30. Charlie
Charlie
Noah convinced me to go home. I parked on the curbside by my house, and I don’t know how I even got here. Somewhere on the highway my brain zoned out, and I’m questioning whether I ran any red lights, if I somehow made another car crash into a ditch.
I grab my phone hanging out in one of my cup holders that’s caked in layers of sticky leftover soda. Swiping up, I go onto my Instagram, using a thumb to death scroll through my personal page and all the pictures I once took of Brody and I.
Payton’s right. I’m pathetic for not deleting any of these. They still sit untouched with memories I really need to delete from existence, and the longer they stay on my feed the longer I’ll be holding onto broken pieces of myself.
When I click on a picture, I can pull apart all the tiny bits of that day before the picture was snapped.
If he was being rotten towards me, if we actually had a good day, if he was drunk, or if we got into a heated argument.
All of it meshing together. I know what skeletons all the pictures hide.
At some point, I think I was trying to convince myself I was happy with him.
I start to click on each one of them, deleting them and hating the notification that I could restore them if I wanted to.
I want everything wiped off my phone, as if we had never met in the first place.
I do one more thing I should've done... I follow Noah on Instagram along with several thousand gothic girls who are all obsessed with him. It takes barely three seconds before the little notification that he followed me back pops up, and I’m doing that weird thing where you want to hysterically cry but laugh at the same time.
When another notification beeps, he’s commenting on a picture Payton captured of me trying to be cute with my pom-poms. He leaves me several red hearts, and it makes mine pump faster.
The best part is that out of all his followers, he’s barely following ten people, and one of them is me.
Headlights flash across my windshield, and I spot Brody’s white Camaro parking in front of my car.
I debated for several long seconds. Either I stay in the car with the doors locked or I meet him face to face.
I gather my purse and swing open the car door with a foot.
The damp air washes over me, and the road glimmers from the storm that rolled through earlier this morning.
Broody’s car door slams, and he’s cracking his knuckles. A pure sign he’s ticked off. I already feel the walls around me caving in. He’s a blurry figure in the distance, as he straightens out his jersey jacket with both hands.
Even from here, his face appears hard as granite, and his eyes slice through the distance between us. He walks over with cool, collected steps, but I already know he’s manipulating me. His mouth is pressed in a thin line, but his jaw twitches. I’m super-glued to the sidewalk when he’s feet away.
“Hey...” Brody uses a thumb to wipe his bottom lip before dipping his hands into his jean pockets. “We need to talk.”
“About what?” I ask.
“About your little boy toy you keep flaunting in my face.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not flaunting him.”
“Oh, you don’t know?” He lifts an eyebrow. I dig my fingers into my purse.
“No, I don’t,” I shake my head, glaring at the ground.
“He was here the other night. What were you two doing?” He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. With each breath I inhale, it gets tighter by the second.
“Are you watching me?” It’s as though my lungs were packed into a small cardboard box.
“Everywhere I go you're there. You even followed us to the movie.” My palms grew slick around my purse. My throat tightens. The words feel like shards of glass. He doesn’t answer the question and it makes it worse.
“You cheated on me, we have been broken up for almost two months.”
“Your little boyfriend texted me on your phone this morning. He gave me a little present of you.” Brody’s gaze almost feels like a slap across the face, and the words are like an invisible rash against my skin.
“Pretty bold of him to go through your phone. When I did, you slapped me. Remember? Me almost crashing my fucking car because I went through your phone?”
“He did what?” I ask and dig through my purse for my cell. I pull it out, typing in my passcode and click on my messages. My thumb hovers over the text message with Noah flipping Brody off with a picture of me asleep behind him.
“So now it’s okay for your boyfriend to go through your shit,” he says, and I glance up at Brody and then back down at my phone as the screen blurs. I go back and forth between both of them as an unsettling wave floods into my bloodstream.
“Why do you care?”
“Because I had you first, and I still want you,” he says without the cold, twisted tone in his voice. “Here is something else for you.” He scrolls through his phone and puts his phone up to my face.
“That’s it, Trouble.”
“Don’t stop. Please don’t...I want you to be my... I want you to make me come. No one has made me come before.”
“Then, come for me.” I hear my own moans coming from his speaker and can picture Noah’s eyes watching me so carefully, his gaze too sweet and tender as his fingers got me so high off his touch. That moment entirely private between us is somehow on his phone.
“You’d give it up to him, but you don’t wanna sleep with me?” Brody asks.
“You have a camera in my room?! What the hell!”
“Oh, come on, don’t be like that,” he groans.
“You cheated on me.” I cough it up, and I beg for the numbness to shield me and envelop me again. “How am I supposed to feel? I can’t just let that go. You said we were going to talk, and I find you... fucking my brother’s girlfriend.”
“You’re the one who ended it.” He tilts his head back and lets out a shallow breath.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You blocked me.” He points a finger at his chest. “Remember?” he asks, running one hand over his face. “You told me you were done. Now you’re fucking him? Do you love him? Huh?” He throws his hands up.
“Why do you care how I feel about him? You didn’t respect my boundaries. I didn’t want to sleep with you. But the entire time we were together you’ve been sleeping around with countless girls.”
“But you whore it up with him? You’re nothing but a hypocrite!”
“He doesn’t just want me for sex, Brody!”
“I know. I have a problem. I can fix this.” He steps forward, reaching for my hand and taking it. His thumb rubs across my blue veins.
“You can’t.”
“You won’t have to play roulette if you give me another chance. I’m sorry about threatening to post our videos. I shouldn’t have done that.”
I pull away from his grip and take one step backwards. I’ve convinced myself I’m over Brody. The dust should be settled between us, but he seems to like to kick it back up into the air.
“Stop following me around. Stop threatening me. Just leave me alone. I’m fucking destroying that camera of yours!”
“But, baby, come on. I love you.”
I bunch up my fists and hold them up to my chest, shaking them as I say, “Leave me alone!” I swirl a foot around and make a shortcut across the grass.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t chase and badger me.
He stands there like a lost puppy, as if I'm the one who broke him.
But I know what I'm doing right now, I’m finding that camera and smashing it in the backyard.
“You’ve been ditching me for Brody!” Payton snaps with a high-pitched tone.
She’s rampaging through my closet, tossing hangers and shirts left and right.
“How could you! After everything he’s done?
” Her words slap me across the face, and she’s completely delusional. “I saw you two talking this morning!”
I crumble onto the mattress, with my arms hanging limply between my legs. “You’re making a mess out of my closet,” I say as a hanger hurls across the room, hitting the floor with a thud. Another knocks over my neatly arranged nail polish on my vanity.
“You’ve been ditching me this summer for him.
You're totally keeping it from me, you two are back together.” My favorite black dress flings into the air, landing in a heap of clothes on the floor.
I hope she realizes she’s picking up my room if she continues to treat it like the trailer she lives in.
I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t want to be with him anymore,” I say.
It turns to pure silence, and it stretches out like an eternity, each second more overwhelming because no matter how much I’ve tried to move on from Brody, he’s still tearing me apart from everyone.
First it’s Noah going through my phone, and now it’s Payton having her classic five-year-old tantrum when she doesn’t get her way.
But I get it. Brody was a complete mistake and Payton wants to protect me from getting hurt.
We’ve always been like that with each other, and without her I wouldn’t have a moral compass.
“I don’t believe you,” she says back. My gaze drops to my nails and the painful hangnails forming around my cuticles.
“You keep telling me that. But each time you ditch me several times in a row, it’s because of him.
I’ve been calling you all night to hang out.
” Payton twirls around, throwing her hands into the air before they slap back down onto her hips.
“Oh, shut up!” I use two hands and push myself off the bed and start snatching the clothes off my floor.
“Don’t tell me to shut up!” I can feel the heat radiating off of Payton, and her chin trembling as she glares at me.
“You're making a damn mess in my room!” I throw the pile of clothes on my mattress and run a hand through my hair. “I don’t have to invite you everywhere I go.”
“I’m trying to be a good friend and protect you from that prick!” Her voice cracks, and her anger gives way to something deeper than hurt. “I really thought you were done with him, but you keep going out with other people, and you won’t talk to me. We haven’t hung out like we used to.”
“I don’t need you to protect me!” I place a palm against my heart, my eyes fluttering. “Take your damn shirt and go home. I’m not dealing with this right now.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes! I need some space.” I swallow hard. My tongue is like sandpaper against the roof of my mouth. My lips are dry and cracked as I part my lips. “I love the shit out of you, but you can’t come over and act like this.”
“Fine. By all means if you want to date him, don’t come crying to me when he breaks your heart again.
” She fights with herself as she attempts to fold her shirt.
She grumbles under her breath before giving up and slapping the shirt at her side as she storms out of the bedroom and down the hallway.
I stand there holding my breath, my rib cage clenching onto my lungs, squeezing the life out of them.
When the front door slams shut, I know she’s gone.
I’ll give her a few hours before texting her.