The Pain in Loving You

by Steiner, Kandi

  He broke the space between us, crushing his mouth on mine. His lips sparked the fire and I sucked in a breath through my nose, head spinning, before my hands found the center of his chest and I shoved him back hard. He hit the truck and threw his hands up, eyes an inferno as we both panted.

  I watched him, my conscience telling me to walk away while my body screamed for me to never let go. Nothing made sense. Everything made sense. The whiskey clouded my head and I stopped trying to fight the fog, launching myself at him and yanking his sweater until his mouth was on me again. He lifted me, spinning us and pinning me against the truck. His lips traveled down my neck to my collarbone, my chest, the swell of my breast. He sucked the skin hard, trying to brand me, but I wasn’t his to mark.

  “Stop,” I breathed, and he groaned, taking it as a challenge as his hand slipped under my tank top. I moaned, breathing hard into his mouth as he slid his tongue inside mine. I was dizzy. I wanted to give in. I wanted him. Badly.

  But this was wrong.

  “Stop!” I said again, this time pushing him off and dropping my feet back to the ground. “We can’t do this.”

  “Why not?” he panted.

  “B?”

  Jenna’s voice startled us both and I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the truck before turning to face her.

  She crossed her arms, eyes bouncing between the two of us. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Jamie forced a long exhale through his nose, and I couldn’t even look at him again. I didn’t want to see the pain, the resignation.

  “Come on, Jenna. Let’s go.” I reached for her hand and she took it, eyes still wild under bent brows as I tugged her away from Jamie. To his credit, he didn’t follow this time.

  When we were out of ear shot, Jenna pulled her hand free and picked up our pace. “You better have some fucking booze in your dorm room because you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  I glanced back at Jamie, who hadn’t moved. He just stood there watching us leave, and I knew nothing would be the same after I told Jenna. She would make me choose. She would be the voice of reason I was running from.

  “All I have is Whiskey,” I whispered, tearing my eyes from Jamie to the path we were walking. I meant that sentence in more ways than one, and I knew before telling Jenna anything that I couldn’t ever lose him.

  But that meant I’d have to lose someone else.

  Chapter Ten

  Hangover

  THEY SAY TIMING IS everything, nd I was beginning to learn that timing was everything but kind to Jamie and me.

  I woke up that next afternoon hungover as hell, but finally feeling relieved from the pressure that had been crushing my chest. The sun was shining hot through my dorm window and I kicked the covers off. Jenna grumbled, rolling away from the light as I stared up at my ceiling, going over my plan for the day.

  After talking to Jenna until nearly five in the morning, spilling everything, I felt better. I expected her to judge, or hell — to maybe be mad, seeing as how she had dated Jamie in high school — but she didn’t, and she wasn’t. She listened to me sob and break down and she held me through all of it, and then she did what I knew she would.

  She made me choose.

  I thought it would be harder, I thought it would kill me to say out loud who I wanted, but after confessing everything and feeling the whiskey and beer leave my system gradually, it was like walking out of a foggy haze into the purest clarity. I knew what I had to do, and even though I knew it would hurt, I was ready to do it.

  Crawling out of bed, I padded to the bathroom and popped two ibuprofen before attempting to wrangle my hair. As I did, I cringed at my reflection. I looked like absolute shit, and I knew I deserved it. Ethan shouldn’t have had to put up with my dramatics last night, and he shouldn’t have to be lied to, either. I hoped he would understand. I hoped he would forgive me. I hoped he would move on, finding a girl who could treat him better than I did.

  More than anything, I hoped he’d be happy.

  And then there was Jamie. My stomach lurched at the thought of him. After last night, I didn’t know if he would hear me out — if he would give me a chance to explain myself or if he’d give a shit after I did. But I had to try. One thing was certain after talking to Jenna all night — I wanted to be with him — needed it, really. I just hoped I wasn’t too late.

  I remember the next sixty seconds like a slow motion car wreck.

  Me, staring at my reflection in the mirror, planning out all the words I would say. Jenna, sprinting up behind me with my phone in her hand. Her voice, panicked. Her hair, wild. My mom’s cries on the other end, loud and jarring, pounding against my head that the ibuprofen had yet to help ease. It happened all at once — all of those things — but I remember them singularly, morphed, almost as if I’d dreamed them.

  I had everything planned out — what I would say to Ethan, what I would say to Jamie — but I never got the chance.

  In that moment, everything in my life shifted focus. What I thought was important was trivial, what was last on my mind became first.

  My dad died on the day I realized I loved Jamie Shaw.

  Love pulled my soul one way and grief yanked it another, and so it ripped in two, split into jagged, irreparable halves. One floated high, calling me up with it, while the other sank into a bottomless black hole.

  But I was too weak to fly.

  The heavier half dragged me with it and I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream, I didn’t fight. I drowned easily, staring at the floating half on the way down, wondering if we’d ever meet again.

  • • •

  I felt everything alive inside of me slowly slipping away as I stared out at the choppy water. A storm was rolling in, the gray clouds lurking off in the distance as the sun began to fade. It wasn’t as cold as the night before, and I stood where the water met the sand, my board under my arm, wetsuit zipped up high to my neck.

  It was as if each time the water rose high enough to lick at my toes, it stole a little more of what was left alive inside of me, leaving dead driftwood in its place. My eyes grew hollow, my breaths grew steady, and my heart grew weak.

  I could still hear my mother’s words, and they still didn’t make sense. A freak accident, she’d said. It sounded like a horror movie, or a newspaper article about a distant human being whom I didn’t know personally. It didn’t sound like my life. But it was.

  My dad’s parents had a house on a lake in Central Florida. We used to drive up on the weekends to ride the wave runners and go swimming. Every memory I had there as a child was filled with joy. Mom said Dad was there for Nana’s birthday, swimming just off the dock like we always used to. He was just swimming, just enjoying a weekend at the lake, and then his life ended. Cords plugged into the dock and house boat had slipped into the water, electrifying it, and he’d suffered from electric shock drowning. I didn’t even know that was possible, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t process it.

  Maybe it was a combination of everything in that moment — the guilt from what I’d done to Ethan, the ache of what I felt for Jamie, the shock of my father’s death. Everything had been thrown into a blender, dial set to shred, and now it was all I could do to stand near the edge of the ocean and not wish to drown in it.

  I left Jenna in my room, packing my bags because I couldn’t, and caught a cab to the beach to try to feel. I just wanted to feel something — anything. I wanted it to sink in. I wanted to cry. I wanted the numbness to go away, but it was only plunging deeper, seeping into the cracks between my joints, settling into its new home.

  “You can’t go out there.”

  His voice was steady, low and oaky like always. My lip quivered at the sound of it and I nearly dropped my board. Fastening my grip, I hiked it higher, not turning to see him for fear of a completely different emotion sinking in. “I’ll be fine.”

  “It’s about to storm, and it’s getting dark,” Jamie warned, and I felt his arms hook around my board from the other side. I grippe
d it tighter at first, but then my shoulders fell and I released my hold, letting Jamie take it away. I instantly felt empty as he set it easily in the sand, and I kept my eyes on the swell to avoid looking at him.

  He stood beside me, gazing out at the water with me, and for a moment he let the wind and the waves be the only sound. His hand reached out, just barely, his pinky brushing mine before I slid my palm into his and held on tight.

  “Jenna called me. She… she told me what happened.” I didn’t respond, but my thumb rubbed his.

  Thunder rolled low and menacing in the distance, and I felt its cry deep in my stomach.

  “Talk to me,” he pleaded.

  A sickening ache spread through my chest and I fought against the sob. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t worry about it making sense, just talk. Just… get it out.”

  I nodded, over and over, my lips between my teeth as I held his hand and watched the sun set behind a wall of storm clouds. I didn’t know where to start, but as the last sliver of gold fell behind the gray, I took a breath, sharp and unsteady, and then I spoke.

  “I’m supposed to hate him,” I started, sniffing. “I was named after the freckles on his cheeks, the same ones on mine, and I’m supposed to hate him. He raped my mom,” I choked out, and the emotion started to surface, tears welling and blurring my vision. “And I never knew. I never knew that the hands that taught me how to ride a bike were the same ones that held my mom down the night I was conceived. I never knew the eyes that cried with tender joy the day I lost my first tooth were the same ones that watched my mom beg for him to stop hurting her.” I shook my head, and Jamie’s hand gripped mine tighter. “He was always there. He was the one to buy me my first notebook and pen and tell me to write. He was the one who took me on a shopping spree the day my childhood best friend moved away. He was always there,” I covered my mouth with my free hand, squeezing my eyes shut. “And then he wasn’t, because I pushed him away, because I was supposed to. I haven’t talked to him since the day I graduated high school. I ignored his phone calls. I told him not to come to Christmas dinner for the first time in my life.” My throat constricted, and I squeezed my eyes harder, trying to block out the truth. “I didn’t talk to him, Jamie. And now I’ll never talk to him again.”

  The tears built up enough to spill, and I felt them hot on my cheeks as Jamie pulled me into his chest. My arms wrapped around his waist, cries staining his t-shirt as he held me tight. I felt the first drop of rain fall on my forehead, but I didn’t brush it away.

  “It’s okay to love him,” Jamie whispered, and another deep roll of thunder sounded with his words.

  “No it’s not,” I breathed, lifting my head from his chest. I met his eyes, their greenish-gold glow bringing me the strength I needed to say the next words. “Just like it’s not okay to love you.”

  His nose flared, and his hand found my chin, tilting it up before sliding to cradle my neck. “You love me?”

  I nodded, biting my lips together as a sob threatened to break through. A new stream of tears slid down the same path as the ones before them and he used his thumb to wipe them away.

  “Why is that not okay?”

  “Because,” I tried, my fingers playing at the hem of his t-shirt, but I didn’t have the words to explain. I couldn’t use letters and syllables and sentences to string together the thoughts in my head, the feelings in my heart. “I can’t be with you right now, Jamie. I’m going home tomorrow for the funeral and I just… I can’t promise you anything. I can’t…” My words faded off, because speaking them out loud hurt. I couldn’t promise Jamie anything because I had nothing left to give, not now that everything had changed.

  Not even five hours before, everything important to me was centered around a nineteen-year-old girl’s universe. I wanted to declare a major, I wanted to party all week with my best friend, and more than anything, I wanted to set things right with Ethan and Jamie.

  But that universe seemed so far away now.

  Now, all that mattered was that my father was gone. He was dead. I’d been ignoring him, thinking I had all the time in the world to figure out what role he would play in my life. But I was wrong.

  Like I said, my father died on the day I realized I loved Jamie Shaw.

  It was as simple and as complicated as that.

  Jamie lifted his other hand to mirror the first, framing my face. His eyes bounced between mine, his brows bent together as he studied me, focused like always, trying to break through the wall I was slowly building between us. “Is it okay that I love you back?”

  A short cry left my lips but he didn’t let me answer before his mouth met mine. He kissed me like he was losing me, like that kiss was his last chance to keep me, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it wasn’t. I broke on that day, on that beach, and though I tried to fight it, the numbness of it all had blanketed me completely.

  “Stay with me tonight,” he whispered against my lips, pulling me closer, trying to meld our bodies together. I nodded, still crying softly, and he tried with every ounce of power he had to kiss away my tears before they could fall. He kissed me all night long. He kissed me until my lips were chapped and my heart was bruised. He was desperate to leave his mark, and this time I let him.

  The next day, I left for the funeral and I never came back.

  Jenna flew with me, handling everything I couldn’t — the paperwork at school, the questions from my mom, the outfit for the funeral. She held my hand through the service, through the stream of people offering their condolences, and that night when we made it back to Mom’s house, I sat down at my computer, and I wrote.

  I wrote page after page of absolutely nothing, but everything to me in that moment. Every word made me feel better and worse all at once, and so I chased one feeling and ran from the other, round and round until my fingers ached. I think I needed that first, true heartbreak to feel enough to write the way I did that night. Words don’t get written from a heart that’s never felt. They come from pain, from love, from unspeakable depths — and they were my only release.

  That was also the night I pledged myself dry.

  With that last taste of Jamie still fresh on my lips, I shelved him, knowing I’d suck him dry if I didn’t let him go. It took writing my feelings for me to be able to name why I’d left Jamie behind. The truth was I believed him when he said he loved me, and I knew he loved me enough to let me bring him down along with me. I could barely get out of bed every day. What kind of person would I be if I let Jamie love me in my condition?

  It turned out I was water, he was whiskey, and I couldn’t dilute him — not now that I knew he loved me enough to let me. I needed to be stronger, to be ice the next time I melted with him.

  I did make one phone call back to campus, to Ethan, telling him over the phone what he deserved to hear in person. Then, I finished school at Palm South University, and always made sure to be out of town for the summers when I thought Jamie could maybe come back.

  He called me twice a year, every year — once on my birthday and once on the anniversary of my dad’s death. I never answered. And I never called him back. It seemed I was trying to let go of Whiskey and he was trying to hold on to me.

  It was just a matter of time before we figured out who would win.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sober

  EVEN AS FAR AWAY from shore as I was, I could still hear the ring of my cell phone. I could still feel it vibrating like it had that morning, just like it had every year on this day since I’d left California. And just like always, I’d let it vibrate and ring, not silencing it but not answering it either. I’d stared at his name on the screen and thought to myself that I was almost there — I was almost to the point where I’d be able to answer. I was closer, but I still wasn’t there just yet, and so that phone call sat at the front of my mind while I swung my feet lazily in the water on either side of my board.

  There were only two times when I had felt okay over the past
three years: when I was writing, and when I was surfing. Each of them provided their own, unique kind of solace.

  When I was writing, I was facing my fears — my anxieties, my feelings. I was putting them into words, giving them life, letting them know I recognized they existed. It was therapeutic and even if no one other than my professors had seen anything I’d written, it felt good just to get it out of my system.

  Surfing, on the other hand, was the step before writing. It was what I did when I needed to avoid a feeling, or when I needed to allow myself time to think on it before I could point my finger into its chest and call it what it was. Right now, I was taking a pulse check, celebrating how far I’d come while also recognizing I still had a ways to go to be completely whole again.

  The swell was smaller than California, but it was enough. As a perfect wave started forming, I bent forward and paddled out quickly, popping up on my board just in time to catch it and ride it back to shore. For the few moments I glided across the top of that wave, the wind in my long, wet hair, I felt free.

  Then, I paddled out a bit, sat up, and straddled my board once more, my eyes on the sun that was still struggling to wake up with me.

  It’d been exactly three years since my father’s death.

  How drastically my life had changed since that day.

  I still remembered every aching moment that lined the path of healing I’d been walking since then. I remembered the break on that beach with Jamie, the numbness after the funeral, the denial and desperation that followed me around for nearly a year before I finally started accepting and adjusting. Writing and surfing — they were my only release.