force moans out of both of us with every movement.

“Harder,” I beg.

He pushes harder.

“Faster.”

He moves faster.

We’re both gasping for breath between our tears. It’s intense. It’s heartbreaking. It’s devastating.

It’s ugly.

It’s over.

As soon as his body is motionless on top of mine, I push against his shoulders. He rolls off of me. I sit up and wipe my eyes with my hands, then stand up and pull on my underwear. His fingers wrap around my ankle. The same fingers that wrapped around the same ankle the first night I met him.

“Tate,” he says, his voice riddled with everything. Every single emotion wraps itself around each letter of my name as it comes out of his mouth.

I pull away from his grasp.

I walk to the door, still feeling him inside me. Still tasting his mouth on mine. Still feeling the stains of his tears against my cheek.

I open the door and walk out.

I close the door behind me, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

I can’t even walk the three feet back to my apartment.

I collapse in the hallway.

I’m liquid.

Nothing but tears.

Chapter thirty-four

MILES

Six years earlier

We went home. Not to our home.

Rachel wanted Lisa. Rachel needs her mother.

I kind of need my father.

Every night I hold her. Every night I tell her I’m sorry. Every night we just cry.

I don’t understand how it can be so perfect. How life and love and people can be so perfect and beautiful.

Then it’s not. It’s so ugly.

Life and love and people become ugly.

It all becomes water.

Tonight is different. This night is the first night in three weeks when she’s not crying. I hold her anyway. I want to be happy that she’s not crying, but it scares me. Her tears mean she feels something. Even if that something is devastation, it’s still something. There aren’t any tears tonight.

I hold her anyway. I tell her I’m sorry again.

She never tells me it’s okay.

She never tells me it’s not my fault.

She never tells me she forgives me.

She does kiss me tonight, though. She kisses me and takes off her shirt. She tells me to make love to her. I tell her we shouldn’t. I tell her we’re supposed to wait two more weeks. She kisses me so I’ll stop talking.

I kiss her back.

Rachel loves me again.

I think.

She’s kissing me like she loves me.

I’m gentle with her.

I go slow.

She’s touching my skin like she loves me.

I don’t want to hurt her.

She cries.

Please don’t cry, Rachel.

I stop.

She tells me not to stop.

She tells me to finish.

Finish.

I don’t like that word.

Like this is a job.

I kiss her again.

I finish.

Miles,

Rachel wrote me a letter.

I’m sorry.

No.

I can’t do this. It hurts too much.

No, no, no.

My mother is taking me back to Phoenix. We’re both staying there. It’s all too complicated, even between the two of them now. Your father already knows.

Clayton brings families together.

Miles rips them apart.

I tried to stay. I tried to love you. Every time I look at you, I see him. Everything is him. If I stay, everything will always be him. You know that. I know you understand that. I shouldn’t blame you.

But you do.

I’m so sorry.

You stopped loving me with a letter, Rachel?

Love,

I feel it. All the ugly parts of it. It’s in my pores. My veins. My memories. My future.

Rachel.

The difference between the ugly side of love and the beautiful side of love is that the beautiful side is much lighter. It makes you feel like you’re floating. It lifts you up. Carries you.

The beautiful parts of love hold you above the rest of the world. They hold you so high above all the bad stuff, and you just look down on everything else and think, Wow. I’m so glad I’m up here.

Sometimes the beautiful parts of love move back to Phoenix.

The ugly parts of love are too heavy to move back to Phoenix. The ugly parts of love can’t lift you up.

They bring you

D

O

W

N.

They hold you under.

Drown you.

You look up and think, I wish I was up there.

But you’re not.

Ugly love becomes you.

Consumes you.

Makes you hate it all.

Makes you realize that all the beautiful parts aren’t even worth it. Without the beautiful, you’ll never risk feeling this.

You’ll never risk feeling the ugly.

So you give it up. You give it all up. You never want love again, no matter what kind it is, because no type of love will ever be worth living through the ugly love again.

I’ll never let myself love anyone again, Rachel.

Ever.

Chapter thirty-five

TATE

“Last load,” Corbin says, picking up the remaining two boxes.

I hand Corbin the key to my new place. “I’ll make one more walk-through and meet you over there.” I open the door for Corbin, and he exits the apartment. I’m left staring at the door across the hall.

I haven’t seen or spoken to him since last week. I’ve been selfishly hoping he would show up and apologize, but then again, what would he even be apologizing for? He never lied to me. He never verbalized promises that he broke.

The only times he wasn’t brutally honest with me were the times he didn’t speak. The times he looked at me and I assumed the feelings I saw in his eyes were more than what he was able to verbalize.

It’s apparent now that I more than likely invented those feelings from him in order to match them to my own. The occasional emotion behind his eyes when we were together was obviously a figment of my own imagination. A figment of my hope.

I scan the apartment one last time to make sure I packed everything. When I step outside and lock Corbin’s door behind me, my movements are taken over by something I’m unfamiliar with.

I can’t tell if it’s braveness or desperation, but my hand is balled into a fist, and that fist is knocking on his door.

I tell myself that I’m free to escape to the elevator if ten seconds pass and the door doesn’t open.

Unfortunately, it opens after seven.

My thoughts begin to riot with rationalization as the door opens wider. Before rationalization wins and I dart away, Ian appears in the doorway. His eyes change from complacent to sympathetic when he sees me standing here.

“Tate,” he says, capping my name off with a smile. I notice the shift of his gaze toward Miles’s bedroom before his eyes fall back on mine. “Let me get him,” he says.

I feel the ascent in the nod of my head, but my heart is making a descent, scaling down my chest, through my stomach, and straight to the floor.