Tears fill my eyes. I don’t know what to say. If I speak to him, I’m just going to hurt him. He’ll think all this is his fault when it’s my broken mind.
He calls and calls again, and I just let it ring. I turn and look over my shoulder. Rush is glaring at me from thirty feet away. For several more minutes, he follows the car.
Suddenly, Rush twists the wheel savagely and turns into a laneway, and the car vanishes from view.
I grasp the headrest and stare out the back window, then the windshield, wondering where the hell he’s gone. Has he gone home, or is he going to appear in the road ahead and cut us off?
Several minutes pass by and nothing happens, but I can’t make myself relax. I half-expect him to pull up beside us on the motorway.
It’s dark when I get out of the car in London and drag my case up the front steps and then the stairs of my apartment. As I turn the key in the lock, I’m suddenly aware of a car idling a few doors down. I turn and look, and the headlights suddenly switch off. It looks roughly the same size and shape of a black Land Rover. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, though, as nothing happens as I stand there staring at it.
I don’t know what else to do, so I sit on the sofa, tears leaking from my eyes, feeling like I’ve been dropped from a great height. Like I’m still falling, plummeting down and down. I should probably eat something or at least have a cup of tea, but I’m too tired to even fetch a mug, and I don’t have any milk. I crawl into bed and shut my eyes, allowing the exhaustion and misery to wash over me like darkness.
When I open my eyes, I expect to see the pale striped wallpaper of my bedroom at Rush’s, but instead, I see lemon yellow walls, paperback novels and a stuffed rabbit smiling six inches from my face.
I pick it up and stare at it. It’s the same stuffed rabbit that Rush picked up from the floor when he put me to bed, after spending the whole night with me in the hospital. I stroke the rabbit’s ears, remembering his face that morning. I asked Rush for something that day that I was too afraid to say to anyone else, and he didn’t run. Didn’t glower. Didn’t make me feel like shit about it.
I squeeze my eyes shut and hug the rabbit to my chest.
Sometime later, I drag myself out of bed and head down to the corner store where I buy two pints of milk, a loaf of bread, butter, and two huge chocolate bars. After I pay, I turn toward the door and see Rush’s face staring at me from the cover of a music magazine with a headline about Saint Cyprian. I breathe in sharply and hurry out.
I make tea and some toast with butter and Marmite, but when I bite into it my stomach rolls and I wish I hadn’t. I drink the tea standing at the window and looking out, feeling like I used to as a kid the day after my birthday.
Drained. Disconsolate. Lonely.
As I lie on the sofa, my phone rings. Rush’s name is on my screen.
I sit up and stare at it, frozen with indecision. We’re both grown-ups. I can do this.
I take a deep breath and answer the call.
“What the fuck, Dree?”
No hello, just What the fuck.
“Hey,” I say, shakily.
“I’m coming over. We need to talk.”
“You’re in London, aren’t you?”
He ignores my question. “You can’t just run away. We can’t just leave things like this. We can’t leave things period. I need to see you.”
“What do you want to say?”
I hear him breathing harshly. “Why the fuck did you run?”
I close my eyes, tight. Imagining him here. Feeling his lips press against mine. I want that so badly, but what if I just freak out on him again? “Rush, I can’t. I have to go.”
“That’s it? You won’t even talk to me?”
“We’ll talk,” I say desperately, before he can argue with me about it. “But I need a few days.”
“Please don’t make me wait that long,” he replies, his voice hollow with despair. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
His words slam into me like bullets. I grip the phone hard, anxiety making me shake. “This isn’t the time. That’s too much.”
“That’s just who I am. You knew that. It’s not too much when it’s the truth.”
I wasn’t ready for this, but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for Rush. “I have to go,” I say again in a whisper.
I hang up and throw myself face down on the sofa.
Rush doesn’t try very hard to give me the space I asked for. Every time I see his name flash up on my phone screen, longing and panic dart through me. I can’t tell which is the stronger emotion, and while I’m still trying to decide, the call goes to voicemail. I go through this battle over and over again.