Chapter 1 The Great Something #2
He stood quiet for a moment, and I grabbed onto the solace his silence brought me. Silence meant he was thinking—considering. That’s all I needed. A simple consideration of what the last five years of our lives together meant to him.
“Fuck!” Jonah exploded, slamming his suitcase down to the floor. The action splintered alarm through my chest and a gasp through my lips. He had turned away from me so that all I could see was his back, rising and falling with each labored breath he let in and out.
Seeing him like this flashed an image of the first dance we’d been paired up to perform together in class.
The dance that was the catalyst for our love.
How we were positioned now was almost exactly how that performance would begin.
Me, facing him, wanting him, reaching for him.
And Jonah, turned away, shut down, and lost to me.
“Alice, I’m trying to do this as nicely as I can, but you’re not making it easy.”
Jonah made his move to face me again, and when he did is when I began to shake. His eyes were callous, his kissable lips were thinned, and my heart was suddenly very, very scared.
Jonah pulled his lips back and began to cut me down to tattered shreds. “Being with you is like a goddamn chore, okay? I wake up next to you and I can’t wait to get out of the apartment. I do whatever I can to stay out late, and you just let me without fighting.”
The panic in my throat began to squeeze out tears that dribbled down my face in wet streaks. Jonah looked down at my tears, but he didn’t stop.
“I drink way too much now, and it’s because of you. Because I have to drink to be happy around you.”
“That’s not true,” I tried to protest, but my voice failed to help past a whisper.
“It is. Think about it. Can you remember one time over the last year where I’ve been happy around you without a beer in my hand or a shot being poured down my throat?”
I could, actually. There were plenty of occasions, but I wasn’t about to argue with him and make him any angrier.
Right now I was just trying to hold the tattered parts of my heart together long enough for us to come to some type of agreement.
Jonah had said lots of awful things to me before, and we’d gotten past them.
At this point, I didn’t care how he spoke to me. I didn’t care what he said to me. I just cared that he stayed with me.
“We had such a good day today, Jonah. Today is proof that we’re getting back on track to how we used to be!”
Today, we’d gone to the dance studio early so Jonah could help me practice my routine for the competition coming up in Chicago less than a year away. We’d laughed and teased each other throughout the day, smiles stuck on our faces throughout the rehearsal.
It felt so good to be like that with him again. He hadn’t held me or kissed me or even touched me much recently, but today he did and before this came up, I thought today was perfect.
Jonah’s muted green eyes angled with pity. “I did that for you. I wanted to give you one last good memory before I left.”
I had to stop myself from cursing, knowing how much it disgusted him whenever I did.
There were just so many overpowering emotions building up in me that I didn’t know which one to latch onto.
In the midst of the turmoil sloshing around my heart, my eyes fell to the suitcase strewn across the floor.
“Did you already pack?”
The way the suitcase fell when he pushed it and rocked back and forth, like the front was bursting with hidden items, made me question him.
Jonah nodded, and my heart crushed in on itself; it was crumbling piece by jagged piece with no intentions of ever being put back whole again.
“How long—” A soft sob ripped through my words, embarrassing and unstoppable. “How long have you known you were going to leave me?”
Jonah swallowed hard and sniffled. Locking his eyes right onto mine, I felt the detriment of his words before he even spoke them.
“I’ve thought about breaking up with you since our first year together.”
Milliseconds before the searing sting of his words could hit, the anger hit first.
“Bullshit.”
Jonah had the audacity to roll his eyes. “You can think whatever you want.”
“This isn’t me thinking anything. This is me knowing based off of your words and your actions.” Turning with fire in my veins, I ransacked through our closet before pulling out the giant, light green scrapbook Jonah made me for our one year anniversary.
“You can’t say that you weren’t sure if you loved me and that you wanted to break up with me back then when you wrote me this for our one year.” I flipped the scrapbook open to the very back, past all of our happy and smiling memories, where his letter to me was tucked away.
Pushing the book towards him, I forced him to confront his confession of love for me that he’d handwritten and given to me as a gift.
In the letter, in his own tender and lovingly crafted words, was the first time he’d ever told me he loved me.
It was right there in front of him, glaring at us both.
“You can’t try to tell me you didn’t love me when you wrote this, because I’ll never believe you.” In his eyes was the truth. His truth. Our love was his truth back then.
And yet, he lied straight through his own truth anyway.
“I’m not sure I ever loved you.”
I tried to gasp for air, but there was none left.
Only fire and dread to fill my lungs. With those words, I was thrown into a limbo that lacked oxygen and stability.
I was sinking down further and deeper into a jungle below, where all I could see were nightmares and unforgiving hazel eyes haunting every corner of my freefall.
“I’m gonna get going.”
My heart lurched my body forward towards him, desperation screaming in my blood to lock the doors, cry, plead, do whatever I could to make him stay. This couldn’t be it.
“No.” My arm shot out to him, and just as my fingers grazed his arm, he shook me off.
Rejection expanded across my whole chest like a quilt of finely woven misery and smothered my hope to a gasping wisp.
Jonah walked out of our bedroom and down the hallway, past pictures of our life together scattered across the walls.
He ignored every single one of them.
“Jonah, wait!” I ran after him without a thought in my head, just love in my wildly beating heart.
“My ride is waiting outside. I can’t wait anymore.”
“Where are you staying tonight?”
“With a friend.”
“Which friend?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?”
Finally, I caught up to him enough to place myself in front of him, my breathing audible and wrecked with despair. “It does to me.”
The love in my heart with Jonah’s name traced onto it ate itself alive as I witnessed just how little he seemed to care what it meant to me.
“It isn’t Hannah, is it?” I wasn’t sure why I asked him that, and by the expression in his eyes, I could see that he wasn’t expecting me to ask him that either.
“No.”
Hannah was another dancer at our studio who’d arrived a couple years ago and had always rubbed me the wrong way. She’d flirt with Jonah in front of me, ogle him, then in the next second try to be my friend. Jonah had never shown interest in her, but they were friends.
“Can you text me when you get to California?”
Desperation stitched my voice together as I begged him for just this one thing. A text. A simple click of his fingers across his phone and that was all.
Jonah’s gaze burned into the ground below. He stood there with one hand on the front door and the other around his suitcase. I stood there with my heart bleeding down my sleeves, with dried tears crusted on my cheeks and fresh ones sitting in my eyes.
The anticipation surrounding us was forceful, pushing down on my chest with more weight than I could hold up on my own. I was struggling, cracking under the pressure of his response, and at any moment, my entire body was going to give out beneath me.
Rolling his lips together, Jonah lifted his eyes from the floor and skipped right over my face. My heart flipped and crashed to the bottom of my stomach, shattering into a billion shards as he turned the handle of the front door and yanked it open.
“No.”
He shut the door with that as his last lingering word between us. No.
I collapsed onto the couch next to me on my hands and knees, crumbling into myself as the heartache ripped down the length of my body.
My loud cries penetrated the room, and the atmosphere became a mixture of grieving moans and untamed hyperventilating.
Alone with my sorrows, I crawled like a pathetic animal up to the back of the couch against the front window of our apartment.
Tearing the curtains on the window to the side, I needed to see him. I needed to see him as he drove away from the life we’d built together like it was nothing more than a house of cards, unsteady and easily caved in.
My watery gaze found Jonah in the poorly painted sunset pulling the curtain on this chapter of my life. He was throwing his suitcase into the trunk of a dark blue car.
Every sob wracking my body ceased as I saw the car.
I knew this car. I saw it every day at the dance studio where we worked.
As the pieces of familiarity fell together in my mind, she popped her head out of the driver’s side.
Hannah.
Jonah pulled open the passenger side door, and Hannah flashed him a warm smile that curdled the acid in my stomach.
Betrayal sprouted its claws and sunk deep in my soul as I watched them move and act and breathe like they’d done nothing wrong.
Like they hadn’t just upended my entire life with a lie.
They both disappeared into the car together and drove away into the sunset as the new romantic characters of what was supposed to be my fairytale and happily ever after. In minutes, I had become the villain. I was the outcast of my own story.
Numbness settled in my chest as I sank back down against the couch. In a matter of minutes, the entire life I’d known had fallen apart with the pull of one string. One lie unfurled the seams of my life so completely that I hadn’t even seen it coming.
Nothing felt real. Nothing felt at all. The rough tweed of the couch below my legs was the only feeling left, every scratch of it against my skin reminding me to breathe.
Scratch. Breathe. Scratch. Breathe . Scratch. Will anyone care now if I stop breathing?
That’s how I spent the rest of the night.
Breathing.
Living.
Wondering where my story would go now that its heart had been ripped out.