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“Are you still up, Ruby?” Alex asks, maybe a couple of hours later.
“Yeah, sorry.” Shit. He must have heard me ruminating. Either that or my tossing and turning with discomfort.
“Is it my snoring?” he asks, innocently.
“No,” I say, climbing on top of him, previous revelations aside.
fifteen
Iwakeafewhours later to the rustling of a body somewhere in my vicinity. In my tired haze, for just a moment, I think that it’s Jake. I reach for him, finding instead nothing but an open space next to me and, when my eyes adjust to my surroundings, I remember what had happened. The weight of my reality crashes down on me. It was Alex casually grabbing articles of clothing off my floor, not Jake. It would never be Jake again.
“Oh, hey,” he says. “Didn’t mean to wake you up. I have to get to work, though.”
“Oh yeah, totally,” I reply, sitting up on the bed. What a relief. That should give me…roughly 16 hours before I need to deal with how I’d, literally, fucked this up. “I forget sometimes that you’re one of those people who live life between normal hours with the rest of the normal people.” That’s what I say.Please leave so I can get dressedis what I think.
He does, though—leave—and expediently. The energy is heavy and wrong, and it’s more than just me. It’s him, too. Once again, I can’t quite read it. He kisses me quickly, saying something about coming over after I get off work later. I tell him okay, and then he’s gone. I breathe in relief and breathe out existential dread.
Then, there’s a knock on my door. Shit. I scramble to pull on a pair of sweats and a tank top. It must be Alex. I hope that he’s just forgotten something and hasn’t decided that he wants to have some type of discussion about what happened right now after all. Berating myself for being this way, I force my reluctant body to do the normal thing: keep walking towards the door and open it. Unfortunately, once I do open it, it isn’t Alex at all—it’s Jake. He’s standing there holding a laptop box and his eyes are sad and he just stares at me. For the longest time, he doesn’t say anything at all—he just stands there, and it hits me like a thousand tiny needles that he must know. I want to crawl in a hole. I want to reach inside my chest, rip my heart out, and drop it at his feet. I want to grab him and kiss him, or write him poetry, or tell him a lie that will fix it. But of course, I can’t do any of that.
“Ruby,” he says slowly, “why was that fucking asshole just leaving your apartment?”
But it wasn’t a question, and I don’t answer. I just stand there, frozen. My mouth is probably hanging open, but I don’t make a sound.
“That’s…what I thought.” And that’s it. That’s all he says before he turns and makes his way down the hall, towards the half staircase that will take him to the entryway, out the door, and effectively out of my life. I stand there, choking on that realization, for what feels like minutes but for what must have been a lot less, because once I do finally will my feet to move, and they do move, I’m able to catch him just outside the building, barefoot in the middle of a heavy December rain. It’s so cold that it shocks my system, and maybe that’s why I’m able to say more than I’m able to admit to myself.
“Jake, I’m sorry!” I yell at his back. He stops but doesn’t turn around at first. “I don’t expect anything from you, I just want you to know that it’s not what you think.”
“Really?” he says, turning and running his hands over his face and through his soaking wet hair, body language that I’ve learned to recognize as indicative of his inner struggle. “Because it looks like you wanted to get revenge. And you fucking got it—so congratulations, Ruby. You fucked me up good. Are you happy? Did you finally get the guy youreallywanted? Did I help you do that?”
“No,” I say. “No. I never wanted revenge. I never wanted to hurt you. I just—I’m fucked up, okay? I’m a fucking mess—”
“Fuck yes, you are.”
“—and I just. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t handle the way that I felt about you and after you told me what happened in San Diego, I freaked the fuck out. I had this idea in my head that I was just going to stand there and love someone and let them hurt me over and over again and it was too much and I couldn’t take it, so I just…ruined it.”
‘Before it ruined me,’I don’t say. On my very best days, I’m hanging from a very delicate thread, walking an even more delicate line over a river of broken things that I’ve barely managed not to let consume me. I do this by existing behind a veil of biased facts I tell myself about what happens when you expect better from people and what they can do to you when you let them in. Despite all of this, somehow, he had made it in, and when it felt like my heart might burst, my fucked up ego took care of the rest.
“Yeah, you did—,” he says, “ruin it. Hope it was worth it.”
He turns to leave, and I let him. I don’t say anything else; I don’t try to change his mind. I can hear in his voice that he can’t take any more of this, and I won’t subject him to it.
“Oh, and you can keep it, by the way. I don’t fucking want it.”
I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but it’s of little consequence when you’re standing in the middle of what’s essentially a minefield of all the things that mattered to you, and you’re watching them explode. It’s even worse when you’re the one that set them off in the first place. I watch him go until he crosses the street and is swallowed into a sea of 9-5ers in black coats with black umbrellas. Somehow, despite being an obvious spectacle, when my chest cavity implodes, no one notices.
I drag myself inside and see the laptop box sitting in the hall by my door.Keep it. I don’t fucking want it.
I pick up the box and cross the threshold into my apartment. Once the door closes behind me, I’m overcome with every emotion and sensory experience I’d been repressing. I’m cold and I can’t feel my feet. I’ve been laid to waste and I’m heartbroken. My body hurts and I’m a piece of shit. I may even have frostbite, but I think that’d be okay. Losing a few toes sounds like a decent start to fair penance for the pain I’ve caused. I sink down the door and onto the floor. Eight weeks ago, I thought I had it all figured out. I had a system, a routine, and it had worked. Keep surviving, don’t let anyone get too close. I catch a glimpse of the person who’s to blame for all my problems in the reflection of the window, and it’s me. I see my own cloudy, incomplete visage and all the pieces that are supposed to be there but aren’t. I wonder when I started hating her.
I think I was wrong about the rain. I need a shower.
sixteen
Itcan’tgetworsenow, I thought.Time to pull myself up off the floor and face the consequences, I thought. So, I did. I went to work that night, and no one noticed a thing. No one asked. I smiled, and I poured drinks. I joked around with my coworkers behind, what I can only assume, were dead eyes. Dane showed me how to take care of some of the vendor stuff, and I set up my interviews. It was busy, and it went on like any other day would have, as if I hadn’t just blown my whole world up. But when it rains, it pours, and for me, it wasn’t quite done pouring quite yet.
I’d almost made it. I was just about to leave for the night when she walked in. What would have happened if I’d left just five minutes earlier?
“Hey, Ruby. It’s been a while. I was hoping you’d be here. I really need to talk to you about something.”
