Haunt Me (Heartbreaker Duet #2)

thirty-one

Mom and James leave early to catch their own flights.

Walter doesn’t have any more sick days to take off work—not that he seems to care about his career as much as he cares about making sure that Eden is ok and cared for. He doesn’t care about anything as much as that.

But today, he goes to work, and Eden and I are left alone for the first time.

We wander around the house, until we end up in her room.

“So this is your childhood bedroom,” I say awkwardly as I walk inside, looking around. It does look girly, but there is something off with it: everything is new. It has got no posters or photos covering the walls, no memorabilia, no kids’ toys left over from a childhood that never happened.

This is not her childhood bedroom. And I am a moron. Her eyes grow horrified. I’m sure mine mirror her expression in a millisecond—that’s how long it takes me to realize what I’ve just said.

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Eden, I didn’t think, I shouldn’t have said—” I fumble for words.

“It’s ok,” she smiles. “It should have been my childhood bedroom, right? Sometimes, I pretend it is.”

I take her hand and bring her palm to my lips. “You are the bravest person I’ve ever met. And I am the stupidest person I’ve ever met,” I add more quietly.

“That’s can’t be right,” she replies. “I’m sure you’ve met at least one person stupider than you.” This girl, I swear.

“I doubt it.”

I sit on the bed. Nope. Doesn’t feel right somehow.

I stand up. The ceiling feels too low for my head; I’m so tall I dwarf the whole room. I sit back down. Eden lets out a giggle. At least I’m amusing her. I lower myself on the floor, cross-legged, trying not to let all the angles of my body stick out too much. Eden settles down next to me, gathering her body in a little ball. I remember how we sat on the floor like that, Pooh pressed between our bodies, that night she was having a panic attack back in Greece.

“Thank you for coming all the way to Chicago just for this,” she says.

My whole body jerks. “‘Just for this?’ You’re joking, right? ”

“I don’t…”

“I didn’t only come here for you. I exist for you.” She goes pale—I’ve scared her. But I thought she knew.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “Isaiah, I can’t—I can’t pick up where we left off,” she says finally. “It doesn’t work that way.”

I feel like closing my eyes and indulging in the fantasy. How easy would it be to just ‘pick up where we left off’. How simple, how amazing it would be. But no, it would not be simple or amazing. We left off at heartbreak and trauma. Looking back will never be healthy. The only way to go is forward and through.

She’s right. It just doesn’t work that way.

“Where we left off,” I say, choosing my words carefully, “was not necessarily a place I would like us to be again.” She sags in relief next to me, and I know I said the right thing. A rare occurrence. “It was a horrible place for me, and I know it was even worse for you. It was hell.”

“It was what brought me to where I am today,” she replies. “For example, these past few years, whenever I felt so sad that I wanted to scream, and it was often, I did two things. Do you want to hear?”

“I have never wanted anything more,” I say.

“Weirdo,” she laughs. “Ok, so the first thing I tried would be to escape inside my head. To go to a memory of us, one of my favorite memories of us, and hide in there. Just reliving it over and over, until I forgot what I was upset about. It usually worked.”

“Did it?” I’m suddenly so choked up I can barely speak. “And you… That means you had favorite memories of us, right? What were they?”

“Every minute we spent together,” she replies, watching me.

I try to swallow; I fail. “Even when we just sat together silently?” I ask her.

“Especially that. Those hours are at the top of the list.” She smiles. I forget how breathing works.

“Yeah, mine too.” I smile back at her, even though the effort kind of hurts my face. It’s worth it just to see how happy it makes her. “What was the second thing?”

“Your voice.” She just undoes me with those two words. “I would put on one of your songs, and scream along with you. I did that rarely, because it wasn’t easy to listen to you sing—it hurt. But once I managed to face it, it always worked, without fail. Always. Your voice is just… magic. ”

“It’s not,” I say, frowning. Yet again, I come face to face with the fact that she was fighting for her life while I was rising to fame. And the fact that she was listening to my songs that were dripping pain… Pain about her… It does a number on me. “It’s really not.”

“Well, it kept me sane, much more than those doctors did, I can assure you.”

“I’m glad.”

“It was either that, or getting even more crazy,” she laughs. “You were kind of hard to miss, you know. You were everywhere, like oxygen. One would have to suffocate in order not to breathe you in.”

I shiver violently.

“But you ended up saving me, Isaiah, even though you didn’t know you were,” she adds.

“Eden, please, don’t, or I’ll—I just won’t be able to stop myself anymore.”

“Stop yourself from what?”

“Kissing you.”

She sits up. Oh no. Please don’t let me lose her right now. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have said that .

“You want to kiss me?” She looks so surprised.

Of course I do. Wait, does she doubt it? Did she think that what happened between us yesterday was just to make her feel better? Does she not realize that I would have died if I hadn’t kissed her?

“What is the question here?” I take a step closer, and she sucks in a breath. “Are you wondering if I want to kiss you again ? If I want to kiss you and do nothing else ?”

My lips are less than an inch from hers; her mouth is trembling. I love how flustered it makes her, me leaning in. I can hear her struggle to inhale, see her lips moisten, feel her cheeks grow warm under my intense gaze.

“All of it,” she breathes.

“I want to kiss you.” I brace a hand on the wall behind her. My sleeve is almost touching her shoulder, but not quite. I’m not caging her between my body and the wall, but, oh, I want to. “I always want to kiss you, Eden. Since I met you. You’ve driven me crazy since day one. You… your proximity changes the chemistry of my brain. All the noise of the world, all the ugliness and the grief, everything stops the minute I am in your presence. It’s been the same way since I first saw you in the woods, your knee bleeding, your laces undone. It hasn’t changed, it’s only grown. ”

“It’s the same for me,” Eden murmurs and I inhale sharply through my nose. Is she trying to kill me? “Always has been. The same way you just described it, the way your songs describe it. That’s what it’s been like for me too.”

Her eyes are made of liquid honey, widening as she looks up at me. She is wearing the oversized hoodie again—an echo of her ill-fitting clothes when we were teens. But this time her shirt is bright red, bringing out the highlights on her hair. All I can think of is the way it slides off her left shoulder, revealing a strap of pale pink bra underneath.

It’s driving me crazy.

Wait. She’s talking to me. Must. Focus.

“My songs?” I croak.

“Yeah, your music, your lyrics.” She licks her lips and I almost fall apart in front of her.

“Are you looking to get kissed out of your senses?” I ask her, inching even closer. She doesn’t back off. “Because I am hanging on by a thread, but your sisters are liable to walk in on us any second now.”

“Everyone else being here didn’t stop you before.” She raises her eyebrows at me.

“It so did.” I lower my head over hers, and a strand of my hair falls forward, brushing her brow. “If I remember correctly, I literally had to go outside of the house to kiss you.”

“If I remember correctly, I literally had to beg you.”

That’s it.

I grab her by the waist, my arm coming around her slender body, and pull her to my chest. She bumps into my chest with a breathy gasp. Her eyes are smiling up at me, but then they darken. She shivers against me. I am not laughing now. I cup her face as if it is the most precious thing in the world, and fight to keep my eyes open as I lower my mouth to hers.

I run my tongue over her lips, moaning lightly as my whole body stands to attention. Her fingers are on the back of my neck, trailing the tips of my hair. She opens her mouth for me, but I barely get to taste her before I feel her withdrawing from me.

“Wait,” she says, and I freeze. Well, my hands do. My body has a mind of its own and it’s still on fire. “We can’t… Hey, you ok?”

I nod, leaning heavily against the door frame.

“Yeah,” I say, “just got lightheaded.”

“Because of…? ”

“You. Because of you.” I can’t take my eyes off her. She blushes abruptly, the color climbing up on the side of her slender neck. Gosh, how can a human be so beautiful?

“Oh.” Oh indeed. If she only knew that thoughts I have to fight—just to manage to stay upright. “I’m not sure what to say. ”

“Say what you’re thinking.”

“I’m thinking that we need to talk before this…” she gestures between us. “Before we gets too carried away.”

“Too late, but continue.”

“We have so much to talk about, right?” I nod, agreeing. “It would be the responsible thing to do.”

“We are nothing if not responsible.” My eyes are still on hers.

“Right.” She looks away first. “I kind of blurted out to you some of what I have been thinking yesterday, but there is so much more.”

“There is so much I need to say to you too,” I say. “We have had so many conversations inside my head, and it’s hard to keep track of what I have actually said to you, because it all feels so real.”

“In your head?” she smiles, wiping her lips. They are swollen and look tender to the touch. The sight makes me weak.

“Yeah,” I reply, distracted. “I think about you constantly. Sometimes I think if I was dying, suffocating or drowning or something… I would not think about my next breath. I would think about you.”

“I… I don’t know what to say.” She said that before too. It’s beginning to worry me, if I’m honest.

“Say that you knew I felt like this.”

“I didn’t, though. I don’t.” Eden’s brow wrinkles. “I mean, I didn’t all those years. It felt like you had forgotten all about me.”

I push my shoulder off the wall and take a step away from her, knowing fully well that I won’t be able to control myself if I so much as breathe her in. I have to concentrate on my next words. I must be very clear here.

“Do you think,” I enunciate, “that I forgot about you, that I ever could? Even for one second? For one breath? Do you think I could ever have forgotten about you?”

She looks at me with those eyes that own my freaking soul.

“I did,” she says finally. Simply that.

An unearthly groan comes out of my throat. I can’t believe I screwed this up so badly.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her eyes filling with agony. It’s not her fault. I need to tell her it’s not, but I can’t utter a word. “When I saw you for the first time after I broke up with… After I broke you , it stirred up so many things inside me. I realized I was not ok. I mean, I had made some progress, but I don’t think I had realized until then how much not ok I was. I was stuck in survival mode, frozen up, distant from a reality that was too much for me to handle.”

I bite my lip hard, closing my eyes against the pain her words evoke.

But the pain won’t go away; it slices me clean through, like a knife.

“I know I said we need to talk,” she goes on, “but right now, I can’t even begin to explain to you what happened, without being intensely triggered. I can’t… I can’t even sit here, in this house for long. I always run away. As you saw.”

I stand still, listening to every word she is telling me. I won’t interrupt her with one syllable. I just nod so that she can continue.

“I have so many things that I can’t control inside of me, because I was too little to remember what happened to me. All these things that might set off a PTSD episode for me, these triggers that I… I don’t even know what they are. And I have been working on it all, but it’s going so slowly that sometimes it’s hard to keep hoping.”

“We can wait,” I say. I didn’t mean to say it like that, it just came out. But the light that fills her face at my words fills me with encouragement. “I will wait for as long as you need, Eden. I have waited for so long without a hint of hope. I sure can wait now.”

“You have waited?” she repeats in wonder. “For a long time?”

“I have.”

“For what?”

I close my eyes. “I am in love with you, Eden. I have been in love with you since the moment I…”

When I open them, she is already turning her back on me, ready to bolt. I stop talking and grab her wrist to keep her with me.

“It’s ok, I’ll stop,” I whisper. “I’ll stop, it’s ok.” She stops trying to escape, but I still hold on to her until she quietens. “Tell me,” I ask her brokenly, “tell me we will be all right. That’s all I need in order to be able to wait. Tell me we are not broken. Just that. I can’t… I don’t think I would stay sane through it again. Through another bunch of months or years of fighting to survive without knowing if everything is lost.”

“No fighting,” Eden replies. Her hand is trembling in mine, but she still has her back to me. “Not any more. You have suffered long enough. This needs to be over.”

I stop breathing .

“Over?”

She nods, freeing her hand. Just stands there, her back to me. A sob rises in my chest and my vision goes blurry.

“No!” I scream it quietly. Just. No. “Eden.”

Slowly, she turns to face me, and the expression on her face is jarring. Despite everything I’ve gone through since losing her, nothing compares to the icy dread twisting in my stomach right now. It’s as if I am dying while still being alive. Being turned into a ghost in front of her eyes, haunting her bedroom.

“This is killing me, Eden.”

“It’s killing me as well,” she replies. “Do you remember asking me to haunt you? Well, only dead people haunt.”

I grab her by the waist so fiercely her body slams into mine. I didn’t mean to do it with such force, but as her skin melds into mine, fierce energy electrifies my veins, waking me up.

Making me want to fight for her. This girl. My girl.

“Don’t ever say that about yourself!” I whisper fiercely, holding her trembling body between my hands. I can feel her chest moving rapidly, her breaths coming short. We are so close I can almost taste her. “Don’t you ever say that, do you hear?”

She nods, her eyes on my lips.

Is it too late to believe in God? Because I think I might need saving after all. I don’t think I will survive leaving this house. Not like this.

“Don’t—don’t break my heart, Eden. Please. Don’t end it.”

“Don’t break it again , you mean.” Her eyes have that same dead look in them; the one from six years ago. The empty stare I had thought I had chased away for good is back. “It’s what I do. I run away. I am the heartbreaker, after all.”

My chest hurts. So she hasn’t forgiven me, after all. And how could she? I wouldn’t forgive me.

I let go of her, lowering my head. I can’t bring myself to look at her again.

“I can’t live like this,” she says. “I can’t keep hurting you. It hurts too much.”

It is on the tip of my tongue to completely humiliate myself and blurt out: ‘hurt me then, I don’t care!’ like a complete idiot, but I suddenly understand what she’s been trying to tell me all this time. She is hurting, and my being here isn’t helping. If I thought it did, even in the slightest, I wouldn’t leave, no matter what. But I’m only making it worse by being here.

I can see that now .

I just hope that it’s just for now. That it won’t always be like this for us. We can’t have been destroyed forever. Right? Right?

“Do you want to stop writing songs with me?” I ask her in a small voice and she shakes her head.

“I’m not coming back with you on the tour, Isaiah. It… it hurts too much.”

“I know. But we can still write together, we can—”

She looks down. “I can’t write with you and not…”

“Not what, baby?”

She looks straight into my eyes and my breath stops. Naked, raw need is written all over her face. Pure Desire. Pure want .

“Not want you,” she says breathlessly.

“Want me then.” I nearly scream it. “Want me. You have me.”

“But I don’t have me ,” she nearly screams in reply. “It’s… it’s going to be ugly.” I am shaking my head, laughing bitterly. Don’t talk to me about ugly , I think. “I can’t go through the pain of ending something again, and I will have to, because I’m not in a good place.” I shiver. That sounded so logical, so Eden-like, that I know it’s final. Her mind is made up. “Besides,” she continues in a calm voice, “there is nothing to end if we don’t begin anything. So let’s just not begin.”

No. It’s already begun . Can’t she see it?

Or maybe she can, but she can’t handle it. Not now. Not ever.

Complete panic grips me, fear like nothing I have ever known. The universe drops out from underneath my feet at the thought that there just might be too much trauma between us for it ever to work.

I won’t allow this. I’ll… I’ll make us happen, by sheer force of will.

It’s stupid, but it’s all I have right now.

“Just…” My lips have gone bloodless and it’s hard to move them. The same lips that were on fire for her just minutes ago. “Let me have some hope. Let me come back and date you when you are ready. Let me try, please, let me fight—” my breath catches.

“That wouldn’t be fair to you,” she says. I know she said we should be reasonable, but, dammit, no. Not if it means this. “You have to focus on your tour, after all.”

“Forget all about the tour.”

“You don’t mean that.”

Don’t I? Right now I would set my whole life on fire if the glow would warm her a little. Help heal her. She gathers her hands to her chest, her fingers twisted white. She is in pain. And the longer I stay here, the worse it’s going to get .

“I-I have to go,” I say in a voice I don’t recognize.

I guess that’s how she must have felt back then. Frozen in place. Small. Powerless. Detached.

I remember the day she broke up with me, how she looked. Her face… it wasn’t her face. It belonged to someone else. Now I guess I will never know what had happened between Solomon and her that led to that scene between us—it will be too triggering for her to tell me. Not that I need to know; I probably couldn’t bear it anyway.

But now I have an idea of how she must have felt.

…

James is waiting for me in a car two blocks down the street. I gape when I see him, and he stares at me over his sunglasses.

“You falling apart yet?” he asks me.

Has he been here this whole time? All these hours?

“Why did you stay?” I ask. I’m surprised my voice comes out normal. Ish.

He opens the door and comes over to stand next to me. “Mom went home, but I couldn’t leave you here,” he says. “Then Eden… she told me to wait for you. That you wouldn’t be staying.”

A chill works its way down my spine.

She knew. She had decided she would send me away. That we shouldn’t ‘begin’ anything. I thought my coming here was the start of something new, but she just wanted to say goodbye. That was all.

“Come on.” James is talking to me with so much kindness it freaks me out.

He starts to wrap his hand around my shoulders, to guide me into the car as if I’m a kid, and I shake his hand off impatiently.

With rage.

He chuckles. “You’ll be ok,” he says.

But we both know it’s a lie.

On the plane ride back to Europe, I add three more verses to Heartbreaker , a second bridge and a second ending. I add a new melody too. It’s so sad, it briefly feels like medicine. But once I land in Belgium, I think back on what I have written, wondering if it has actually made me feel better: it hasn’t.

On the ride to my hotel, it starts raining. My chest starts hurting; it’s getting hard to breathe all over again. Fully knowing that I reek of desperation, I whip out my phone and text her.

Tell me to come back. Tell me to stay .

What? Eden replies almost the next second.

I rest my head back and breathe in, slowly . She replied.

Tell me to leave the tour. To forget it exists. To just stay with you, while you heal. I won’t… I won’t even talk to you, you won’t even know I’m there.

I don’t think she will reply, but I’m too tired to regret writing what I did.

But then my phone lights up with a new text. Unbearable terror grips me. I sit up, sweating. I wish I could go back to three minutes ago and never text her. Because I know, even before looking, what her text will say.

A sob escapes me as I look down at the screen.

Goodbye, Isaiah.