The ringing of my phone wakes me up. Again, I have no idea when I fell asleep. I only know that I’m in our room, propped by the wall, my phone in hand.
And the display says it’s Pixie.
Sitting up straight, I thump a fist to my chest, trying to get my lungs, my heart going, and hit accept at the same time. “Pixie?”
There’s silence but I can hear breathing. It makes my breathing easier. As if she’s giving me life.
“Say something,” I whisper. Now that we’re connected, I’m drawing a blank as to what to say to her. I run through all the emotions I possibly can in the seconds that pass. Relief, anger, fear, love.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know I made you worry and I shouldn’t have left without talking to you first.”
“Yeah. But doesn’t matter now.”
“Did you get some sleep in the last two days?”
My lips twitch in a small smile. “No.”
“Have you been looking for me all over?”
“What do you think?”
I hear her swallow. “I want you to stop.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to be found. By you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you should stop looking for me.”
I laugh; I can’t help it. This is funny. Because if it’s not funny then it’s gotta be the cruelest thing I’ve ever heard. “They got to you, didn’t they? It’s your parents. They’ve finally convinced you I’m not good enough. They’ve finally made you hate me.”
“It’s not…” Her voice breaks. “It’s not my parents, Abel. It’s no one. Nobody got to me.”
“Then why the fuck are you trying to hurt me?” I shout, and then regret it. I didn’t mean to scream at her, not when she’s talking to me.
I don’t want a repeat of what happened at Nick and Blu’s place. I don’t want to fight. I only want to hold her. I want that privilege back. She can’t take it away from me now, when I need it to live.
“I’m not trying to hurt you, Abel. I’m trying to set you free.” She swallows again.
I know she’s trying to blink her eyes, trying to get rid of her tears, and I grip the phone tighter. Jesus, I don’t want her to cry. Every time she does, it’s like someone is slashing my skin. Her tears are my poison. And she was sobbing that night when she left me.
“Don’t cry. Please,” I beg in a whisper.
She sniffles. “Okay. I’m not.” Clearing her throat, she says, “You’re angry, Abel. You’re so mad at them.”
“They burnt down your treehouse. Of course, I’m mad at them. I’ve been mad at them for ages. I’ve been mad at your mom for abusing you. I’ve been mad at your dad for never stepping in. I’ve been mad because they made it hard for us. They made every fucking thing so hard for us.”
“But we’re here. We got away, remember? I chose you. You don’t have to be mad at anyone. We don’t have to be mad. Not at my parents, not the town. Not even at your parents. You don’t have to make anything right for me. I don’t need that from you.”
Ah, so she’s getting all my voicemails. I wanna rage at her, but I guess I’ve lost all strength. Maybe another day. Not right now.
“You have to stop being angry. Everything you do is because you’re so angry. You took that job down at the studio because they condemned us for that. We create all these fantasies, we make tapes because we’re trying to prove something. They don’t care, Abel. No one does. And it’s okay because it doesn’t matter. We don’t have to prove our love to anyone. We don’t have to rebel. No one’s keeping us apart anymore. We’re only hurting ourselves. This anger is eating us alive.”
There’s defiance in every atom of my being. How can she forget? How can she forget what they did? What they put us through.
“You have to stop running, honey,” she whispers after a few seconds. “No one’s chasing us anymore. We both have to stop running.”
Honey.
My heart skips a beat at that. My mom was the only one who ever called me honey. When she died, I never thought I’d get to hear it again. The pang in my chest grows, fucking roars for Pixie to be here. She needs to be here. She belongs with me.
“I will, if you come back,” I say. I’ll say anything for her to come back.
She chuckles. It lacks her usual warmth though. “Not for me, Abel. Do it for yourself. Do it because that’s what you want. Not because that’s what I want.”
“I am. I –”
“I’m giving you your control back.”
I remember every single word I spoke that night. It was all true, whatever I said. I have analyzed that shit like, a hundred times. Did I say something that drove her away? Was I too harsh? Was it the way I couldn’t stop yelling? It was only because sometimes my love for her gets too big to keep inside. It booms and rumbles and fucking thunders.
“I don’t want it, you hear me? I don’t want my control. I don’t want my heart. I just want you. I…” My throat is closing up again, blocking all the air, and I swallow. A big, hard gulp. “I’m nothing without you, Pixie.”
“See, that’s the thing. Maybe you should find out who you are without me. And maybe I need to do the same, you know. We need to find out who we are without each other. Because if we don’t know that, then how can we ever love each other?”
There’s a bad feeling in my chest. Real fucking bad. The kind I had when I stepped inside my empty house a little over six years ago.
“Pixie, don’t. Don’t do this. Don’t hurt me like this.”
It’s getting harder and harder to breathe.
“I’m not. You can’t write a story with dying characters. It’ll come to an end before its time. I want our story to live. I’m saving it because I want it to live forever,” she whispers. “Goodbye, Abel. I love you. Don’t look for me. Don’t run. No one’s chasing you.”