Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It started with small questions. That was how I lost him – not in one dramatic blow, but in the slow, grinding repetition of a girl who couldn’t stop asking and a boy who couldn’t be bothered to answer.
The party. Lisa. Ross’s hand on the wrong waist, his mouth too close to the wrong ear, and the way he’d looked at me when I confronted him afterwards – not guilty, not caught, just annoyed, as if I’d interrupted something tedious rather than something treasonous.
He said it was nothing. He said Lisa had been drunk and leaning on him and he’d been steadying her, and that I’d seen what I wanted to see because I’d been in a mood all night and was waiting for a reason to kick off.
I tried to believe him. I lay in bed that night and ran through it frame by frame – the cramped living room, the music, the cheap party lights that made everything feel other-worldly – and I told myself that maybe the angle had been wrong, or the light had tricked me, or maybe Lisa really had just stumbled and Ross really had just caught her, and the closeness I saw was just physics, just bodies in a crowded room doing what bodies do.
But I didn’t believe it. I’d watched his face when he didn’t know I was watching and seen something I couldn’t unsee – a softness, a lean, a flicker of attention that had nothing to do with keeping a drunk girl upright.
So I asked again.
‘Are you sure nothing happened with Lisa at the party?’
I asked him on the phone that evening. I asked him on Saturday, sitting on the wall outside the leisure centre while he kicked at the gravel with his trainers and stared at the ground.
‘Kim, I’ve told you. How many times do I have to say it?’
‘I know, I just—’
‘Nothing happened. Lisa’s a mate. She was hammered. I was being nice. That’s it. End of.’
End of. He said that a lot. End of, full stop, done, can we move on? He’d close the subject the way you’d close a cupboard door – firmly, with a click – and I’d stand on the other side of it knowing I hadn’t finished but unable to reach the handle.
The problem was that every time he shut it down, the doubt didn’t go away.
It just went underground. It burrowed into the back of my mind and sat there, breeding, and by the time it surfaced again – usually late at night when I was alone, when I’d replayed the scene one more time and noticed some new detail I was probably inventing – it was bigger and angrier and more desperate than before.
I became someone I didn’t recognise.
I hated it. I could feel myself doing it – the clingy texts, the needy phone calls, the way I’d scan his face for clues whenever Lisa’s name came up in conversation.
I hated every second of it, but I couldn’t stop.
It was as if first the girl at the nightclub, then Lisa at the party had cracked something open inside me and the fear was leaking out.
And no amount of reassurance could seal it because Ross’s reassurance wasn’t reassuring.
It was impatient and slightly contemptuous, and it left me feeling worse each time, not better, like pressing a bruise to check if it still hurt.
‘You don’t even care that I’m upset,’ I said once, sitting on his bed while he packed his rucksack for football.
He didn’t look up. ‘I do care. I’ve just said the same thing fifteen times and I don’t know what else you want me to say.’
‘I want you to say it like you mean it.’
‘I do mean it.’
‘You don’t sound like you mean it.’
He zipped the bag shut and turned around.
His face was tired, and he looked older than seventeen.
For a second, I felt a flash of guilt so sharp it almost cut through the anxiety.
I was exhausting him. I could see it. I was draining the colour out of him with my questions and my tears and my constant, gnawing need to be told that I was enough, that he wasn’t going anywhere, that Lisa meant nothing, that the girl he loved was me.
But the guilt only lasted a second. Then the fear rushed back in and filled the space, and I opened my mouth and asked again.
‘Do you promise it was nothing?’
‘Kim. For fuck’s sake.’
‘Just say it. Just say you promise.’
‘I promise. All right? I promise. Are we done?’
We were never done. That was the cruelty of it.
Every promise I extracted from him was hollow before he’d finished saying it, because I didn’t trust the words any more – I only trusted the feeling, and the feeling was wrong, and no number of repetitions could fix a feeling.
I knew this. Somewhere in the rational, functioning part of my brain I understood I was caught in a loop that couldn’t be broken from inside, that the reassurance itself had become the problem because each time I asked for it I was proving to both of us that the last round hadn’t worked.
But knowing didn’t help. Knowing just meant I got to watch myself fall apart in high definition.
We started fighting properly. Not the quick rows we’d had before – rows that burned hot for ten minutes and ended in kissing and apologies and the breathless relief of making up – but slow, grinding arguments that lasted hours, went nowhere, and left us both grey and exhausted.
I cried too easily, and Ross went too quiet.
The pattern became its own weather system, rolling through our days with a grim, predictable rhythm: I’d bring it up, Ross would shut it down, I’d push harder, Ross would go colder, and somewhere around the third or fourth pass, we’d both end up in the worst versions of ourselves – me begging and Ross staring at the wall with his jaw locked and his eyes somewhere else.
I said things I didn’t mean. I told him he was selfish.
I told him Lisa was welcome to him. I told him I wished I’d never gone to that club or to the party, which was true, and that I wished I’d never met him, which wasn’t.
He flinched when I said it, and I felt a sick lurch of triumph that lasted about four seconds before it curdled into shame.
He said things, too. Not cruel things – Ross was never cruel, not exactly – but worse, in a way. Dismissive things. Bored things. Things that made it clear he was running out of patience and didn’t particularly care if I knew it.
‘You’re being paranoid, Kim.’
‘I’m not paranoid, I’m telling you what I saw.’
‘You saw what you wanted to see. You always do.’
That one stuck in my ribs like a splinter and stayed there, because what if he was right?
What if I was a person who invented problems, who saw betrayal in every shadow, who couldn’t leave a good thing alone without poking at it until it bled?
My mum had said something like that once, years earlier, during an argument about something I couldn’t even remember – you always have to make things harder than they are – and the echo of it made me feel small and fundamentally broken, as if the flaw was in me and not in what I’d seen.
I tried to stop. I went a whole week without mentioning Lisa or the club, and it nearly killed me – I walked around with the questions backed up in my throat like a traffic jam, swallowing them down every time Ross looked at me, smiling when I wanted to scream, being bright and easy and fun because that was the version of myself he liked and I was terrified of what would happen if I showed him any other one.
It didn’t work. By the end of the week I was wound so tight I could barely eat, and when Ross cancelled our plans on Saturday to go to a mate’s house instead, I broke.
I texted him fourteen times in two hours.
I called and hung up. I called again and let it ring until his voicemail picked up, then sat on my bedroom floor with my phone in my lap, my face wet, and my chest heaving.
And I knew, I absolutely knew, that I was making it worse, and I could not stop.
Ross came to see me the next day. He sat on the low wall outside my house – our wall, the one we’d claimed as ours since the first week we were together – and he looked at me, and there was something in his face I hadn’t seen before. Not anger. Not impatience. Something finished.
‘I need a break,’ he said.
The word ‘break’ went through me, sharp and terrible.
‘A break from us?’
‘A break from this. From—’ He gestured vaguely between us. ‘From all of it. I need a week. Just a week, on my own, to get my head straight.’
‘Ross—’
‘Don’t ring me. Don’t text me. Just give me the week, and I’ll come back, and we’ll sort it out.’
I stared at him. The wall was cold under my legs, the sky was overcast, and a car went past playing something loud with the windows down. Everything felt unbearably normal for a moment that was splitting my life in half.
‘A week,’ I said.
‘That’s all.’
‘And then you’ll come back.’
‘And then I’ll come back.’
I started crying. I didn’t decide to, it just happened, the way breathing happened, the way blinking happened, involuntary and unstoppable.
The tears came, and my face crumpled, and I pressed my hands over my mouth to hold the sound in, and I heard myself say it – the thing I’d been saying too often, the thing that had lost its power through repetition but that I meant, God, I meant it more than I’d ever meant anything—
‘I love you. Please don’t go. I love you, Ross, I love you so much—’
He put his arms around me. He pulled me in and held me against his chest. I could feel his heartbeat through his jacket and his chin resting on the top of my head.
He held me tightly and steadily, and he didn’t cry.
His breathing stayed even. His hands didn’t shake.
He held me the way you hold someone when you’ve already made a decision and the holding is the last part of it – not a beginning, not a promise, just a closing.
I felt it. Even then, through the tears and the panic and the desperate clutching, I felt the difference between being held by someone who was staying and being held by someone who was leaving.
I just couldn’t let myself know it yet.
He pulled back. He kissed my forehead – a dry, brief, terrible kiss, a kiss you give a child before you turn the light off – and he stood up from the wall, put his hands in his pockets, and walked away down the street.
He didn’t look back. I watched him get smaller and smaller, past the postbox and the bus stop and the turning for the high street.
I sat on the wall and waited for him to glance over his shoulder, just once, just a flicker, because that would mean something, that would mean he was already regretting it, that would mean the week would pass and he’d come back and we’d fix it.
He turned the corner without looking back.
I sat on the wall until the cold came through my jeans even more and my tears dried to a tight, salty film on my cheeks, and I told myself it was a week.
Just a week. Seven days. I could survive seven days.
I’d keep busy and stay calm and not text and not call, and on the eighth morning I’d wake up and he’d be there, and the nightclub, Lisa at the party, and the fighting would all be behind us, and we’d start again.
Seven days passed. Then eight. Then ten.
He didn’t call. He didn’t text. He didn’t appear at my door, or on our wall, or at school on Monday morning.
His phone went to voicemail every time I rang it, and his MSN went quiet.
His mates shrugged when I asked and looked away when I pushed, and the days kept passing and the silence kept growing, and I kept waiting on the wall after school, every afternoon for two weeks, watching the end of the street for a figure I already knew wasn’t coming.
He never came back.
No explanation. No goodbye. No final message, no mutual friend delivering a sorry excuse, no letter, nothing.
Ross Mercer walked away from me on a grey afternoon and vanished from my life as completely as if someone had wiped him off the surface of the earth.
And the girl he left sitting on that wall – seventeen, tear-stained, sick with love, still believing that if she just waited long enough, he’d come round the corner – spent the next twenty years carrying the wound without ever understanding what had caused it.
I carried it into my twenties. I carried it into my marriage.
I carried it into the spare room where I worked and the kitchen where I cooked and the bed where I lay beside a good man who loved me and wondered, in the dark, private hours before sleep, what I had done that was so terrible it had made a boy walk away without a word.
I never found out. Not from Ross. Not from anyone.
Until the friend request.