Chapter 6 – Damaged

Adeline sat in the passenger seat of her own car, occasionally sipping out of the bottle he had given her, unsure of what to say. This attack had lasted about thirty minutes. He had sat with her for a couple of those in the auto shop, but once she had calmed down enough to stop shaking he had helped her out to the car.

He had put her in the passenger seat, climbed into her driver's seat, and they had sat there since – her struggling to breathe, him struggling to say something that might help.

“I'm sorry,” she finally said to him. She twisted the almost-empty bottle in both hands and looked down at her lap, almost feeling shame for what had happened.

“Sorry for what?” he said.

“I don't know. Sorry for freaking out again, sorry that you had to see it, sorry that you had to sit here helpless.”

“Those are pretty stupid things to be sorry for,” he said with a smile. “I thought you were going to say you were sorry for not telling me the first time it happened, so when it happened again I could be a little more...prepared for it.”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling a little more shame creep in. “I'm sorry for that too.”

“I was kidding.” He looked over at her and smiled again. “Mostly, anyway. Why didn't you tell me what happened that night?”

“That I'm literally a nervous wreck? Yeah, that's really something I'm comfortable telling you outright.”

“You're not a wreck,” he said. “You have an anxiety disorder. When you started calming down, I did a little research on my phone. The trouble breathing, the tunnel vision, the screaming...these happen a lot, don't they?”

She wanted to speak, but all she could do was nod her head.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. He turned the keys in the ignition and threw the car into reverse. “Let's get you home.”

They were both quiet on the drive home. By that time, it was almost noon and the traffic was heavier from people getting off work to grab their lunch.

As they were stalled at a red light, she got up the courage to look over at him. He had his sunglasses on, but the rest of his face was covered with concern.

That's when she finally saw it – the real Lance. This was what Stephanie had talked about for the past month. This is the man that Stephanie saw behind the nasty attitude.

He actually was human.

The light turned green and as he slowly followed traffic, she looked away from him. She couldn't bear to look at him, knowing the things she had said to him and what she had thought about him behind his back.

She had been an awful person. To her, it was no excuse that he had been awful too. As mean as he had sometimes been – he had shown her too many good moments, moments where he made an effort to get to know her. She had blown him off and then opened an old wound to intentionally hurt him.

She couldn't excuse herself.

A few minutes later he pulled into her parking lot and parked the car. As she was preparing to get out of the car, he unbuckled his seat belt and opened the car door.

“Are you grabbing a cab?” she asked.

“Not for a while,” he said. “I'm staying with you to make sure you'll be okay.”

Her own shock hit her, and he must have saw it on her face.

“That's okay, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “That's great, in fact. I didn't expect it, that's all.”

They rode the elevator up her building in silence. She wasn't sure what to say to him – after all, for the past three weeks, the only side of him she had seen was the unpleasant one. Suddenly, he had become more than pleasant. This was a side she wasn't used to seeing.

They got off the elevator and walked a couple doors down to her apartment door. When he stood there for a few moments, not knowing what to do, she smiled.

“You have my keys,” she said shyly. “My apartment key is on my keychain.”

“Oh,” he said, then laughed.

“The place is a little unkempt,” she said as he unlocked the door. “I'm usually so busy, I don't get a chance to unpack a lot.”

“The first thing you do when you come into my apartment every morning is pick up my dirty clothes and dishes,” he said as he pushed open the door. “You'll have to do a little better than a few unpacked boxes to impress the king of bachelorhood.”

She stepped past him into her apartment, immediately self-conscience about him seeing the place. It wasn't as put together as his place was. She had only finally had time to get her dishes and silverware unpacked the weekend before, and her living room was still littered with boxes of movies, pictures, and a few of her favorite books and magazines.

“At least I finally have a place for you to sit,” she said as she grabbed the door and shut it behind him.

“This is a nice place,” he said as he looked around. “I never saw the place when Stephanie was living here.”

“It's a place,” she said with a shrug. “It's a little smaller than what I'm used to living in, but since I'm here alone...” She paused. “You know, it's okay.”

“I don't want to be nosy, but I have to ask – why are you here alone? Why didn't your husband move with you?”

“He does most of his business out of LA, Paris, Prague...whatever pretentious and exotic location that his filming sends him to,” she said after a pause. “He never comes to New York unless he absolutely has to, he hates the place; he figured if he moved with me, he'd spend most of his time on a plane or in another city anyway. So we decided it would be best if I came alone.”

“That's a little cold,” he said.

“You don't know my husband very well,” she said.

He wandered over to the side table where he saw a black and white photo in a brushed silver frame – obviously a wedding photo, since he saw Adeline in a gown.

“This is you and him?” he asked her.

“Yeah. That's our wedding photo.”

He looked at the photo for a few seconds, focusing more on her than her husband. He pored over every detail of her that he could see – creamy, smooth skin, the teardrop-shaped diamond earrings, the curly wisps of hair that had fallen out of her up-do – and particularly her smile. He hadn't ever seen that smile.

“You look happy,” he said. “And you look beautiful.”

Outwardly, she blushed; inwardly, she felt her heart jump.

“You want some coffee?” she asked. “It's been a bit of a rough morning.”

“Like I need the caffeine,” he said. “But yes.”

While she brewed the coffee, he walked around her living room, taking in every detail. Most of the furniture in her living room was muted earth tone colors, which didn't surprise him when he considered her mostly muted personality. All her wood furniture was dark and well taken care of, as if she dusted it every day. Aside from a few boxes, everything was clean and tidy compared to his apartment. If he had walked in without knowing her, he would immediately know it was a woman's apartment.

It surprised him that she didn't have many pictures out. Aside from the wedding photo on the end table and two other photos – one of her and her husband, and a photo of her with Stephanie – there was no visual cue to the owner of the apartment anywhere. She had a small wooden chest sitting by her couch, with a woven basket on top of it, full of neatly coiled balls of yarn. Her TV and entertainment center were small, unlike what he had at home. Across the top of the couch laid a crocheted afghan that looked old enough to be from the late-70's.

The last place his eyes took him was to a small bookcase in one of her corners. Beside it sat one of her boxes, half-full of small paperback books. Unpacked on the shelves were a handful of others – a leather-backed Bible, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Les Misérables, and Northanger Abbey just on the first shelf. On the second, she had chaotically stacked a random collection of Nora Roberts, Julie Garwood, Patricia Cornwell and Nicholas Sparks books. Hiding in the corner on the third and last shelf, closest to the box, were a couple of tattered Harlequin paperbacks, and he smiled.

Of course; she's a woman, he thought to himself.

“You sure are nosy.”

Her voice startled him and he stood up in a hurry, turning around to see her putting two coffee mugs on the table in front of the couch.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was checking out your books. You have quite a collection here.”

“Oh, yeah, I haven't gotten most of those unpacked yet. I'm working on it.”

He knelt down to look again. “You have some great classics here.” He picked up one of the tattered romance paperbacks and held it up with a smile. “And then you have some hidden gems.”

“Oh,” she said, blushing slightly. “Jeez, don't look at those. Those are mostly my Nana's. It's her fault – I'm quite embarrassed by the fact that I like those because of her.”

“I think you have a good range. I respect your tastes – to be honest, I tried to make it through some of these and I don't have the attention span.”

“Well,” she said with a smile, “there's no surprise there.”

They both sat down on the couch, right next to each other.

“So,” he said, “I was looking through your living room and I realized that I don't know a lot about you.”

“I guess we've never taken the time to get to know each other that well, have we?”

“Not really. So did you grow up in LA?”

“No.” She sipped out of her mug and pulled her legs underneath her body. “Actually, I grew up here in New York.”

“Really?” he asked in surprise.

“Yeah. Lower Manhattan until I was eleven, and then I moved to Hoboken. I didn't move to LA until I graduated high school. I went to USC on a full scholarship.”

“Pretty impressive,” he said. “How did you meet Stephanie?”

“Well, you know her and her family came here from Australia when she was young – when they moved to Manhattan, she lived a few houses down from me. After I moved to Hoboken we didn't go to the same school so we didn't see each other anymore, but we found each other at USC. Funny thing that the two of us both went to school to pursue the same thing.”

“Why did you move to Los Angeles anyway?”

“I've always had a bad case of stars in the eyes. My Nana was a huge fan of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn. She always talked about how it would be nice to be them – rich, beautiful, and spending most of your days sunbathing by the beach. Naturally, I picked that up and I moved to LA because I thought it would be like that – I was three years into my degree before I realized that it was nothing like that, but by that time I had gone too far to quit.”

“Don't we all wish it was actually like that,” he said with a laugh. He looked over and saw the basket from before, and curiosity piqued him. “What is that?” he said as he pointed at it.

She looked over at the basket and then back at him.

“Oh, that's my knitting stuff.”

“No way,” he said.

“No way what?”

“You don't seem like a person who would knit,” he said.

“My Nana taught me when I was about fourteen. She crocheted, too – mostly afghans and stuff though.”

She looked behind her on the couch at the afghan thrown over the back. She ran a hand over it gently.

“I tried to make one of these a long time ago and I had zero patience for it because these things take forever. I'm more of a 'scarf that turns into a potholder because it takes too long' person. But Nana had all the patience in the world for this. For six years I don't think I ever saw her without a project in her hands, unless she was taking care of me.”

“Your Nana's important to you, I take it.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Do your parents still live around this area?”

She looked away from him.

“My parents died when I was eleven years old.”

The energy in the room became somber.

“What happened?” he asked.

“They went to the Catskills for their anniversary. My dad's boss owned a cabin there and he let them use it for the weekend. I stayed with Nana in Hoboken for the weekend, and I remember that I missed them so much that she let me play with her antique China tea sets to help me feel better. She let me set up a tea party on the picnic table outside and brought out all my stuffed animals, and she made cookies and little muffins. We played tea party all weekend and I had so much fun that I forgot all about missing my parents.”

The grin on her face made him smile.

“My parents were the adventurous type,” she said, the smile disappearing. “If they had a choice they would take the winding mountain road over the safe and straight one. But my dad was horrible with directions – every single road trip we took, he always got us lost at least once. On the way back to New Jersey he was looking for his exit. There was a guy in a van driving the opposite way.”

Lance noticed that she was starting to choke up.

“He was too busy trying to find a good radio station, and he wasn't paying attention to the road. He, um...he veered into my dad's lane, my dad didn't see him in time, and they ended up colliding head-on. My parent's car flipped three times and finally landed upside-down on the road. The guy in the van walked away with a broken leg, a fractured wrist, a couple broken ribs and whiplash – my parents died on impact.”

He reached over and grabbed her hand, and even though she wondered why, she grasped it tightly.

“All I remember about that Sunday is that Nana got a phone call and she sat in her rocking chair and cried. That night I asked her why my parents hadn't come to pick me up yet because I had school the next day, and she told me that they were gone, and I'd be living with her from now on. I don't remember moving my stuff into her house, or the funeral. I vaguely remember leaving all my friends behind in Manhattan and saying goodbye. My Nana became my best friend.”

“She sounds like a great person,” he said. “I'd love to meet her.”

“Nana's gone, too,” she said, choking up again. “I was working in LA when she died. Her next-door neighbor, her best friend for over sixty years...that's who called me. A couple days before it happened I had talked to her on the phone, and I asked her how she did it, how she took me in and cared for me at her age, no second thoughts about it. She didn't have an answer – she didn't even know why I would ask such a question, why it would even cross my mind that she wouldn't take care of me. That's who she was. Anyway, I stayed in Jersey long enough to bury her, settle the will and sell the house. I think I was there a month and when I left for LA again, I told myself I would never come back to Jersey or New York. I've ended up coming back twice.”

“Addy...I'm so sorry.”

He squeezed her hand one more time, and she wiped away a tear.

“What was the other time for?” he asked.

“What?”

“You said you've come back to New York twice since then – obviously this is the second time. What was the first time for?”

For a moment she didn't say anything, nor did she look at him. There was a brief time that she closed her eyes, exhaled a breath, and he saw another tear slide down her cheek.

“Addy?”

“I'm sorry,” she said. When she looked up at him, her eyes were filled with tears. “I'm sorry that I have to do this, and it's nothing personal, but I need some time. I can't do this today.”

Before he could respond, she stood up from the couch, grabbed both coffee mugs off the table, and carried them into the kitchen.

He sat stunned, his mouth hanging. He had thought it was going well, despite the fact he had inadvertently brought up some memories that were obviously hard for her. Had he said too much, or gone too far?

“Okay,” he finally said when she walked back in the room. “Um...I guess I'll go outside and call a cab.”

“I know I keep doing this to you, blowing you off,” she said. “But this time, I'm really sorry. I just...I can't.”

“It's fine. I just want to make sure you're going to be okay,” he said.

“I'll be fine, eventually.”

Hearing what he needed to hear, that she would be okay, he started walking toward the door. She opened it for him and after he passed the threshold, he was about to head toward her elevator.

“Lance...”

He turned to her, to see her looking at him.

“All you need to know right now is...I'm damaged,” she said. “I think I'm damaged beyond repair. Marc can't fix me, Steph can't fix me...neither can you.”

He narrowed his eyes at her, puzzled.

“Please don't try to fix me,” she said.

She closed the door and he heard the deadbolt click. He shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and walked towards the elevator, preparing himself to stand out in the chilly air waiting for his cab.

She was amazing – and he had to figure her out.