Messy Love by Stephanie Witter
This one goes to Dean and Alec for keeping me motivated. :p
Sam, Jo and Michelle will understand.
WYATT
I had always thought that being a good person was easy. I had been so damn wrong I’d laugh if only my fucking heart weren't about to irremediably break and if I wasn’t so scared.
Being good wasn’t easy. Doing something good for someone else could very well ruin you and leave you with nothing but darkness. I was about to experience that first hand.
I looked down at the old and battered stuffed turtle with a missing leg in my hands. One tiny object changed everything right when I was just starting to turn my life around, right when I was making an effort to make her happy.
“What’s that?’’
Her soft voice full of sleep after a night I was sure to cherish for the rest of my days made me tighten my grip around the turtle until some puffy white stuffing fell at my bare feet.
I closed the door and turned around to stare at the most beautiful woman I had ever met, a beautiful woman who turned my life upside down months ago and forced me to be a better man.
But if I wanted to be truly better I needed to break her heart and mine.
My life had always been a mess and every time I had thought things were looking up and I dropped my guard something else came up. With her in my arms all night long, I had thought that I had a fucking right to be happy and claim my damn happy ending. I believed that because I fucking loved her with all my destroyed and poisoned heart I could be with her because she saw the ugly in me and still wanted me, even after all the pain I caused her. But no. I couldn’t have her.
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat and lost myself in her eyes.
She knew me, so much better than I thought possible. I didn’t need to utter a word for her to understand I was gearing up to hurt her.
She took a step back, shook her head once and looked away. She was already retreating from me, and it cut me so deep I wouldn’t feel less pain or less weak if I was bleeding all over the place.
“Please, don’t.’’ The plea in her voice was my undoing. Shit. How could I do this after everything?
I closed my eyes and turned my back to her. I needed to hide. I couldn’t do this if she kept on looking at me like that, with all that pain etched over her face. But before I could find my voice, hers tore through me.
“If you do this again, I’m not coming back this time, Wyatt.’’
My eyes fell on that fucking stuffed turtle so old it smelled of mold and dirt. I didn’t have a choice. I needed to protect her. She thought I was only reverting to my old habits, hurting her just because I was scared, but this time was different.
I had an excellent reason to get her out of my life. I needed to remember that.
I closed my eyes, didn’t turn around and said the words I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Then go.’’
MARISSA
When you’re adopted and you looked in the mirror the first question to come to mind was "who did I look like?" It was superficial and yet was very much a part of who you were.
I always wondered when I caught a glimpse of myself in a window or a mirror. I had always wanted to know from where I came.
And now I was about to find out.
The envelope, tall, white and quite thin, laid in my hands. Who knew such a simple thing could hold all the answers I had been carrying with me since I was a pre-teen? With the years, that need for answers only grew, and with it a fear consuming me regarding my conception. Had my birth mother been raped? Had she been in an abusive relationship? All kinds of scenario haunted me and sometimes when I looked at myself I had trouble breathing.
It was strange because the worst-case scenarios appeared more plausible than the possibility of being simply an unwanted baby.
It should be easy to tear this envelope open then. I shouldn’t second guess my decision to know who my birth mother was.
There were a lot of things I should probably do, but I still sat on the bed in my childhood bedroom at my parents’, surrounded by the teen I used to be only a couple of years ago. At that moment, I felt a lot younger than my twenty years, as if I was back to being the shy kid only my big brother could get out of her shell.
I swallowed and looked away from the big poster of Kurt Cobain tacked on the wall next to the closed door and stared again at the envelope in my hands. I brought my fingers to behind my ear and rubbed at my black tattoo of three birds taking flight. I always touched that tatt when I was nervous or upset.
I took a deep breath and finally stopped that agonizing waiting game. I slipped my pinkie finger in the flap of the envelope and tore it open. I pushed through the trembling of my hands, through the buzz in my ears and the throb in my temples. My eyes homed in on the papers piled inside and the first thing greeting me upon grabbing the papers was a bad photocopy of my birth mother’s ID.
My heart clenched in my chest until I gasped, the poor sound nowhere near as strong as what I felt at the moment upon seeing my birth mother for the first time.
The picture on the ID was graining, and I couldn’t make out a lot of her face, but I didn’t have any doubt. She’s the one. For the first time in my life, I saw someone I physically related to.
My face with high cheekbones looked a lot like hers. My mouth, wide and with thick and well-defined lips matched hers almost to perfection. The small dimples in my cheeks… They’re the same as hers. I didn’t know if her eyes resembled the unusual violet-blue color of mine, or if her dark hair were the same almost black shade as my own, but the shape of her eyes did look like mine.