Heartbroken Heights Read online

  One of the characters in the old movie on the TV screen grabbed one of those old rotary phones. As the man entered in the number with painful slowness, Chloe thought of her own phone and glanced at the side table to look for it.

  It wasn’t there. Chloe let her listless gaze sweep across the room, checking any flat surface where she may have left it. Her search yielded nothing, and she realized that she must have left her phone in her room or the bathroom sometime after she had abandoned it rather than acknowledge a weeks-worth of concerned texts and calls from David.

  Concerned. Chloe drew the blanket up to her eyes and huffed a loud, mournful sigh into the soft fabric. David had no right to be concerned about Chloe after leading her on like this. Or did she lead herself on by giving herself false hope and loving someone she could obviously never have? Chloe didn’t know who was to blame here, but she did know that she intended to wait a good long while before even considering going out with anyone again. Maybe she would just swear off men altogether and get a dog despite her allergies.

  “I just don’t get it!” The television voiced Chloe’s thoughts. Had she misread all the smiles? The jokes? The long talks over restaurant tables? All the times David called her of his own volition to ask her to spend time with him—to ask her out on dates? He had used the word “date”. Chloe had too.

  Although… there had been that time David ran into Megan. Chloe called him her “friend” when she introduced him to her roommate, not wanting to assume anything. Had that given him the wrong impression?

  But he said he wanted to talk. He wanted to make things work. But what were “things”? That could be a relationship or a friendship, and from the way David acted around Kathleen—what was Chloe supposed to think?

  She couldn’t think, not at the time, and now that she had spent several hours doing nothing but thinking, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know anything more. Her eyes welled up at the very thought of David standing in front of her, looking into her eyes as he confirmed her fears that he had never wanted an unathletic partner who would just slow him down and watch from the sidelines.

  She had thought her to-be boss picking an underqualified but prettier girl over Chloe was bad. This would crush her, and that was why she had left her phone in the bedroom, bathroom or wherever and had no interest in getting up to find it. The possibility of hearing an explanation that would make David’s opposing words and actions make sense wasn’t worth the risk.

  Chloe had thought about calling Stacey, but that was a risk too. Throughout their long friendship, Chloe had come to be both appreciative and apprehensive of her friend’s unfiltered personality. Stacey’s tough-love approach had gotten her through some rough times when her father passed, but had sometimes come off as insensitive enough to hurt Chloe’s feelings. She didn’t know which way she would feel if she called her friend, but she wanted to talk to someone. Anyone.

  Anyone but David, she corrected herself miserably.

  The movie ended, and the cheerful music playing over the credits was too much for Chloe. She turned off the TV, freed her arms so she could reach for her laptop on the other side of the couch and started a video chat, hoping her computer-nerd friend would be on the other end to answer.

  “Hey!” Stacey’s leopard-print glasses and messy brown hair replaced her profile picture of a soccer ball.

  “Hey.”

  The light-grey walls behind Stacey bobbed up and down wildly, then stilled as she settled down to talk. “Alright, that was the most lackluster hey I’ve heard in my life. What’s wrong?”

  Chloe pondered how to turn the destruction of her happiness into a couple understandable sentences. “I stopped seeing David. I don’t even think he ever thought we were together.” Hot tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, but Chloe refused to let them fall. A fold of the soft blanket pressed against her cheek, and she refused to let her only comfort get cold and wet.

  “Huh. Why do you think that?”

  Chloe launched into her explanation, reaching for her water glass for extended sips whenever she felt close to crying.

  “If David wasn’t into you, why would he spend all this time with you? And why would he specifically use the word ‘date’?” Stacey asked, narrowing her eyes dubiously.

  Chloe gave her friend the answer she’d given herself. “I don’t know. But you didn’t see him with Kathleen, Stacey. He’s usually a pretty quiet guy, but with her he was all cheerful and touchy and—"

  “Touchy how?” Stacey asked.

  “Touchy like… like… hugging. Playful shoving. You know, all that gross, cute stuff.” Stuff he and I used to do. Chloe had to get a little more aggressive with her anti-tear strategy and rub them away under the poorly-constructed pretense of scratching her nose.

  “Uh huh,” Stacey said like a doctor gearing up to offer a diagnosis after listening to a list of symptoms. “Stuff like, I don’t know, Cam and I do? Y’know—Cameron, my sister?”

  Of course Chloe knew Cameron, but she also knew that wasn’t the point. “Y-you think Kathleen could be David’s sister?” she asked incredulously.

  “Sure, why not? You said yourself that he wanted to work things out. Why would he even talk that way if he and Kathleen were a thing?”

  Chloe mulled over this new development, fighting back treacherous wisps of hope. She had been too lost in her own inadequacy to even think of the possibility that David and Kathleen could be related. “I guess… I guess he never introduced her as anyone. Like he never said she was his friend or—or anything else. But they don’t look alike at all,” Chloe pointed out the biggest flaw in this theory.

  “She could still be family,” Stacey argued. “I guess you’ll just have to call him back and find out.”

  “But what if she isn’t? Then I look stupid and naive.”

  “Then she isn’t. Maybe she’s just a really good friend of his.” Stacey shrugged her shoulders. “But I know you’ll regret it if you don’t talk to him before he leaves.”

  Chloe knew that. She knew it with all her heart. She just didn’t know if she would regret it more than talking to him and hearing the wrong thing. “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Anyway, I was just on my way out the door, but call me if you need anything else, okay?”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  Chloe closed her laptop slowly. All her tears, feelings and speculation came back to one truth—she didn’t know who Kathleen was to David, and he was the only person she could ask.

  Slowly, determination burned a pathway into Chloe’s heart. She didn’t know what Kathleen meant to David, and she didn’t know why he wanted to work things out if he didn’t even believe she could try his sport… but she was going to find out. She owed that much to herself, because during the months she had spent getting to know David, she had done something that she had never expected.

  She had fallen in love, and Stacey was right. This wasn’t something she could give up without a fight, even if the fight was against her own insecurities.

  Chapter Twelve: David

  “Hey Julian,” David started slowly.

  The two had been sitting next to each other and eating breakfast in silence for several minutes, so Julian looked up, surprised. “Yeah?”

  “I think I might be an idiot.”

  Julian raised an eyebrow over his scrambled eggs. “You have your moments.”

  “Thanks.” David stopped to gather his thoughts, using the pause to check his phone for new messages. There were none. “Kathleen and I went climbing in the canyon on Saturday.”

  “Yeah, I know. You invited me and I couldn’t go, remember?”

  Refusing to be led away from the distressing thought that had plagued him for a couple days now, David forged ahead. “Chloe came too. She ended up being free.”

  “I bet she and Kathleen got along great. They’re kind of alike,” Julian mused.

  “They—" David stopped and thought for a moment. “I guess they are. That’s not the point, though. Chloe’s been acting
off since her trip, and we had an argument in the canyon. Now she hasn’t talked to me in a week.” Now that David had managed to start talking, each consecutive word flowed easier. Why hadn’t he been this eloquent when he talked to Chloe? “I thought she was upset because it’s almost time for me to leave for Georgia, but she wouldn’t even let me talk about that. I was thinking…”

  David hesitated for the last time, wondering if he should just wait for Chloe to call him back instead of talking to Julian. He didn’t like feeling vulnerable and unbalanced. He didn’t like peeling aside his carefully-constructed facade, opening his innermost thoughts and feelings to the judgement of others.

  But more than anything, David had finally realized that he didn’t like being alone. That meant he had to do what Julian had been pushing him to do all along—let people in.

  “I was thinking,” David continued slowly, “and I realized that I may have never told Chloe that Kathleen was my cousin.” It was such a simple thing, but it had taken David days to think of it. He spent yesterday replaying every conversation about or with Kathleen in his mind, trying to remember any instance when he had said “my cousin”.

  There was none. He had never explicitly introduced her as family, and with every day of silence from Chloe that passed, his suspicion that he might be the biggest idiot of all time grew.

  “Well…” Julian trailed off. “That’s probably not very smart.”

  “I know,” David agreed ashamedly. “I just don’t know what to do about it. She won’t talk to me.”

  “You know where she lives,” Julian pointed out. “Go get her, Tiger.”

  “I thought about that.” David refrained from mentioning exactly how much time he had spent imagining just showing up at her door. “But what if that isn’t the issue? Assuming she’s jealous could hurt her feelings.”

  Julian spun his barstool away from the counter so he could look David in the eyes. “How many times has Chloe asked you to take her climbing? And then this beautiful girl shows up—not even shows up—flies to Reno just to climb with you.”

  “It sounds bad, I get it. But Chloe started acting off before she ever met Kathleen or knew she was coming,” David argued.

  “She probably found out about Kathleen somehow from someone or something that wasn’t you, which is even worse. It doesn’t just sound bad. It is bad. No, let me finish,” Julian insisted, cutting David off. “Look, we’ve been friends for a long time. I was there when you got married, and I was there to watch what losing your wife did to you. I couldn’t help you. No one could. You didn’t want help, you just wanted to be alone.”

  The earnestness in Julian’s voice grew. “That changed when you met Chloe. You changed when you met Chloe. You’re better around her. Not even better, actually. You’re just... fine, like nothing ever happened. I feel like I have my best friend back.”

  David dropped Julian’s gaze to watch the seconds tick by on the clock above one of the bookshelves in the living room. Julian had never talked like this before. Never.

  “What I’m saying is that if you don’t go see Chloe and clear things up, I will,” Julian told David with a short, gruff laugh. “I don’t know why you haven’t just told her why you don’t want her to climb, but you need to because you need that girl. So, I’ll say it again. Go get her, Tiger.”

  David didn’t know how to show how deeply Julian’s words had touched him, so he just nodded.

  Julian was right. David had to leave Nevada in just three days. It was now or never, and Julian had shown David that never wasn’t an option.

  So, David grabbed the first pair of shoes he could lay his hands on, closed the front door on an encouraging smile from Julian and traced the familiar path from Julian’s house to Chloe’s apartment—

  —only to realize that it was one in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Chloe wasn’t home. She was at work.

  As though he had aged years in just a few seconds, David slowly lowered himself to sit on the steps leading into her building. Was sitting on her doorstep and waiting three hours for her car to turn the corner romantic or desperate? With any luck, Chloe would interpret it as both, because David wasn’t budging. He came here with a purpose and a plan, and he couldn’t give up now. Julian probably wouldn’t let him back into the house if he did.

  David’s phone rang, startling him out of his reflections. He didn’t know the number, but he decided to answer it anyway. “Hello?” he said, his voice strong with his newfound conviction.

  “H-hi. Uh… it’s Chloe. Sorry, this is my office phone.”

  All the climbing-honed strength in the world couldn’t have prevented David’s phone from slipping out of his surprise-numbed fingers. He didn’t even stop to check it for damage before snatching it up and pressing it to his ear. “Chloe! Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I just needed some time. Can we talk after I get off work? In that plaza where—I mean, the one with the lit-up water fountains?”

  The one she and David had walked through after their ice-skating and steak-dinner date. The one where they had their first real kiss. “Of course, I’ll be there.” A thousand scrambled words had his head spinning, but he managed to contain the mixture of apologies and explanations. It could wait. Everything could wait until they were together again.

  They met exactly where Chloe had said, and they did one better. David found her waiting at the fountain. The biggest one, the one furthest from the sidewalk and closest to the big old church at the back of the plaza… the one with the bench on which they had kissed that perfect night.

  This time, instead of twisting on the bench to sit face to face, they just sat next to each other, gazing across the plaza. For the first time since Chloe’s trip to LA, David’s mind fell silent. A quiet peace grew between them, and during David’s little glances to check on the woman beside him, he could tell that she was using the silence to gather her thoughts too.

  “Hey, I’m sorry.” The fountain bubbled away behind the bench, but David could hear Chloe perfectly. “I really didn’t mean to go so long without texting at least. I just needed some time, and every time I picked up my phone I didn’t know what to say. So I’m sorry for that, and I’m sorry that I lied to you in the canyon. About being alright, I mean.”

  David wished he could reach across the bench and put his arm around Chloe’s slumped shoulders, but he had apologies of his own to make first. “I’m sorry too. I know I act strange when you ask to climb, and you deserved an explanation a long time ago. It’s just not something that’s easy for me to talk about, and… and I was afraid you would think of me differently.”

  “Yeah, I get it.” Chloe’s eyes never left the folded hands in her lap. “It’s because of… well, me.” Chloe gestured at herself, encompassing her body with a frustrated up-down motion of her hands. “Right?”

  David blinked, thoroughly confused. “What? Not at all.” He unhooked Chloe’s hands, taking one and squeezing like he could drive that thought away. “It’s not you, it’s me. And I don’t care how overused that is, because it’s true. I, uh…” David had to stop and bow his head, working at the knot in his throat. “I told you I lost my wife. I didn’t tell you that I lost her in a climbing accident. She, uh… she fell, and I felt like it was my fault. I still do, sometimes.”

  Chloe said nothing, but she didn’t need to. She just rested her other hand over their joined fingers, letting him take as long as he needed.

  “Julian is the only one who understands how much it still affects me, I think. He’s a good guy, and that’s part of… part of the reason I didn’t tell you before, I guess. He hates not being able to help me, and somewhere along the way, helping me turned into fixing me.” David avoided Chloe’s gaze. “I didn’t want you to feel like I needed to be fixed.”

  “David.” Chloe’s soft fingers took David’s jaw and turned his head toward her so she could entrap his gaze. “Why would you think that I would feel that way?” She let go of his chin to reach into her pocket. “Look.”
r />   David took the hard little object, half hidden by her fingers, and raised it to the bright sunlight. The delicate steel engravings on the handle of her father’s pocketknife shone as brightly as when he had rescued it from the canyon floor.

  “I lost my dad,” she reminded him. “He died during my first year of high school. I still think about him all the time, and it still hurts sometimes. Pain like that never goes away, but it does fade, and it doesn’t need to be fixed. It’s a good thing. It means you loved someone deeply enough to care about them and miss them with your whole heart now that they’re gone.”

  David sat silent for a moment. “When did you get so wise?” David asked, trying to smile but not quite managing one. “I guess I never thought of it that way. I thought to get over my wife, I had to forget about her. But I’m starting to see that’s not right at all. I just need to learn to look past the memories and enjoy the little things in the present.”

  He looked Chloe in the eyes, and this time, he managed a real smile.“The little things like sitting on a bench beside a woman I’m crazy about who is okay with me unloading all my problems on her.”

  Chloe didn’t laugh, but her hands gave David’s a little squeeze. “I think that woman doesn’t mind listening.”

  David wanted to laugh, but he still had one more bit of serious talk to work through. “I’ve been getting better lately, but I still hate climbing with people I care about. Watching them up there…” His throat thickened as he gestured toward the sky with one hand. “And then when you kept asking to climb, all I could think about was you falling.”