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“I wish,” he replies, his eyebrows knitting together. “Sorry… There I go, making things awkward again.”
My hand reaches out, but it stays there in the air, neither pulling him back nor ushering him out. “I think we can both agree that it wasn’t you who made it awkward tonight.”
“No, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree,” he tells me, and turns his back, heading for the door.
I have a matter of minutes to stop him, but the door opens, he steps out, he closes it behind him, and I hear his footsteps thudding along the landing and down the staircase—deliberately loud, like a heartbeat—but I remain frozen. My hands are tied. The infantry of guilt has me hostage, and they won’t let me take so much as a step forward until Rowan is gone.
Once I hear the bang of the main entrance, my limbs loosen enough to turn me toward the windows; grabbing my t-shirt and sweatpants, I pull them on as I move. With shaky hands, I open one of the windows and drift out onto the balcony like a ghost, haunting this home that doesn’t feel like mine. I hang back a little, peeking over the wrought iron, twisted into vines and spirals. I see him down there on the street, tapping fingers on his phone.
It's not too late,a tiny voice whispers in my mind: a dissenter in the ranks.Call out to him.
But he’s not my Romeo and I’m no Juliet. I don’t do romantic propositions from high-up balconies, especially not after making my potential lover feel like he… violated me or something. So, I just watch him until his Uber comes, and I keep watching the spot where he was standing long after the car has vanished, wondering if he was ever really there at all. It all feels like a really bad dream that started out so well, luring me into a false sense of fantasy.
A chillier wind whips around me as I rest my forearms on the recently-painted balcony railings and gaze out across the firefly lights of the Garden District, thinking of all the lovers and broken hearts out there in the glinting dark. It sounds ridiculous, but I keep forgetting that I’m not the first, and not the only, person in the world to lose someone so special. There must be thousands of others, like me, out there on this very night, getting on with their lives. So, why do I feel stuck? After two years, why do I still feel like I’m sinking in quicksand? Why, when I think I’m on the brink of clawing my way out, do I get dragged back down again?
“Love, don’t do this,”I hear him in the rustle of palm fronds, potted on the next-door’s balcony.“Don’t keep tearing yourself into pieces, or you’ll be so shattered that no one can put you back together again. Don’t do this to me.”
“You left,” I whisper, tears welling. “I didn’t do this to myself.”
He didn’t do it to me, either. Not really. But, goddammit, I need someone to blame. I need someone to be angry at, because being sad is getting me nowhere, and nothing is healing the way friends promised me it would. “Time heals everything” is bullshit, and if I just have to wait longer, I’m afraid of what I’ll be by the end of my sentence. A husk, no doubt, incapable of anything close to love.
What if I’d insisted on him coming in the car with me?
What if it hadn’t been raining?
What if he’d braked a second sooner?
What if the driver had swerved in time?
What if the DuCates had decided to love me then, instead of later?
What if… what if… what if…
“You’ll drive yourself mad, doing that,”Ben’s voice murmurs on the breeze, but it’s just the still sane part of my own mind, passed through a filter of what I can remember of his voice.
“Too late,” I reply, brushing tears from my cheeks.
“Start a fresh page, love,”he urges.“Finish my journal with your own story. I want you to have more, Summer.”
I don’t know what twisted part of my brain that is coming from, warping his words of having more with me, but I don’t appreciate it. Shaking my head to dislodge the mockery of his presence, I retreat back into my apartment and shut the balcony door, hoping that’ll put an end to it.
It does, to an extent, but the leather sofa is facing me… and I see a ghostly replay of what happened there tonight. The dimmed ripple of it is still prickling in my muscles, my face still flushed.
With nowhere else to go, I hurry to my bed and bury myself beneath the covers, pulling them right up over my head to hide in the darkness. But it’s not long before I start to feel suffocated, unable to breathe through the thick, patchwork comforter that Ms. T insisted on sending me off with. I yank the covers back down and stare up at the dark varnished beams overhead, fully aware that I’m going to spend another sleepless night like this, spaced out, stuck in the shadows.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. On autopilot, I take it out and the screen illuminates my face in cold blue light. There’s a new message. From Rowan. Small and simple and crushing.
I’m an idiot. Forgive me. X
My fingertips hover above the screen until it turns black, and in the darkness, the vultures circle again, coming for my heart.
14
ROWAN
“Saturday, May 28th, about four o’clock in the morning,” I glance over at the bedside clock to be sure, “four-fourteen, to be exact. And… I don’t know what to say. I wasn’t going to say anything, but there’s definitely something to this ‘building a routine’ crap, and it’s not like I can talk to anyone else about this. So, I guess it’s me and… well, me. Something to look back on and laugh when it starts to feel funny. Right now, it feels like shit.”
A toilet flushes, coming from Lyndsey and Oscar’s en-suite. I lower my voice, terrified someone might hear.
