Back to Yesterday (Bleeding Hearts Book 2) Read online

  Back to Yesterday

  Bleeding Hearts Book Two

  Whitney Barbetti

  Contents

  Note to the Reader

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Acknowledgments

  More Books by Whitney Barbetti

  About Whitney Barbetti

  Copyright 2016 by Whitney Barbetti

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition

  Cover photography by Dave Kelley, http://www.davekelleyartistics.com/

  Cover model: Katrina Coon

  Cover design by Najla Qamber, http://www.najlaqamberdesigns.com/

  Interior design by The Write Assistants, http://www.thewriteassistants.com/

  Editing by Murphy Rae, http://www.murphyrae.net/

  Proofreading by Alexis Durbin, https://www.facebook.com/IndieGirlProofs/; Amanda Maria, https://www.facebook.com/AMtoPMbooks/; Ginelle Blanch

  Epigraph poem used with permission by J.R. Rogue, https://jrrogue.com/

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, actual events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The use of any real company and/or product names is for literary effect only. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.

  Note to the Reader

  Please be aware that Back to Yesterday is not a standalone romance. To understand this story, you must read Into the Tomorrows first. This book completes that story; there will not be another novel with Trista and Jude as the main characters. The next book in the Bleeding Hearts series is still untitled, and will feature a character from this book.

  If you would like to be notified as soon as the next book releases, please subscribe to Whitney Barbetti’s newsletter at http://www.whitneybarbetti.com/signup/

  Thank you for reading!

  The world opened

  her mouth,

  bared her teeth,

  swallowed me whole.

  She wasn't ready for me.

  Said she wanted me to feel

  the sadness inside her.

  Said she wanted to marry it

  to the melancholy in my marrow.

  She wasn't ready for it.

  Said sorrow stings,

  I tasted of borrowed bitter,

  spat me out, made me

  into something new.

  I just want to be ready for you

  - J.R. Rogue

  To those who feel deeply

  Chapter One

  June 2013

  I breathed in the gentle wind, let it burn my nostrils. The sun was warm on my skin, bringing with it a memory of one of my yesterdays, of the man who made me look forward to my tomorrows.

  I closed my eyes, imagined his face. Imagined how I’d touched his skin, how he’d kissed mine. How his words had made me feel loved, needed.

  It was all I’d ever wanted.

  One step forward, one breath out. One dream gone, one hope forgotten. A thousand wishes lost once they’d left my lips. He’d been in almost every one.

  A breeze fluttered my oversized shirt, flapping its frayed edges against my bare legs. My arms rested at my sides, my fingers clenched around my phone. How long had it been since my hands had held his? Since I’d felt the very definition of human connection? Too long.

  “I miss you,” I heard myself say, but my words were a whisper from cracked lips, a tremble from my feeble jaw. My heart was a drumbeat in my head, and I repeated one word in time to each beat: no, no, no.

  Goose bumps lit my skin as the sounds of my surroundings broke the trance I was in. People laughing, televisions blaring their afternoon Judge Judy as they ate from chipped dollar-store china. The world moved around me as I stayed still. Dawn flooded the horizon, driving away the gray and warming the buildings as it made its approach to where I stood.

  As the sun touched first my toes and then my legs, I closed my eyes. From my feet to my head, it warmed my skin, and I imagined it washing away my sins. A baptism performed on the edge of a building.

  I loved you, I thought to myself, his many faces like a slideshow behind my eyelids. I still do.

  Bring me back to yesterday, to the man who made me feel worth something.

  I no longer wanted a tomorrow. I wanted him, but he was gone. He was my tomorrow, all of my tomorrows, and he was gone.

  And as I took another step to the edge, I looked down at the cars below me.

  Trista, he whispered. Are you ready?

  God, his voice. It’d been so long since his words had caressed my ear. My knees trembled, their knobby bones the only thing holding me together.

  I shook my head, willing him away. He was gone.

  I swallowed the saliva that had pooled in my mouth. How had I gone from being someone with a schoolgirl crush to someone standing on the ledge of my shitty apartment building, contemplating taking one extra step and falling through the air to what awaited me below?

  I’ll wait for you.

  It hurt, his voice. His memory was an open wound. I had nearly been ready. And here I was, back to who I’d been before all of it.

  The phone in my hand rang. The number was unfamiliar—but they all were. My heart was crumbling inside my chest, but I answered and waited.

  There was a rumbling, a cough, and a breath. And then, a ghost spoke, giving me the shiver he always did when he said it.

  “Trista.”

  Chapter Two

  Two years earlier

  2011

  I told myself I was okay.

  Breathe in, breathe out, was my reminder as I drove away.

  I looked in the rear-view mirror more than the front windshield as the apartment building shrank to a tiny speck and the mountains turned into little blips, so far from my touch that I was sure I’d imagined them.

  A few days later, I followed my grandfather’s request, one that led me down a long, neglected road.

  I shouldn’t have gone there. I knew it the moment my car pulled down the bumpy drive, as the potholes jostled me against the window and the beads hanging from my rear-view mirror clanged loudly.

  But despite her apathy toward me, I was easily called back to her.

  Each trailer was more decrepit than the one before, with the color fading as I drove closer to her house on the uncomfortably familiar road. Some were missing paint on several boards that had been used to patch holes, and most had more than one broken window fixed with duct tape.

  My mother’s trailer sat at the back of the lot, just a few steps from the river behind it. Once, we’d had a freak rainstorm that had caused the river to rise up and spill across the grass toward the trailer. The shed in the back of our lot had taken the brunt of the damage and had been only partly fixed by my mom’s incapable hand
s.

  At one point her trailer must have been navy, judging by the small fleck of color that stained the cinder block below the siding. But now it was pale blue, with spots that showed its age after spending decades baking in the sun, exposed to the elements.

  Mom’s car was gone, but that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t home. Her boyfriend—the flavor of the month, really—could have borrowed it, or, more likely, it could’ve been towed. Like it often was.

  I pulled into the space next to where she usually parked her car and turned off the engine, but made no move to get out.

  The shutters on her trailer were missing slats and the white paint had cracked and chipped so badly that it was hard to tell which was the original color between the white and the brown that showed equally throughout.

  My gaze moved to the door, which had been kicked in by more than one of her boyfriends and even by her once, in a drug-fueled craze. Duct tape had been applied haphazardly over the crack, but you could hardly see it through the screen door that was barely clinging to its hinges. Everything here was duller, like you’d stepped into a period movie, like a sepia-toned curtain had come down over every good thing there had ever been.

  A movement out of the corner of my eye alerted me to my mother’s neighbor’s presence as she scuttled past my car and to the back, where the dilapidated shed had begun sinking into the old mud. I remembered the little old lady, who liked to dig into everyone’s trash the day before the trash men came.

  A recent rain shower had left puddles throughout the pock-marked lawn, and I watched as she nearly lost her balance in one such hole before pulling her foot out and moving without preamble to the trash. Many mornings, I’d woken to see her white hair moving along the bottom of my bedroom window as she made that walk to our trash. I never waited to see what she found—no doubt she’d come across packs of cigarettes and drug paraphernalia at the bottom of the bag, under the moldy food and bottles holding dregs of rancid beer.

  I sighed when she disappeared behind the back of the trailer, and pushed myself out of the car, stretching as I stood up, finally.

  I’d driven straight here from Colorado, all because my grandfather had asked me to check on her. Not that he’d come out and said it, but his “Have you heard from your mother recently?” in his scratchy voice had told me he was concerned for her. I wondered when he could finally stop worrying about the person his spawn was growing into, and when he could just live the rest of his life in peace.

  Closing the door softly, I took in the neighborhood again now that I was breathing the same air. Everything was muted, like a whisper of what it had been at one time. It was quiet—not even the squeal of a child’s laughter to break the thick fog that settled over the area like it was a graveyard.

  I turned back to the windows on my mother’s trailer, took in the darkness behind them. It was too quiet, too dark, for her to be home.

  After trying the doorknob and realizing it was locked, I reached under the bottom wooden step on the stairs and retrieved the key she kept there. I let myself in and blinked in the darkness. The light switches didn’t do anything when I flicked them, which was typical of her—she probably hadn’t paid the electric bill in a while.

  I had a feeling then, a feeling that I should leave and tell grandpa a lie. But instead, I opened a curtain and let the light pour in before I wiped down the counter with a cleaning wipe I found under the sink. More dust than food covered the wipe and I scrunched my nose. The whole place looked like it’d barely been lived in for weeks. Not that my mother kept a neat home—far from it. But from the layer of dust that covered nearly every surface, I figured she’d been gone for a while.

  I picked up the dirty clothes that littered the living room and shoved them in a basket I found by her washer and then wiped down the rest of the kitchen. I couldn’t tell you why I felt it necessary to do these things other than the fact that I couldn’t stand to spend more than a few minutes in such a dirty space and not do something to make it better.

  I flopped onto the couch, and a second later my phone rang.

  Stilling, I stared at it as it vibrated across the glass coffee table. It rolled past cigarette butts and pennies, along with some unidentifiable substances before I finally picked it up.

  Seeing his name on the caller ID made my heart thud painfully in my chest.

  Jude.

  Gliding my fingers over his name, I debated answering it. But I couldn’t. It was too soon. It had only been a day. After leaving Colorado, I stopped at a hotel for the night before waking to my grandpa’s call. And now I was in my mother’s dusty living room, staring at Jude’s name as the phone rang in my palm for two solid vibrations before it stopped.

  I set it carefully on the table, hoping he wouldn’t call back.

  But he did.

  It was like he knew I was staring at his name as he called, as if he suspected with enough persistence I’d answer. But I wouldn’t.

  When the phone stopped ringing that time, I sucked in a breath and stared at it, almost wanting it to ring again.

  But it didn’t.

  Sighing, I rubbed at the center of my chest, where the pain of leaving him hadn’t dissipated. I looked out the window, at the gray that surrounded me, and wished for a different yesterday, one where truths had never needed to be defined as such, because they’d been things I’d known all along.

  Colin hadn’t tried to call me once, but, strangely, Mila had. I’d ignored it like I’d ignored Jude’s and suddenly, I’d never felt so alone as I did right then, on my mother’s garage sale couch as I looked at my many missed calls.

  I set my phone down on the coffee table and stared out the window again, waiting to see the familiar tan car roll down the lane, to hear its backfire as it turned off the main drive to her corner. I remembered years of doing this, from age ten to age seventeen, waiting for my mom to come home. Most of the time, I waited with dread—watching for her arrival so I knew whether to hide from her or to embrace her and hope she would remember to love me the way I wanted her to.

  I blinked away the tears that formed at the corners of my eyes. It wouldn’t do, to cry tears over her neglect now. Years of listening to her endure abuse at the hands of the boyfriends she’d brought around had harvested a lot of sympathy for her, but I couldn’t give in to it. She brought them back in, repeatedly, after kicking them out or calling the cops.

  When I was younger and fully grasping that I didn’t have a dad to rescue me, I’d tried hard to make her love me. It would sound pathetic to a lot of people, the many breakfasts in bed I’d prepared for her or the homemade cards and coupons promising to help her around the house. But nearly every breakfast in bed had ended with her too hungover to eat, and I always helped around the house without prompting because I’d been embarrassed of the condition of it while growing up. After finding maggots in one of the kitchen cupboards once, I’d decided to take care of her in the hopes that she’d take care of me too.

  As I looked around the room, I saw the things I’d done for her had fallen by the wayside. It wasn’t just the amount of dust, but the fact that I could curl my fingers into the carpet and come away with an ashtray’s worth of ash or food crumbs. The room had an odor of smoke—of the illegal variety, mostly—and something sour, like milk spilled and not cleaned up. If I’d had more energy, I might have searched for the vacuum and a clean washcloth, but I was tired from being in the car for hours. From crying. From the constant aching, the weight in my chest that reminded me of who was waiting for me and why I couldn’t go to him.

  I felt betrayed that he hadn’t told me about his heart condition. After I realized the gravity of his condition, and I reflected on our climbs at Yellowstone, cold ran through my veins. He could have died from over-exerting himself. And where would that have left me? I wanted to be angry that he hadn’t told me what was going on between Mila and Colin, but the truth was that it wasn’t his fault. And I’d been no better, kissing Jude on the roof of the apartment he sh
ared with my then-boyfriend.

  A thousand times since I left, I thought about turning around. I could have ran back to Jude, back into the arms I knew he’d hold me with. But jumping from a six-year relationship to a new one immediately wasn’t healthy. I reminded myself of this every time I thought about returning.

  A text blinked across my phone and I knew it was Jude.

  Jude: Trista, God, I’m sorry. Please call me.

  But I couldn’t. And I wanted to. I wanted to, so badly. My hand had felt empty for the last twenty-four hours. And when I’d curled up on my motel bed, I wished to hear his even breaths more than anything. The aching for him was a solid presence, a burning rock in my chest.

  I pressed delete, knowing I would only taunt myself by looking at it when I was feeling weak.

  I must have fallen asleep on the threadbare couch, because the next thing I knew, the screen door was slamming with a racket loud enough to rock me off the couch.

  It’d only been a month since I’d seen her, but my mother looked different. She was thinner, the skin in her cheeks sagging in the cavities below them. Her blue eyes were red-rimmed and her hair was greasy and limp, recently dyed blonde. An at-home job, judging by the way it stopped halfway down some strands, and by the varying shades throughout her hair.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” she drawled, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her cracked lips.

  I pushed my hair away from my face. “Grandpa asked me to check in on you. He hasn’t heard from you in a while.”

  She laughed, but it sounded like a cackle and it set my jaw on edge. “My old man is having my daughter do his dirty work?” She flipped the light switch, bathing the room in yellow light.