Track 17 Evil #3
“Yes, you did!” He yelled. “I was going through the worst time in my fucking life, and I needed you! I told you I needed you, and you bailed on me, Sydney!” He slapped his hand against the truck, and I flinched at the impact.
He took a deep, uneven breath and ran a hand through his hair as he tried to compose himself. His drunken voice was low and gravelly again, saturated in suffering.
“I would never do that to you.”
My heart cracked open, and my tears made their presence known.
“I’m sorry,” I cried.
He looked at me with glassy eyes, too hurt to see me, or too angry to care.
“No. You’re not.” He backed away. “You’re just sorry you have to face it.” He shook his head, and I closed my eyes tightly as tears poured from them.
“Don’t worry, Syd. I don’t need you anymore.” He seethed. “I figured out how to live without you. Just like you wanted.”
I sobbed as my heart was ripped out of my body.
“That’s not what I wanted…”
“No?” He scoffed. “Could’ve fooled me.”
He waited for my response, but I wasn’t sure I could give it. I wasn’t sure it would be enough. But I had to find words. I owed him as much. I took a deep breath and searched hard for my voice.
“I don’t know how to be around you. It’s better this way.”
He let out an airy, smug laugh as he pointed at me.
“Better for who? For you?” He lowered his hand as he slowly moved toward me. “Why, so you can lie to yourself and say you don’t want me how I want you?” He stopped just before me. “I was there that night, Syd. I know what would’ve happened next.”
A shiver ran down my spine and straight into my gut.
“Nothing would’ve happened next.”
“Nothing?”
He closed the space between us, his voice low, deep, and thick, and my heart sped up with my breath. He placed both hands beside my head again, and he spoke only so I could hear. His voice was an electric wave on my skin.
“Is that what you tell yourself, Syd? So, you can pretend you don’t want me? Like it’s not what you’ve wanted since we were sixteen? ‘Breathe the way you breathe, like only a lover understands,’ right?”
My eyes widened, and my jaw fell slightly at my own words spit back at me. He smirked with a cocky, crooked grin.
“What’d you think I’d forget?”
I couldn’t answer. My eyes locked on his, strong and steady, but inside, I was screaming.
“I remember everything when it comes to you.”
My breath was weak and shaky, and I could feel it in my suddenly malleable bones—I was going to lose my will any second.
“Say it, Sydney. Say that’s not what you meant.” His eyes danced between mine, and his next words dripped with a seduction that made my whole being come alive. “Say you don’t want to fuck me, and I’ll leave you alone.”
I almost couldn’t take it. The sound of his twisted, intoxicated voice. The use of his explicit words and their erotic implication. A tremor ran the length of me, and I nearly came undone right there in front of him.
His eyes fell to my lips, and it took everything I had not to collapse my mouth onto his. Desire rolled off me in waves, I was sure he could feel. My thoughts spun in rapid succession as I tried to find the words that would end this. That would save me from myself.
“Say it,” he demanded.
I took three shaky breaths and almost caved. Almost succumbed to the truth in my heart, the truth that was throbbing in my aching core. But then, I found them.
“I don’t.”
He hovered over me, his eyes firm on mine, and then he grinned. Satisfied. Like he had already won, even though I had denied him. He pushed himself off the truck as he watched me.
“You’re so full of shit, Syd. I don’t even think you know it.” My eyes followed his thumb as he swept it across his bottom lip.
My voice, my body, everything felt weak, but I did well to sound secure. I clenched my teeth as I swallowed.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Why am I—why are you doing this?!” His hands flailed up and gestured between us before he ran them through his hair and spun around. “You’re fucking ruining me, ruining us!”
I looked away and tried immeasurably hard to let this man believe he was alone in this.
That none of it was real. That there was nothing to ruin because there was nothing to save.
It was an evil thing to do—to leave him alone in his hurt.
In his love. But I convinced myself I was doing it for him.
I was trying to save him from me. Because he deserved better than the torture, I was putting him through, and my lack of self-control.
So, I remained cold, when all I felt was warm, suffocating, overwhelming love.
“Don’t be dramatic, E.”
“It’s not dramatic, it’s the truth! But you wouldn’t know the truth if it ran you over, would you? How the hell can you be so cold? How can you sit there and act like this is nothing when you know the truth?!”
I set my jaw firmly. “Are you done yet?”
“Not. Even. Close.” He scowled.
We stood in silence, our breaths angered and quick. My teeth gritted together so hard, I was sure they’d be ground down to dust. I needed to leave.
“Well, I’m done.” I spat. I had to be. I couldn’t look at him any longer without telling him everything.
Without pouring my broken heart out onto him, and then ripping it away again.
I couldn’t have explained myself if I tried.
I was so lost in my web of confusion, I didn’t even realize he was right—I was ruining everything I was afraid to lose, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I moved past him, determined to walk away before it was too late, but he wouldn’t let me go without one final punch.
“You know, Syd,” he said to my back. “The girl I used to know? She was solid as a rock. She knew who she was, what she stood for. But you?” He scoffed.
“You’re like wet sand—fragile, shapeless.
You pretend you’re so steady and strong, but the second life comes at you with a little bit of rain, you crumble.
Wash away like you were never real to begin with.
Just like everything else that used to hold weight in your life. An empty fucking illusion.”
The slap of his words stopped me in my tracks. My jaw clenched, and my eyes squeezed shut as the knife of them stabbed through me, gutted me, and discarded my remains.
“Now I’m done,” he said, and he walked back into the bar, slamming the door on his way in.
I walked all the way home in a daze. My heart felt like it was torn out of my body, beaten and bleeding, and left to die.
I never knew a person could hurt so badly without a single physical wound.
It was a new kind of pain. Deep and penetrating, and it seeped into every bone, every vein.
Every nerve ending in my body felt the agonizing ache.
When I got home, I drank an entire bottle of Mom’s Cabernet and rolled around in the bed of my cold, dark basement bedroom.
I tried to cry. I tried to break down. I tried to feel the weighted loss I had no doubt endured in my suffocating, drunken mess of a mind.
But it didn’t come. I was sick to my stomach, and my heart had bled dry, but I couldn’t feel.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t fucking breathe.
Have you ever held your breath so long that you can feel the shape of your lungs?
Feel their painful plea as they quiver for the air you forcibly deprive them of?
You know that desperate feeling in that last second, just before your next breath?
The moment you question if you just royally screwed up when your eyesight gets spotty, your head gets light, and you’re more than sure you’re about to accidentally kill yourself if you don’t breathe right that very second?
That’s exactly where I was—that moment of panicked desperation before you take your next breath, knowing you just fucked yourself up, by choice.
And I couldn’t take it anymore.
After more than an hour of suffering in it, I lunged for the door and ran like a starving soul to my next breath.
It was two A.M., and I wasn’t sure he’d be home, but I didn’t care.
I was hellbent on a mission to breathe again, everything else be damned.
I had no idea what I was doing but knew exactly what to do.
It was like having an out-of-body experience, but being perfectly conscious during it—knowing your next move, and not caring about the consequences.
I knew where this road would take me. And I had no intention of stopping.
Ren told me E had a place on Rowan in the new luxury buildings they built last year. I pulled up in a cab I still don’t remember calling and slipped in through the main door as someone else exited. I searched for his name on the mailboxes and rode the elevator up to level four.
I knocked on the door of apartment 402, and I waited for E to answer.
But no one came.
I knocked again.
No one came.
I almost lost my courage after the third knock, and maybe it would’ve been better if I had, but like I said, sometimes fate has already decided for you.
I heard the swift click of the lock as it came undone and the jiggle of the doorknob as it turned and opened the door.
E stood before me in nothing but thin sweatpants that hung low on his trim waist, with nothing underneath them.
His hair was perfectly disheveled, and the dim light cast shadows that made the cuts of his muscles look even more defined.
He rubbed one eye as he held the door open and squinted with the other as he tried to make sense of me.
His hand came down to his side, and he licked his lips, pulling them into his mouth as he assessed me.
My eyes traveled all over his body. Across the wide span of his chest, over his toned, structured arms, his strong hands I remembered the feel of.
They followed down the long trail of his flexed abs that led right to a bold outline of the only thing beneath his thin covering.
He tilted his head back, and looked down the bridge of his nose at me as my eyes snapped up to his.