by S. Massery
I nodded. My story completed hers.
She shook her head. “He didn’t say goodbye to any of us. Even Colby. Especially Colby. But… I think Colby expected it? All of a sudden, Colby was on top of the world.” She sighed. “And he had his sights set on you almost immediately.”
I frowned.
Leah looked at me with wide eyes. “I don’t mean that to be insulting.”
I wanted to tell her it wasn’t insulting, it was just fact. It was part of the fear: Colby only wanted me because Jared said no. Colby only acted this way because he could. Because, like that day in the forest, I wouldn’t tell him to stop.
My voice was obliterated.
“Please…” I use both hands to wipe at my face. “Take me home.”
24
The days roll by, and I contemplate my life. Am I happy? Do I like Boston?
No, and yes.
For the first time in forever, I buy paints. I feel like a kid with money to spend in a candy store. I only buy the canvases I can carry without damaging on the subway. I only buy small tubes of paint, because I am cautious. I have the rest of my supplies at home.
My ritual has always been: set up the easel, paints, floor cover—in this case, an old table cloth—and music. Once everything is set, I sit and stare out of that window at the endless row of brownstones. I think, What the hell am I going to paint?
Eventually, I dip my brush into the paint and just start.
“This is Love” by Air Traffic Controller plays, and I stop. I listen.
I grab my phone and set the song to play on repeat.
It is anger, it is everything Colby had told me, and everything I had told myself. It invokes every feeling of helpless vulnerability that I have ever felt. I stray, more often than not, toward the darker colors. I tap my heel against the stool’s bar. This is love, love, shut up, this is love. Hadn’t Colby said something similar? Hadn’t he said, You love me. There were no questions.
Every dream, lately, has been a nightmare. Every nightmare wear’s Colby’s face, and it always ends in sex that I don’t want, but can’t refuse.
I still cough and gag when I brush my tongue at night. It’s too similar to the feeling of him in my mouth, choking me.
I still hate orders.
I still keep silent rather than speak out. Until today, until Avery.
Abruptly, I switch the song. “Survivor” by 2WEI. A cover for a movie trailer.
Avery is better. Avery has been drawn out, exhausting, uplifting. I smile when I think about him—usually.
I listen to this song until my head spins. I alternate between the two songs. Peace and anger. It isn’t until the sky starts to lighten again that I realize I have painted all night.
The painting is small; the canvas was only ten inches, square.
I smile, satisfied, and go to bed.
In my dreams, I stand in front of the solar eclipse I painted. It burns me, but I cannot look away. Something comes from the darkness; a person walks toward me slowly, with too much swagger to be anyone I know now.
It isn’t until he’s close that I recognize Jared. His smirk. His scowl. His face flits between the two expressions too fast to be human. He holds Colby’s head in his hand.
I fall backward, screaming.
Avery and I have yet to have sex again. There are things I sense he is keeping hidden from me, and I can’t take it anymore.
“Let me in,” I beg one day.
I want take his agony away. It is written all over his face when he’s not trying to smile at me. I think I do make him happy. But I don’t take up all of his thoughts. I am not on his mind when he first wakes up. I’m not on his mind when he stares into his coffee or when his fork hovers between his plate and his lips because he is caught ensnared in something over my shoulder
Another part of me wants him to get it out so he can get over it. When we met in Chicago, a year after New York, he was broken. He admitted it. But then… He said that he was better. He was ready to move on with me. So, which is it? That part of me makes me purse my lips and raise an eyebrow. I try to school my face into something more akin to sympathy… but I’m not always successful. I don’t have much sympathy left while I sit in the dark.
Avery frowns, letting the pain show before shuttering it away. I take his hands and pull them onto my lap. He’s had a few glasses of whiskey, between here and dinner, and I hope now is the best time to ask. I can’t bear the look anymore without knowing how to fix it.
His fingers tighten around mine, and he looks out the window.
“Her name is Elaina. We dated for a year. We clicked almost immediately.” He inhales, nostrils wide. He’s transported to a different place. “We had met on a boat. You know I’m originally from San Diego.” I nod, although he isn’t looking at me. “It was a summer job after college. I moved back home in July… the year we met.” He looks guilty for a moment. “I got an internship with the accounting department of a marina, and they had a full-time position open on one of their bigger tour boats a few weeks after I started. From there, I met her dad. He owns a private yacht, and he told me that he liked the look of me. He needed someone to help on his boat, since he was always taking out high-end clients. All he needed was someone to help run the sails and look nice. Maybe be a bartender once they docked at an island or cast the anchor.”
He pulls his hands away from mine. The loss of contact has me floundering, but I don’t say anything. He’s in his own world, and besides: I asked for this.
“So, I did a few gigs for him on my off days. He paid well. And then one day, he needed me for a family trip. He was going to take his daughter—who he told me he wasn’t really on good terms with—out to a good fishing and swimming hole. She was stunning—” I hold up my hand, silently passing on those details. He grimaces. “Sorry. We flirted pretty relentlessly, and we kissed before we returned to land while her dad was in the bathroom. From there, it was a fast and furious sort of thing. We moved in together after a few months. But in all that time, she never said she loved me. She just… I don’t know. I think she loved me, but she couldn’t fucking say it.” His hands balled into fists. “So, I left. I figured if she couldn’t say it, maybe with me gone, she’d realize…”
I wait.
“She didn’t. I mean, she said she missed me. She wanted me back. But I asked her if she loved me, and I got a blank stare.” He finally meets my eyes. I’ve always loved his eyes, but the anger and hurt and disappointment in them nearly kills me. “When I got a job offer here in Boston, I didn’t ask her to come with me. I just broke up with her, and broke my heart in the process.”
I nod, trying to understand.
It makes me think of Jared—not adult Jared, but the one I knew as a child. I never told him I loved him, either, and maybe those words would’ve made him stay. Maybe those words would’ve chained him to me for eternity—it sounds like that’s what Avery was going for with his ex, at any rate.
Avery left her. I guess a year wasn’t enough time for her to digest her feelings, but it was too long for him. “I had a boyfriend who demanded I love him,” I tell him. I wince when he meets my eyes and scowls.
“That isn’t the same.”
I am the disregarded china in the cabinet. My stories are collecting dust.
His words hurt me, although I try not to let him see. Maybe he doesn’t see the ramifications of Colby’s actions. He doesn’t know anything of Colby, after all, of how he altered my perception of love and how I will struggle to admit it, ever, just like his ex-girlfriend seemed to. She might have a desperate, dark past that she wasn’t willing to admit to him. Or, more likely, that he never asked about.
I shake my head and turn slightly away from him. It’s the best that I can do to protect myself further. I cannot ask him what I want to know: Will you wait for me to be ready? A small part of me thinks not; he will know when he is ready for love, when he is in it, and if I’m not on the same page…
He lifts my hand from my la
p and kisses my palm.
It’s an apology, although I wish I knew which part he was sorry about.
Avery went home that evening. There needed to be a mourning period, a respectable pause of our relationship for the love they lost—or maybe that was just him, putting words into my head. It feels too close to cheating—talking about her and then sleeping with him.
Liking someone is a finicky thing.
I sit in my window seat—the best part of my apartment—watching the rain. After a while, I pull out my phone. Avery and I are new friends on Facebook, so it should have been easy enough to go back and find pictures of the two of them. There are marina pictures and pictures of him in a white casual uniform at the bow of a big boat. His grin was huge, and he looked… younger. Happier. More like the first time we met, which was pre-Elaina.
But no pictures of her.
Hell, I couldn’t even find her last name.
Finally, after jumping from his photos to the marina’s page, I find one that he hadn’t been tagged in. But she was: Elaina Williams. The picture is half out of focus: the two of posing on the dock next to Santa Elena, a giant yacht.
I only hesitate for a second before I click on her name.
Her profile picture is still a picture of her and Avery. I enlarge it and try to ignore the churning in my stomach. They look at each other. His hair is the same length it was when I had first met him: just curling at his collar. Adorable and messy. It is brighter, bleached from the sun. They both wear goofy grins. She is petite—it shocks me how small she seems compared to him. I am not huge, but I am not doll-sized, either. The top of her head comes up to his shoulder, so I probably have at least three inches on her. She has big brown eyes, thick dark brown hair that could’ve been used in a shampoo commercial, and tanned, olive skin.
She was stunning. Avery’s words bounce around in my head. Like a madwoman, I swipe through the rest of her pictures. There are so many of her, some of them with an older guy, tan though decidedly white, but with similar features; I have to assume he’s her dad. Avery’s boss. They look like they were so happy. Until… they weren’t.
Pictures with friends, pictures of the water, of life with a dad who owned a boat, of a dog—I want a dog, my inner voice whines—of people who look similar enough to be siblings, and an ageless mother. It’s the kind of aging my mother tries to achieve through injections, which makes her all the more unlikable.
Enough is enough. Avery and I have only been dating, what, two months? He didn’t say when he broke up with her, but enough time had passed for him to uproot his life in San Diego and move to Boston. I count on my fingers back, back, back. I had met him in June before my senior year of college. He was a year ahead of me, so he had just graduated. By the time I saw him more than a year after our first encounter, he was freshly heartbroken. The fact that it’s been a solid year since then… well, that would be the anniversary of their relationship and their breakup.
The last thing I click on is a video on her profile, from a year and a half ago. Her face fills the frame. “Ave,” she laughs, and I’m jealous of even that perfect sound, “say it again? For the camera?”
Suddenly his face is squished next to hers. His eyes are wide, and his hair is wet, plastered to his face. He isn’t wearing a shirt, but he is wearing a necklace of wooden beads that I haven’t seen before.
He turns sideways and plants a kiss on her temple. “I said, Elaina Sydney Williams, will you move in with me?”
Her smile is catastrophic.
I close out of the video before I hear her answer.
25
Past
Colby texted me at midnight that he was in my backyard. I threw on a sweatshirt over my sleep shirt and snuck outside, wondering why we were doing this on a weekday. When I saw him, he smirked at me. He grabbed my face and kissed me, not unlike the first time. I couldn’t move until he released me.
But then his hand slid down and wrapped around my throat. He pushed me back against the side of my house. How could I have not seen the angry glint in his eye when I first walked toward him? A shiver ran up my spine; it was still cold, for the end of March, but that wasn’t the cause.
Fear would flay me apart if I let it.
“What did you say?”
I blinked at him. He squeezed my throat, once, and then loosened his grip. A warning? I opened my mouth, but nothing would come out.
Colby leaned into me, his lips at my ear.
“Don’t you love me, Charlie?” I shivered again and nodded frantically, as though my body wasn’t controlled by my brain anymore. “Say it.”
“I love you,” I whispered.
“Then tell me what the fuck you told Leah.”
What I told Leah? What did I tell Leah?
Something inside me cracked. “Please,” I said. “I love you. Please.” I couldn’t have said what I was even asking for. Tears seeped from my eyes, and all of a sudden I couldn’t stop my hands from trembling against my legs. I lifted my arm and touched my fingers to Colby’s wrist.
I feared he would hit me.
I feared he would leave me.
I couldn’t decide which was worse.
“Son, I’d advise that you take a step back.”
Both of our heads whipped toward the back door. My dad stepped out further, triggering the light sensor. He looked scary, the way the light cast harsh shadows on his face. His expression was murderous.
Oh, no.
Colby’s hand fell away from my neck, and I glanced back at him. The darkness had hidden the bruise on his temple, an ugly red and purple mark that gave him a ghoulish look. I gasped, unable to fathom how it had gotten there.
“Come here, Charlotte,” my father said.
But I couldn’t move. My muscles were locked, and the only thing keeping me upright was the side of the house at my back. A step toward my father was a step away from Colby. My lungs weren’t working right; I kept inhaling and not getting any air.
Dad came down and pulled me up the steps with him. He tucked me behind him and kept facing Colby. My mother appeared in the doorway with her phone, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I tucked my face into her neck. There were too many emotions in me, but I didn’t want to sort them out. I just wanted to go back to bed and pretend they didn’t catch me outside with Colby.
“Colby,” my dad said. This was it: they were going to forbid me from seeing him. They realized that he had been a bad influence on me, or something. I cringed further into my mother. “The police are on their way.”
“You called the police?” My voice was hoarse, but my mom heard me.
“No, honey, they called us.”
I risked lifting my head and glancing at Colby. He had sunk to his knees in the grass. He pulled at his hair and looked ready to scream.
“He assaulted your friend,” Mom continued. “The one you’re always with. Leah.”
Leah. Tell me what the fuck you told Leah.
The one you’re always with—well, that wasn’t true. The one I used as a scapegoat, more often than not.
“I told her everything,” I said to Colby. He glared at me, but my fear was lessened with my father between us. I couldn’t imagine what he did to her, but I felt every shred of guilt.
“You bitch,” Colby muttered.
My dad growled. “Take her inside, Lydia,” he ordered.
Mom started pulling me inside. I struggled, because there was a piece of me that needed to see this through. I needed to see what would happen. “What did you do to Leah?”
He just shook his head and smirked at me. “I fucked your daughter,” Colby said to my dad. “She took so much fucking shit from me. She loves me, though.” He grinned at me, craned around my dad. “Sleep well, baby.”
My heart stopped, then picked up a much more frantic pace.
“You’re never going to see her again,” Dad said.
My mom had managed to drag me into the house, then—all the way to the front door. She swung it open a
nd let two officers in, and it clicked that they were arresting Colby. I started screaming as they passed, choking on sobs that burst out of my chest.
But my dad was there, pressing me into his chest and half carrying me up the stairs. He put me on my bed and closed the door; I heard him lock it from the outside.
“A lock?” Mom asked. Her voice carried through the door, skeptical.
“She’d run away—you know it, and I do, too. We’re keeping her safe.”
I got up from the bed and tried to see what was happening outside of my window, but I had a terrible view. The red and blue lights were gone. Sleep well, baby, Colby had said. Immediately, I dove for my dresser. Tucked into an old pair of socks was a small baggie of pills. Xanax, I remembered, because Colby was harassing me for freaking out too much. Chill pills, he called them. I put five in my mouth, but then—
My phone started ringing, buzzing and dancing on the nightstand.
I picked it up without saying hello.
“Charlie, oh my god—”
Leah.
She was still talking a mile a minute, “—Colby is insane. Don’t go near him, okay? He just—I mean—Charlie, I have your best interest at heart, you know that, right?” She exhaled sharply into the phone.
I spat the pills back into my palm, half-dissolved.
“God, I am so sorry. I’m pressing charges this time. I just wanted you to know. I’m so sorry.”
I set the phone down without hanging up, because the guilt that I felt earlier was gone. I had become a black hole. There were tears on my face, and I could hear Leah still talking: her tinny voice was nearly indistinguishable.
I’m sorry, on repeat.
Finally, she hung up. In the silence, I realized that I needed to get this on paper. All of it. It was now almost one in the morning. By dawn, my memory would be fuzzy. I would doubt what I said, what Colby said, what Leah said.
