“Thank you.” I shut my eyes. “And can you turn the music back up?”
A few seconds later, Spill Canvas fills the room again and I drift off to sleep, happy to let my mind enter sleep mode.
“How long has she been like this?” Fingers lightly trace up and down my back.
“Since she came back from dealing with her dad,” Lila says with worry in her tone. “So, like, four days. She barely gets out bed and she won’t eat anything.”
“What the hell happened?” Micha sounds equally as concerned.
I rotate onto my side, blinking my exhausted eyes against the sunlight spilling through the window. Micha is sitting on the edge of my bed with his hand on my back and his hair has a little wave to it, which means he’s recently been sleeping.
“Nothing happened,” I say and they both jump.
“That’s a lie.” Lila paces the floor with her hands on her hips. Her blonde hair is twisted up and she’s got on a purple lacy dress. “We know something happened.”
Micha’s is wearing all black, with his chain hooked to the belt loops. His eyes search mine and my insides quiver. “What did your dad say to you?”
I sit up and his hand falls off my back to the bed. “He didn’t say anything.”
“Ella May”—he reaches for my face—“don’t feed me bullshit.”
“I’m not feeding you bullshit, Micha Scott.” I climb out of the bed and drag my feet toward the bathroom. “Did you ever consider that this is who I am? That maybe you can’t save me because you’d have to save me from my own head?” I lock the door and collapse onto the floor, hugging my knees to my chest as thoughts race through my head.
I wish he wasn’t here.
I wish he would just let me go.
I wish I didn’t have to wake up anymore and deal with life, because it hurts. It all hurts.
Seconds later, someone knocks on the door. “Ella, open the God damn door before I break it down.”
“I want to be left alone,” I snap. “I never asked you to come here, Micha.”
“I know you didn’t,” he says softly through the door. “Lila called me because she was worried about you. And so am I. You act like you might be going back to that dark place again.”
“I’m not. I promise.” I feel too drained to deal with anything else, so I crawl over to the shower and turn it on, letting the sound of the running water drown out his voice. It feels like I should be crying, but my eyes are dry.
I lie on my back on top of the fuzzy purple rug on the floor and stare up at the small crack in the ceiling. I never expected him to come here. I wanted more preparation, but it’s time to face the inevitable.
I’m letting him go. Cutting the strings. Because I love him that much.
I made the decision on my way home, as my dad’s words continually haunted me. I want something better for Micha than a dark, murky future.
Suddenly, the doorknob lock pops up. The door swings open and Micha stands in the doorway with a bent hanger in his hand.
“What are you doing, pretty girl?” he asks, taking in the sight of me. “One minute we’re good and suddenly you’re shutting me out again.”
Closing my eyes, I inhale, and then open them again, breathing out. “We need to talk.”
He shakes his head, looking like he understands what’s coming. “No, we don’t, unless it’s about something happy.” He tosses the hanger into the sink and drops to his knees in front of me. “You can have your mood swings, but I’m not going to let you shut me out. It’ll blow over.”
I prop myself up on my elbows. “No, it won’t. It’s part of me.” I muster a shaky breath. “I think we should break up.”
Quickly shaking his head, he lies on top of me. “Stop it. I’m not going to let you do this. Just tell me what’s going on and I’ll try to fix it.”
My whole body aches. “Nothing’s going on. I just don’t want to do this anymore. It’s getting tiring.”
His eyes blaze with anger and he crashes his lips to mine, suffocating my thoughts momentarily as his tongue slips deep into my mouth. I kiss him back as his thumb runs along each one of my ribs, but when his hand heads down south, I snap back into reality and start to panic. I have to do something—anything—to make him hate me; otherwise he’ll never let me go and he has to let me go.
Placing a hand on his chest, I gently push him away and look directly into his aqua eyes. “Micha, I cheated on you.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re so full of shit.”
“I’m being serious.” I let my hand fall from his chest. “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while, but I didn’t know how to.”
He leans back. “No, you didn’t.”
I sit up and tuck my legs under me, plucking at a thread on the rug. “Please don’t make this any harder than it is. I did it and I’m sorry… I didn’t plan it or anything. I was just drunk and it happened.”
He’s starting to believe me and I feel like the world’s biggest a**hole, but one day, when he’s married and has kids and he’s happy, this moment won’t matter to him.
“Who was it with?” His voice is quiet, but quakes with rage.
I force down the massive lump in my throat. “That doesn’t matter.”
His gaze bores into me. “Yeah, it does.”
My legs tremble as I stand up and turn off the shower. “I’m not going to tell you so that you can go beat the shit out of him.” I start to walk around him, but he sidesteps me, blocking my path as he puts a hand on each side of the doorway.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you did it,” he growls. “Tell me that you f**king ripped out my heart and stomped on it.”
My tongue feels like lead, but I manage to keep my voice steady. “I’m sorry, Micha. I really am. I’d take it back if I could, but no one can change the past.”
Turning away from me, he punches a hole in the wall just below the light switch. He storms off and, moments later, the front door slams shut. Silence is all that follows, which is what I want.
I want him to hate me, just as much as I hate myself.
That way I can’t bring him down with me.
Days feel like weeks as I plummet into a deeper hole of darkness and exhaustion. Thoughts of giving up drift through my mind and all I want is to shut my eyes and never see the light of day again.
The idea starts to seem better and better and I head to the bathroom to do… something. When I pass the mirror, though, I pause in front of it. My eyes are big and bloodshot and my skin is pallid. My thoughts drift back to when Micha made me look in the mirror at myself and he told me he loved me. I gently sketch the infinity tattoo on my back as a cloudy haze lifts from my mind.
There are people in this world who love me.
I wonder if my mom thought about this before she took her life.
I grab my phone, slip on my shoes, and run out of the house. It’s midafternoon and the sun is shining as I sprint across the parking lot toward the school’s main entrance. I haven’t showered in days and still have on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt I’ve been sleeping in. My hair is tangled in a ball behind my head and I have no makeup on, but it doesn’t matter.
I burst into the therapist’s office and luckily she’s eating a sandwich instead of talking to a patient.
She springs up from her chair. “Ella, what’s wrong?”
Breathing profusely, I lower myself into the chair in front of her. “I think I need help.”
Chapter 6
Micha
It’s been over a couple of weeks since Ella sliced open my heart. My life’s turned into a shithole, full of booze and meaningless woman, although I can never get anywhere with any of them. Just when things are about to go somewhere, Ella’s sad eyes flash through my mind and I bail out. It’s like I’m back in high school again, searching for something to fill the void in my heart. Only the hole is twice as wide and the person who made it bigger is the only person who can fix it.
I’m sitting in the small apartment the band is renting for a month, writing some really messed-up lyrics that are too painfully insightful for an audience. I’m getting more riled up the further into the song I get when there’s a knock at the door.
I toss the pen onto the bed and drag my butt over to the door to open it.
“Dude, you look like crap.” Ethan pushes past me and makes a circle around the room. It’s a studio apartment with a bed in the corner and a set of old-school sofas in the center that face a television. “So this is where you’ve been staying?”
There are clothes all over the floor and I kick some out of the way as I trudge back to the bed. “It’s not any worse than where we grew up.”
He points over his shoulder at the door. “I beg to differ on that one. Do you know some guy just tried to sell me a hooker on my way up here?”
“That would be Danny,” I say, picking up the pen. “He’s always trying to sell something.”
Ethan turns to me with this wary look on his face. “So I’m on the road totally enjoying being by myself when I get this call from the lovely Miss Lila saying that you and Ella broke up.”
I rub the back of my neck tensely. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Ethan sits down on the couch and crosses his arms. “What happened?”
“Do you really want to talk about our feelings again?” I toss the notebook and pen aside. “Or do you want to go out and do something fun? How long are you here for? I don’t have to play tonight so we can go out. There’s this really awesome club I’ve been wanting to check out and Dylan assures me there’s a lot of slutty woman there.”
“As much as I love slutty women, I didn’t come here to party.” Shaking his head disappointedly, he continues. “I came to tell you something Lila told me. I would have just called you, but I was down in Virginia and I thought, what the hell, I’d come tell you myself.”
I pull on a T-shirt and shove my wallet into my back pocket, ready to leave him and go out by myself. “Make it quick.”
He rests his arms on the top of the sofa and his boots on the coffee table in front of it. “She didn’t cheat on you.”
I’m in the middle of reaching for my keys when I freeze. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s why Lila called me,” he explains. “She said that as much as she hates to stab her best friend in the back, she thought it was too important not to tell me what Ella told her, after a lot of shots of tequila. She made the whole thing up. Said she did it because she wants you to be happy and in her eyes you can’t be happy with her. Whatever the f**k that means. I never really understood half of the things she did—or does.”
My arms fall to my side, unsure whether to be pissed off or relieved. “Let me get this straight. She lied, told me she cheated on me, just so she could break up with me.”
Ethan surrenders his hands up in front of himself. “Don’t get pissed off at the messenger.”