Chapter 38 Sloan
Sloan
Then - Seattle
No one ever talks about just how loud silence can be.
It’s deafening.
The loudest sound ever recorded was the eruption of a volcano on the Indonesian island Krakatoa in 1883. It was estimated to be around 310 decibels. It erupted on August 27, and collapsed the majority of the island, producing a tsunami felt in South Africa.
But I think silence is louder, and I think it might do more damage.
At least—Bohdan’s silence.
That might be something more like an implosion, because it really feels like this apartment is turning inward on us.
I blink up at the ceiling and the shadows painted there from the light streaming in from the bedroom window.
He shifts in bed beside me, tugging on those seafoam-green sheets I was so certain might help, but it’s not to get closer to me.
He’s so far away.
He’s Krakatoa and I’m South Africa.
I don’t even remember the last time he touched me. And maybe it’s that, the absence of him around me—this person that grew with me and moulded me and shaped me—that has me whispering quietly, not really to him but up towards the ceiling and anyone who might be listening, “Please just talk to me.”
He stops moving beside me, the collapse of his island momentarily paused. I don’t look, but I think he might pinch the bridge of his nose before palming his jaw. His voice is worn, rough around the edges in all the worst ways. “What do you want me to say, Sloan?”
“Anything,” I whisper with this tiny kernel of hope.
He definitely shakes his head, and I feel those waves all the way over on my continent before the eruption comes.
It wasn’t an implosion. It wasn’t quick and quiet, barely a blip on the radar.
He’s louder than he’s been in months. “That I lost my fucking career? That I was supposed to be the best? Supposed to wipe away every fucking record ever and now I can’t even go outside without my brain feeling like it’s bleeding?”
Part of me collapses, but he keeps going, and takes the rest of me with him down, down, down into the ocean underneath us.