Come Together by Marie Force
Chapter Five
“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world. But you do have some say in who hurts you.”
—John Green
Why was he confiding in her this way? If you’d asked Noah before he left the house if he’d tell Brianna what happened with Melinda, he would’ve said you were crazy. He never talked about that topic with anyone, so why would he tell her, of all people?
But after hearing what had happened to her, he’d felt compelled to let her know he got it. Strangely enough, it made him feel a little better to know that shit like that happened to other people, too, even if he’d never wish that kind of heartache on anyone.
Brianna had been a revelation in more ways than one. There was nothing not to like about her away from work. In addition to being funny, she was also very, very pretty, which, of course, he’d noticed before tonight. If he were honest with himself—and really, what’s the point of lying to yourself?—he’d have to admit to being instantly attracted to her on day one. Perhaps that was why he’d allowed himself to be so easily annoyed by her.
“Why do you feel the need to keep what happened to yourself?” she asked as she sipped her cocktail.
“It’s embarrassing.”
“To whom?”
“To me. My wife was screwing my employee.”
“Isn’t it a bigger deal to you that he was your friend?”
Noah shrugged. He hated to think about that time in his life, let alone talk about it. “The whole thing sucked.”
“I’m sure it was awful, but to keep it completely to yourself is to give it power over you long after it should be a distant, unpleasant memory.”
He eyed her with newfound respect. “Did your therapist tell you that?”
“Among many other things. She made me see that Rem’s actions weren’t a reflection of me. They reflected him. I was a victim of his cruelty. You were a victim of theirs.”
“I hate that word. Victim.”
“I hate it, too, because people think victims are weak. But we’re the strong ones because we survived something that could’ve ruined us. What I told you about my ex-husband is like one one-thousandth of the full story. I’m sure there’s more to your story, too, things that others will never know, but you’ll never forget. There’s nothing weak about being a victim of someone else’s cruelty.”
It was the best articulation of what he’d been through that Noah had heard since his life blew up in his face, and it was a huge relief to know that someone else got it. “You’re very wise.”
“No, I’m not wise at all, or I would’ve seen him for what he was long before I did. My dad saw it. He told me if someone seemed too good to be true, he probably was. I didn’t want to hear that. I was in love and determined to have it all with him. If only I’d listened to my dad, who’s the wisest person I know, I could’ve avoided a lot of hell and heartache, not to mention financial ruin.”
“He ruined you financially, too?”
She nodded. “I was a fool to allow him to oversee our finances. My credit was all tied up in his, and by the time I realized the full extent of what he’d been doing, we were nearly bankrupt. He’d wiped out our accounts, maxed out the credit cards and had stopped paying my student loans. I couldn’t even afford to hire a divorce attorney or get an apartment of my own after I left him. I had to borrow money from my parents that I’m still paying back, and my cousin’s husband is handling my divorce pro bono.”
“God, what an asshole.”
“He played me every which way and weaponized my love for him. He was shocked when I left him. He never expected that to happen because he thought I loved him so much, I’d never dare to leave him.”
“I’m so glad you got free of him.”
“I’m not completely free yet, but I’m working on it. He’s refusing to sign the divorce papers, but I have a court date in a couple of weeks that might force the issue without his consent. I’ve got proof of all the shit he did, which my lawyer says will matter to the judge. We got lucky with a female judge who has no patience for men who prey on women.”
“I hope she sticks it to him.”
“I hope so, too. I’m looking forward to being completely free of him, but it’s going to take me years to dig out of the financial hole he left me in.”
“You ought to sue him.”
“That’s what my lawyer says, too, but that would cost more money and just extend the nightmare.”
“And I get why that’s not something you want to do, but why should you be stuck paying his tab?”
“The thought of dragging it on is so nauseating to me.”
“I’d think the idea of paying off his debts would be even more sickening.”
“You sound like my dad. He’d like you.”
Before Noah could respond to that, the waitress returned with her sides and his ribs.
She took a bite of the beans and made a sound of pleasure that traveled like an arrow straight to his groin, making him thankful for the cover the table provided. For God’s sake, now he was getting turned on by her in a restaurant? Before he met her at the start of this job, he’d had reason to wonder whether he’d ever again be interested in another woman for anything more than the random physical release. She’d answered that question rather definitively on more than one occasion since she came to town.
With this massive job at the center of both their lives—and a lot riding on it for everyone involved—he needed to keep this relationship professional, no matter what. The last thing he needed with the biggest job of his career only half finished was any kind of romantic entanglement with the architect running the show.
Tell that to your dick, jackass.
My dick needs to stand the fuck down and stop paying attention to her.
And now he was having conversations with himself about his dick.
He devoured the delicious ribs and tried to ignore that everything she did was sexy.
The waitress returned to refill their water glasses from a pitcher. “How is it?”
“Delicious as always,” Noah said.
“Fantastic,” Brianna replied.
“You folks from Butler?”
“We are,” Noah said.
“We hear there was a big accident about four miles south of here. A car off the road. They expect the road to be closed most of the night. Since the snow is coming down hard, and you’d have to drive around the mountain to get home, we’re offering free rooms upstairs for the night to anyone who can’t get home. One per party. Let me know if you want me to grab one for you.”
Noah’s mind went completely blank as he stared across the table at Brianna.
She looked up at the waitress. “We’ll take one. Thank you so much.”
“No problem. I’ll get you a key. Be right back.”
Noah wanted to say no way in hell to spending a night upstairs with her. That was the worst thing they could do with his little brain running roughshod over his better judgment where she was concerned. But driving more than an hour around the mountain in a raging snowstorm wasn’t something he was eager to do either.
Fuck.
“I know it’s not ideal, but I was already afraid of driving back in the snow before I heard a car was off the road. And by ‘off the road,’ does that mean ‘off a cliff’?”
“Probably an embankment.”
“Which isn’t quite as terrifying as a cliff, but enough to make me want to stay put.”
“My cousins are firefighters. They’re probably on the scene.”
“I hope everyone involved is all right.”
“Me, too. I’m sorry about this.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “It’ll make for a funny story to tell Mrs. H.”
“She’ll be thrilled we had to spend the night. This whole thing was a fix-up anyway.”
“You think so?”
“Oh, hell yes. My grandfather and uncle probably gave her the idea to send us off on an outing together. This entire evening is right out of their playbook. I wouldn’t have put it past them to arrange the accident to keep us here, too.”
“For real?”
“Well, not that part about the accident, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn they were behind the idea for us to come here in the first place. They’ve made it their mission in life to get all my cousins and siblings happily settled down, and their track record has been shockingly good so far.”
“How so?”
“I could give a ton of examples, but my favorite one so far has to be what they did with my cousin Hannah. Her first husband was killed years ago in Iraq.”
“That’s so sad.”
“It was awful. We grew up with Caleb, and his loss hit us all hard. He was a great guy, and they’d been together since they were kids.”
“I’m so sorry for her.”
“It was rough for a long time. In the last few years, we started to realize that another of our childhood friends, Nolan Roberts, had a thing for Hannah. He was a close friend of Caleb’s, so it was messy, you know?”
“I can imagine. What did your uncle and grandfather do?”
“Nolan is the mechanic in town. That’s his shop down the street from the diner.”
“I know him. I took my car there for oil a couple of weeks ago. He and his coworker, Skeeter, took excellent care of me.”
“Skeeter is a whole other story. Anyway, Hannah had a standing date with some friends once a week that she looked forward to. My grandfather and uncle waited for a week when everyone else was unavailable and then messed with Hannah’s car so it wouldn’t start when she was ready to leave. She had no choice but to call Nolan, and while he was there, he finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. They’re married now with an adorable little girl named Caleb, but they call her Callie, and another baby on the way.”
“That’s seriously the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“They’re both great people who deserve to be happy.”
“We’re both great people who deserve to be happy, too,” Brianna said.
Noah was slightly terrified of where she might be going with that. “Is that right?”
“It is. We deserve it after what we went through with them.”
“My definition of happy changed after that. Happy to me is a drama-free life.”
“I understand that. The kind of drama that happened to us is the worst, but neither of us went looking for it. We didn’t cause it, and we can’t let it completely ruin our faith in other people.”
“How can you have faith in anyone after what he did?”
“It’s not easy, but I choose not to let the actions of one person color my outlook on everyone.”
“You’re a bigger person than I am if you can still trust people. I don’t think I’ll ever trust anyone the way I did her and Miguel.” Noah finished the last of his ribs and took a drink of his beer. “That mistake with the fireplace never would’ve happened on his watch. His attention to detail was meticulous. Carlo is great, but he misses shit all the time and makes mistakes that Miguel never would’ve made.”
“It’s tough to replace someone like that.”
“He’s irreplaceable at work, which makes me hate what he did even more. I gave him the keys to my kingdom, and he ran off with my queen.”
“Are they still together?”
“I don’t know, and I tell myself I don’t care.”
“You could find out easily enough.”
“What difference would that make to me?”
“Maybe if it was a love match, you’d feel better about it.”
“No, I wouldn’t. They had to betray me to get their ‘love match.’ So why would I want to know that?”
“If I were you, I’d prefer to know that what they did was about more than scratching an itch at your expense.”
“Eh, I don’t care either way. It happened. It sucked. It’s over. I’ve moved on.”
“Have you, though?”
* * *
Brianna couldn’t believeshe was talking to him this way, about the worst time in both their lives. But it was comforting to meet someone who understood what that kind of betrayal did to a person. It ripped apart the fabric of your entire life and left you shredded. She was still putting the pieces back together more than a year after uncovering the full extent of her ex-husband’s deceit.
If there was one good thing about being in Vermont, it was being far away from all the misguided sympathy from friends and family at home who’d wanted to do something to help—at first. But what could they do? What could anyone do? She’d given her heart to a monster, and he’d trampled all over it. After a while, her friends and family had grown weary of hearing the latest episode in her ongoing drama, leaving her more alone with her heartbreak than she’d been at first. Her cousin, Dom, was the one exception. She’d been there through it all and had never wavered in her devotion. For that, Brianna would be eternally grateful.
“I think I have,” Noah said in response to her question. “Moved on, that is. It’s been three years.”
“Do you date?”
“Not really. I have a friends-with-benefits thing with a woman I’ve known since high school. Neither of us is interested in anything more than that, so it works out well.”
“So that’s it? A friend with benefits for the rest of your life?”
“I don’t know about that, but it works for me right now.”
“I get it. What’s the point of risking anything if there’re people out there like your ex and mine, right?”
“Right. I did that once. Risked everything, and it didn’t work out, so why bother with the hassle of that again?”
“Can I ask you something—and you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Sure. I mean, I’ve already told you more than anyone else knows.”
“Thank you for trusting me with that. I promise it won’t go any further.”
“What did you want to ask me?”
“If you were happy with your wife before it went bad.”
“I was, which made it so much worse when I caught her with Miguel. I’d had no idea that anything was that wrong. I mean we had our issues, but who doesn’t? It reminded me of what my mom said after my dad left, that she’d had no clue he was unhappy enough to do something like that. Sure, things had been ‘off’ between them for a while, but she didn’t see that coming.” He took a drink of his beer. “What about you? Were you happy before you found out who he was?”
“Blissfully. No one in the history of love had ever been more in love with anyone than I was with him. I’m sure I was completely annoying to everyone who knew us with the way I’d go on and on about how wonderful he was. Only to find out it was all a con. Everything that happened between us was part of his master plan to ruin my life.”
“Why would anyone spend the limited amount of time they have in their lives ruining someone else?”
“I’ve done a lot of reading about the mindset of the sociopath, and I’ve come to understand that it’s not intentional on his part. It’s just how his mind operates. His goal is to maneuver a situation to his optimal benefit at the expense of anyone and everyone who gets in the way. I wasn’t a person to him. My feelings had no bearing on him, so it was nothing for him to hurt me the way he did. It took me a long time to understand the psychology of it. My therapist is the one who first used the word sociopath to describe him.”
“Do you ever wonder…” He fiddled with a paper-wrapped straw that the waitress had left on the table.
“What?”
“How it’s possible you lived through something like that and continue to function somewhat normally?”
“All the time. When I look back on those first few months, all I see is the darkness. My life imploded in one twenty-four-hour period. Everything went from fine to not fine in the literal blink of an eye. For a long time, weeks, I didn’t think I would survive it.”
“How did you?”
“When the full extent of what he’d done became clear to me, I started to get angry. Strangely enough, that helped.”
“I know about that kind of anger. I never thought I could kill someone, but when I saw them together…”
“Which one would you have killed first?” she asked with a grin.
“Him.”
“Why not her? She was the one you were married to.”
“Because he was screwing me twice over by screwing her.”
“I can’t believe you had to see them together that way.” She shuddered. “That had to be the worst.”
“Took a long time to scrub those images from my mind.”
The waitress returned to take their plates, handed a key for a room upstairs to Brianna and asked if they were interested in more drinks or dessert.
“Since I don’t have to drive, I’ll have another,” Noah said. “Anything for you, Brianna?”
“I’ll have one more, too. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the dessert menu.”
“Coming right up,” the waitress said. “The band is here until midnight.” She moved on to tend to other tables.
Brianna looked at him through thick lashes. “I just want to say… I didn’t expect to talk to you like this, and it’s been nice. Thanks for listening to my tale of woe.”
“Likewise and thank you for listening to mine. It’s strangely cathartic to meet someone who’s been through something similar, although yours was much worse. At least my ex didn’t also ruin me financially.”
“You’re lucky.”
The waitress brought their drinks and the dessert menu. When Brianna didn’t see anything that tempted her, the waitress placed the check on the table.
Noah handed her the coupon Mrs. H had given him and his credit card.
“Let’s split it,” Brianna said.
“No worries. I’ve got it. And I was going to say that I already owned my house and my business when she came along, so my brother, the attorney, strongly suggested a prenup. I was so pissed with him for thinking I’d need that.” Noah smiled at the irony. “He said, ‘You just never know what’s going to happen, and you have assets to protect.’ Thank God I listened to him.”
“You dodged a second bullet with that.”
“No kidding. I probably ought to thank Grayson for that one of these days.”
“You really should. He saved you an even bigger headache than you already had.”
“It’s funny… I hated having to tell her that my brother was recommending a prenup. I thought that was a shitty way for her to start with my family. But she said she understood he was protecting me and signed it without another word about it. In the end, it was no big deal between her and me, but it sure saved my ass when shit went sideways.”
“Jeez, no kidding, huh? Imagine having her as your partner in the business after what she did.”
Noah cringed as he laughed. “Thanks for putting that thought in my head.”
“Sorry.”
“I feel like I’ve had three years’ worth of therapy over one dinner,” Noah said. “Thanks for that.”
“I’d say it was my pleasure, but I sure hate to hear that anyone else has had a similar thing happen. I’ve found it helps to talk about it, though. Keeping it all bottled up inside isn’t healthy. I don’t want to hold on to all that shit.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. My MO has been to keep it all to myself, if for no other reason than it was so freaking embarrassing. My wife and my best friend-slash-top employee? Seriously? Like was there no one else for her to screw? It had to be him?”
“That makes it so much worse than it would’ve been if it had just screwed up your marriage.”
“So much worse.”
“If you want to move on from it, you should tell people what happened. You’re not the villain in that story, Noah. Someone did this to you. No need to suffer in silence over it. The longer you do that, the longer the two of them get a pass with the people in your life.”
“That’s true. If my sisters ran into her somewhere, they’d probably be glad to see her. They liked her.”
“Yeah, you need to tell them what she did. She doesn’t deserve to be treated well by anyone in your life.”
“How much do you charge for this advice?”
“Free of charge in exchange for some baked beans and coleslaw.”
“Don’t forget the cornbread and vodka.”
“Ah, yes, that, too.”
“Not to mention deluxe accommodations at the Pig’s Belly Tavern.”
“And for this, I went to medical school.”
“Did you?” he asked, stunned.
She cracked up. “No, I was just rolling with the shrink thing.”
As Noah laughed—again—he realized he’d done that more in the last couple of hours than he had in years. He’d lost his sense of humor along with his best friend, his wife and the life he’d thought he was going to have with them both by his side. “Enough of this depressing shit. Let’s go dance.”
