Sweet Ache

Chapter 27

HAWKIN

My arms scream and sweat runs down my chest. I have no fucking clue how long I’ve been banging on the drums, but I know that a part of me feels a little more whole while the rest of me feels a lot more empty.

The beat bangs in my ears like my dad’s words to me over and over and over. And as fucked up as my head is right now, all I can think about is how wrong he was. And how absolutely right he was. It makes no fucking sense though. So I pound a little bit harder, try to lose myself in the rhythm I can’t find to try to cover up the pain some when all I want to do is drown in it.

He told me love would make me weak, would kill me just like it did him. Well, I loved him, I loved my mom and both of them have brought me to my knees today with their lies and made me weaker than I’ve ever felt in my life.

How’s that for fucking irony?

Just when I’m ready to take a chance and step out of the goddamn box he put me in, I feel like I’m blindsided by the truth that I’m just as weak as he was. My mom just proved that by knocking me to my knees with the hidden secrets she’s kept locked in her erratic mind. The one woman I’ve loved … just made me weak. So these fucking drums are taking the punishment I’d love to throw his way right now.

When my mom screamed those words to me—the hatred, the accusations, the hurt—I swear that the image of the aftermath of my dad pulling the trigger flashed in my mind. But along with the old ones etched there came new memories. Ones so bright and powerful, they knocked the air from my lungs and no matter how hard I pushed them away, they just kept coming.

In that split second of time, I tried to rationalize that it was the Alzheimer’s fabricating lies but deep down, I knew they were true. It was almost like hearing those words opened my subconscious, allowed me to remember details that the fog of his suicide repressed: the crammed suitcase on my parents’ bed, my mom’s red-rimmed eyes that morning she’d blamed on allergies, the continual guilt my mom carried like a badge before she transferred it unknowingly to me.

The images spin out of control. They are so vague and yet are so fucking vivid at the same time. I can’t breathe. I want to throw up. I want to scream. To cry. To slide under the haze of alcohol and numb myself. To fade away for a bit.

Must run in the family.

The thought is distracting enough that my arms give out and the drumsticks slip from my hands to the floor below with a clatter. I grit my teeth and clench my fists and yet don’t even have the fight in me to want to throw a goddamn punch in the air.

I know she’s there, sitting on the couch she hasn’t moved from since she brought me home to bang on Giz’s drums. Something about the gesture, the fact that she remembered I said that’s what I do when I can’t process life, breaks momentarily through the haze of my confusion.

“I’m sorry I brought you there today, that you had to see that … but I wanted you to know.” The words are out of my mouth so softly that she shouldn’t hear them and yet I know she does because I hear her shifting on the couch. She must be wondering what the fuck to do, but truth be told, I don’t even know. I mean, who the hell am I? A man who has lived another man’s principles his whole life only to find out they were a lie?

“I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to stay or be alone….” Quin’s quiet voice pulls me from the goddamn tornado of incoherency in my head and heart. I can hear the hesitancy in her voice but I don’t have it in me to look at her just yet because I’m afraid if I do she’s going to see more of me than I can through this fog of confusion. Silence suffocates the room, both of us unsure of what step to take next.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Do I want to talk to her about it? Fuck no. How do I explain to her that the rug’s been yanked so fucking hard out from under my feet that I don’t even know where to land? Between punching Hunter and now this, the goddamn ground has shifted so much I think it’s going to take a long fucking time for it to feel steady again.

But at the same time, I bite back all of the words on my tongue that want to come tumbling out because for the first time in forever, someone besides Hunter was there, someone knows what I go through to an extent. And as fucking cruel as it was for me to throw her into my fucked-up situation, I feel a tinge of relief for having her there.

“I don’t even know what to say.” I shake my head back and forth as I pick up my shirt beside me and scrub it over my face to buy myself time. When I lower my shirt, I raise my eyes to meet hers, and I don’t know what I expected when I look at her but what I see causes my throat to burn. I see compassion instead of disgust, acceptance in lieu of judgment, pride not shame, and the combination of them all is more than I can process in my already overloaded system.

Her quiet empathy makes me feel things that are wrong to feel right now in the midst of me questioning everything about myself. And yet it’s still there. That need to pull her against me and just cling to her, to have someone be there when before I would have probably pushed her so goddamn hard the other way.

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I know, it’s just … fuck …” I run my hand back through my hair again and don’t know how to explain the emotions inside me. Almost like a cargo truck has turned on its side and all of this has come spilling out all over the place. “The only way I can explain it is like this. What if my dad told me that day that the sky was green? That no matter what anyone said, he was right and they were wrong. So I’ve spent my whole life believing that the sky is green. Fighting against the tide to prove otherwise, wearing blinders to the obvious. Would stake my life on the claim. And then one day someone ripped the blinders off for me to find that this whole time, my entire life, I’ve lived fighting to believe something, love a certain way, and it’s fucking wrong. The sky is really fucking blue.”

Tears well in her eyes as she nods solemnly to tell me she understands what I’m saying although I know she has no fucking clue. No one does.

“I don’t know which way is up right now, what to believe anymore.” I don’t want to talk about anything and yet I keep doing just that.

“Well, everyone’s version of which way is up is different so don’t try to figure that out just yet. Who cares if you’re sideways for a bit? That’s allowed, Hawke, and perfectly understandable.”

I squeeze my eyes shut momentarily. Memories flicker and flame through my mind. The four of us happy. That horrible day, the sound of the gunshot, the blood, the smell, the scream that never came frozen in my throat forever. The three of us mourning. Hunter and me trying to survive as our mom held on to the thin thread holding her to reality. Losing my twin bit by bit. Fighting like hell to keep it all together, protect them, provide for them. The times I’d start to feel that twinge of something in my gut for a woman only to shove her away because she just might make me love her. How hard I fought against so many things, how alone I’ve felt … and it was all a lie.

Every fucking thing.

“When my dad … that day,” I start to say, focusing on the wear patterns of the mid-tom because I can’t look her in the eyes while I explain how stupid I was to believe my dad blindly. “He made me promise that I’d take care of my family at all costs. He told me that when you let someone in, you lower your guard for love, you open yourself up to the worst hurt of all. You prove you’re weak … and when you are weak, you end up like him.”

The sharp inhale of her breath at my comment followed by my name on her lips sends chills over my body. And I don’t need pity for being a stupid, goddamn lemming jumping without thought, following without questioning. And I’m ready to bend over and pick up Giz’s sticks again, deal with how that just made me feel, the fucking acid eating holes in my gut and worming its way into my heart.

“Hawke,” she calls my name again but I can’t meet her eyes. “You were only nine; do you really think it’s fair to judge yourself when what happened probably scared the shit out of you? What normal kid wouldn’t have tried to make him proud by living according to the promises he made you make? You can’t fault yourself for that!”

I know she’s right but it does nothing to abate the years of self-deprecation, the nights spent reliving every moment, the doubt that has ingrained itself into my psyche. “Yeah, but the problem is today just proved my dad right. I let the two people I love the most blindside me.”

“Anyone who loves lets their guard down—whether it be for a pet, for music, for their parent, or for a lover—letting your guard down means that you feel, that you care. And hell yes, you open yourself up to being hurt but my dad used to always say, ‘Hurting is feeling, and feeling is living, and isn’t it good to be alive?’”

I snort aloud, immediately writing off what she’s just said because it hits a little too close to home. I feel alive and numb all at once but the feeling part is so intense I feel like I could sit down and write a thousand songs to get it all out and it still wouldn’t be enough.

And she’s up off her feet in an instant of my nonverbal rebuff and approaches me for the first time since we’ve been in the studio for who knows how the fuck long. She stands in front of me, her face pulled tight with anger, and her hands on my shoulders force me to turn away from the kit to face her. “When you write a song, when you play it on stage, can’t you feel it? Doesn’t it make you feel alive?” She’s not backing down and I’m a little shocked that she’s so in my head she’s confronting me with what I was just thinking myself. “Sure you lose yourself in your music, but you also find yourself, right? It makes you feel so that—”

“Don’t you get it?” I lash out, my anger resurfacing through the haze and unfortunately being directed at her, but I can’t stop myself. “Right now I hate him so goddamn much for doing that to me and in the same breath still love him. How is that not fucked up?” My blood is pumping and my hands start trembling from the rage inside me, my body wanting to shut down but my head refusing.

“Your dad did what he did and it had nothing to do with you.” The quiet calm in her voice stops my mind from spinning for the first time since we left Westbrook. “He may have cheated on your mom, but that’s on him. Your mom may have lied to protect you, to preserve his memory for you, and that’s just being a good parent. It might take a while for you to see it but do you really think she knew what he said to you that day? Do you think she knew by allowing you to keep him as an idol in your life that you’d be left with this burden?”

“It’s easier to live with the guilt.” I don’t know where the confession comes from but it’s out and I can’t take it back.

“Of course it is. You’re human, Hawke. Why should you deserve all of this,” she says, her hands out to the side, motioning at everything in general, “when Hunter can’t get his shit straight, when your mom is fighting with dementia, when your dad took his own life? Of course you feel guilt … but you know what? You worked your ass off to get here, you overcame odds, you do deserve it.”

She might be right but fuck if I want to hear it right now. I don’t care if it was for my benefit or not…. Maybe I do…. Fuck! I can’t process anything right now: good, bad, truth, lies, love, hate. I’ve toed the edge on some of them, but have always held the few ideals to be my grounding truth to find out they were all bullshit principles he never lived by himself. So I’ve lived a life full of empty connections because I was so fucking scared to end up a mess of blood and gray matter and hopelessness that I never allowed myself to love someone.

I just stare at Quinlan in front of me and recall how earlier I thought it was time to rewrite my own life some. I wonder why after all of this time I finally had thoughts of stepping outside my comfort zone and was feeling like in doing so I was going to let my dad down. And then this happened.

Fate’s a fickle, funny bitch sometimes.

“Hawke?” Quinlan looks at me and despite the hesitancy in her eyes she steps in between my legs and puts her arms around me, pulling me into her. I sit, kind of stunned because her touch, her compassion, physically hurts me. It’s like I don’t deserve this from her, don’t want to accept it, yet within moments I’ve tugged on her torso and am clinging to her, have dragged her against my chest, and am holding on for dear life. The need to need someone is so profound I can’t catch my breath.

I fight the ingrained thoughts that want to push her away, to not feel, but that’s all I can do right now is feel. My hand fists in the back of her shirt, my face is buried in her abdomen as I squeeze my eyes shut so goddamn tight because I will not cry but my body shudders with the force of trying to withhold it.

And Quin just holds me tight, giving me all of the comfort I’ve needed from my mom for so many years. I’ve found consolation over the years between the thighs of a willing candidate but not like this, not making myself vulnerable, not needing someone. As unsettling as it feels, I can’t let go, can’t pull away from her and her quiet murmurs of soothing and the silent support of her arms.

“It’s okay to need me …” she says and then falls quiet. I just pull her in tighter and I’m sure she can’t breathe but it’s okay because right now I’ll be her fucking air so long as she doesn’t let go of me.

And that thought … the immediacy of it as it runs through my head almost knocks me as far back as the confession from my mom’s lips.

The funny thing is that even with all the shit I’m trying to process, I don’t know why that one thing doesn’t scare the fuck out of me. Why of all of the revelations I’ve come to today, having Quin here with me feels more right than I ever could have imagined.