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“If you had, would you have cared?”
“Of course. And you said it was okay. I’ll pay it back if that makes you feel better.” He looks like he wants to cry.
I don’t feel an ounce of sympathy. He wants to keep it real. So, I’m keeping it real. And it feels good - like stretching my legs after sitting on them for too long.
“II don’t care what you do. Just spare me your hypocritical lectures.”
“Beth, I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for you.”
“I’m not mad that you weren’t here, Phil. I’m mad that you came back. And I wish you’d leave. Then, maybe I could just fucking breathe.” I growl.
His expression is bleak. I know I’ve wounded him. But it’s the truth. And I’ve been choking on it for the last year. And I’m sick of making myself sick so that everyone else can be happy. "I hope we can get to know each other again. But I am not the little girl I was when you left. Don’t try to interfere with my personal life again.” I say each word with deliberate emphasis.
The sound of footsteps halts our conversation, and he glowers at me as one of my father’s bodyguards walks in. The room is thick with tension and Phil is glaring at me. The young man’s expression grows wary and looks between us. “I can come back if this a bad time?”
“No. You’re already late and he’s leaving,” I snap irritably before I turn and march into my bathroom.
I close the door and try to catch my breath. Why is my heart pounding like this? I clutch my chest and slump down in front of the toilet seat.
I start repeating the mantra I wrote for myself the night Carter left. The one I made myself memorize and say every morning, every afternoon, every evening, like a fucking Hail Mary.
I made myself say it until I believed it.
Until I breathed it and dreamed it.
This moment is my final destination. Carter and the two summers that brought him into my life were traffic jams that made me miss my flight.
But just like in those movies where people have a narrow escape from death, what felt like a reprieve from my fate, turned out to be nothing more than a detour.
Fate always takes her due.
The end of us was inevitable. I meant it when I called him my apocalypse. But, not the kind in movies where everything is destroyed. The biblical kind - where the destruction is really just a clearing away.
This life, the one I’m starting with Duke, is where I belong.
My stomach heaves and I turn around just in time to empty the contents of it into the toilet.
I lay on the floor, a sad, sweaty shell and fight back the panic that threatens to overwhelm me.
I don’t know what is wrong with me… I thought I was over this. But right now, Carter is all I want.
It’s so wrong. The way I feel. I will never act on it. It would ruin us both.
But God, how I wish I could tell them all to go to hell so I could run off and find the only person who has ever soothed my restless, raging soul.
It takes me five minutes of meditation and deep breathing to calm down. I splash water on my face, go back out and get ready to be married.
41
Carter
Shattered
This is possibly the worst day of my life.
I took a Xanax as soon as I woke up and then ate the lint flecked bite of an edible I found in the bottom of my shaving kit. Even after all of that, I’m teetering on a knife’s edge of calm. It’s taking all of my focus to maintain it.
Elisabeth and Duke are getting married today, and because I’m a glutton for heartbreak and misery, I
