Chapter Eighteen #3
And only lifted them when he spoke again. Faint, like all the fight had been beaten out of him. “It was after you were gone from my life that I fully realized the way I felt. And then all I had was—”
“Stories to tell. Stories about the way things could be, if only,” she finished for him.
And he nodded, he nodded.
“For a brief time, I could say what I longed to in them. I could be what you inspired me to be. But then you started to fade from my mind, the hope of you faded, and with it went any ability you had ever helped me to have. Because you did help me, Em. You were the example I looked to, the hope in my heart. I took from you and left you with nothing, I left you with nothing.”
“That’s not true. Life did that to me,” she said, and as she did she thought of all the things that had really burned her romance out of her.
The whispers of people she thought were friends in college.
Christian and his cruel obliviousness. Every indifferent, mundane man, everyone who had actually taken something from her, so gladly, and never thought to ask if she needed anything for herself.
“The miserable mundanity of the world did it. Just like it did to you.”
And then he just seemed to crack right down the center.
He couldn’t even seem to stop things spilling out.
“Jesus, that’s so accurate I can’t even see how you didn’t see it before,” he said, and when he did she thought of all the ways she hadn’t.
And all the ways she had.
“Honestly I think I did. Sometimes I did. But I always told myself it had to be something else. Not wanting me to touch you because me touching you was irritating; looking at me as I ate because it disgusted you, instead of what it really did. Never thinking it must have looked like a steak to a starving man, never thinking it must have seemed like so much abundance to someone without. Because I could see you, I can see how you are exactly. But I couldn’t see myself through your eyes.
I can never see myself through someone else’s eyes.
Everybody is full color to me, a huge story filled with incredible detail, but when I imagine them seeing me all I can imagine is a plain sheet of paper,” she said, almost to herself more than anything else.
Going over everything about herself that had led them here, just like he was doing.
Ripping the bandage off to expose the ten-year-old wound underneath.
Making it bleed, she thought.
But then he cut in.
“If that were true I don’t know how I filled a thousand of those pieces of paper with you,” he said, with so much sudden emotion in his voice it split the sentence in two, three, a thousand. She had to piece it back together herself, with shaking fingers. Ten books, she thought. Ten.
While trying not to cry.
“Oh god, they were all about me.”
“So you can see it now.”
“The jumper.”
“Yes.”
“Jessie with the ears peeking through her hair.”
“It used to drive me out of my mind.”
“Clara and her love of vampires. Bethany with her back seat full of books.”
Because I had DVDs on mine, she thought as she remembered him peering into her old Ford Pinto. Disdainful, it had seemed to her at the time. Desperate and then caught, it looked to her now. Am I in the frame from your point of view, Chappell Roan sung in her head.
While he told her she was.
“They were all you. It was always you, every line, every word. I gave you everything I couldn’t in all the books I ever wrote. I couldn’t do anything else, you were my only thought for so long. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you,” he said.
But all that did was open up a world of even further emotional horrors.
“Oh god, please tell me that’s not the real reason you couldn’t.”
“I told you it wasn’t torment.”
“But that is. Oh god, that’s awful, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I’m sorry, Daisy. I shouldn’t have told you, I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this. You don’t need to know about some obsessed asshole who made you into all his foolish hopes and dashed dreams. That’s not on you, all right.”
“Oh my god, stop blaming yourself for everything, you didn’t mean anything the way I thought you did.
You’re a good person, okay, you’re a good person,” she cried out, so brokenly he went to reach for her then.
Her heart actually lifted to see it, even amidst the near sobbing breakdown she’d fallen into.
But just as quickly, it was gone. It was gone.
And now his face hardened.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what happens when I do let myself feel things passionately.
When I do let myself love someone as much as I love you,” he said.
But before she could cut in, he shook his head.
His mouth twisted up at the corner, almost bitterly.
“You know, I didn’t realize it fully almost all the way through college.
It was the night of the fight that I truly knew.
The night I know you barely remember—but I do.
I know every single thing that happened, right down to the last detail.
The dress you were wearing, black with yellow flowers.
The bracelet on your wrist with the padlock on it.
The smell of your perfume. It’s the same one you wear now.
God, the number of times I’ve had to breathe it in through all this, and feel that night all over again.
” He looked at the ceiling, despairing, and so clearly about to make some terrible point that she flinched away from him.
She took a step back. She tried to reframe what he was starting to say, before she even fully understood.
“But you were nowhere near me when it happened,” she said.
And now his eyes were back on her.
“For most of that night, sure. But then he hit you.”
“If you’re trying to say—” she tried to cut in. Even though she knew it was a lost cause. He was on a roll now, his gaze far away as if he were fully somewhere else. In a place where he was the person he believed he was. And not the one she was trying to tell him was real.
“I don’t think he meant to,” he said. “Elbows get thrown in a fight, people get hurt, accidents happen. But I didn’t react like it was one.
I couldn’t. I saw it happen and I wanted to kill him, I wanted to murder him.
In fact, I almost did. I dragged him out into the street and beat him until my hands were bloody.
And I did it while you were lying on the floor of that bar, being looked after by better people than me. ”
Then he focused back on her. Gaze flat.
All the feelings for her gone, buried.
“Still want to tell me I’m good?” he asked. Then, as he walked away, “Didn’t think so.”