Chapter 28 Achilles Heel
“ M ore champagne?”
My head jumped up in the direction of the woman dressed in all black aside from her bright, white smile. “Yeah-yes. Please . Thank you.”
She tipped the champagne bottle my way, filling my glass until the bubbles fizzled out and tickled my fingers. She then walked over to Monica and topped her glass off too before taking her leave.
Thank God for alcohol.
“What do you think about this one?”
Monica turned in all angles in front of the three floor length mirrors in front of her, smoothing her hands over the rise of her hips.
Sipping back a mouth-full of champagne, I responded, “It’s nice. Very pretty.”
Monica’s shoulders slumped at the same time she let out an aggravated sigh and whipped around to face me.
“You can’t be so polite with this sort of thing, Alice.
It’s a wedding dress and ‘nice’ won’t cut it.
I need you to be brutally honest because we only have today to get this done and it needs to be perfect. ”
“Okay, okay, sorry.” Eyeing the silken ivory dress that laid loosely over her curves, a grimace twisted my face as I shook my head.
“It’s not anything that wows me, I guess. It’s too simple.”
“There we go!” Monica clapped her hands together. “That’s the kind of criticism we need! Onto the next dress!”
“Try something with a flare maybe?”
“Ooo, like a runway kind of wedding dress. I like it.”
Just as Monica headed back into the dressing room to grab the next dress, her purse started to ring.
“Can you grab that?” Monica threw over her shoulder.
Keeping my drink up high in one hand to keep it from spilling, I reached into Monica’s purse next to my feet and fished her phone out. The name on the incoming call set my stomach to boil, the alcohol inside bubbling nauseatingly.
“It’s Ethan,” I called back to her, my voice weaker than intended.
“Just answer and tell him to call back later.”
Fighting with my rising anxiety, I tried to reason with Monica through the constricting emotion winding around my throat, squeezing tighter as his name flashed across the phone.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to just let it go through to voicemail?”
Please don’t make me talk to him. Please don’t make me listen to his voice.
I hadn’t heard his voice anywhere but in my dreams since the day we kissed, and I knew before it even happened that I wasn’t ready to hear it again so soon.
“Yeah, just tell him I’m busy.”
Through the thick wood of the dressing room door separating us, Monica managed words sharp enough to splinter through the barrier and soar dead center for my heart.
“He knows where we are right now anyway. He picked out examples yesterday of dresses he liked that this store had so he should know we’re busy. ”
Shards from her words punctured the thinly veiled wounds of my heart, wounds that had barely begun their recovery. Now, they were bleeding out all over again and filling my stomach as I answered her phone.
“Hello.”
A pause lingered over the phone before his voice came out deep and clearly confused.
“Alice?”
Gulping down gobs of oxygen, the air suddenly tasted dry and was warm against my tongue. “Yeah. Monica is in the dressing room. Do you need me to give her a message?”
“Oh. I—” He stumbled over the oddly placed guilty tone in his voice. “I was just calling to ask her about dinner.”
As he said it, it struck me what a normal thing that was for him to do—to call his fiancé and ask about dinner. I supposed normalcy was good to see from them, especially after these last couple weeks.
I would be happy for them and their normalcy eventually. I swore it.
“I’ll tell her to call you back.”
“Thanks.”
After that followed too many seconds of dead silence for my already sick with worry stomach to handle. If he wasn’t going to hang up, then I would.
“Okay, well—”
“Alice?” he interrupted, stopping my words and my heart in the same beat.
“Yes?”
Holding the phone tight against my ear, I waited for him to speak with the lips he’d kissed me breathless with. My stare darted from corner to corner of the room and managed to not focus on any of it as I waited for his voice to come through the phone.
“What?” I pushed out, losing my grip on my patience as the quiet seconds stomped down on my panicked heart.
I hated this private moment with him as much as I craved it. I hated that I craved it. I hated myself for wanting to sit on the phone with him and listen to his silence until I went mad from it.
Eventually, he sighed. “I don’t even know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Is it cliche if I say everything?”
“Yes. It’s also not very helpful.”
“Yeah,” he breathed. “I just don’t know what to say anymore.”
Quietly, I asked, “Why do you have to say anything at all?”
Over the phone came a sigh that weighed down on my flailing heart with more grief than I’d ever felt smothered by before. “Because if I say something, then you’ll say something back… and I miss hearing your voice.”
“Ethan,” I exhaled as sharply as the pain stinging my chest.
“I know. I know.” Torment gripped his voice, and I so perfectly pictured him pinching his thumbs over his eyes to block out the pain. “I just wasn’t expecting you to pick up the phone…”
“Then maybe we should hang up.”
“Maybe we should.”
And yet neither of us did. We stayed just as we were, holding onto the silent lifeline between us.
“Can I ask you something?” His voice was so soft and smooth, like a caress made of low tones and forbidden words.
I lowered my voice to match his. “Should you?”
“Probably not.”
A regrettable smile twitched on my lips and I turned my head to press my mouth against my shoulder to hide all evidence of it.
“Then it’s probably best that you don’t.”
“What if I did it anyway?”
My shoulders rose and fell as I breathed a deep sigh, expelling every bit of melancholy that clotted my heart. “Remember what you said about loose lips? They’re a recipe for disaster.”
Ethan hummed into the phone, the sound vibrating through my ear and burrowing deep inside my soul.
“Is that what we are? A disaster?”
Lowering my voice to a whisper, I spoke past the ache lodged in my throat.
“We’re nothing.”
We were non-existent. A dream with the anxiety of a nightmare. Nothing real, nothing tangible aside from the pain we created together. We’d fade away just the same as the memories of a dream do until we were nothing but fragments of lost time.
His voice quiet and somber, he spoke first.
“Goodbye, Slim.”
A gasp I had zero control over ripped up through my throat as the pain of his one word knocked the very breath from my lungs, doubling me over on the couch I sat on.
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Even if I don’t, it’ll always be true.”
His words were a knife, plunging through and deflating my heart at the very same time the lock on the dressing room door switched open.
The line between Ethan and I went dead, and a lonely quiet crept over the phone in place of Ethan’s comforting silence.
Panicked, I dropped her phone back in her purse just as Monica emerged wearing another wedding gown.
“What did Ethan have to say?”
“Just wanted to ask about dinner. I told him you’d call him back.”
The sickening sensation crawling in my stomach grew as I lied to my sister with such ease. I wasn’t a liar before this. I was good, and I had morals that I lived by effortlessly. Ethan had spoiled all of that with just one illicit kiss.
His lips had branded me a liar and a cheat, and I could never rid myself of those titles because they would always be true.
“That’s nice.” My sister seemed pleased with Ethan initiating dinner between them, and her soft smile cut me down layer by pitiful layer. “He’s been doing better with small stuff like that again.”
Swallowing down the acid that had risen in my esophagus, I nodded.
“That’s good.”
Monica went to stand in front of the mirrors again, taking in her reflection with speculative eyes. “He moved back into the bedroom a couple days ago, so I think whatever was up his butt is gone now. Thank fuck.”
One second was all it took for my gut to drop through the floor and bile to jump in the opposite direction.
“He did?”
“Yeah. He still won’t put out, but I’m hoping to get him all liquored up tonight so we’ll see.” Monica tossed in a wink at me through her reflection in the mirror, and that was all it took.
Tingling sensations warped throughout my limbs, shooting out into my fingertips as they trembled uncontrollably. Panic knifed its way up my throat, burning the whole trip up until it made its way to my mouth and my shaking hands shot out and grabbed for the trash bucket directly next to me.
“Woah, okay, okay!”
My sister’s voice muffled through the wrenching and heaving as I threw up every last bit of alcohol and dignity I had left. Hands smoothed over my back as I emptied my stomach, tears running ashamed pathways down my cheeks before gentle fingers swiped them away.
Guilt overwhelmed me as I threw up, coating the sides of the wastebasket with every miserable, shameful thing I’d done or thought of doing or felt with a taken man.
He wasn’t mine, and yet I’d kissed him and thrived in stolen moments between the two of us like he could be.
He was sleeping in the same bed as my sister and having secret conversations with me that I allowed to take place.
As my sister rubbed my back, I sobbed with the thoughts of what I’d done to her.
Was I just so irreparably broken after Jonah that I sought out the one person who could break me for good? Did I seek out that kind of misery or was I just that unlucky? Was I the sort of person who basked in self-destructive tendencies, or was it sheer misfortune that I had met Ethan when I did?
“I’m sorry,” I cried to Monica as she comforted me.
“Oh, that’s okay. The champagne was making me a little queasy too.”
But it wasn’t okay, and it wasn’t the champagne. She had no idea what I was actually sorry for, and she could never know. I could lose Jonah. I could lose Ethan. I could lose anyone in my life and turn out okay except Monica.
She was my Achilles heel and Ethan was the arrow.
All I could do was keep running from him to save all of our lives.