Chapter Seven #2
He laughs now, properly – his face can’t contain it, isn’t even trying to hide the laughter.
Belle’s face breaks. The tears continue to fall, dark spots blooming on her jeans.
‘Come on, Belle, I thought you could handle a joke.’
I thought watching the video was the worst part, but really, it was watching him laugh when I told him I’d seen it.
The video was for an audience – lads, bravado, a performance – because he was scared, showing off.
But the laugh, that was just for me. The laugh told me he thought I was being ridiculous.
He was sober, in my bedroom, and he’d looked at my face and decided that what I felt wasn’t real enough to take seriously.
I carried that laugh with me for longer than I carried the video.
For years afterwards, every time something hurt and I opened my mouth to say so, I’d hear the laugh first. A little checkpoint before every feeling.
A warning to ask myself: is this actually a big deal, or are you being Belle about it again?
But the laugh and the video weren’t the only things that broke us.
There was London underneath all of it. I did want more, more than Maidstone, more than the bedroom I’d slept in since I was twelve.
I wanted a career, a flat, a life I’d built for myself.
I wanted him to want those things for me.
I could have made it work – an hour on the train, weekends, all of it – but he didn’t have it in him to wait.
We loved each other, but we hadn’t figured out how to love each other well, and neither of us had the words for that yet. I know that now. I’m not sure he does.
I look at Jake next to me. He clears his throat just once, rocks back and forth, from the toes to the heels of his feet, hands in pockets, eyes to the floor. Is he even watching this? It almost looks like he’s bopping along to music.
Catching my eye, he dramatically yawns, hand clapped over his mouth. ‘We all know how this goes …’
My eyes well up before I can stop them, tears spilling down my cheeks, landing on my dress.
Is he really that heartless? Can ten years have passed without him giving this a second thought?
I used to tell myself this was just what Jake did when things got too much – the avoidance, the yawn, all of it, but I’m less sure now.
I’ve just watched him laugh while I cried, again, and I can’t tell where the coping ends and the not caring begins.
We both know how this ends, but I didn’t think I’d have to relive it.
‘Don’t laugh at me,’ young Belle says quietly, but something in her voice has changed. Jake’s smile falters just a little. ‘I sat in my room and watched that video on repeat. On my own, over and over, trying to work out if the person in it was the same person who tells me he loves me every night.’
She wipes her eyes with the teddy bear she’s had sitting on her childhood bed for the past twenty or so years and continues. ‘You said my life would be nothing without you and now you’re sitting here, laughing at me for being upset about it.’
Jake’s face shifts, he opens his mouth and closes it again.
‘Who else was there?’
‘It doesn’t—’
‘Was it funny when you said it? Did they all laugh after?’
He’s silent again. Dead still. No longer laughing but instead retreating, which at the time felt just as catastrophic. His leg bounces against the bed, his eyes somewhere distant.
She tries again, softer this time. ‘Did you mean it?’
He says nothing, but I catch the muscles in his jaw working away now.
‘It hurt me, Jake.’
Still silence.
‘I’m not trying to make you feel bad, I just wanted to … Can you see why I’m upset?’ I look away, unable to watch as young Belle has to ask permission to be hurt. She’s checking with him that her own feelings are reasonable and he’s giving her nothing, not even a nod.
I watch her make herself smaller in real time, not just physically – although that too, arms wrapped around her knees, shoulders curling in – but also the words.
The anger she’d found thirty seconds ago is gone and replaced with something softer.
She edited herself mid-conversation because the silence was worse than the lie and the laugh.
‘Please say something. Can we just … Can we talk about it properly? Please? I don’t want to fight.’
I feel sick in my stomach. Not at her, but at how familiar it is. The apology for having feelings.
He shakes his head, words still lost. I hadn’t noticed at the time how pained he looked. I remember thinking he looked more angry than sad.
Silence stretches and younger me fills it in the only way she knows: picking at the hem of her top, looking to the floor, looking at him and back away again.
She’s waiting for him to give her something, anything to work with, and the longer he doesn’t, the more her panic rises.
I know what’s coming, not just because I’ve lived it, replayed it on a loop in my head for years after, but because it’s what she always did when she couldn’t stand the quiet anymore.
She gives him a way out.
I mouth along to the words as she says them, like lyrics stuck on a loop.
‘Well, if you’re not going to say anything, maybe you should just leave …’
It isn’t what she means. She just wanted him to say something or fight for it. But he doesn’t know that and she didn’t say it, and so he takes the door she unknowingly opened and walks through it. Younger Jake storms out of the room. The door slams shut. He doesn’t look back.
The girl in front of me sits frozen for a moment.
Then it hits her. Her body starts shaking first, her mouth turned downwards.
I remember the specific feeling – my pulse in my ears, chest so tight that I struggled to swallow.
How my vision blurred and how I couldn’t clear it.
Jake and I watch as she crumbles onto the duvet, hands gripping the bedsheets.