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The tears flowed down my cheeks realizing what I had to say.
“Cage, you can’t imagine the responsibility that I have. People are depending on me.”
“And, with my mother, you can’t imagine the responsibility I have. She and Nero are depending on me,” he said his eyes filling with tears.
“Is this it?” I asked him desperate for him to say that it wasn’t.
“I guess so,” he said shattering my heart.
I knew I should have said something after that. Anything. But, I couldn’t. The pain I felt disconnected me from my body. I floated somewhere over the two of us looking down. I was sad for the boy crying his eyes out in the passenger seat of Cage’s truck. But I couldn’t feel him. It would have been too much.
I was grateful when he opened his door and stepped into the cold. Anything was better than watching him suffer. Now, he just needed to make it inside and to his apartment before his legs gave out from under him and he collapsed.
Wishing him forward step-by-step, he ascended the stairs. When he took out his key and attempted to put it into the lock was when I couldn’t hold it back anymore. Suddenly drowning in pain, the world around me spun. Luckily I didn’t have to open the door. A friendly face opened it and now it was looking back at me.
“Are you okay?” Lou asked. “Quin, are you alright?”
I wanted to say I wasn’t. I wanted to tell him that Cage and I had broken up and that we weren’t getting back together. I couldn’t. All I could do was step to him and fall into Lou’s arms.
“He hurt me,” was what I said. “I don’t know what to do,” I explained before spending the rest of the night suffocating on my tears.
As devastated as I was when Cage hadn’t texted me back, it was nothing close to what I felt for the next few weeks. One thing became clear to me. I wasn’t made for this.
Maybe I was weaker than everyone else. Lou went through guys like popcorn. None of them even left butter on his fingers. Yet, I dated one guy, and breaking up with him left me catatonic. I should have known that I wasn’t made for love.
Not in twenty years had I found someone to love me back. Why was that? I thought it was something I could escape at a school in the middle of nowhere. But, the real problem was that no matter where I went, I was there. The thing that no one loved about me… was me.
Lou did his best to get me out of bed and at least attend classes, but I couldn’t do that either. Part of me knew that no matter the subject, I could probably cram it a few days before the exam and pass. The other part was that I didn’t see the point in school anymore.
What was the point of anything? Why should I leave bed except to eat and go to the bathroom? With all of my genius, I couldn’t figure that out. So, instead, I lied there, I cried, and I allowed my thoughts to endlessly spiral around Cage.
One second I loved him. The next second I hated him. But every moment I cursed the fatal flaw in me that had made me unlovable.
“Quin, you have to get out of bed!” Lou said insistently. “If not for you, for me. There is a smell coming from here that’s making the guys I bring home think I’m using the room to store dead bodies.”
“Sorry,” I said not wanting to be the burden I was.
Lou sighed and then crawled into my bed wrapping his arms around me.
“Come on, Lamb Chop, you gotta snap out of this. There are other guys out there. Believe me. And a hot guy like you would have your pick. You just need to go outside. Lamb Chop, how do I get you to leave this room?”
“I don’t know,” I told him honestly.
“Okay, maybe that was too much to ask for. How do I get you to leave this bed?”
I didn’t respond.
Lou popped up and looked around.
“That’s it. I was trying to be mister nice guy but you’ve given me no choice. Where is it?”
“What?”
“Your phone.”
“Don’t call Cage.”
“You think I wanna call Cage, that stinking, rat-bastard? Oh no. He needs to burn in hell for what he did to you.”
