I put my hand on his chest.
He lets me linger there for a moment before pushing me away.
“Do you hear me?” I ask. “I don’t want to be one of those couples who threaten to break up over every little thing. We can’t be those people.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment.
I wait for him to respond.
Then I wait some more.
There’s something scary in his silence.
I haven’t seen this before.
The expression on his face changes and a new seriousness settles in between his eyebrows.
Everything about him is tense.
Clenched up.
Hidden away from me.
“If you don’t want me here, I won’t come in here again,” I say quietly and walk toward the door.
This is going to be fine.
He didn’t mean that.
But he’s also not in a position to talk.
Something is looming over him.
It’s a dark cloud that fills the whole room, sucking it of oxygen.
“I meant what I said, Harley,” Jackson says quietly.
Again, his words are short and deliberate.
Focused.
It’s as if he means every one.
But I know that he can’t.
No, he doesn’t want to break up with me.
He just made love to me.
He just told me how much I mean to him.
Where is this coming from? What happened?
“Why? What are you talking about?” I ask. My voice comes out cracked and high-pitched. I cough to make the lump in the back of my throat go away, but it doesn’t.
“Why are you doing this?” I plead.
But he turns away from me.
I walk over to him and forcibly turn him to face me.
He can’t get away with this.
He can’t just break my heart and break everything that is real and true between us and walk away without an explanation.
His eyes have no life in them.
I press him closer to me and I force my lips onto his.
But he pushes me away.
I stumble.
He catches me, picks me up, and plants me on my feet as if I were a child.
“What are you doing?” I whisper, tears flowing down my face. “What is going on? Whatever it is we can fix it.”
“I… just…don’t want to be with you anymore,” he says quietly. He pauses slightly in between the words as if saying them requires a feat of enormous strength.
“Why? You have to tell me why!”
“No, I don’t.”
I clench my fists and throw them at his chest. He lets me pound him for a moment then grabs me by my wrists and holds them out.
“Calm down.”
But I can’t.
My whole body is shaking, and my legs seem to give out under me.
When he lets me go, I collapse onto the floor.
The world starts to spin around me.
I’m on one of those amusement rides where you go as fast as you can around a fixed point and your only goal once you get on is to just hold on as tight as possible to get through it in one piece.
So, that’s what I do. I hold on and wait for the centripetal force to take me away from here.
Somewhere in the distance I hear him again.
He is far away and getting even further with each word.
“Please take all of your stuff and leave. Martin will see you out and help you get home. I have loaded this card with enough money to last you a long time. Martin’s fee is already paid and he will protect you when you need to go somewhere.”
The door slams shut behind me, leaving me alone in this forbidden place.
I hang my head and let the tears run down my cheeks with abandon.
I don’t push them away, I just watch them come.
Whatever pain I felt before when I left him is nothing compared to this.
This one feels like a butcher knife going into my body over and over again. Just as I think I can take another breath another pang of pain rips me apart.
The tears don’t stop, but after a while I manage to stagger up to my feet.
I glance at the desk.
Is this why he did it?
Because I went into this wing?
Because I intruded into his past?
Because I dared to look at some pictures of Lila?
He wouldn’t let me clean up the broken glass on the floor.
But he was foolish enough to leave me here.
I grab the silver picture frame and launch it toward the wall.
It shatters against the bookshelf, sending little pieces of glass in all directions.
I close my eyes after a few pieces hit my face.
I like the feeling of this destruction.
If I can’t mend our love, I will destroy it.
I grab another picture frame and throw it at the rest.
I want to make him feel as badly as he made me feel.
But I know that it won’t.
Everything here can be replaced.
And I can’t replace us.
“What are you doing?” Martin runs in, grabbing the largest frame from my hand and throwing it to the floor.
“This doesn’t concern you.”
“You cannot do this, Harley,” he says, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me away from the desk. “You need to calm down.”
“Fuck you!”
He forces me out to the hallway once and for all, letting me go to lock the door behind us. I run toward the staircase.
I collide into the banister, and the top part of me leans slightly over the edge. I look down.
What would it take to just jump?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
7
Harley
When I consider the impossible…
“What are you doing?” Martin pulls me away.
I start to laugh.
He takes a step away from me in confusion.
“What did you think? I was going to jump? Because of that asshole? He wishes,” I say confidently.
I don’t know if Martin believes me, but I’m so certain that I practically believe it myself.
But the truth is that I almost did.
Just on impulse.
Just because it was the only thing that might have made me feel better. Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel better, but it would definitely make me feel nothing.
And that would’ve been an improvement.
“You’re bleeding,” Martin points out.
I follow his gaze to my arm.
The cuts don’t look like they’re deep, but the blood spilling out of them is crimson.
After examining the wounds and convincing himself that there are no shards of glass in them, Martin takes off his shirt and wraps it around my arm.
I watch him do this in third person. I’m not really here.
This isn’t really my body.
None of this is really happening. It’s just a bad dream from which I’m going to wake up any minute now.
I wait.
I wait.
I wait some more, but nothing happens.
Martin leads me to our bedroom and shows me a paper box where I should put all of my stuff.
I don’t have much.
A laptop.
A notebook.
Some clothes, but they are half unpacked in the carry on suitcase in the closet.
I pack that up as well and Martin carries it all for me.
“Don’t forget this,” he says, handing me the card that Jackson left in the office.
Somehow he had managed to take it while ushering me out of the door.
“What is that?” I ask, even though I know exactly what it is.
“Mr. Ludlow wanted you to have it.”
“Mr. Ludlow is an asshole.”
“That may be so, but you don’t want to leave this here.”
I stare
at him and roll my eyes.
“He had me put a lot of money on it. Here’s the receipt.”
He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. I glance at the figure at the bottom.
“He had you put a hundred grand on it?”
Martin nods.
“Why?”
“He said to just let him know if you need more and he’ll add to it.”
“Why?”
“Because he wanted you to have the money. To live. To pay for stuff.”
I shake my head. “No, no, no. That’s not what he wanted.”
Martin nods.
“He didn’t want to feel bad for dumping me. So, he thought that he could just pay me off. As if I were a hooker.”
Martin shakes his head.
“You don’t believe me?”
“Please take the money, Harley. It’s a lot of money. You deserve it.”
The word ‘deserve’ sticks with me. What is he talking about? What does he know?
“Why?” I ask.
But then he clams up and turns away. “Mr. Ludlow knows your financial situation and he wants you to be…comfortable.”
“You and I both know that he’s just trying to wash away his sins. He thinks that if he pays me then it’s okay that he broke up with me for no reason. He thinks this will make everything better. And you know what annoys me the most? That I always thought that he wasn’t like the rest of those wealthy, rich as fuck assholes. I always thought that he was different. That he didn’t think that his money bought everything in the world. Well, I was wrong. I was wrong about many things.”
The rest of the day is a blur.
Martin takes me back to my old apartment with Julie.
He brings my stuff in with me and I go straight to my bed and curl up under the covers.
I want to take a shower to wash all of this ugliness from me, but I don’t have the strength.
I put on my headphones, put on some instrumental music, and cover my eyes with my eye mask.
I drift off to sleep and when I wake up sometime later, I hear Julie and Martin talking in hushed tones in the kitchen.
The room is dark and I turn the music up louder and close my eyes again.
Being awake is a reminder of everything that I have lost.
I want to go to sleep, but salty tears start to run down my cheeks instead.
I bury my face in the pillow to muffle my sobs.
“I should go comfort her.” I hear Julie say somewhere in the distance.
“Just give her some space,” someone else says. Who? Oh, yes, Martin. That phantom of a man who brought me here.
“No, I should,” she whispers.
Don’t, I pray.
Leave me alone.
I don’t want anyone here.
I just need to lose myself in my own sorrow.
I cover my head with the blanket and turn more into the wall.
The fetal position is supposed to be comforting, but it’s not. It rouses me out of my sleep and makes my mind run again.
Memories of him come flooding back.
His hand on mine.
Palm to palm.
Our fingers intertwining.
His kisses as soft as a butterfly’s.
His full lips.
His sparkling eyes.
The soft way he said my name when he wanted to bring me closer to him. The loud way he screamed my name when he was inside of me.
It wasn’t that long ago that I thought that we would be together forever. He’s standing in front of me at my parents’ wedding, mouthing ’I love you’ over and over.
I was so certain then.
He walked around as if he had a secret to hide, a good one.
The one he couldn’t wait to share with me.
I knew deep down that he was going to ask me to marry him. I couldn’t wait to say yes.
But now I know what the secret was, he was planning on breaking everything off.
The past rushes into the present, painting everything black.
8
Jackson
When I do the impossible…
I hear her typing.
There’s a happy twang to it.
The words seem to be spilling out of her as she loses herself in that imaginary world that gives so much meaning to her life.
As I listen to her write, I hope that she doesn’t forget how this makes her feel when I hurt her.
The thought of doing it makes my body shudder.
Every cell in me fights against it.
I know it’s wrong.
It’s the last thing I want to do.
But it’s also the only thing I can do to protect her.
That’s why I’m doing this. It’s the only reason.
She’s going to hate me.
She’s going to want an explanation, but if I don’t extricate myself from the situation fast enough, if I don’t just pull off the bandage all at once, the pain will be too unbearable.
But worse than that.
If I start to explain then I might tell her the truth.
This is one thing she must not know.
This is the one thing that I have to keep to myself.
Again, it’s to protect her.
This is the only way.
I look for her in her favorite working place, the pink room, but she’s not there. I check everywhere downstairs and then head back to our bedroom. Please don’t be there, I say to myself over and over again.
I can’t do this there. That place is our home. I can still smell her hair on the pillow cases. No, that place has too many memories.
I look around and again she is nowhere to be found.
Where are you? I wonder. My feet take me to the west wing. She won’t be here. I told her this place was off limits.
Through the crack in the door, I see her.
She’s holding Lila’s picture in her hand.
My heart drops. My breathing slows down. I freeze.
I told her bits and pieces of what happened.
But I never told her the whole story.
She knows about the fireplace and she knows about the fire.
What more is there to tell?
Suddenly, everything about this room seems ridiculous.
There was a time when I couldn’t even go in here, but now? Now, I’m going to do the impossible here.
From now on, this will not just be the room where I lost my baby girl. This will also be the room where I lost my soul mate.
Don’t do it, my body screams. I clench my fists. Tears start to well up in my eyes, but I push them away with force.
I feel myself become completely rigid.
I straighten my spine and square my shoulders.
My eyes deaden.
My breathing slows down.
She apologizes for being in the room. She tries to make amends. But none of that can stop the moving train. I have to do what I have to do. I have to say the words. I open my mouth once, but they don’t come. Harley Burke is the love of my life. I cannot imagine my life without her. I cannot do this. But if I want her to live then I have to. Being apart is a sacrifice I have to make. It’s the only thing that is going save her. Protect her. Allow her to live the rest of her life free of danger.
They cannot know that she means anything to me. It’s the only way out. It’s the only way she’ll be safe.
I take a deep breath. I gather my courage. You have to do this, Jackson, I say to myself. You have to do this now.
“This isn’t going to work, Harley,” I say. “I need you to take your things and move out.”
There are moments in life which separate a before and an after.
There was a time before Lila was born when I was young and free and not a parent. And then after she came into this world and made me a dad.
After her death, everything that happened became a before. But then I met Harley and I thought that this would be the only after I would ever have again. Our love was going to last happily eve
r after.
But reality struck again.
As she sobs and pounds on me, demanding an explanation, I tense myself up, refusing to let any of her pain in. If I let go just a little, then I won’t be able to go through with this. Then I’ll cave and tell her the truth and she won’t go.
I have already experienced what it would be like to not have her in the world and I can’t go through that again. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew that she was dead because of me.
She continues to pound against me. She continues to fight. And then her legs start to collapse under her. She can’t stand anymore and no matter how hard I try to prop her up again, it doesn’t work.
It’s time to go. I turn away from her and leave. When the door closes behind me, I stand here listening to her sobs, fighting every intention in my body to go back there and take her into my arms.
But I have seen what they are capable of. I have seen the dead bodies that they left in their wake and Harley cannot be one of those people with a bullet through her head. Not if there’s something I can do about it.
Through the door, I hear her break Lila’s picture frames. The undeniable sound of shattering glass fills the room. Martin reaches for the door, but I stop him.
“Not yet.”
We stand listening to her devastation.
“Okay, now,” I say and open the door for him then walk away.
9
Jackson
Aftermath…
I get sick to my stomach as soon as it’s done.
I run to the bathroom and bury my face in the toilet. When I come up for air, I take a breath and get sick again.
And again.
I throw up until my insides burn. I throw up until I can’t throw up anymore. But still it’s not enough.
Still, I can’t seem to get this sickness out of me. This darkness that settled somewhere deep within me.
I know that I will not be free of it until Harley is back in my life, and that means I’ll have it with me forever.
I stagger to the bed.
Her scent is everywhere.
The memory of her walks through this house as a ghost. Everywhere I look, there she is, wondering why I broke her heart.
Tangled up in Hate Page 3
