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“Hello!?” I was so happy I was shouting into the phone.
“Jesus, Cat, chill.” Jasmine’s light voice cut through my happy bubble. “Look, I’ve only got five minutes before we start the next scene, but I just wanted to check you were okay? I literally can’t believe it. She’s fucking lost it again. She doesn’t usually go this mental, but she’s seriously taking no prisoners. I’m gonna punch her in the fucking boob for this when I see her again. I swear to God.”
“What? What’s going on?” My good mood instantly evaporated.
“Holy fucking shit. You haven’t seen the news? For fuck’s sake, babe, it’s everywhere. Look, just google Bunny and Max and watch the video. We finish in a few hours. I’ll call you back then, okay?” She hung up without another word.
Jazz’s life was fast and erratic. Calls like that weren’t unusual.
I sat there in silence, my eyes roaming my room. I’d spent years filling it with beautiful finds from charity shops and markets, crazy craft shops, and antique Turkish bazaars. It was my safe space, my happy place, the place where I never had to be anything but myself.
Max had given me such a strange smile as he left, and there was the way his body hunched over, how he didn’t quite meet my eyes.
I didn’t want to look. I knew as soon as I googled Bunny and Max, my fairy tale would erupt. I had a few brief hours of happiness where I thought things might actually work out, and here came the universe with a fair dose of reality to correct my broken course.
I hit the search button on my phone. The top results told me everything I needed to know:
“Reaction to Bunny Relationship Confession!”
“Max Rider Caught Cheating on Bunny Collins Three Months Before Wedding.”
“Bunny Reveals All in New Interview with Melinda Harkin.”
Who’s that?
No one.
Liar.
Listen, I… I need to go to the studio. I’ll be back soon, alright?
I tried to breathe.
Nose. Mouth. Nose. Mouth.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
Three. Five. Three.
None of it was working.
Because he’d lied.
I tried to tell myself it was nothing. It was just one lie. We could talk about it. It was fine.
But like an already cracked pane of glass, all it took was one hit, one tiny notch, and suddenly I was breaking, shattering, splintering into a thousand pieces.
My first gasp heaved through me, a pathetic attempt to draw air into my lungs before the white noise started tingling inside my ears, like everything was being tuned out so slowly that I couldn’t tell where it had gone. Then it was my vision. My eyes were glued open, but nothing came through. There were no black dots or thin veils that stopped me from seeing. I’d simply receded so far within myself that I couldn’t see. By then, my breaths were tightly packed, my chest heaving so solidly that I’d fallen onto my side, curled up around my phone, gasping. Exactly the same position Dad found me in the last time.
He’d lied.
He’d done it again.
He’d lied to get his dick wet, and he didn’t give a shit about anything else.
My body shuddered, my gasps empty as I tried to control myself, repeatedly telling myselfit’s fine. It’s fine. I’m okay. I can do this.But I couldn’t hear anything over the scream consuming me.
The scream was born after Max left, a constant note of pain that lived inside me and weaved itself into every aspect of my life. No matter what I did, it was there. All I had to do was close my eyes, listen inside myself, and I could find the scream. Even if everything around me was fine, with work, friends, family, or anything, that scream remained. It never took a breath or asked anything of me. It was just the young, broken part of myself that couldn’t make sense of the devastation my heart had endured. I pictured her as a child, screaming because she had no words to describe the pain that bled into every part of her life.
