Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
She knew she had made all the wrong moves. Because, sure, she had worked out what was going on with him. But she had done it while making everything significantly worse. He shut himself in the bathroom afterward. Like he was going to bed. At four in the afternoon.
And he did not come back out.
She had to go down to the lobby to pee in the hotel’s public restroom.
People looked at her really strangely; two girls tried to take her picture coming out.
It took everything she had not to grab their phones and throw them down the nearest well.
Instead, she gritted her teeth and made her way back upstairs, determined now to have it out with him.
No more worrying that he would crumble to dust if she said anything about feelings to him. No more worrying that she would crumble to dust if he realized she had any. Just cards on the table. A declaration of intent.
And then she knocked, and he didn’t answer.
She knocked again and called him an ass, and still nothing.
“Miller, I am going to stand here and list all the ways that the original Dawn of the Dead is inferior to the remake if you don’t come out right now,” she said, and even then there was nothing but silence.
At which point she knew:
He had died in there.
He was totally dead. She would burst in and find him expired from the deadly disease of having too many feelings.
Mouth in a permanent rictus grin, eyes massive and full of hearts, hand clutching a book of poetry he’d been gripped by the urge to read to her.
Or maybe something sillier, something more ridiculous.
Something that would stop the panic rising in her throat.
Because it was. Despite how much she was trying to make herself laugh, it was. She was breathing hard when she finally tried the door. The handle slipped under her sweaty hand. And she was right to be in such a state, too.
After all, he’d only actually escaped out of the fucking window.
Four hours she’d spent waiting for him to come out.
And he wasn’t even in there at all. He’d fled—and in spectacular fashion, too.
The window was the size of a letterbox. She had no clue how he’d even managed to get one of his feet through it, never mind the rest of his enormous body. Probably shaved off his own butt to do it, she told herself as she climbed onto the toilet seat to peer through.
Half of her afraid she’d find him splattered all over the alley below.
Half of her sure he deserved it, right at this moment in time.
But all she could see was the fire escape he’d clearly levered himself onto.
No sign of him. He’s probably halfway to a bunker in Nebraska by now, she thought as she eased herself back down.
Then took out her phone to at least try to call him.
Fruitless, of course, because he thought of phones the same way most people thought of Ebola.
She hadn’t even known he had one until three days ago, when she’d heard muffled ringing and found his Nokia 360 swaddled in duct tape in the toilet tank.
But she felt compelled to do something.
Even though all it did was teach her that a phone could still make noise after you had disassembled it and stuffed it into one of your almost-girlfriend’s shoes. She found the pieces, and tried not to cry.
Then failed, of course.
And not just because she had clearly driven him away.
She had also mentally used the G word. Apparently, even in her head she was pushing him too far, turning him inside out, making him into something he wasn’t.
She had really made a mess of all this. And so much so that she vowed, then and there, to be super not whatever this was the next time she saw him.
No touching, no kissing, no calling out his name.
Then she stepped out into the hallway, hoping to track him through the city like she was Jim Gordon and he was fucking Batman, and saw him at the end of it. She saw him, and watched him turn to go back the way he had come, and just couldn’t help it. “Caleb, wait, okay,” she said.
Or called out, if you will.
And holy wow, was that as big a mistake as she had imagined.
He stopped dead, his back still to her. Then he slowly, slowly turned around, like a badly broken revolving door, his face an absolute picture, once she could see it. One of his eyebrows was somehow raised and frowning at the same time. And the eye underneath looked massive.
While the other one somehow remained small.
This is how horror manifests on his face, she thought.
And that felt true before he even answered in a horrified voice.
“Did you just call me by my first name?” he said. Because, oh yeah, she’d done that, too. She hadn’t gone with Miller or Mill or hey you. She’d said something intimate, that only someone he liked having sex with got to use.
Because she was pretty sure, at this point, that he hadn’t liked having it with her. How had he put it? You can be excited and still not want something. “Yeah, and I am now realizing that was a bad call, too,” she said.
Trying not to be bitter about it.
Probably failing.
“So you think you’ve made other ones, then.”
“I know I have. How couldn’t I have when you’re acting like this.”
“This is just how I am, Emmett. Everything else was pretend.”
Back to my surname, she thought. All the syllables there.
And winced.
“Yeah, and I get that. That’s what I’m trying to say, I get it. And I just want you to know that I don’t mind. I don’t think you have to be another way. We can be friends no matter what you’re like. Or what I’m like. Or something like that.”
“You want to be friends?”
Now both eyebrows were up.
And the sight of them sort of punched her in the heart, a little bit. Because, sure, they were angry. But they were also just a little flabbergasted. Like she had said the silliest thing in the world.
“Well, I mean, of course not, if you don’t want to be.”
“I didn’t say that I didn’t want to be, I acted like why the fuck do you.”
“So that’s why you’re incredulous? Because you think I shouldn’t?”
“Of course I think you fucking shouldn’t. Now explain why you do.”
He folded his arms across his chest. Looked at her like, Well, I can’t wait to hear this one. But then, he had no idea how much easier what he’d just said made it. Suddenly she wasn’t as far out on a limb as she’d thought.
“Because I think we could be. I think we could be good ones, if I was just maybe less judgmental about how you are. If I was just more accepting, the way you’ve been with me.
Like all the ways you’ve tried to encourage me to be myself around you and not tell me off and just be kind,” she said, confident about it, until he abruptly held up both hands.
“All right, that’s enough. Stop saying this before I lose my shit.”
“But you said to explain. I just want to clear things up for you.”
“I don’t care what you want to do. I did not do any of those things because I was trying super hard to be less judgmental toward you.
There is nothing about you that would justify judgment at all.
Nothing that shouldn’t be accepted by anybody even halfway decent.
There is nothing wrong with you. Do you understand me?
” he said, the same way someone might tell another that it was poison they were trying to ingest, and under no circumstances must they continue.
Even though he just didn’t get it.
She had to somehow make him get it.
“I understand that you’re doing it again.
But the thing is, I couldn’t do it for you.
Not even that secret way, that you did for me.
I didn’t make you feel better about being a little uncomfortable with affection, or good about being kind of closed off and not always talkative.
I was a jerk about it. I was pushy about it.
Even though there’s nothing wrong with being not very passionate and emotional,” she tried.
But she could tell immediately that this had only made things worse.
He looked completely thunderstruck by the last word. He jerked back for some of it, as if she’d just told him she’d been bitten by a zombie and was on the verge of eating his face off. His hand even came up as if to ward her off. And he couldn’t seem to gather his words.
He went to speak, and nothing came out.
Even the breath he’d taken to make the words didn’t emerge. It was like he was holding it for a moment. Then he tried again, and the same thing happened. Again, and the same thing happened.
But it was the trembling that really got her.
The way the hand he still had out was going up and down like that.
Almost imperceptibly, but almost imperceptibly didn’t matter.
It seemed really bad that it was happening at all.
That he was so furious or so fucked up by what she’d said it was running through him like a constant low-level electric shock.
Though fury wasn’t what came out of him when he finally did speak.
“You think I want to be the way I am?” he asked in a voice that swung so low and husky all she could think of was the word haunted.
Like someone had walked over the grave of his sense of self.
She almost put up her own hand on hearing it to tell him to stop there.
But he got there before she could even get close.
Louder now, much louder, oh so loud it made her heart try to burst out of her body at the sound alone.
“You think I think the way I am is good and normal and you’re just some annoying nonsense I have to cater to?
You’re not the annoying nonsense, Daisy, you are the way things fucking should be.
You are everything I wish I was, everything. ”
And god, the silence after he said it.
It rang in her head. She thought of alarms blaring at the start of some zombie movie to say the apocalypse was upon everyone. Danger, danger, danger, they said, don’t go further down this path.