In Full Bloom (Second Chances 1)

“Can we talk about what happened tonight?” he asked.

She sighed and said, “I guess we need to.”

“I’m not going to force you to talk about it. You’re clearly thinking about it, though. I know that I am.”

She nodded and said, “That was my ex, Jeremy. We dated my sophomore and junior year of college. He wasn’t a very nice guy.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“I was very shy in high school. I studied a lot. I didn’t get a lot of attention from guys. I don’t know, looking back, if he was interested in me because he knew I’d be easy to manipulate or if he was genuinely attracted to me. I guess I was naive at the time, but it was an emotionally abusive relationship. He would always make digs about me. Suggestions about how I shouldn’t wear certain things or maybe I shouldn’t eat that or that maybe I should drop some weight. Small things that eventually undermined my self-esteem.”

Evan tightened his hands on the steering wheel, wishing that he’d gone with his instinct to haul off and hit the guy. He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to deliberately hurt someone like Taryn.

“I don’t know if it was the whole orphan thing, or what, but I was just happy to have some sort of attention. It was negative attention, but it was attention.”

Clearing her throat, she continued, “So one day during my junior year, this was right after I had started hanging out with Cora again, I dropped by his dorm to surprise him. It was so cliché. He was banging some questionably legal girl. Naturally, I freaked out. He ended up turning it around on me. He said that I was always busy studying, that I didn’t pay him enough attention, that I wasn’t inventive enough in bed. Like every single one of those terribly trite excuses that you’d expect.”

“Please tell me you didn’t fall for that,” Evan said. “Or better yet that you punched him right in the dick.”

“I wish I had,” she said dryly. “Mostly I was in shock. I went home and regrouped. Then went and got myself tested. I sincerely doubt that was the only time he’d cheated on me, so it was a concern.”

“Probably a smart move,” he acknowledged.

“Well, as you know, all that turned out fine. He came around later that night, apologizing and trying to smooth things over. I had spent the majority of my day in a free clinic and I didn’t have any of my test results. I was tired, stressed out, scared out of my mind, and completely done with him at that point.”

“Understandable,” he said, suspecting that the story wasn’t quite over yet.

“He continued to follow me around for a few days, even though I told him to fuck off. One night he barged into my dorm room. I don’t know if he had been drinking, or what. He got into my face, started getting really nasty because he wasn’t able to get me to go back to him. At one point, he grabbed me and shook me. I managed to get him off of me. I grabbed a trophy. It had this marble base. I hit him in the head with it. He bled all over my carpet until I kicked him out and then I called the campus police.”

“Oh, Jesus, baby. I should have decked him like I wanted to,” Evan said.

“I would have enjoyed that. It’s been years, but I’m certain I’d still enjoy that,” she said, a smile in her voice.

“Anyway, after that, I took a long break from dating. I realized that I wasn’t even mad about the cheating. I didn’t have any expectation at all with regards to what I wanted for myself out of a relationship, other than that I wanted attention. That being my only requirement.. it just seemed too dangerous. So I focused on school until…now.”

“That guy was a piece of shit, but at the least it sounds like you learned from the experience,” he said, trying to find anything positive to say about the story she’d just told him.

“I did,” she acknowledged. “I still feel so foolish when I look back on it, though.”

“Not foolish,” he said. “Inexperienced. He sounds like he was manipulator, too. The way that he spoke to you tonight, he was deliberately trying to hurt you.”

“I know he was. That was how he operated back then, too,” she said, annoyance lacing her voice.

He reached over the console and gave her knee a squeeze. It seemed like a completely inadequate way to express the way he was feeling right now. Every time she opened up to tell him more about her life before they met, it seemed to be filled with so much pain.

She put her hand over his and laced her fingers through his. The remainder of the car ride, they both sat in silence. Every so often, he’d give her hand a gentle squeeze, not knowing what else he could really do.

When they walked up the stairs to their apartments, she edged toward her door and said, “I think I’m going to go to bed early.”

He weighed the options for a moment before he asked, “Can I stay with you tonight?”

“If you want to,” she said. “I’m just exhausted.”

It wasn’t exactly brimming with excitement, but he’d take that as agreement. He knew, if left by herself, she’d probably continue to stew about it. He could see the tension on her face again and in the way she held herself. There was no way she was going to be able to sleep any time soon.

After changing, he knocked on her door. When she opened the door, she was dressed in a pair of Hello Kitty boxers and a tank top. A smile pulled across his lips as he said, “Last time I saw these, you had a plastic tiara tangled in your hair.”

She pulled the door open farther and stepped back to let him in, a faint smile on her face. “Not my best look,” she said.