Chapter 35 It Hurts Like Hell
It Hurts Like Hell
Eve
In the week after New Year’s, Eve had gone back to Gatlinburg, supposedly to pick up the few things she’d brought with her in June, but a small part of her hoped, however irrational, that she’d find Jamie there.
That he’d returned from Paris early, even if only to come back to his cabin and ignore her.
She could’ve taken that. Something to hang her hat on.
Anything would’ve been better than the silence.
But he never showed up.
It was her own fault. She knew that. She understood it probably better than he did. She wished she could chalk this up to his jet lag—lack of sleep can make people mean—but she’d been too ambivalent for him to feel anything resembling secure in their relationship.
It was over.
It was hard to believe, considering their time at Dollywood.
She thought she was getting a fairy-tale ending, Prince Charming and all that, but there was a reason she never believed in them before now.
Even as a typical Disney millennial, she knew those stories were flights of fancy.
She was the age of many of those princesses when she realized that reality was crushing and cruel; falling in love at sixteen was nothing but a recipe for disaster. Same for thirty-four, it turned out.
Eve returned to New York, having nowhere else to go, belonging to no one.
It hurt to be in Gatlinburg, her apartment in Brooklyn was no longer hers, and her parents would just make her feel worse.
So she went to the only place she felt welcome.
While Maya had never been shy in telling Eve about herself—they first bonded after an argument in their freshman seminar—she was also incredibly generous with her love.
Quite the opposite of Eve, who doled hers out in small doses, fearing what might happen if she gave it all at once. Clearly, a valid concern.
At Maya’s, Eve did little more than sulk.
Maya and/or Siobhan would come by her room every now and then, sometimes with food.
Maya’s little black cocker spaniel, Lil’ Freedia, sat by her side for much of the day, which lifted Eve’s spirits marginally.
But for the most part, it was just her with her thoughts.
She replied to a couple of texts, and only in one-word answers, just so friends knew she was alive.
But was she? She was turning back into the woman she used to be.
Not even slowly, but in a sharp, steady descent back into madness.
Mon, Jan 12 9:56AM
Stella Fischer-Fox: Are you available today? If so, you are welcome to come to the office, or we can do lunch in your neck of the woods.
Eve wanted to blow off Stella for the hundredth time, but the wrench in her stomach told her it was time to face the music.
Even if Stella wanted to drop her as a client, which she had every reason to do, avoiding her wouldn’t change the outcome.
So Eve agreed to meet at her office and finally forced herself out of bed.
Eve lacked the energy for hair or makeup, so she only pulled her hair into a ponytail, ignoring the frizz that she would normally try to tamp down in the name of professionalism.
She used some Carmex to brighten her lips and wore her glasses instead of contacts in an effort to conceal the lifelessness.
It was snowing, so she also didn’t concern herself with dressing nicely—not that she would’ve anyway.
Jeans and a sweater with some boots and a North Face coat she borrowed from Maya, as her own was packed in a duffel bag somewhere.
She trudged through the slush to the Ralph Avenue station and took the C straight to Thirty-Fourth Street.
Stella’s office was on the fourteenth floor of PENN 1, sitting just beside Madison Square Garden, and one of the sixty tallest buildings in the city.
Eve typically felt like something of a big shot, strolling into this massive building to see her agent .
On the agency’s website, her name sat alongside a slew of Broadway heavyweights—directors and designers she’d dreamed of working with, other playwrights she admired.
It helped her believe that her work was worth paying attention to.
But that day, she felt small as she made her way up to Stella’s office, anticipating being dismissed. If she hadn’t been so abruptly dumped just two weeks ago, Eve would’ve assumed this was the worst feeling in the world.
The receptionist at the Hayslett Group was a bubbly young Puerto Rican guy, Matthew, who dressed impeccably and always greeted Eve with compliments and coffee.
Predictably, he skipped the flattery that day—it took only a cursory glance to assess that she was a mess—and sent her straight to Stella.
He did have a flat white ready for her, complete with a heart rendered in the foam, but that just felt like a gesture of sympathy portending her dismissal.
“It’s good to see you,” Stella greeted her. She shut the door behind Eve and then took the seat beside her instead of at her desk. She stared at Eve, scrutinizing her with narrowed hazel eyes, as if she could figure out what the hell was wrong with her client through careful observation.
“Are you okay?” Stella asked, the bluntness in her Long Island accent surprising.
Eve wanted to say yes, hopeful that Stella would be polite enough to ignore the obvious lie.
There was clearly something wrong with her.
But before words could materialize, her eyes brimmed with hot tears and immediately spilled to her cheeks.
She swallowed hard, feeling frozen and overwhelmed as she simply tried to remember how to breathe.
Tried not to be frustrated with her inability to control her own body as another panic attack took hold of her faculties.
Eve involuntarily balled her hands into fists and voluntarily squeezed her eyes shut.
She then remembered what Jamie taught her and reopened them.
She focused on Stella, the flecks of brown dotting her otherwise moss-green irises.
The pattern in the wool of her juniper dress.
The tiny diamond studs adorning her tiny ears.
She waited for sounds—the chatter outside Stella’s office, the ding of the elevators, the sound of sirens.
There were always sirens in New York, from some distance or another. Quite the opposite of Tennessee.
Eve breathed slowly through her mouth, her gaze still on Stella as she worked to knock away all traces of panic. She hoped Stella understood that this wasn’t intentional; she was genuinely suffering here.
Stella turned her entire body toward Eve, her stare softening into something closer to concerned. “Eve. What happened?”
Eve’s instinct was to chuckle at the loaded question. Where would she even start? But her laugh came out as a tiny yelp, and before she knew it, her vision had blurred with tears again.
“You said you were distracted, but it feels like something else. Something…more? We can still put a pause on all of this if it’s—”
“I think I’m losing my mind,” Eve blurted.
The second the words came out, she was gasping for air as if the very expression had taken it away.
“I had a son when I was seventeen and my parents made me give him away. And I never stop thinking about him,” she said, through gulps and sobs.
“They sent me away and they took my baby, and they didn’t care.
” She stopped speaking because her sentences were turning to gibberish beneath her tears. She just let herself cry.
Doubled over in her chair, she hugged her knees like her barely born son and allowed her weeps to fill Stella’s small office, unconcerned with who might hear.
She cried for the son she never got to know.
She cried for her miscarriages. She cried for Leo.
She cried for what she’d done. She cried for what she didn’t do.
She cried for finding Jamie when she had no right to be happy.
She cried for losing him just when she started to believe she deserved that happiness.
She cried for disappointing her parents and then alienating them.
She cried for deserting her grandmother, even in her twilight.
She cried for knowing some of these things weren’t her fault, but needing to take the blame anyway.
She cried for every moment she’d wanted to die over the past year, and for all the times she felt alive.
She was sobbing so hard, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t pass out, but she was desperately grateful for Stella’s embrace as she gently coaxed her to let it all out.
“It’s okay,” Stella promised, stroking her back. “You’re okay.”
As her wails slowly turned to sniffles, Eve felt empty.
Not in a bad way, necessarily, but as if she’d gotten rid of this thing she’d been carrying for too long.
Pent-up emotions that had been neglected for months, maybe years.
Definitely years. Her face and neck were drenched, leaving her cold, but she felt… better.
“I keep fucking up,” she said quietly to Stella. “I wanted to write. I tried to finish this play. But I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“You put so much pressure on yourself,” Stella lamented. “I don’t even know if you’re aware of it, but I wish you would give yourself a break.”
Eve smiled sadly. “I tried to. When I left New York, I broke up with Leo.” She waited for Stella to respond, but she said nothing.
No judgment, no questions. Nothing. “I went to Tennessee to get away from everything that made me feel anything,” she went on.
“And then I met this guy. Jamie. And he did the opposite.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Stella said.
“I think I fell in love with him,” Eve said, but quickly corrected herself. “I know I did. But then I came back home, and I’m realizing that I’ve been stuck in a holding pattern. And I don’t have any business loving anyone right now.”
“Says who?”
Eve sniffled. “Says him.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Stella said. “Couples fight. Me and Jonah had an argument just this morning.”
Eve shook her head, a fresh set of tears beginning to trickle.
“He doesn’t trust me,” she said. She always figured Jamie would get sick of her; it was why she kept the wall up for so long.
At least then she could say it was because she was an asshole.
But things falling apart just when she was letting him in felt especially wicked. “And he probably shouldn’t.”
“You should go to him,” Stella suggested. “Like in the movies. Go to Tennessee and give the big ‘I’m sorry’ speech. It’s subversive because you’re a woman apologizing to a man. Even if it does go against everything we stand for.”
Eve chuckled, genuinely amused and appreciative of the laugh.
But barring the fact that she’d already done that once, it would be an invasion this time.
“I’ve thought about that, but…if he wanted to see me, he would’ve said so.
He doesn’t play games,” she said, wiping more errant tears. “If he still wanted this, I’d know it.”
It was that simple. Jamie was done. And with impeccable irony, he’d left her the same way she had Leo—bluntly, abruptly, and then going ghost afterward. Poetic justice, she supposed.
She fucking hated irony.