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“Cat?” My voice was soft in the room, and I hated how her eyes widened briefly before falling back into their numbness.
This wasn’t my Cat. Where was my warrior, ready to take me out as soon as she saw my face, the one who was always fierce and battle-ready?
“Cat, baby, what’s going on?” Like I didn’t already know.
I tried to calm down. Slow breaths, white knuckles, but I was wavering between shouting at her for shutting down and dropping to my knees and begging her to speak to me. This was fucking manic. What the fuck was she doing just sitting there like a zombie? She should be screaming at me. Tearing into me. Destroying me, raging at me, punishing me, or something other than this fucking ball of pity. What the hell was wrong with her?
She had to fucking move. I couldn’t look at her like this. How was I meant to challenge her when she’d closed herself off so tightly?
I stepped into the room, treading slowly towards her. I lowered onto the bed, too far to reach her, close enough to see a rim of red around her eyes.
“Can I tell you a story?”
She didn’t react. Just kept scrolling and scrolling, like whatever she was looking at would never end. I took it as a yes. I wouldn’t fuck around with maybes. She told me she missed me. She fucking missed me. After years of reaching for her in the darkness, convinced I’d been abandoned, she turns the tables and tells me she was reaching back all this time. All those stupid misunderstandings and pride and putting our fucking hearts on the line and look where we were. I refused to let this go. She couldn’t dig her nails into my shoulder and tell me she wanted to destroy me and expect me to simply walk away.
Not a fucking chance.
“There was this dickhead kid from Barton who grew up dirt-poor. Mum and Dad could barely afford to keep the shop open, but they loved him enough to buy him a guitar one Christmas, and that was it. I — well, I’ve told you this before, so I’ll skip the boring parts and get to the bit where his parents die, and just as he thinks life isn’t worth living anymore, he meets a girl so beautiful and powerful that she makes him feel like he could rule the world. And he loves her. He fucking loves her with every ounce of his being, but he’s a dickhead, right? So, he lets his friend rope him into a conversation that he regrets as soon as it is over. And then he gets signed, and he goes off to London, thinking he can see her on weekends, and you know what, Cat? Do you know what happens next?” I looked at the floor, my face hard with rage and unchecked tears. “She’s gone. She disappears like a fucking puff of smoke in a dream you remember so vividly it’s etched into your fucking brain with a Sharpie.” I was shaking. I hadn’t spoken about this shit in years, and here it was, dragging itself out of me, the festering wound opening up to show her how deeply she scarred me. “Do you get what that’s like? To have the person you love vanish without a word? I thought you were dead, Cat. I thought you’d been hit by a bus or something, and no one told me. It was terrifying.” I had to stop there. If I started talking about those first few months after she left, I’d lose it.
I let myself trail off. I was done. That was enough. It was barely an explanation, but it was one of the many grand speeches I had cooked up since we had met again. I had so many of them, so many things we needed to talk about, to push through, to heal from. We could do it. Holding her as she came apart, I believed we could do anything if we tried. But we had to fucking try. We had to do it together and not pull away at the first sign of a crack.
She went through shit, too. I knew she’d been suffering like I had. You couldn’t cut through a bond like ours cleanly. Our hearts were too enmeshed for that. But fuck me if it took me time to see it. Throughout my deep depression, I still believed she would come back, that she still loved me. I just had to wait. One day I’d walk through the door and she’d be standing there, smiling at me with open arms, and forgiveness would wash away all the ugly hurt.
The only sound in the room was the tap of her thumb as she continued to scroll. Tap. Tap. Tap. No sign that she heard me or that she wanted to respond. Empty tapping and slow breathing.
I opened my mouth to speak again, no idea what would emerge. It was that razor’s edge where one step could make or ruin my life, and I just had to throw myself into the abyss.
But she got there first.
“Is that all?” Her voice was ice, harsh and empty.
“Is there anything else I need to say?”
My deep pit of despair yawned wide open as she unfurled and looked at me, her face dead.
“I’ll send a bill to your manager. For wasting my time —allof this time — from the very beginning. You know my hourly rate.” She straightened her spine. “If that’s it, you can get out.”
She drained every single ounce of the warmth she had shown me in this bed with the weight of her disappointment or rage or whatever the fuck had her dying right in front of me.
No. She wasn’t fucking doing this. Not again. This was killing me. I couldn’t leave, not knowing if we were okay. Why did I have to wait on the fucking side-lines while she sorted out her feelings, only to have her reject me again as soon as it became too real for her?
“Will you at least hear me out?” I was getting frustrated. “I’m so, so sorry I was such an idiot. I didn’t see how important you were to me until it was too late. But, baby, you’re just looking for an excuse to end this thing between us. Why would you rather run away than stay and try to fight for something with me?”
She took a shuddering breath, her fingers tight around her phone. Something flashed in her eyes. “Why would I fight, Max? Why would I fight when all you’ve done is hurt me?”
I couldn’t stand seeing her shrivelled and so much less than she was. I wanted to blame myself for all of it. I was the one who first stabbed her, who pierced her beautiful bubble, but she also had a choice.
“Because you love me!” My voice was too loud in the dark room. I was getting close to reaching across the bed and touching her to bring her back. “Because we love each other. I don’t want to let this go,” I said, softer this time, a confession rather than an assertion.
“It’s not your decision to make.”
“It’s not yours either!” I clenched my jaw, trying to calm myself down. “We’re in this together. Whether you want it or not, I’m here for you.”
I don’t know how I managed to stay reasonable when every part of me was screaming. She was trying to break us, and the blind panic that had gripped me as I raced here was stepping out in full force.
“Stop turning this into a love story. You want everything to be creative and magical, but it’s not. I’ve been using you from the start. This only ends with you hurting me again!”
She was panting so hard, her breaths deep as her body shook, her eyes clenched along with her fists, refusing to look at me. I’d never seen her like this before.
