by Mia Wolf
“No,” I tell her and turn my chair around to find Alex laughing for some reason. I give him my card and he returns it when the payment is done.
“Should I buy you another drink?” the woman asks while my back is to her.
I don’t respond, slip out of my seat, and leave the bar for the night. I call a cab to Ashley’s place because we need to talk.
When I arrive at the mansion that she calls her home and ring the bell, no one answers. Then I realize I’m supposed to answer the intercom. It makes me laugh.
“Hello,” I say laughing, “sorry. This is Warren Maibach. Here to see Ms. Ashley Wang.” My words are slurred, but I feel good.
The door opens a few seconds later and I walk through a long, brightly lit hallway that gives me a little bit of a headache from all the glowing lights. Ashley is standing in the garden outside the main building of her house.
“How did you know where I live?” she asks me with her arms crossed in front of her.
“It’s evening,” I tell her, pointing at my watch. “We’re supposed to talk in the evening.”
“You’re drunk, what am I supposed to say to you?” She seems to be angry for some reason.
“I’m not drunk, Ashley,” I reassure her, but she sighs and stares at me silently, her arms still crossed in front of her chest.
I look up at the sky and see the stars. And it suddenly fills me with a lot of happiness because I’m with the person that I always think of when I see the stars. So far above me that I can only pretend to catch them. I reach my hand up to the sky and pretend to catch a star but lose my balance a little. That makes me laugh, too. I falter and take some time to regain control.
“Look, Ashley,” I tell her. “The stars shine just like you do.” I point at the sky then look at Ashley, but she’s not looking up. She’s staring at me, her nostrils flaring. My happiness dissipates because she’s not seeing what I see.
“Why aren’t you looking up?”
Chapter 18 – Ashley
I’m standing in the garden, staring at Warren and thinking how unflattering he looks right now. Loose shirt, unbuttoned at the top, jeans slipping obnoxiously lower than his waist, and there is a look of irresponsibility on his face that’s making my disdain turn into anger. I’m standing far away from him yet I can smell the alcohol on him and all I can think of is the audacity he has to show up looking like a mess in front of me. Does he not care about what I think of him? Are we that comfortable with each other?
“Why aren’t you looking up?” he asks me, slurring his words but yelling at the top of his lungs as if I’m on the other side of the planet.
I don’t respond, I don’t speak, I cannot comprehend a single thought right now, I am that pissed. To say that I am furious would be an understatement. Right before I decide to make it clear to Warren that I absolutely don’t have the time nor the tolerance for his inappropriate behavior, he says something that makes my anger dissipate.
“I don’t know either how I turned into this, Ashley.” He doesn’t look at me when he speaks as if he cannot make eye contact in his condition.
I don’t know whether or not to believe the sincerity of his words or whether or not to brush them off as a drunken haze, but the remorse on his face speaks volumes. Instead of anger, I find it mildly annoying now that he’s standing here, half indecent and drunk out of his mind.
“My driver can drop you off at your hotel,” I say and stand up to go inside the house to get my phone. I walk with hurried steps because I don’t trust Warren with himself right now. I’ve never seen him like this. When we met ten years ago, he was a shining, radiating beacon of light and hope for me. Someone who could do no wrong, someone so pure that it was nearly impossible to see him as a human being. I shake my head and give myself a reality check.
He’s just drunk. It’s not a crime, it’s natural. I repeat the words until they make sense as I grab the phone from my bed. When I turn around, I see Warren standing at the door. I recoil seeing him there and my heart races. I put a soothing hand on it to calm it down.
“Warren, why did you follow after me?” I ask as I try to understand the tension that’s in his eyes. He seems to be torn over some ethical dilemma, or so it looks.
Seeing Warren standing at the door reminds me of the dinner with Steve Parera and the same anxiety surfaces. Except that this time, I won’t have Warren to look after me because he’d be the one causing it.
“Warren, please leave my house,” I say, mustering up all of my courage. I’m used to intimidating a sea of men when I walk into a room and when I start talking to them they’re almost my disciples. And yet when I’m alone with a man, like right now, all of my confidence, courage, and boldness fly out of the window. I’m really shaken right now, and if Warren doesn’t snap out of his drunken stupor, we’re going to get into a lot of trouble.
When he doesn’t heed my request, I repeat it, but this time he steps closer to me. He takes an achingly slow step in my direction, almost stumbling and falling to the ground. I instinctively move backward until my back is to the wall.
“Warren, what do you think you’re doing?” I ask, but my words are not reaching him. It’s like he’s possessed. The Warren I know is gone.
Watching him move towards me and being unable to stop him, I realize that my hands are numb. My back has become numb and there are tears in my eyes for some reason. I’m not sad, I’m afraid. The tingling in my toes doesn’t help me to have a firm footing on the ground.
“Why are you looking at me like I’m a monster, Ashley?” Warren asks and finally, the menacing look on his face has turned into a more familiar yet disconcerting one.
“Because you’re acting like one,” I yell at him and sob like a baby. I hate myself for being weak but when I notice the faintest sliver of the Warren who brought me a world full of warmth my heart leaps for it.
He’s becoming more and more like himself, but he’s still inching closer to me. My knees won’t be able to hold me for much longer. I smell the whiskey on Warren which makes my stomach turn. He doesn’t stop moving towards me and I’m out of pleas, requests, and commands. I don’t want to be at his mercy. I fall down to my knees and sob uncontrollably as Warren crouches down next to me.
He reaches his hands out to me and cups my chin, and I’m shaking. My teeth chatter as I look up at him through eyes pooling with tears. Why would he do this to me?
“Leave me alone, Warren,” I manage to say.
Something changes in him. He retreats and sits on the floor, pulling his hand away and clutching it to his chest with the other hand as if he just recognized that he has made a grave error. Like he’s saying he didn’t mean to.
I know I don’t have the sense to put it into words, but if I did I would tell him that it’s already too late.
Slowly, I regain composure and sensation returns to my hands and legs. I stand and run out of my room and into the kitchen, leaving Warren crumbled on the floor of my bedroom. I cannot stand to look at him right now.
Water, I instruct my brain like I’m back to being two years old. Gulping down cold water and letting the last of my tears flow, I take stock of what just happened. Was I wrong about Warren? No. The man sitting motionless in my room, looking like a travesty is not the Warren I know.
Funny how my brain wants to get a restraining order. I deal with avid fans a lot and it has been a necessity in the past sometimes to put some distance between me and the people who don’t draw the line between personal and professional. But Warren? The man I’ve been stupidly in love with for far longer than the duration of our relationship? I’ve spent a decade dreaming about him. Perhaps that’s where I went wrong. Dreams don’t true. And reality has a heartbreaking way of turning twisted and perverse.
I call my driver, instead of the police, and tell him to take Warren home. I forward the hotel’s address to him. Rick eyes me with suspicion, my red, puffy eyes probably giving a lot away. I raise a hand at him in a manner of saying, “don’t ask me a
nything right now.” He nods and does what I ask him to.
The horror of the incident quickly recedes, and I come back to my senses, feeling foolish at my strong reaction. I don’t wallow in the details of the night for too long. When Rick has left with Warren, I don’t go back to my room. I crash onto the couch and have a sleep riddled with nightmares.
Chapter 19 - Warren
I wake up in my hotel room with no knowledge of how I got there. I see the first signs of sunrise through the window. The last thing I remember was going to the bar and talking to Alex and then—
Shit. The memory comes back to me like a lightning bolt, but it’s not the memory that gives me the splitting headache. I hold my head in between my hands and press as hard as I can to make the swathes of pain go away. It’s futile, of course. The worst thing about drinking has got to be the hangover. I can still taste the bitterness in my mouth. My entire body seems to be on fire. I messed up big time.
Despite the lack of control over my body and a head-bursting ache, I reach for my phone and text Ashley.
“I am so sorry for last night. You know that’s not like me. Can we meet any time soon to talk about it?” I type as quickly as I can and hit send, the fear of rejection looming over my head.
The response comes quicker than I expect, and pushes a dagger through my heart. It almost knocks the wind right out of me.
“Warren, the damage is done. Can I please get some space? Don’t talk to me for a while,” the text says. I read and re-read it to make sure it means what it means, trying to find a possibility that perhaps somehow in my half ramshackled state I have forgotten how to process language and Ashley is not asking me to get out of her life.
Then the voice of vengeance rises up. Was it that big of a mistake that it can’t be forgiven? I am ready to fall to my knees and beg. But I quiet the voice down because all it brings is destruction, and I cannot do that to Ashley.
“What can I do to make you change your mind? I am ready to beg if that’s what it takes.”
I grit my teeth in anticipation as the screen reads “Ashley is typing…”. What are the chances that her response will be favorable? I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth because I can’t stand the smell of alcohol anymore and it’s everywhere; in my mouth, on my clothes, even in my hair. When I’m done, I take a deep breath and read Ashley’s text.
“It’s not the end of the world, we could be a little less dramatic about it? As for doing something, how about you start with respecting my boundaries? I don’t see the point of causing any more hurt to each other. And for what? Because we’re holding onto memories of people who don’t even exist anymore?”
She hardly sounds like the woman I made love to a couple of days ago. Is that what she means when she says that she doesn’t know who I am anymore?
“Ashley, I am asking for one more chance. Is that so hard to give? If after that you decide we’re better off out of each other’s life, I’ll respect your decision. For the love of the relationship we once had, can you please let me make up for my mistake? Being with you is the purest thing I’ve ever done. Please don’t take that away from me.”
I can’t stand the tension of waiting for her reply, so I step into the shower. As I feel the warm waterfall on my body, I remember the events of last night. I can clearly see Ashley’s face, aging by a century. Knowing that I was the reason for the mortal fear that she must have felt makes me feel like a monster. If only she knew the monster that lives inside of me, pawing at my chest. I fist madly at my temples. They still hurt from the headache, buzzing with pain, but I want to hurt myself even more for breaking something so beautiful. Before I went down the rabbit hole of self-sabotaging behavior, I promised myself one thing: I would not let harm come to someone else because of me. And now I’ve gone and hurt the only person that has treated me like a human being in the last decade.
What kind of a monster does it take to instill that kind of fear in a person? Maybe I should walk away from Ashley for good. What if I hurt her again? I’ve certainly shown that I’m capable of it. And I know what the bear inside of me is capable of.
I walk out of the shower, my shoulders drooping. I check my phone to see Ashley’s reply.
“Can you stop bringing up the past? You’re nothing like the person I used to know.”
I read the text and feel raw anger bubble up so intensely that I nearly crush the phone in my hands. I throw it on the bed and slam my fist into the wall instead. My bear is pounding at my chest, trying to get some sense into me.
The person she used to know was hardly a person. It was a shadow and maybe that’s all the worth I have. It feels like a sin to want to be myself when there is so little acceptance for it. “This is me,” I want to tell Ashley. The monster she saw yesterday is a real part of me. It lives within me. It hurts that me being myself causes only destruction. It burns and annihilates. It’s criminal to go near something as beautiful as Ashley Wang.
But I’m tired of being a shadow. The thing that Plato never talks about in his Allegory of the cave is who is keeping those people tied inside the dingy underearth? Who will set them free? When do they see that the shadows aren’t real, that there is a world that they’ve been blind to? Am I doomed to walk in this skin but never be seen, doomed to be the shadow?
“I feel like it’s almost a crime to be myself, Ashley.”
It’s a plea. It’s me serving my heart on a platter and she skewers it right through.
“I think a little distance between us is what we really need. If you can’t respect what I’m asking you to do, I’ll have to block your number for some time. I really hope it doesn’t need to come to that.”
I do as I’m asked without a word of opposition, but I’d be lying if I said that it doesn’t kill every fiber in my body to stop me from running up to her house and falling at her feet. Perhaps, she’s right. Some distance will be good for the both of us. Maybe all I need is some perspective.
Chapter 20 – Ashley
“We’ll get the fabrics by tomorrow and the samples need to be out today,” I say to my team, first thing in the morning when I walk into the office. I feel as though I’ve already had a day behind me, what with my exhausting text message conversation with Warren.
I’m standing in the center of the room with all eyes on me, ears perched up to hear my every command. I know for a fact that nothing I say will be overlooked or ignored. Clad in white from head to toe, my hair tied in a ponytail, spine as straight as a stick, I exude confidence and clarity. This is me, this is who I am. Not the weak little thing I was reduced to last night. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to forgive Warren for doing that to me.
“I need an update from all departments before leaving office today.” The command is meant for everyone in the room, but I gesture to Violet to make sure it gets done. She nods, then pulls me to the side.
“You said you wanted all CCTV footage today. I’ve spoken to the security office, and they said they won’t be able to give it to us until tomorrow.”
I’m slightly annoyed, but know that Violet can’t help it, so I nod at her. I turn around to walk away but my first step falters slightly. Violet grabs me by the arm to steady me. I yank myself free from her grip because I’m still prickly from last night. I cannot stand another breach of personal space. And while my misstep hasn’t gathered unnecessary attention, my overreaction to Violet’s natural response definitely did. I purse my lips, looking down at the floor so I don’t have to see anyone’s face or meet their gaze.
“Sorry about that,” I murmur to Violet and hurtle towards the washroom instead of my office.
As another flash of last night conjures up in my head, I place a hand on my chest to calm my racing heart. I make sure I’m out of everyone’s scrutiny because this, this weakness that I have, this inability to have composure, this fear for my life is not like Ashley Wang. Ashley Wang is a fearsome beast and she does not falter.
I push open the cubical and sit on the toilet seat. I canno
t remember the last time I felt this out of control. My knees are trembling like they were last night, and my hands are shaking, too. My breathing is short and uneven. I notice all this because I’m used to changing every inch of my exterior to bend reality to my will. Just a raising of my eyebrows can turn people’s “no” into a “yes”, and a warm smile can lower someone’s guard.
I try not to take my anger out on myself, but I can’t blame Warren either. Even after everything, he still has a soft spot in my heart. Or I have Stockholm syndrome. I roll my eyes. When I have calmed down sufficiently, I walk back to my office and slip into my chair, resuming work. I draw the blinds just in case I have another breakdown—I wouldn’t want to scare my team. They are overworked as it is, and I don’t see the workload reducing for at least a couple of more months.
In the evening, at home, I contemplate sleeping on the sofa again because I still don’t feel safe enough to go into my bedroom. He was asking for another chance, I scoff. He has made me afraid of being inside my own home. My brain suddenly asks me when he became such a monster in my eyes? And the answer comes just as quickly. Last night, when he crossed lines he shouldn’t have. I will never feel safe around him again.
I muster up all of my courage and slip into bed, preparing myself in advance. The memories will come up, the trick is not to let them overtake my judgment.
Surprisingly, when I’m lying motionless in my bed, calmer than I thought I would be, a different memory rears its ugly head. It’s a memory from ten years ago.
We were in the first month of our relationship. I was a young, troubled human being who didn’t know how to deal with life and was struggling alone. The funny thing is that if my mom had known of my difficulties, I don’t doubt that she would’ve helped me. I could just never bring it up to her, I never cried out for help.
I thought that the broken toy that I had become was only capable of messing up. And I tried my best to punish myself for it. I didn’t want to kill myself, no. I wanted to hurt myself, make the pain so loud and blaring that I couldn’t shut it off. It sounds so twisted when I think about it now, but back then, that was my reality. I never wanted to end my life, I just wanted to bleed to feel alive.
