Accusations
Only a few days later I find myself in Halifax in yet another hotel that looks virtually indistinguishable from all the other hotels I’ve temporarily called home over the years. As I stand in the lobby waiting to get my key card, I have to wonder just how many hotels I’ve actually stayed in. Hundreds? A thousand? It’s a staggering thought. I don’t know what it means, but something about it actually terrifies me a little. How have I lived so many lives in just twenty six years?
All these existential thoughts are getting me nowhere. Pondering and wallowing doesn’t solve anything and I know that yet I still can’t seem to do anything else.
Someone hands me a key card and I accept it without a word or even a glance in their direction. I’m on autopilot now, as I have been so many times lately. Key card in hand, I make my way toward the elevator and ride it up to the floor indicated on the card. I’m halfway down the hallway before I realize that someone is trailing behind me. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and immediately I know who is there.
Taylor. Who else could it be?
“Wait up,” he calls out. “I think we’re sharing a room.”
“Of course we are,” I mumble, but I do as he says anyway. Those are, after all, the most words he’s spoken to me in days, if not weeks.
I keep my back to Taylor as I open the room and haul my luggage inside. There’s no reason why I can’t ignore him, too. I’d like to think I’m giving him a taste of his own medicine, but sometimes I’m not sure Taylor can even feel enough for it to matter. Would he even register any sort of pain if he realized I was ignoring him? When I finally do catch a glimpse of him while putting my things away, I see that his face is mostly blank. Mostly. He’s biting hard on his lip, and I know he does that when he’s trying not to let his true feelings out. It’s the first sign of any emotion I’ve seen him express in I don’t even know how long.
If I’m honest, it scares me a little.
Taylor catches my eye for a second, and it’s a second too long. If I thought emotionless Taylor was scary, a Taylor who I can tell is close to breaking down is even scarier—mostly because I know he won’t let me help him. In the past I might have offered anyway; right now I don’t think I have it in me. So I turn away from him and get ready to take a shower, hoping to wash off the traveling funk and my frustration with Taylor.
Of course, he’s the only thing I can think about in the shower, and I don’t mean that in a sexy way. Sometimes I just get so angry with him, and right now is one of those times, even though I don’t know how much of any of this is his fault. I just need someone to blame for how stupidly complicated my life is, and I’m sick of beating myself up for it.
I shower quickly, because it isn’t helping my mental state at all to stand under the spray and mope. I dress in the bathroom and quickly finish getting ready for bed, hoping that I can at least fall asleep quickly and that my sleep won’t be plagued with stupid dreams about the guy in the next bed.
Of course, he isn’t in the next bed.
When I walk back into the room, I see that Taylor has made himself at home in the bed I had clearly claimed for myself. He watched me set my bag down on it—the bag that is now in the floor next to it—and plug my phone up on that side of the bedside table. Yet he’s stripped down to his boxer briefs and sprawled across the bed as thought he owned it.
Sometimes Taylor is really good at reminding me why I want to blame him for everything.
Rather than fight him on this, I simply turn the light off and curl up in the other bed. As before, Taylor has left the television on, the volume turned almost all the way down. It’s still just enough noise to quiet my brain, though, and it isn’t long before I feel myself drifting off.
“Zac,” Taylor whispers.
So much for sleeping.
I groan, and Taylor seems to take this as an invitation. It’s only a matter of seconds before I feel the bed shifting under his weight. I slide further away until I’m nearly falling off the edge of the bed, but Taylor follows me the entire way.
“Are you mad at me?” He asks.
“What gives you that impression?” I ask. “You’d actually have to pay some sort of attention to me to come to that conclusion.”
“You are mad,” Taylor states plainly, sounding completely defeated as though he hasn’t done anything to cause that anger.
I sigh. “Just let me go to sleep. I don’t know why you’re bothering.”
“Because this is the only time I can,” he says weakly. “I can’t talk to you when we’re at home. You know that.”
“Why, because you’re scared of what Natalie will do?”
“It sounds stupid when you put it that way,” he replies.
I roll over to face him. “How is that not exactly what you’re doing, Tay? You’re scared of what she will do if you even treat me like I’m still your brother. You’re terrified of your own wife.”
“And do you think I would be if she hadn’t given me reason to be?”
“I don’t know, Tay,” I reply. “I don’t understand you at all. And I don’t understand her at all either.”
“She’s a crazy, manipulative bitch,” he says. “What’s there to understand?”
“Why she didn’t tell Kate about you and me? She knows about Carrick. I… I may have let Kate think that was the secret Nat has been gloating about knowing,” I admit.
“Nat couldn’t say anything about us,” Taylor says. “I mean, she could. But the pictures are gone. I made sure of that. She can talk all she wants but it’s her word against ours.”
“Yet you’re still scared of her.”
Taylor blinks. “Wouldn’t you be? Even if it is just her word, it’s enough to destroy us. And anyway, that’s… that’s not all she has on me.”
“It isn’t?” I ask. Maybe the empty look on Taylor’s face has been an act. He’s still holding himself together somehow, but I can see the cracks. I see him starting to break and let me in more than he has in weeks.
He shakes his head sadly, letting his bangs fall over his eyes. “Have you seen her lately? Since she left the house?”
“Once,” I reply.
“Didn’t you notice that big bruise on her arm?”
I think back, trying to recall how she looked that day at my former house. All I can recall is her evil face, but I suppose there may have been a bruise on her arm. Between her own clumsiness and being a mother of four, Nat’s always sporting some bruise or scratch. I’ve never thought anything of them, but something in Taylor’s voice makes me wonder.
Could he… no. Of course he couldn’t. But haven’t I wondered lately just how well I know Taylor? Maybe the person I want him to be couldn’t hit his wife, but maybe he isn’t that person at all.
“Tay?” I ask, my mouth refusing to form the rest of my question.
He nods, still not meeting my eyes. “When we had that huge fight. The one where I smashed my phone, you know? I threw it at her. She just… she made me so mad. I grabbed her arm and told her she was going to show me where she had hidden every copy of those pictures, and I guess I scared her. Anyway, that’s why I think all the pics really are gone now.”
All I can do is stare at him. The way he tells me about assaulting his wife is so casual that I can’t even believe it. After a moment he looks up at me, and the sadness in his eyes shocks me. Maybe he really can feel emotions after all. Maybe even remorse.
“I swear, Zac… I’ve never done anything like that before. I was just… I was scared too, you know? Scared of what she could do to us, and I just lost it. But it doesn’t even matter that I’ve never hit her before, does it? Who will people believe?”
“Why do you assume they will believe her?” I ask.
“If they saw the bruise, they’d believe her,” he replies. “Between that bruise, all the other ones she can’t really explain and this miscarriage… she’s got enough to use against me and create some doubt, and she’s made it perfectly clear that she will. And if she brings us and everything else I’ve ever done wrong into it? She could drag my name through the mud and she’ll come out smelling like roses. There’s nothing I can do.”
“There has to be something,” I reply weakly, even though I don’t really believe it. What can he do?
Taylor shakes his head sadly. “There’s nothing. She can’t prove her accusations, not now, but I can’t prove them false either. It will always be my word against hers, and if people have the slightest suspicion that I’m all the awful things she says I am… and I am some of them… that’s enough. That alone will do enough damage.”
It seems so ridiculous that he should have his hands tied by Nat’s potential accusations, but I know he does. She’s not the innocent little woman that she appears to be. She’s always scheming and plotting something, but to everyone else she still somehow appears innocent. They can’t see who she really is, and for that reason, they will believe what she says. Everyone knows enough of Taylor’s indiscretions. Of the two of them, his character is the most questionable… to everyone but me.
My opinions about Taylor seem to change so quickly that it almost gives me whiplash. I don’t know how he can so easily win me over again. But I love him. No matter what he does, I’ll always be too weak to resist him, and he probably knows that. Maybe he’s just as manipulative as his wife. I try to dismiss that thought as soon as it occurs to me, but it won’t go away.
Could it be true? Is Taylor manipulating me?
I stare into his sad eyes and I just don’t know. I see honesty in them, but can that be faked? Is everything he’s doing just designed to get my sympathy? I don’t know. But I do know that if it is, he won’t tell me the truth, not even if I ask. All I can do is take what he says at face value and trust that he really is stuck between a rock and a hard place with Natalie.
Finally, I give him a nod. “I guess you do have to be careful, then. Toe the line.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter what I want now.”
What he wants. He doesn’t say that it’s me, but that’s implied. Isn’t it? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all part of the manipulation. I don’t want to know the truth. What is true is that we can’t be together as long as Natalie is still controlling him, and for right now, I can see no way he can escape from her. I don’t need any more truth than that.
“I’m sorry,” I say softly, wrapping my arms around him.
Taylor curls up against my chest and doesn’t speak again. In a way, I’m glad. I don’t know if I trust his words, so for right now, I find myself not wanting any more of them. For weeks I thought all I wanted was for him to speak to me, but now I just want to be with him in silence.