Chapter 19
Jeremy stared at the man he’d fallen in love with, the man he’d trusted, and his heart cracked. “What memory?” he asked, his body shaking. He’d known this was coming. He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but he’d known. “What happened to you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Harrison shook his head. “All you need to know is, I’m one of those damaged people who can’t be fixed. I knew we were all wrong for each other the night you told me about Aaron. I should have left then. It would’ve been the right thing to do but, I couldn’t force myself to walk away from you.”
Heart thundering, Jeremy took a step backward. “What are you saying? That you were abused as a child, like Aaron was?”
Harrison swallowed hard as he nodded.
“I don’t understand,” Jeremy said, crossing his arms in front of him. “Why didn’t you say anything?” It had been so hard for him to tell Harrison about Aaron. About all he’d gone through in those years and how difficult it had been for him to leave. “I told you everything and you said nothing.” He’d believed he was safe with Harrison. Safe from himself and his own self-destructive behaviours. “Why?”
“I’ve been trying to tell you, I have. But I didn’t want to lose you.” Harrison stopped, raking his hands through his hair as he took a deep breath. “You make happiness look contagious, Jeremy. You have no idea how compelling that is for someone like me.”
Turning away, Jeremy took a few steps across the room, his hands fisting as anger bled into his veins. “So, you thought you’d drip feed me your trauma instead?” He remembered the conversations they’d had during the past few weeks. “First there was the story about your troubled teen years. Then the tidbits about your father hurting you. I knew there had to be more, I fucking knew it.” He wondered how long Harrison would have continued revealing little bits and pieces of himself. “What did you think you were doing? Seeing how long it would take me to figure it out? Was this some game to you?”
“No.” Harrison looked horrified. “I couldn’t tell you all at once. I couldn’t, it’s too much.” His shoulders sagged forward as he shook his head. “It’s too much.”
“You couldn’t walk away. You couldn’t tell me the truth. What the hellcanyou do?”
Harrison stared at him for a moment before he took a deep breath. “I can leave before I do any more damage. That’s what I can do.” He walked over to the door and opened it before pausing to look back over his shoulder. “Goodbye, Jeremy. I’m sorry.”
Jeremy never made the decision to move—not consciously. He only knew his fist filled with the front of Harrison’s shirt before the other man was yanked back inside. When the front door slammed closed beside them, it was Jeremy’s hand pressed flat against the back of it.
“No.” He snarled the word into Harrison’s face. The man had just dropped a bomb on his head and now he was supposed to stand aside while Harrison walked out of his life without even telling him why? That shit was not going to fly. “You are not getting out of this so easily. Do you understand?”
They stared at each other for a long moment before Harrison nodded.
Releasing his shirt, Jeremy took a step back and levelled Harrison with a glare. “I want you to tell me what happened to you. And don’t you dare leave anything out.”
“What’s the point?” Harrison gave a defeated shrug. “We both know there’s no getting past this. At first I hoped maybe we could but…” He ran his hands through his hair again as he moved away from the door. “You need to stay away from people who are damaged,” he said, repeated the words Jeremy himself had used only weeks earlier. “And me?” Harrison grabbed at his own chest with one hand, his fingers digging in hard. “Every part of me is shattered from the inside out. I’ve put the pieces back together as best I can, but I’llnevernot be broken.” He shook his head, his eyes shrouded in pain and sorrow. “You deserve better than anything I have to offer.”
Jeremy’s eyebrows lifted and his teeth ground together. “That’s it?” he demanded. “You knew all of this before and you stayed with me anyway. You let me fall in love with you. And now the shit’s hit the fan, you decide it’s over? Just like that? Well, fuck you, Harrison.” He shifted his stance, bracing himself. If Harrison tried to leave before he got the answers he wanted, he’d have a fight on his hands. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me. And if I’m going to lose you, I at least have the right to know why. You owe me that.”
“Fine.” Harrison threw his bag to the floor, his eyes flashing. “Where would you like me to start? With my alcoholic father? He was an abusive arsehole who beat the crap out of my mother. He would have beaten me as well, if she hadn’t put herself in the way. As it was, I only copped the occasional black eye when I stepped too far out of line.” He prowled around the room as he spoke—a caged animal who’d been poked one too many times.
“Or maybe I should tell you the part where my mother committed suicide by overdosing on prescription drugs right in front of me. She tried to take me with her you know, handed me the pills herself. And I took them, willingly, because I didn’t want to let her down.” He paused to drag air into his lungs with deep, ragged breaths. “The only reason I didn’t die that day was because my father came home early after being fired from his job—again. You’ve got to love the irony. The very man who drove my mother to take her own life was the same man who saved mine.”
Jeremy couldn’t think, couldn’t even begin to comprehend what he was hearing. “Your mother,” he said. “Why would she want you to kill yourself?”
Harrison frowned, as if the answer was obvious. “She was trying to protect me.”
Jeremy’s legs gave way and he leaned back against the door. “What?”
“She thought I’d be safer dead with her, than alive with him.” A sound that mimicked laughter flooded out of him. “Safer. Can you imagine?” The grating sound grew louder. Jeremy flinched, and it cut short.
There was a moment of silence and then Jeremy cleared his throat. “Is that everything?”
“I wish it was,” Harrison spat out. “I still haven’t told you what I did when I found out my father died the next year.” He paced around the room, his hands moving in quick, fidgety gestures. “He was murdered actually. You know the type. Seedy motel. Blunt force trauma to the head. The cops never figured out who did it.” A breath huffed out of him. “Not that anyone much cared.”
Jeremy wasn’t interested in what happened to Harrison’s arsehole of a father. “What did you do, when you found out?”
“A bottle of tequila.” He grimaced, as if he could still taste it. “Nasty stuff, but it seemed like a better method than pills.”
Every ounce of air left Jeremy’s lungs in a rush and he sank to the floor. “You tried to kill yourself again.”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. Life hadn’t improved much so…” There was a dismissive shrug as Harrison lowered himself to his knees in front of Jeremy. “After Mum died, I thought moving to Australia would fix everything. I’d survived the worst, so things would be better, right? Only it wasn’t that simple,” he said, shaking his head. “You see, I brought myself with me. My distrust of everyone. My behaviour problems. The constant dreams that trapped me back in that room over and over.” His shoulders sagged, as if the weight on his shoulders had become too heavy to bear. “I was so full of anger and shame for who I was. I hated being a burden on my aunty and uncle. They were good people. They didn’t deserve to get stuck with a piece of shit kid like me. And it didn’t matter how many times they told me they wanted me with them. Nothing they said could touch me.” There was little left of his voice now and Jeremy moved closer to be able to hear him. “I was still so lost. Stuck halfway between life and my mother’s grave.
“When we got word my father had been killed, what little was left of me broke. I felt like I didn’t belong in the world anymore. What place did I have here, when the people who’d brought me into it were gone in such violent ways? I could never be anything good, not coming from where I did. I was glad my father was dead. The world was a better place without him in it. I couldn’t help but wonder if it would be a better place without me, too. Surely it would be easier on everyone if I was just… gone.”
