“So you’re not in love with me anymore? Is that what you’re saying?”
I don’t know how to answer that. What does it feel like to fall out of love with someone? I feel like there’s been so much pain caused that I can’t love him the same way that I used to.
“I love you, Eli, and I care about you…but—”
He stands, pacing at the foot of the bed in nothing but sweatpants. “Fuck, Lydia!”
His raised voice makes me flinch.
He looks down at me, eyes glassy. “So what, you gonna just move on? Find someone else and forget about me?”
I swallow. “I just want peace, Eli.”
“Please don’t do this.” His voice cracks. “I can’t lose you. I’ll lose my mind without you.”
Please don’t beg. Don’t make this harder.
My hands shake so badly that I have to tuck them under my thighs.
“Eli…I can’t. This just isn’t working any—”
I can’t finish my sentence before I feel the sharp sting in my scalp and a burning pain from being jerked back into the bed by my hair.
“ELI!” I scream.
He wraps his hand further into my hair, making it feel like he has a death grip on me, and pulls my head up, closing the space between our faces.
“You. Can’t. Leave. Me.”
I can’t breathe; I can’t get a full breath in through the panic. It feels like there are bricks being placed on my chest, getting heavier and heavier.
“Eli—Please!”
“Shut the fuck up, Lydia!”
I can’t focus past the pain, past the tears, past the burn in my scalp that’s becoming unbearable. Suddenly, I’m being dragged from the bed down into the ground.
I catch a glimpse of my clock, and the realization hits me that nobody is home. Sarah and Mark are at work, and Huxley is at summer camp. I’m all alone. There’s no one here to help me.
Eli slams me onto my knees, dragging me across the floor. My knees burn, and I try to steady myself, but I can’t see anything around me. The tears blur my vision, and the panic taking over doesn’t allow me to think straight. The only thing I can focus on is the fear and the pain that feels suffocating.
He takes my face in his hand and jerks me, forcing me to look at him. “You’renotleaving me, Lydia. What do I need to do to get that through your head? Do you need me to beat it into you? Is that what it’s gonna take?”
“Why—” I choke out. “Why are you—doing—this!”
The sobs are uncontrollable, almost to the point where I’m unable to speak through them.
“Because baby…you don’t understand…” He makes this noise; it’s almost a laugh, but it sounds too evil to be a laugh, too sinister. “There is no leaving, Lyd. Where are you gonna go? You said it yourself. Nobody else wants you. You wanna give this up because we’ve had a couple of bad fights? You’re going to throw away the kind of love we have over a couple of bad days?”
“This—isn’t—love, Eli.”
He slowly releases my hair, but the pain doesn’t let up. He takes my face in his hands, and I can feel the full-body tremors taking over.
His expression shifts from anger into this sad, broken softness. “You can’t leave me, Lydia. Ican’t live without you.”
“This isn’t—okay,” I cry out. “This isn’t—normal. I—don’t want—this!”
His fingers around my face tighten just slightly. “I’m telling you, you don’t understand, Lydia. I think…I think I would literally kill myself if you left me. It would hurttoomuch.”
