Chapter 44 I Have No Right to Hate You
M y stomach dropped fast and hard just as her eyes rounded with panic as they met mine in the mirror.
The door swung on the bathroom stall behind her that she’d just come out of, and neither of us spoke.
She looked just the same as she did on stage, save for the red, blotchy spots around her puffy eyes that told a tale of her tears that she’d come in here to shed in private.
I was probably the last person on the planet she’d want to run into after having just cried her eyes out, but I suppose it’s true what they say about karma.
She is one fickle bitch.
Dropping her blurry eyes from mine, Hannah scurried over to one of the sinks to wash her hands.
The sound of the running sink filled the bathroom and tried its best to cover the uncomfortable tension between us.
On awkward feet, I walked up next to her to use the sink one over from hers, setting my quick-fix makeup bag I’d nabbed on the way over on the edge.
Feeling a bit daring, I peeked over at her to see if she was doing the same to me.
She wasn’t, actually.
Instead, she was busy trying to clean up the mess she’d made of her eye-makeup, aggressively wiping a wadded up paper towel beneath her puffy eyes. As I watched her struggle, an unanticipated bout of pity blossomed inside of me.
That pity turned a nagging finger at me in my head, scolding me for letting her hang out to dry. Her eye makeup really looked a total mess, and the bottle of concealer I had hidden in my makeup bag burned through to my palm laying against it.
If I were in her shoes, I would want someone—no matter who it was—to offer a helping hand.
Sucking back a big inhale, I fingered my way through my makeup bag until I wrapped my fingers around my concealer and held it out to Hannah.
Her stare cut across to my outstretched hand in the mirror, regarding the gesture with caution. Without sparing me a glance, she carefully took the bottle between her fingers and mumbled out a quiet, “Thanks.”
Next to each other, we did our makeup without saying a word until Hannah got up the courage to make awkward small talk.
“How did you and Gabe’s routine go?”
I popped one of my shoulders up in a shrug, hiding the smile digging into my cheeks best I could.
“It went well, I think. The audience seemed to like it.”
In the mirror, she nodded and then again, we fell quiet.
The red around her eyes was now hidden thanks to my concealer, but the swelling around them was more difficult to hide.
Maybe she was just crying because she was embarrassed of the fall in her dance.
Maybe she was upset that she knew, even though the results had not come out yet, that she and Jonah had lost such an important competition.
Though, I had to wonder, for all the times I’d worn that same, crestfallen guise, if her reasoning for tears was the same as mine when I was in her place.
“You want to talk about why you were crying?”
A look of horror washed Hannah’s face that she quickly hid by bowing her head towards the sink. “I really don’t think you care why I was crying.”
She posed an interesting question. Did I really care why she was crying or was I just being polite?
This was a woman who helped tear down my entire life, so finding her crying her eyes out in a bathroom stall should bring me some sort of happiness, right?
There was a part of me that entertained the thought that she deserved to be crying.
She deserved whatever hurt her enough to bring her to tears.
Though that thought became harder and harder to hold onto when I considered the most likely cause for her tears.
“Did Jonah do something?”
“No,” she fastly defended, offense dipping her thinly plucked eyebrows together.
“Okay, okay.” My voice held my surrender, and I turned my attention back to fixing my face in the mirror. It was sad, really, how quick she jumped to his defense when all it did was prove my theory right.
I couldn’t even count the number of times I’d done the same for Jonah when deep down, I knew he was the direct cause of my suffering.
It was part of the facade of dating Jonah.
He made you so afraid to lose him, so sure that he was the best you’d ever find, that you excused or turned a blind eye to so much of his nasty behavior.
Eventually, his behavior was normalized and the cycle was allowed to continue.
“So,” Hannah began out of nowhere, drawing my attention to her curious face in the mirror. “Who was that guy that punched Jonah?”
Oh shit. How had I forgotten about that?
“Just a friend.”
I hoped Hannah couldn’t pick up on what it meant when I curtailed my stare from hers.
I guess I didn’t really have to lie anymore now that Monica and Ethan weren’t together and Ethan and I were never getting together.
In the final moments, Ethan and I weren’t even friends like I’d just called us.
We weren’t friends and we couldn’t be lovers, so it left us as nothing to each other but ghosts of the other’s hidden past.
Hannah seemed to buy it. “I’ve heard Jonah’s side of the story to why he punched him. I’m curious what yours is.”
The stroke of my blush brush across my cheek froze.
If she was asking me what my side of the story was, did that mean she didn’t believe Jonah’s?
“He pretty much told me I was unlovable. My friend didn’t like that.”
The truth was ugly, but it was also a warning to Hannah to how bad it could get with the man she was engaged to. By the lack of surprise on her face, the idea that she already heard the warning bells firing off in the distance and was looking to me for confirmation crossed my mind.
“He told me that it was my fault he dropped me,” she admitted.
“It wasn’t. His hand slipped. I saw it.”
“It did! Thank you,” she said, exasperation running through her voice. The pity I felt for her deepened as I witnessed this small display from her. Her wild eyes, buzzing with a frantic need to be believed that she wasn’t to blame, that she was in fact being gaslighted by Jonah.
Having put the finishing touches on my makeup, I packed up and readied to leave. Hannah noticed and handed me back my concealer with another ‘thanks.’
There was something so weird about this moment that I couldn’t shake the feeling of, but I couldn’t put my finger on it either. It felt familiar and strange all at once, and even though I had nothing more to say, the feeling that more needed to be said refused to relent.
And apparently, Hannah felt the same way too.
“Look, I know you hate me,” she began out of nowhere, like the words just exploded out of her.
“I would hate me too if I were you.” She turned to me, but cast her stare to the bathroom floor.
“I did a shitty thing and I know that I hurt you. But…” She huffed and stalled, obviously uncomfortable with this entire conversation and looking like she wanted to bolt through the door instead.
“You didn’t deserve it, even though Jonah convinced me that you did. ”
This confirmed the suspicions I had about what Jonah told Hannah about me when they were going behind my back. He undoubtedly relayed horror story after horror story about how awful a girlfriend I was, and Hannah being the hopeful next girlfriend of his, believed him no questions asked.
“But… no one deserves to be cheated on and for what it’s worth—” Finally, Hannah looked up at me.
“I’m sorry for how it happened. It wasn’t right, and I knew it at the time, but I just didn’t stop it.
I thought being with Jonah was more important than anything else, and I know you’ll never forgive me and that’s not why I’m doing this, to like, get forgiveness or whatever. I’m saying it because I mean it.”
Staring at Hannah, I had to mentally check that my mouth wasn’t hanging open.
I wanted to ask what it was that made her apologize.
Was it an in the moment thing or had it been eating away at her for months?
I knew it didn’t matter and wanting to know was petty.
What mattered was that she apologized and exactly at the same time that she was doing so, it dawned on me what felt so strangely familiar about all of this.
In Hannah and Jonah’s scenario, I was the Monica.
I was the one who had been betrayed for months behind my back by someone I loved and trusted just like I had done to Monica. If I placed my scenario into this one, Hannah became me and Jonah became Ethan—two people who snuck around in the name of love and broke someone’s heart in the process.
The specifics of it weren’t what mattered right now.
What mattered was the similarity of the basic crime and the result of how it was handled.
How I had to find out about Hannah and Jonah was inexplicably devastating, but that part was done and passed.
That couldn’t change, but what could was this —this exact opportunity to change the dialogue and give Hannah the relief I desperately wanted in my own mirrored misdeed.
If this was me apologizing to Monica for what I’d done, how would I want her to respond to me?
“First off, I don’t hate you. I have no right to hate you.”
I would be the biggest hypocrite in the world if I hated Hannah for what she did. I was allowed to hate myself for my actions—and boy did I—but how in the world could I justify hating someone for falling into the same love trap I did?
“I understand why you did what you did more than I ever thought I would. How you went about it was really awful. You happily helped run me out of the studio—”
“I didn’t think you would leave, Alice. I—”
“ But, ” I shot her a warning look. “There’s two sides to every love story. Your side is that you fell in love with an unavailable man and he fell back in love with you.”
And I know more than you know the kind of heart and headache that brings.
“I never really believed this until recently, but you really have no say in who your heart chooses to love.”
Hannah shook her head in vehement agreement. “You really don’t.”
“And because of that… I don’t blame you for what happened.” Shock lit behind Hannah’s eyes, her entire face drawing blank. “I blame Jonah for how he handled it and how he treated me, but you? I don’t blame you for falling in love with him.”
Relief swept clean across her gaze, a sheen of tears filing in immediately following.
It was like you could physically feel the weight lifting from her shoulders and from the room all together.
Her shame evaporated and took with it the grudge I’d been harboring for her.
I didn’t need it anymore. It wasn’t doing me any good to hold on to such hate for a person who made the same mistake I did.
The same mistake that I would give anything to get forgiveness for.
“And I do forgive you.”
Hannah let a smile go that looked like, for the first time in months, she’d finally been able to take a full, deep breath. The smile on her face filled me with a rush of jealousy and want. I wanted that kind of weightless smile, the kind that only appears when you rid yourself of your worst demons.
I had done that for Hannah, and there was only one person who could do the same for me.
Maybe…
Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe I could wear that same guiltless grin if I owned my shame like Hannah had. The heart in my chest pirouetted as I thought about all of the maybes of a life where I stopped hiding my lies and came clean to Monica in a delicate way.
The bathroom door next to us opened with a bang, interrupting the gut-clenching idea that festered in my head. Gabe’s head popped through, his eyebrows furrowing for a split second at Hannah before jumping his gaze straight to me.
“The winners are being announced.”