He deserves someone whole.
I used to think I could get there. I spent the last few months thinking I was actually getting better. Mike helped me forget, with his warmth and his hands and his laugh that made my heart feel like it was about to burst with happiness.
I started to think maybe I would be okay. That what Jason did doesn’t have to define me.
But I know better now.
I turned off my phone on day two, when Mike wouldn’t stop texting me, and I couldn’t look at them anymore. I haven’t touched it since. I can feel it over there. I know there are more texts. Maybe some phone calls. Maybe Nate, who tried to reach out the day after I left, and I never got back to.
I want to be home with Nate so bad I can barely breathe, but he can’t help me right now.
He doesn’t even know.
Mike knocks every night, and the guilt has started to consume me. I told him he could always sleep here, and I can’t even give him that anymore.
“Alex? Are you awake?”I don’t say anything. I don’t move. “Please let me in. We don’t have to talk. But I need to know you’re alright.”
I’m not alright. I don’t think that’s something I’m capable of, not in the way he means it, not in the way that means opening the door and everything going back to the way it was.
I stare at the locked door, but I never get up to open it.
“Okay,” he says, eventually. “Goodnight.”
His footsteps go back down the hall to his own room, and I’m forced to spend another night without him.
On the third night, he cries.
He says his usual, asks if I want to talk, and goodnight when I don’t answer. But instead of walking back to his own room, I hear a thud against the door, followed by a whimper.
I’ve seen Mike cry. Mostly when he talks about his parents. And after the fight that almost ended us. He was quiet those times, hiding.
Nothing like this.
“I don’t know what I did,” he sobs against the door. “I would never force you to do anything, Alex. I’m so sorry if I made you feel that way. We don’t have to do that. I’m not mad at you, if that’s what you think. Please.”
I’m tired of crying. It feels like that’s all I’ve been doing for the last two years. But hearing Mike like that, knowing it’s my fault, has me muffling my sobs with my pillow, wishing I could let him in.
I wait until a good time, when I’ve heard Mike up and moving around the house and the front door closing behind him, to pick up my phone. The screen is filled with endless notifications that I scroll past without looking,
Nate, Iris, Liz, Ben, Mike at least a hundred times.
“Alex?”She answers on the first ring, her voice filled with concern before I’ve even spoken. “Are you okay?”
“Can you come over?” My voice cracks. “I need you.”
“I’m grabbing my keys,” Iris says. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes later on the dot, I hear the sound of the front door opening and her coming straight up the stairs.
I’m on my side, facing the door, my comforter pulled up to my face. She stops in the doorway, and I don’t know what I look like from her point of view.
But I can guess.
The door closes softly behind her before she crosses the room without a single word and climbs into the bed beside me. Wrapping her arms around me, she runs her hand through my hair, and it’s the first time anyone has touched me since that night with Mike and—
That’s all it takes.
She doesn’t shush me or tell me I’m okay. I’m not. I cry until I can’t anymore, until I’m empty and wrung out, and her shirt beneath my cheek is wet and my head is pounding. And the entire time, she moves her hand up and down my back, patient in a way I don’t deserve.
