Chapter 33 I Fell and I Crashed
I need to talk to you when you get here.
The first words I woke up to Thursday morning set a load of bricks in my stomach from the moment I stepped out of bed.
By the time I pulled up and parked in their driveway, the size of my uncontainable thoughts had doubled and my head felt more like a hot-air balloon than anything else. My overnight bag in hand, I walked up to the front door and let myself in. Immediately, I ran smack dab into a wall of silence.
The living room and kitchen were empty. The T.V. was off and there were no voices coming from any area of the house. My shoes across the floor were the only sound to touch my ears for quite some time as I walked further into the house.
Maybe I should text Ethan that I’m here?
Just as the thought crossed my mind, the first sound in the house that did not come from my shoes struck my ears—and it came from my old bedroom.
Curiosity leading me that way, the noise drew me in like it had thrown a rope around my body and was pulling me until my ear pressed against the cool wood of the bedroom door.
Inside, the peculiar noises coming from within screamed with a blood-curdling familiarity.
Heart leaping up my throat, I pressed my fingers to the door, swinging it wide open. Monica’s head jerked up at the sound of the door, her watery eyes landing on mine and punching a hole clear through my heart so it was gaping and bleeding and gasping for life.
“Can you shut the door please?” Monica demanded through a sob.
I followed along without even the slightest pause, closing the door behind me and hurrying towards the bed.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not fucking okay. Do I look okay?”
Truth be told, she looked like I’d never seen her look before, and that was the scariest part so far. The bags beneath her eyes and the exhaustion leaking down her face in wet streaks combined to create something I never thought I’d ever see in my big sister.
Defeat.
My badass, independent, take-no-shit sister looked utterly defeated.
And I had a sinking feeling at exactly the reason why.
“Did something happen?”
Please be work related. Please be about losing a case or her job. Please be anything other than what I’m thinking.
Sucking down a jagged breath, Monica exhaled two words that would define the inescapable heartbreak lingering inside of me for the rest of my life.
“It’s Ethan.”
As she said his name, I felt the reality settle in.
The words floated from her mouth and burrowed into my chest, sinking through each layer of my heart until it reached its core.
They wound around my heart’s core like weeds until they’d wound so tightly, they cut off all circulation.
For the next several minutes, I experienced the cold of a dead organ trickle through my body.
The chill of death reached out from my heart into every part of me, stiffening my blood to ice so I was truly numb from the inside out.
“What about him?” I asked, already hearing the distance needled in my voice.
Monica choked on one of her cries, having difficulty getting the words out. At seeing her pain, I willed the numbness to drive deeper.
“I think he wants to break things off between us.”
So Ethan had done exactly as he said he would do. He’d hinted at an end to their engagement in a conversation last night that I’m realizing went nothing like either of us thought it would.
“How do you feel about that?”
The cut of Monica’s stare was so severe on mine, that I instantly knew I’d asked the wrong question.
“I feel fucking fantastic about it! How the fuck do you think I feel, Alice?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That was dumb.”
My apology spilled out fast, trying to erase the idiotic slip up I’d just given Monica. A normal sister wouldn’t be testing how her crying sister felt about the possible ending of her relationship. She’d say something more along the lines of—
“The wedding is only a month away. Is he crazy?”
“That’s what I said!” Her eyes went buggy, desperation spilling out of them. “But he was just going on about how we jumped into things too fast and maybe we were making a mistake.”
Plenty of mistakes had been made, but none of them were Monica’s to own.
She put her fist to her mouth, stare bubbling over with panic. “I can’t lose him. I can’t. He’s the only guy I’ve found time to actually date in the last three years and probably will be the only guy I’ll ever get to want to marry me.”
“What?” Scooching closer to her on the bed, I reached my hand out to lie on top of hers. “Why would you say that? You’re amazing and brilliant and beautiful and any guy—”
“Would be lucky to have me?” she finished for me with sarcasm biting her words. “That’s a crock of shit saying and you know it. I’m married to my job and everyone I’ve ever dated has known that, and it’s worked that way just fine for years . I never wanted anything serious with anyone before.”
Until the man of both of our dreams came along.
“But then Ethan and I had that scare and… it all just seemed to sort of fall into place when he proposed.”
“Wait—you didn’t want to get married before Ethan?”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to get married.
I just never stopped long enough to think about it.
Then, he proposed and… I started thinking about it and how I’m pushing 30 and if I ever wanted to have kids that it would probably have to happen pretty soon, and maybe I couldn’t wait for another guy to come around and decide that he wants to hitch his wagon to mine, and I should take advantage of this perfect specimen in front of me, offering me all of those things I didn’t know I wanted. ”
As she was talking, I was picturing it all. Their wedding, their children, their perfect life together. They could still have it.
All it would take is a snip and a cut, and I’d be out of the picture for good.
“Did you tell him any of this?”
Monica sniffled, wiping the back of her sleeve underneath her bright red nose.
“Sort of. I talked long enough and cried hard enough that he didn’t end it, but we’re still not in a good place.”
My heart knew what I was about to say and tried to convince my tongue not to say it.
I had to though. I owed it to Monica for everything I’d put her through even if she didn’t know I was to blame.
I’d made one too many selfish decisions with the blind hope that one day, everything would work out the way I wanted.
But I was wrong. This wasn’t about me getting what I wanted.
This was and had always been Monica’s show and I had tried to upstage her, thinking the wants of my heart were more profound than hers.
Ethan and I both had assumed that was the case, but we were wrong.
Ethan and I were both so wrong and now, the least I could do was fix it before leaving their lives in peace.
“Maybe you should go to premarital counseling? A few sessions and you guys should be right back on course.”
The part of me that knew Ethan knew it was a lie, but the part of me that knew Monica was sure it might work. Ethan would fight and sustain the belief that it would never work between them, but Monica was an excellent negotiator and could convince a toothbrush it was a lawnmower.
Counseling might really work for them, and half of me really hoped that it did.
The other half of me was beside itself, wailing into oblivion for a loss that was never even mine to begin with.
Monica blinked a blank stare at me, and I’d give all the money in my bank account to know what she was thinking.
“That’s a great idea. That’s—” She paused, the shine of tears glossing over dry. “That’s a really great idea. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”
She rose up off of the bed, not waiting for an answer to what I realized was a rhetorical question. “That’s good. I’ll bring it up to him and even if I just get him to go to one, I know I can make him hear me.”
The question of love was front and center on my mind and trying its best to claw up my throat and be heard, but everything inside of me recognized the answer wouldn’t matter.
Even if she didn’t love him, it didn’t matter now.
She was his and he was hers even if not locked together by love, but rather an agreement.
A promise. Or for Mon, a fear of being alone.
Having someone she maybe didn’t love was better than having no one at all.
It was just rotten luck on my part that the man she had and didn’t love was one that I did.
I’d felt it happening over these last couple months and I tried my best to ignore it, to tell myself it was nothing but a crush.
I told myself repeatedly that I wasn’t dumb enough to fall head over heels for the first man I felt something towards after my breakup.
These were rebound feelings and nothing more.
Yet, the more I denied the feelings, the heavier they grew.
The feeling of falling was so surreal the entire time, like I was tipping backwards in a chair, balancing on nothing but wobbling legs.
Each interaction with Ethan I tipped back farther and farther, the panic of falling expanding inside of me.
And now— right now —sitting in my old bedroom watching Monica gleam with confidence at saving her relationship, I felt the fall.
In the exact moment it was confirmed that Ethan and I would never get our time in the sun, it happened. The pain of dread exploded in my chest, so white hot and severe that it sent a wash of white across my vision, giving new meaning to blinding pain.
A gasp rattled through my chest as I doubled over, my weakness hunching me into myself to try to relieve the pain even a little.
Nose between my knees, I tried to breathe through the pain, but each breath deepened the ache.
In slow motion, I had fallen, arms reaching out for anything to grab onto to stop the fall but was left grasping at air as I fell all the way, crashing into the reality that yes—I really was that dumb.
I had fallen deeply in love with Ethan Black as the crippling agony of my broken heart was proof of.
“Are you okay?” Monica’s voice sounded as if I was buried underwater, distant and her concern muffled.
Not at all.
“I just need to use that bathroom if that’s okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, go. I’ll start packing the car so we can hit the road when you get out.”
Handing over Monica a nod of confirmation, I bolted up from my seat on the bed and out the bedroom door, closing it behind me. I only made it half a step before the pieces of my broken heart yanked me to a stop.
Standing there waiting for me with the same anguish in his eyes as was in my heart, was Ethan.
My heart slammed against my back at the sight of him, trying to run away from the source of its pain. I nearly stumbled back with the force of its escape attempt.
Without thinking, I grabbed for my heart that belonged to him and held on, cradling it as best I could for the next however many seconds Ethan stood in front of me.
He stood there looking nothing like the resolute man he was yesterday when he left my apartment.
That man yesterday loved me with a certainty that one day, he’d be able to express that love freely.
This man in front of me now was but a shell of that man. Now, as if robbers had come in during the night and stolen every bit of happiness they could get their hands on, he looked gutted from the inside out.
Ethan appeared as broken as I felt, and I was sure it was because he knew what I knew.
It was sitting in his eyes, mucking up our would-be happily ever after.
He knew we would never get to know what it was like to explore what we could be together or why our meeting one another felt like cosmic design.
He knew that we were over before we ever even got the chance to start.
Eyes still fixed to mine, Ethan shook his head and quietly told me something we both already knew.
“I was wrong.”
Disbelief lathered through his tone, proving once more how sure he was that this would work—that someday he and I would be together. It hurt to hear, too. He wanted us as badly as I did and knowing that it wasn’t enough had tears swarming my eyes before I knew it.
I loved him and I wanted him and I couldn’t have him.
I was crumbling, wobbling on deflating strength, and needed to get somewhere I could safely fall apart. In front of a man I loved when I had no business to do so was not the place.
“I’m sorry.”
The words were out in a whisper and I hoped Ethan heard the truth within them for all the things I was sorry for. When his face fell even further, I was sure he’d heard me and I used my last bit of energy to push past him into the bathroom directly next to him.
The door in my hand swinging shut faster than the pulse racing in my neck, Ethan managed to squeeze three words between the closing gap.
“Don’t forget Slim.”
And then we were cut off from one another, the door closed between us with his confusing words lingering inside the bathroom above my heavy head.
Thoughts of what he didn’t want me to forget clashed with those of my heartache as I slid down the bathroom door, my falling tears sliding down my face in unison.