Twenty-Six #2
I’m completely speechless. Unmoored. Shattered.
He’s drunk , I remind myself. And angry.
He doesn’t mean what he’s saying. This is not him.
This is not who you fell in love with. You fell in love with the good parts.
The sweet, sensitive, and caring person that he allowed you to slowly unearth.
Don’t let him ruin everything. Don’t let him treat you this way.
Fight back. I say the words over and over in my head, like a mantra.
I feel about an inch tall and more humiliated than I’ve ever been in my life.
“When you’re with someone…it’s normal to develop feelings,” I whisper in a broken voice. “Some things are just beyond our control…” My eyes are watering, and with extreme difficultly, I turn in his direction.
“Bullshit. Everything can be controlled! You spent years being treated like shit by a guy who’d rather fuck other girls than be with you, and now you’re going to tell me that you’ve fallen in love with someone like me?
So let’s hear it, then: When did I make you fall in love with me?
Was it when I fucked you and used your body like the bastard I am?
Or maybe it was when I started coming inside you?
Maybe that was the moment when you fooled yourself into thinking that it meant something to me?
Or was it because I took you to my parents’ house?
Fuck, you’re acting like a child.” His words hit me like a slap, taking my breath away.
“Enough,” I say, in a barely audible murmur. “Please, stop it.” I pick myself up off the ground with slow movements. It feels like the room has started spinning, and I look around for something to hold on to. But the only things I find are my own arms, which I hug tightly to my chest.
With one step, Thomas closes the distance between us.
A gust of alcohol and weed hits me right in the face, making me feel nauseous.
Or maybe it’s just him that makes me want to puke.
He looms over me, looking menacingly down at me.
He grabs me by the shoulders and brings his face down close to mine.
Still in shock, I let myself be manipulated like a marionette.
“I don’t love you,” he spits cruelly at me. “And I never will.”
I am breathless. “Why…why are you doing this to me? What did I do to you to deserve this?” My voice has been reduced to a strangled sob. I can feel the pressure of his fingers slacken.
He’s looking at me. His chest rises and falls like he’s out of breath.
I remain chained to his stare. And I don’t know how, but I feel like the look on his face is telling me—screaming at me— I will never be able to get the memory of your face right now out of my head.
My face. A blank face. Ripped apart by suffering. Ripped apart by the man I love.
“You can do better,” he growls through gritted teeth. “You deserve better.” He releases me with a shove that makes me stagger back. “Now get the fuck out of this room; I want to be alone,” he finishes, turning his back to me and grabbing the bottle of whiskey from the desk.
I just stand there helplessly, staring at his broad back with my legs trembling.
I want to vent all my suffering at him. But I can’t so much as utter a word.
It’s like a part of my brain has been paralyzed.
I have no idea how, but I do somehow get out of the room.
The room that, until a few weeks ago, I shared with him.
The room that still contains some of my books, some of my clothes.
A piece of me. I leave it there. I leave it with him, and then I disappear with my broken heart.
I got it all so wrong. I confessed my feelings to the man I love, and he, without even a shred of respect for me, obliterated them right before my eyes.
Ridiculed them. I shouldn’t have done it, not like this.
I made a mistake, a serious one. But I can’t believe that I just made up a love that never really existed.
All those times he defended me, supported me, encouraged me, and protected me.
He took care of me; he gave me everything he had to give.
The night my mother kicked me out, he took me by the hand and brought me to an ice-skating rink because he knew how happy it would make me.
He took me stargazing so I could relive a piece of my childhood.
And he indulged me when I asked to stay in the rain with him, just because it would bring me joy.
That is the guy I fell in love with. The boy whose arms became my favorite place in the world, and didn’t he promise that I could stay there as long as I wanted?
The boy who, after making love, drew his face close to mine and whispered that he’d never be able to be without me again.
Who got me a bracelet just because he saw how much I liked it.
Who took me to his home, to the places where he grew up, and showed me the most important parts of his life: his mother, his brother.
I wasn’t building castles in the air. I refuse to believe that.
I fell in love with him because he was lovable.
But his words, so full of contempt, keep running through my head. And I swear I’d rip my brain out of my skull rather than continue to hear them. Just like I’d rip my heart from my chest rather than feel all this pain.
I spend the night sobbing in my bed, occasionally falling asleep and startling awake several times. I feel like I’ve been tossed into some nightmare, and for a few moments in the thick darkness of my room, I can even fool myself into believing that is what’s happening.
The first rays of dawn come slowly. When you’re suffering, time seems to stop.
But the pain remains. It’s all there, inside of you.
And it kills you; it sucks out your life force.
It tears at your soul. I’m about to slip into another muzzy half sleep, but then I feel my phone vibrate with a new text.
I gasp slightly when I see his name come up on the display.
That’s not possible. He couldn’t possibly have the guts to text me now. I stay there with my phone clutched in my hands for a few seconds while I consider whether to read the text or just delete it.
I decide to read it.
I need you to come here. I’m begging you.
I stare at the message in consternation for a long time, trying to make some sense of it.
He has completely lost his mind. Where does he get the audacity to ask me for something like that?
After the way he treated me, I shouldn’t even be thinking about it, but damn it, the wound is too fresh, and thinking is all that I can do.
Love makes us stupid. Exploitable. Dependent.
Screwed up and weak. And I’m all of that.
Right now, I’m every one of those things.
Which is why, for a second, I actually consider going over there.
Even if it’s just to shout in his face how cowardly and disgusting he was toward me and claw back a modicum of the dignity that he shredded.
Then, another text: It’s urgent.
Panic takes the wheel. With one hand pressed against my chest, I leap out of bed. What if something actually happened to him? The worry is enough to get me rushing over there.
I walk to the frat house with my stomach in knots and a nauseous feeling that intensifies with each step I take.
I’m even momentarily afraid that I’m going to have to stop and vomit.
The front door isn’t locked, and the interior is full of sleeping guys and girls, even though it’s already almost noon.
There are empty bottles scattered everywhere.
The smell of weed and sweat permeates everything.
On the floor, I spot three Spanish lit books, carelessly abandoned.
I pick them up, because the thought of leaving them in the midst of all the chaos hurts my heart.
I climb the stairs, trying to soothe the agitation that’s turned my knees to water.
I grab the door handle, and a terrible kind of premonition comes over me.
It’s like an alarm bell going off in my head, a voice whispering that I should run away.
But I don’t pay it any heed; instead I turn the handle and go in.
My blood runs cold. I see clothes scattered across the floor. An empty whiskey bottle on the desk. Thomas’s belt at the foot of the bed. His shirt dangling half off the mattress. White powder on the bedside table. And him on his stomach, wrapped in a sheet, asleep .
But none of that is what steals my breath.
What freezes my heart are the glacier-colored eyes that stare mockingly at me.
The barely there grin that slowly appears on a mouth smeared with lipstick.
The shock of tousled red hair falling over bare breasts, the rest of her covered by the same sheet that surrounds my boyfriend’s naked body.
No.
Not my boyfriend.
Not anymore.
I feel the ground shaking beneath my feet. My ears are ringing. That retching feeling is crawling back up my throat again.
“Oops,” Shana says maliciously, sitting up straight. “Surprise.”
The books I’m holding fall to the floor with a dull clatter that wakes Thomas up. Instinctively, he throws his arm out toward the part of the mattress that, until recently, I occupied. His hand lands on Shana’s belly, and I feel a stabbing sensation in my chest.
This is not possible.
This is not really happening.
But then Thomas raises his head and turns to look at her. “What the fuck are you doing in my bed?” he growls, leaping to his feet. My eyes land on his boxers—he’s still wearing them—but that doesn’t mean anything.
It’s only then that Thomas notices I’m in the room. And the expression on his face shifts dramatically. He’s no longer surprised; instead he seems terrified. He pales, and I’m sure that he knows it too; he knows that this is our point of no return.