Falling for Him 3 (Rachel and Peter in Love) Read online

  I sighed, but got in the car quickly and waited while he navigated back onto the street, “Are things at work going okay?”

  “No! And why does it matter to you? It’s not like you can do anything to fix them.”

  Again. Did he hurt me on purpose? I tried not to let my hurt show, but his attitude was starting to rankle. “I can listen. Talking about your problems might help you find a solution,” I offered, wanting to get him to talk to me. This conversation was going all wrong.

  Peter shook his head, “No! I don’t want to talk about work right now.”

  It didn’t seem that Peter wanted to talk about anything. Dinner involved stilted conversations about the mundane, and to any outside observer, we would have looked like two people who had declared a tentative truce for the dinner hour.

  As he dropped me off, he kissed me on the forehead, resisting my attempt to hug him. “Do you want to come up for a while? Karen’s out for the rest of the evening.”

  “No. I’m headed back to work.” Seeing my stare, he realized that he was skating on thin ice and attempted to mollify me, “Let’s try that new Indian restaurant tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up around 5:30 p.m. and maybe we can catch a movie afterwards.”

  I smiled at him and nodded, “That sounds good. I’m sorry things aren’t going well, but they’ll get better. You’ll see. They always do.”

  I jumped out of the car, feeling better about things for the moment.

  My thoughts turned back to the phone conversation I’d just had with Peter: Suddenly it hit me that he was acting in the same way to how he was the first time we met in Yosemite. Aloof. Sarcastic.

  I remembered how much I had disliked him the first time we met. Finding out that the only way I was getting home was to hitch a ride on the back of his bike had been an eye-opening experience. What had started out as a horrible ride back turned out to not only ok, but even spectacular in the end. I had gotten to know the real Peter and found that I liked him. A lot.

  Right now though, nothing was good. Everything went the wrong way. Even thinking about Peter filled me with heartache. For both of us. Is this true love? Isn't this supposed to be easy? And not bring disaster after disaster? Would it be better if we broke up? How can we conquer this obstacle?

  Those questions rattled through my brain the rest of the evening. My heart hurt just considering the possibility to break up with Peter, but each time he let me down, it hurt as well. What’s even worse, each time it hurt a bit more. There was no winning, it seemed.

  I hate Lara! That point I was very clear on. Not only did I hate her for the wrongs she’d done me personally, but she continued to hurt my relationship with Peter, even though she was currently in a psychiatric clinic. Every problem Peter and I experienced, could be traced directly back to her. God, she’s like this evil gray cloud hovering over our relationship, ready to swoop down with a new disaster if even a hint of happiness sneaks in!

  I went to bed that night determined to find a solution to my dilemma soon.

  The next day, Peter showed up early and without calling. I was still in my sweatpants and t-shirt, having spent the afternoon catching up on laundry and housework since it was Saturday.

  “Hey, come on in. I wasn’t expecting you that early, so I’m not ready, but I can get changed really quick.”

  Peter looked me over and shook his head, “Don’t bother. I’m not really feeling up to going out anyway.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and asked, “Then what are you doing here? Did you just want to hang out for a while and perhaps order in?”

  Peter shook his head, “No.” He pushed his hands through his hair and stalked around the room, “I’m not sure why I’m here. I should probably just leave you alone and let you get on with your life.”

  What?! Before I could ask for an explanation or respond, he headed towards the door. “Stop! You’re so not walking out on me without an explanation!”

  “Rachel, I…I’m no good for you. I’m no good for anybody, especially right now. Perhaps after Lara…”

  “Shut. Up. Don’t you mention that bitches name in my home! I won’t have it. She’s looney tunes and you’re letting her ruin your life with some misplaced sense of guilt over something that was beyond your control. Shit, Peter, her own father didn’t even recognize how ill she was!”

  “Don’t talk about her like that! She’s sick and needs help! My breaking up with her was just the last straw and pushed her over the edge…”

  “Listen to yourself! I’m so sick and tired of hearing you blame yourself. Peter, it’s not your fault she tried to kill herself!”

  “Yes, it is. If I hadn’t gotten involved with her in the first place…”

  “So, now you want to turn back time. You realize it doesn’t work that way, do you? Why are you giving her so much power? Do you want to be back with her instead of with me?”

  Peter looked aghast at that suggestion, “Hell no! Why would you even ask such a thing?”

  “Try looking at things from my perspective. You don’t talk to me. You never have time for us anymore. You’re sullen and withdrawn when we are together.”

  “Great! The solution to our problem is staring us both in the face. I’m leaving. This relationship, or whatever it was, is over. I won’t have to worry about hurting you and you can get on with your life!” Peter slammed the door open and stomped towards his car.

  I was so furious with him; it took several minutes for the reality of what had just transpired to register. Peter just broke up with me! Or did I just break up with him? Did we really just break up over Lara?

  When I finally came back to my senses, I hollered at him to return, but he was already pulling away from the curb. I started to cry and hurried back inside my apartment. I searched frantically until I found my cell phone and then dialed his number. Come on Peter; answer the phone so I can apologize.

  I knew my comments and lack of understanding had pushed him over the edge. I regretted speaking the truth in such a brash way, but he’d also been pushing me to react.

  When the call went to voice mail, I tried again, crying harder when it immediately went to voicemail indicating he’d turned the phone completely off.

  I collapsed on the sofa, crying for our broken relationship, for the misplaced guilt that was eating him alive, for the future that might never be.

  Karen and Robert found me in that position ten minutes later. Karen took one look at my tear-stained face and kissed Robert “Goodbye.” She waited until Robert had left and closed the door before she rounded on me, “Peter?”

  I simply nodded my head, crying and talking at the same time was so difficult. “Ice cream?” she asked, going to our universal stand-by.

  “That…won’t…help this…time,” I cried.

  Karen shook her head as she joined me on the couch. She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and let me cry. When my tears had subsided somewhat, she handed me some tissues and I dried my eyes as I spilled everything.

  I told her how concerned I was for Peter and she told me that Robert and his friends were also very concerned. Robert and Peter knew each other from high school and they had been best friends since that time. He possessed inside knowledge about events in Peter’s life that I hadn’t ever heard.

  It seems that Peter had forgotten to mention the way his mother died. Karen told me what she knew and then called Robert and invited him back over, asking him to bring pizza and chocolate chip cookie dough with him.

  Robert returned a few minutes later and helped fill in the blanks about Peter’s childhood.

  “Peter’s mom was always a little depressed. I guess no one ever questioned why or if there was a cure. According to what Peter said when we were schoolmates, his mom suffered a nervous breakdown when he was 10. They didn’t have fancy treatment centers back then, nor could they have afforded one. Her doctor prescribed some anti-depressants for her, but they didn’t work.”

  “Wow. That explains some things.”

&n
bsp; Robert nodded; “There’s still more, Rachel. A few years later he came home from school one afternoon to find his mother lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. She had slit her wrists and bled out and was already dead.”

  No wonder he’s taking Lara’s attempted suicide so hard! It must have been almost unbearable for a teenager to find his dead mother.

  “Oh my God! Poor Peter! He must have been devastated!”

  “From what I can tell, Peter blames himself for his mother’s death. He seems to believe that he should have done more for her, supported her to get the proper medical help.”

  “But he was only a kid! Didn’t he get counseling or something afterwards?” I exclaimed.

  “Not that I’m aware of. If he did, he never talked about it. He still wasn’t quite over it when we were seventeen and ready to go to college. I could tell whenever he spoke about his mom that he was still carrying around a huge load of guilt over her death.”

  “Well, that kind of explains why he’s reacted to the situation with Lara the way he has.”

  “Maybe, but at some point he has to deal with his past. Several of us were hoping that you would be able to help him through this situation.”

  I shook my head sadly, “He doesn’t want my help. I’ve been supportive, understanding, forgiving…nothing seems to make a difference.”

  “So was the fight about anything in particular?” Robert asked.

  I felt ashamed when I realized the accusations I had thrown at him and how they would have been received in his current state of mind. “I basically told him to get over himself and that I was tired of seeing him blame himself for Lara’s shortcomings. I said some not so nice things about her as well.”

  “Let me guess, he defended her to you?” Robert said.

  “Yeah! “

  The room grew painfully silent as we all three tried to come up with a solution to the problem at hand. Peter needed our help, but we were at a loss for how to help someone who didn’t want to be helped.

  Karen was the first one to speak, breaking the tense silence. “If he doesn’t deal with his inner demons, he’s going to be in trouble. They’ll just keep festering until they eat him alive and he finds himself in the same place Lara is.”

  The hopelessness of the situation reminded me of my very own inner demons. My father had left my mom and me when I was only eight years old. That was an ugly time in my life and I remembered witnessing more fights than any child should ever have to. Thinking back on it, that time in my life had been almost more than I could bear.

  The fighting had started to go beyond the verbal, hedging into the physical, when my father had called it quits. I remember the last thing he said to my mom, "You and that kid; that's just too much for me."

  Then he left. He just walked right out the back door of the small house where we lived and never came back. Thinking back on it, I recognized that this was the turning point in my life. From then on, I never felt really worthy of love anymore.

  My mother retracted emotionally, withdrawing into herself, which left me feeling as if the whole thing was my fault. For years, I thought that my father had left solely because of me. Even now, I still didn’t have a loving relationship with my mother. We never again became close to each other and she’d always been the last person I would come to seek advice. But that’s a problem for another day! Right now, Peter was my biggest worry and he deserved and needed all of my focus.

  Chapter 6

  Robert visited Peter in his office the next morning. “Hey, what’s up?” he said as he was let into the office by the secretary.

  Peter scowled at the woman as she turned and left. “Not much. What are you doing in this part of town?”

  “I was wondering if you wanted to grab some coffee. Let’s catch up, we haven’t been out for what seems like ages.”

  Peter folded his hands on his desk, “Did Rachel come crying to you?”

  Robert sensed that he was walking a very fine line with Peter right now, so he answered carefully, “She was upset when I brought Karen home last night. You wouldn’t happen to know what she was upset about, would you?”

  “Robert, don’t play games with me. We’ve known each other too long for that shit. I’m sure she told you everything that’s been going on and you and Karen have both drawn your own conclusions. But this is between Rachel and I. We’ll work it out. You, go and mind your own business!”

  Robert perched on the edge of a chair, “Peter, I’ve been your friends since I can remember, so I’m going to cut to the chase. You’re letting your past color and determine how you react to the present.”

  Peter shook his head, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Really? Tell me you’re not comparing what happened with your mom to what’s happening with Lara? Tell me you’re not still trying to deal with the guilt over her death.”

  Peter shook his head again, this time more forcefully, “What happened to my mom had nothing to do with Lara! I dealt with my mom years ago.”

  Robert looked at him sadly, “Peter, if you can’t be honest with me or Rachel, at least be honest with yourself. Why don’t you go talk…”

  “Why don’t you butt out and mind your own business? Rachel and I are going through a tough spot right now. That’s all it is. All couples fight and then they make up.”

  Robert realized that Peter was in complete denial and getting angry with him wasn’t going to solve anything. He backed off, raised his hands and told him, “Hey buddy, just know that I’m here to help. If you need to bounce ideas off someone, or need to talk – I’m here for you.”

  Peter nodded, “I’ll keep that in mind. Now, I really need to get back to work. Was there anything else you wanted?”

  Robert shook his head and told him he’d catch him later. He had known Peter long enough to know that leaving him alone with his own thoughts and emotions was the only way Peter would ever work through things.

  Robert was just about to pull the door to Peter’s office closed when a harried looking business man stormed into the office and past the secretary.

  “Sir, wait,” she called out.

  The man pushed past Robert, yelling at Peter as he advanced on his desk, “Do you even have the slightest idea what happened to our computer systems this morning? Do you?” he demanded.

  Robert stood just outside the doorway, observing both the client and Peter. “Jim, I told you I’d have the new system up and running by next Monday.”

  “That’s not going to cut it. You promised to have our system online two weeks ago. This morning the entire system crashed because of an attempted security breach. The. Entire. System. Do you understand how many stores needed to shut down and reboot? Over two hundred, that’s how many!”

  “Look, I’m working as fast as I can on the upgrades, but you’re the one who was too cheap to purchase new hardware. Not me!” Peter was shouting by the time he finished speaking and pointing an accusing finger at the person he had referred to as Jim.

  Robert stood there in shock. Peter was an excellent businessman and savvy when it came to customer relations. He had just broken every rule in the book and then some by yelling at a client and accusing him of being the source of the problem!

  Jim cursed and then turned on his heel and stormed from the room, “You’d better have the upgrade ready for install by the end of the week, or else!”

  “Or else what?!” Peter shouted after him.

  Jim turned and leveled him with a stare, “Don’t. Make. Me. Show. You. Do your job! The one we’re paying you to do!”

  Chapter 7

  It was early the next morning before Robert was finally able to get ahold of me. I had worked all day and then gone to see a movie by myself, needing a small escape from reality, if even for a few hours.

  I had returned home after eleven and gone straight to bed. As I stumbled into the kitchen, I saw the note from Karen lying on the counter. Call Robert before you go to work! Urgent!

  Picking
up the phone, I dialed Robert’s number and fixed myself a cup of coffee while I waited for him to answer.

  “Hello?” answered a sleepy voice on the other end of the line.

  “Robert? It’s Rachel. Karen said you needed to talk to me and it was urgent.”

  “Yeah. I went to see Peter yesterday.”

  I overheard him moving around and yawning through the phone and smiled, “How did that go?”

  “Not well at all. He’s defensive and in complete denial that his past has any bearing on the present.”

  The hope I’d been holding on to died a slow death, “I’m sorry about that. Was that the urgent message you wanted to give me?”

  “No. Just as I was leaving, one of their clients came storming into the office. He was livid over the fact that the upgrade Peter’s company is doing for them is two weeks late. Meanwhile their computer systems are being attacked, shutting down their entire network.”

  “Oh no. What a mess! Did Peter manage to calm him down?”

  “On the contrary. He yelled at the man and basically accused his client of being a cheapskate and that the problems and delays were all his fault.”

  “He didn’t? Why would he do something like that? With Lara’s father having pulled his business, they need every client they can get!”

  “I know. I’ve never seen Peter like that. He was sarcastic, arrogant and downright mean to the man. The man, Jim was his name, gave Peter until the end of the week to get everything fixed, or he’s threatening consequences.”

  “What type of consequences?” I asked.

  “He didn’t say, but from what I witnessed, he’s a big player. Just his word alone can cause a lot of damage to Peter’s company.”

  I tried to reconcile what Robert was telling me about Peter with the man I loved. Peter was extremely self-disciplined. He was polite and obliging to everyone, even when they were undeserving of such treatment. This type of behavior was not him at all. Normally he would never raise his voice, especially not while dealing with a client.