Dissonance

by Drew Elyse

  By the time I flew through the revolving door, I could hardly see through the onslaught of emotion. I felt my body make contact with someone else’s, my shoulder careening into theirs.

  “Charlotte?” the body said, I knew the voice, but I couldn’t place it. Not caring who it was, I tried to keep going. I had no idea where to go, but I needed to get far away from there.

  “Charlotte, stop,” the voice came again, more distressed this time. Hands wrapped around my upper arms, holding me gently but not letting me pull away.

  Trying to blink some of the tears away, I looked up and saw Leo’s concerned face looking down at me.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” he asked beseechingly.

  I couldn’t talk. I knew if I tried, all he would get would be sobs.

  “Let’s go inside, we’ll get Logan and–”

  “No!” I choked out. “No… please, no.”

  “Please talk to me, Charlotte. What happened?” he pleaded with me.

  No, there was nothing I could say. There was nothing in my mind but the desperate desire to get as far away as I could. I shook, viciously, throwing any strength that I had into each jerk until his hands lost their hold on me. The moment I felt that freedom, I took off, my feet hitting the pavement as fast as they could carry me.

  I heard Leo call out my name again, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t even slow. I had to get out of there. I had to get away.

  “I was wondering if you and Lottie could sing again for our first dance,” Eli asked. “Alex is just planning to have the band play the song, but I want to surprise her.”

  I was about to agree, to say that I’d be honored to do it and I knew Charlotte would too, when my door was slammed open for the second time in one day.

  Leo came barreling through the entry, charging straight towards me with an unconstrained menace about him that I’d never seen before. I was so shocked by it I didn’t even realize he had cocked his fist.

  Pain exploded in my jaw. Distantly, I heard the clattering of Eli’s chair toppling over as he grabbed hold of Leo to stop his onslaught.

  “What the hell did you do, you sorry son of a bitch?!” he bellowed at me.

  What the fuck?

  “Leo, man, calm the fuck down. What the hell just happened?” Eli was in front of him, trying to placate him. The two were pretty evenly matched, but it was obvious Leo had rage on his side. Eli knew better than to take that on.

  “Why aren’t you kicking his ass?” Leo demanded. “She’s your fucking sister!”

  That had me on my feet.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think you already know, asshole,” he answered, trying to get around Eli.

  “Explain. Now!” There was no room for argument in my tone. He was talking about Charlotte, I wasn’t entertaining stupid games.

  “Why don’t you explain why your girlfriend came running out of the building in tears? What did you do to her?!”

  No. That couldn’t be right. Charlotte hadn’t been here. And did he say she was crying? She didn’t show emotion like that. “I haven’t seen her since I left this morning.”

  “You fucking liar!” Leo’s yell was followed by a harsh grunt as Eli slammed him into the wall.

  “What. Happened?” Eli enunciated, ready to attack if he didn’t get some answers.

  “She came running out of the doors. I grabbed her arm and she was sobbing,” Leo explained, causing my chest to constrict with each word. “I told her we should come up here to talk to that prick,” he indicated me, “and she started panicking. She fucking bolted. I chased her for a few blocks, but I couldn’t keep up.”

  Fuck. No. No. No. She was not getting away.

  “Which way did she go?”

  He sneered at me. “I’m not fucking telling you!”

  I shouldered Eli out of the way, grabbing the bastard by his collar, ready to beat him within an inch of his damn life if he didn’t tell me how to find her.

  “Which. Way. Did. She. Go?”

  Maybe he saw that I sincerely had not spoken to Charlotte. Maybe he wanted to give me a chance to fix whatever he thought I had done. Or maybe he could just see that I was ready to decapitate him by hand if I didn’t get an answer. It didn’t matter to me.

  “She turned left out of the doors, then right three blocks down. I lost her after that.”

  I thought about the direction. Where the hell would she go? I imagined her, running from her fears through the streets of Seattle. And it hit me.

  I took off after her without a damn word.

  Eli kept up with me, jumping into the passenger seat of my car before I pulled away. I didn’t say a damn thing as I swerved between cars, getting through the city as fast as I could. When I pulled up to the park, a briefly saw a look of understanding cross his face, but I was taking off on the path Charlotte always ran before he said anything.

  I found her exactly where I expected her, the same little clearing where I’d told her I loved her the first time. I thought the spot was one of the most beautiful places in the world that day. Finding Charlotte there curled over herself, sobbing between terrible retching noises, shattered that in an instant. The sight terrified me, cemented my feet where I stood. I wanted to rush to her, to pull her to me and make it go away, but I couldn’t move.

  “Charlotte,” my voice sounded broken to my own ears.

  Her head whipped up towards me, her eyes bloodshot and her cheeks soaked with tears. Where her face wasn’t bright red, it was pale from being sick. Nothing sliced my heart open about her appearance the way her words did, though.

  “Go,” she sobbed. “Please, go. You have to leave.”

  I was at her side in a second, trying to wrap my arms around her, but she wasn’t having it.

  “Get away from me!” she shrieked.

  My entire body jerked backwards.

  Eli rushed forward, holding her while I tried to pull air into my lungs. The blinding pain of it, I could feel it in every inch of my body. I thought it might honestly kill me. Charlotte was saying something to her brother, but I couldn’t hear it past the echo of her words in my ears.

  Get away from me!

  Time ceased to exist. The only thing that was real were those words and the destroyed look on her face when she had yelled them at me. When a hand landed softly on my shoulder, I nearly shot out of my skin.

  “Logan, come on.” I turned to see a miserable Alex leaning over me. How long had I been lost that she managed to get there?

  The sobbing sound that had been ripping my heart open was gone. I looked around to see Eli had taken Charlotte. I flew to my feet, knowing I needed to go after her. I needed to stop her. I needed her.

  Alex grabbed me. “He took her to the car. She’s…” The sorrow on her face gutted me again. I knew her next words were going to tear me apart. “She said she doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Why?” I could barely articulate the word.

  Alex’s arms wrapped around me, but I couldn’t hug her back. I couldn’t move.

  “She said she’s…” Alex’s voice broke with soft sobs of her own. “She was murmuring about being broken. About how you couldn’t love her… not when she’s so broken.”

  No. No, that wasn’t true. I did love her. I didn’t care about her past. I loved her.

  I loved her.

  And she was gone.

  I collapsed to the ground, and let my own tears fall.

  Two weeks ago, Charlotte left me.

  I made a vow that day that I would not give up. She was scared, so she ran, but that does not mean I had to let her get away. I let her run, let her calm down, but I would never let her go without a fight.

  I’d been sitting around for two weeks waiting for Alex to tell me that enough time had passed, that I could finally go after Charlotte. I wanted to trust that Alex would know when Charlotte was calm enough to listen to me, but I hated the waiting. I hated thinking that waiting might not be the answer, that every minute I s
at on my ass, Charlotte might just have been getting that much further away from me. I knew she was safe. She was with Eli and Alex. That kept me a bit calmer, knowing they were there to keep an eye on her, but it did not help much.

  So, I waited.

  And I drank. A lot.

  That’s how I functioned for the moment. I would drag myself out of bed, go to work, and then come home and drink until I could fall asleep instead of just lying awake wondering if Charlotte was okay.

  One week ago, I beat the shit out of my only brother.

  Alex came to see me a few days after Charlotte left. I had hoped when I had seen her in the door that it meant I could go see my girl again. I was wrong. What she was there to tell me fucking floored me.

  “It was Caleb,” she announced.

  “What was Caleb?”

  “That day at the office, Char was coming to see you, but she ran into Caleb in the lobby. He’s reason she ran, Logan.”

  I sat there for half an hour, listening to Alex recount what she was able to get out of Charlotte. How Caleb had stopped her in the lobby, how he told her that she was broken, how he told her I would give up on her when I realized she was unfixable. My only brother had cost me the love of my life.

  Alex had had to call Eli over to physically restrain me from going after him.

  I wanted to fucking kill him.

  Then, the fucker had the balls to show up at my door.

  I opened the door without checking who it was, assuming it was probably Eli trying to keep me from going off of the deep end by coming to update me about how Charlotte was again. Imagine my surprise when Caleb was standing in the threshold.

  I did not react right away, my surprise, the alcohol, and my lack of sleep conspiring together to slow me down. He got a chance to start in on why he was there, so I let him have it. Maybe if he apologized, I would go easy on him. Maybe if he admitted that he was under the influence, that it was a terrible fucking mistake, I would not kill him for hurting her.

  But he didn’t apologize. He started rambling about something else entirely.

  “I need you to talk to Dad. Apparently, you’re the one he listens to now. Don’t know when the fuck that happened,” he started ranting. “Anyway, I need you to convince him to let me come back to work. That job is mine. It’s fucking been mine since I graduated college and he can’t just keep it from…”

  That was all I let him get out before I buried my fist in his face. I felt his nose crack and break beneath my knuckles, and I was certain it was the most satisfactory thing I had felt since before Charlotte left. Caleb stumbled back until he hit the wall on the other side of the hallway, slumping to the ground against it.

  “What the fuck was that for?” he demanded as blood ran from his nose.

  The rage boiling through every extremity of my body was not going to be settled by words. There wasn’t a word in the English language that could alleviate the volatility that had festered since he had driven Charlotte away from me. Talking being out of the question, I let my body react. Each and every landing of my fist was the sweetest retribution, but the feeling lasted only seconds before that same soul-deep need for vengeance returned.

  I don’t know how long it lasted, the constant barrage of my fists into the cowering body of my older brother. I only remember the moment I was yanked back, arms restraining me from exacting the revenge my body screamed for.

  “Logan,” the person keeping me from my only goal was trying to get my attention. “Dammit! Logan you have to fucking stop. You’ll fucking kill him!”

  The voice started to sound familiar. With that realization, the tunnel that my vision had restricted to started to expand. I stopped fighting against the hold on me. As the image around me became clear, the adrenaline that had me riding high disappeared.

  Caleb was lying on the floor, unmoving. There was no recognizing him beneath the blood that flowed across his face. I stared at his chest, waiting for some sign that I had not done the unthinkable. I didn’t breathe, my lungs aching as fear crippled me. Only when I caught sight of his chest moving ever so slightly, did I collapse. Eli lowered my nearly limp body to the ground.

  What the hell did I just do?

  “Please, you have to help him.” The broken sound that my voice had become was unfamiliar. “You have to take him to the hospital.”

  If I had ever questioned that Eli was my best friend, that moment would have solidified it. Without a moment’s hesitation, he was lifting Caleb’s lifeless body from the ground, running out the door without a backward glance.

  I didn’t move. I just stared after where they had both disappeared, hoping beyond hope that Caleb was going to be alright, wondering what the hell I had done.

  Alex arrived some time later, coaxing me off the ground, cleaning the cuts on my knuckles, and trying to calm me down. I started to wonder if I would ever feel calm again.

  Caleb was fine. I broke his nose and caused a few lacerations to his face, but there was nothing major. He went home the same day. The staff at the hospital had been ready to call the police, but for whatever reason, Caleb insisted that they didn’t. He fed them some bullshit story about getting in a fight over girl. Well, I guess that was not entirely untrue. When they continued to push, he told them he would absolutely not press charges, so they were wasting their time.

  The sigh of relief that accompanied the news that I had not harmed him too badly was powerful. Powerful enough even to wash away the fierce anger I had felt towards him since learning he had scared Charlotte off.

  That did not mean I could easily forget what happened. I never went to check on Caleb. I had been terrified that things had gone too far, but when that fear was removed, I was not suddenly able to forgive what he had done. I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever be able to forgive him. It wasn’t even just because of the fact that two weeks later, I had still not heard a thing from Charlotte. It wasn’t the fact that because of his actions, she had left me. What really infuriated me beyond anything else was the simple fact that he had hurt her. Regardless of how that impacted my relationship with her, he had hurt her when she had already experienced more pain in her life than she could ever have deserved. He had purposefully broken her down, pinpointing her deepest insecurity and attacking right where she was vulnerable.

  I hated him for that.

  A week had passed since that day before another surprise visitor came to my door.

  I had not talked to my mom since Thanksgiving Day. I couldn’t remember the last time I went that long without speaking to her. Maybe it had happened a few times in college, but it was an altogether rare occurrence. She had called a few times, I just had not had it in me to answer. What could I say to her?

  Apparently, she had grown tired of giving me a choice in the matter. She was going to speak to me, whether I was ready or not.

  When I opened the door, her face immediately went from irritated to sympathetic. I knew I looked like shit. The problem was, I just did not have it in me to care. I was moping, no question, but it was all I was capable of at the moment.

  “You look terrible,” she greeted.

  Leave it to Katherine Westfield to tell it like it is.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I shot back dryly.

  I allowed her in, following her over to sit on the couch. She eyed the mess around the apartment. The lingered meaningfully on the medley of bottles on the countering various states of emptiness. I wasn’t proud of the drinking, but sitting in the empty apartment every night, surrounded by memories of Charlotte, was tough to take sober. Hell, her room was still nearly full of her things. Alex has only packed one suitcase worth of clothes and other items to take to her. Charlotte was lucky I let her out of the door with them. I’d even had to move that damn orchid into her bedroom so I would stop staring at it endlessly.

  The real cherry-on-top had been when Eli had come by with Charlotte’s bracelet in hand. She’d taken it off and chucked it across the room as soon as they got her back to their apartment the d
ay everything fell apart. Eli figured it was safer with me. He was afraid she would do something drastic with it and regret it if we ever manned to repair this thing between us. Now, it sat on the coffee table, a constant reminder that Charlotte did not want it.

  Mom noticed it sitting there and picked it up. My first instinct was to snatch it from her. Regardless of what Charlotte felt at the moment, that bracelet was sacred to me. I didn’t even want my mom handling it.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” she suggested, though I suspected that if I were to refuse, the suggestion would be more stern the second time.

  As much as I wanted to hold it all in, to just stew in the frustration and pity I had swirling around in my own head, I owed it to Mom to at least explain what happened with Caleb. There was no real way to manage that without recounting the whole sordid affair. Besides, I had seen what bottling everything up caused. After all, part of what had put me in this situation was Charlotte’s unwillingness to open up. How could I do the same thing after all that had happened?

  And so, I told her. I laid out every fucking bit of the story from the day Charlotte walked into my life on. I didn’t hold anything back, even the parts I was less than proud of. Mom just sat there, her only responses coming from her expression as each event that led to that moment became clear to her. I had no idea what to expect when I finished, but what Mom said next was not it.

  “She loves you.” Mom continued when it was clear that had shocked me, “That is why she was so scared. She wasn’t scared about something in her past, she was terrified that whatever she’s hiding away was going to make her lose you.”

  I had no words. I loved Charlotte with all I had, and I could only hope that Mom had this right.

  “Just don’t give up on her,” Mom insisted. “You’ll get your chance still.”

  She started getting up, heading towards the door. I was still stuck in the same place. Mom had given me more hope in a few words than Alex and Eli had managed in two weeks. She also hadn’t yelled or been pissed about what I had done to Caleb. In fact, when I told her that part of the story, she’s only seemed distressed about the whole thing.