Chapter Sixteen
Kane
I could barely concentrate on the test in front of me. It was a mistake choosing to sit in the front row this week. I’d been bouncing back and forth between the front and the back based on how my interactions with Helene were going. They weren’t going well at the moment. That meant, I should be sitting in the back of the class like the flaky fucking student I was.
But I’d chosen to sit in the front.
When she ignored me and pretended I wasn’t even there even as she set a stack of tests on my desk to pass back, I was offended, which was laughable even to me given she had every right to be offended, and yet, I was the one who was.
And now, ten minutes had passed, and I’d yet to answer a single fucking question on the test. But it wasn’t because I’d not studied. I oddly liked this subject, and I’d read the book cover to cover already just for the sheer interest in it. I was prepared. I was also the piece of shit who couldn’t seem to contain my shit life and stop sharing it with Helene in ways that ultimately hurt her.
I wasn’t surprised it hurt her to see me with other women. Eleven years didn’t erase the intense past we had, and being forced to watch me whore myself time after time smacked of disrespect even now. It sure as hell would if the tables were turned.
The fact was … I was still just as attracted to Helene as I’d always been. The fact also remained that my attraction was the most absurd thing in the world. I had nothing to offer this woman. I had no future in this place, and hurting her was like slapping her in the face time after time. And what would happen at the end of that torture? I’d be gone, and she’d be picking up the pieces all over again. Walking away from her was the right thing to do.
But I’d never been very good at doing the right thing.
What happened eleven years before should have destroyed the intimacy between us. But it hadn’t. Not for me, and given how easily I could break her heart, it hadn’t for her either. And after so many years without that closeness, I didn’t know how to give it up. Even if I couldn’t keep it. That made me an asshole. It also made me the man who’d never figured out how to get over my addiction to her.
When forty-five minutes had passed, I’d only made it through one page of multiple choice questions. I glanced up at her, and she was sitting at her desk, leaning back casually, but her eyes were trained on me. Her expression was impossible to read. It was absolutely blank, but it was clear the way she studied me, looked down at the test on my desk, and then looked at me again as her brow furrowed slightly that she hadn’t missed my concentration problems.
I took a deep breath, forcing my eyes down to the papers and away from her. I definitely should not have sat in the front row.
“You have an hour left,” she warned the class once we were an hour and a half in.
I’d finally made a dent in this fucking thing, but I still had a long way to go. Hell liked her essay questions, and I had many pages of writing yet to get through. When I glanced up at her, she was reading a book. I recognized it. It was one of the books I’d picked up from her bed the night I’d stayed with her.
That night had been strangely perfect. Not the fight, the arrest, or even the awkwardness between Helene and me at her house. But curling up next to her in bed and feeling her body snuggle close to mine like she actually wanted to be close to me, that was damn near euphoric. But then like most things in life that had anything at all to do with a woman, I reduced her to nothing more than a pussy for me to play with the next morning.
I wasn’t sure even now that I could isolate why I’d touched her in the kitchen that morning—except to say it had something to do with seeing her study that fucking picture. She’d been looking at us—the us that died eleven years before. And she’d studied that picture just as intently as I had. The way she focused on that visual piece of our past almost convinced me it was just as important to her as it was to me. That apparently translated into an excuse to grope her.
I sighed in frustration as I tried yet again to focus on my test, and a few heads craned in my direction. I scribbled, biting my lower lip painfully hard to refocus my attention and get through this fucking thing. I forced myself to sit up straighter, and I started writing. I knew Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I liked it even. And so I set my pen loose, finally freeing my mind of her for a while.
The cave is an analogy of an ignorant life. It’s a very visual representation of what it means to perceive things from only one point, missing the larger picture. In Plato’s Allegory, men are chained within a cave, forced to see nothing more than the shadows on the walls around them—never knowing a world exists beyond the cave, and never knowing the shadows are attached to so much more than their limited scope.
But it’s a curious analogy that relates, in my opinion, to even the chains we impose on ourselves. Take the man who spends his life living in one way, sheltered, of his own devices, from the real world around him. His chains are completely self-imposed to protect himself from the unseen and hidden nightmares of the world. But the outcome on his existence is the same.
Perhaps he makes vices like violence, drunkenness, and even promiscuity his reality—his shadows—blocking out everything else around him in an attempt to hide from the things in the world that can hurt him the most. By doing so, he sees nothing but the shadows on the walls—the telltale sign that a life greater than his own exists beyond the cave. But his cave is safe, and his perception of the world eventually becomes limited by the shadows, and his knowledge of what it once meant to live fully in this world dwindles to nothing. His shadows become his reality—his perception forever skewed.
What would happen to this man if he unshackled his life and finally broke the chains he’d placed on himself so long ago? Could he turn around and walk out of his cave, finally seeing the shadows for what they were—a pathetic coping mechanism. Could he realign his reality with truth, rather than the twisted notions of what he’d made his world out to be?
Plato’s Allegory relates to perception and reality. Plato saw philosophical enlightenment as breaking those chains that bind, freeing oneself of ignorance. But the concept applies broadly to all of humanity. People as a whole see a limited scope of the world, chained to their notions, often misguided notions, of what truth is. Seeking something more, I would argue, is the very act of unchaining oneself from the cave wall.
I reread my essay, and I finally set my pen down. It was a nice notion—breaking the chains. I had no real idea if I could ever be strong enough to do such a thing, but … it was a nice notion. My shadows were what separated me from Hell—not the bad hell, the good Hell. I wanted my Hell.
Students had already started turning their tests in and leaving, but I wasn’t the last, and nearly a quarter of the class remained. I pulled the envelope of money I’d stashed in my textbook from between the pages as I stood from the desk, and I walked my test and the envelope up to Helene. When I approached the desk, she marked her spot in the book she was reading, and she stood.
I set the test down, placing the envelope on top of it. She studied the envelope for a moment.
“It should be what I owe you … for the other night.” No amount of money in the world could come close to what I owed her.
She nodded as she fidgeted with the cover of the book she held in her hands.
“I need to speak with you,” she said quietly. She cocked her head toward the door. “Could we step out to the—”
“Professor Hess,” a student called from halfway back in the desks.
Helene didn’t look away from me for a moment, and when she did, I inhaled slowly to calm the race of my heart.
“I’ll be right there,” she responded to the student.
When her eyes returned to me, I nodded. “I’ll just wait.” I returned to my seat.
Helene walked by on her way back to speak with the student, and in the time it took her to clarify a completely clear as day question to the idiot, three more tests had been turned in. Only the idiot and one other slow test taker remained. I fidgeted with the cover of my book, and Helene didn’t bother opening the one she was reading when she returned to her desk.
She stacked up tests and put them in her briefcase along with her book and the envelope I’d given her. But her hand paused on my test that was still sitting at the edge of her desk. She glanced quickly to me but picked it up and leafed through it slowly even as I watched her. When she flipped to the last page, she stopped and started reading.
She barely looked up as the idiot set her test on the desk, and I fidgeted with the cover of my book so harshly I ended up tearing the top corner off. Her lips parted as she read, and her brow furrowed, but I couldn’t see her expression full on, so I had no idea what she was thinking.
She finally looked up, and she just stared at me. I looked back, barely managing to hold the eye contact. When the last student finally stood and walked his test up to Helene, I kept my eyes trained on her. She smiled at the boy kindly, but I could tell she was nervous. She tucked his test along with mine into her briefcase and snapped it shut as he walked out the door.
I waited for the click of the door, and I started to stand the moment I heard it, but her voice stopped me still, and I sank back to my seat.
“Do you feel responsible for what happened to us?” Her expression wasn’t accusatory in the least. It was calm.
I cleared my throat as it tried to constrict. “Yes, I do,” I said quietly. I didn’t know how to be more blunt than that. Of course I was responsible.
She nodded slowly. “You’re not responsible.” Her words were just as blunt, and she said them plainly. “I’ve never blamed you for what happened. I need you to understand that. You don’t have to feel guilty. You don’t have to hurt yourself. You don’t have to…” She glanced away for a moment, but then she sighed. “I just need you to know that.”
The constriction in my throat became tighter and tighter, and my eyes burned even as I stared at her. I coughed as I tried to fight it, and when she stood and grabbed her briefcase, I panicked.
“Good night, Kane,” she said quietly as she walked toward the door.
I stood, feeling the panic course through me like a rush of adrenaline. “I fight because it feels good to hurt. I drink because it feels good to go numb. And I fuck because it feels good to forget … how terrifying it can actually be.” I rattled the words out so fast I was almost shocked to hear them. I gasped as the panic escalated. She was walking away from me, and that couldn’t happen. It needed to happen, but I still couldn’t let it happen.
When she turned around her eyes were wide, full of tears, and her lips were parted and trembling. “What do you want from me?” Tears fell down her cheeks as she pleaded for an answer.
“I need to be close to you,” I admitted, feeling my lips tremble too. “Please let me be close to you.” I was twisting my fingers together, begging pathetically for something I didn’t deserve.
She brushed her cheeks. “What does that even mean to you? What are you asking me for?”
I could think of a thousand ways to answer that question, and I glanced away trying to figure out the simplest explanation. “I want to talk to you, and I want you to talk to me. I want to touch you, and I want you to touch me too. I want to hold you.” I gave up hiding the tears, and when I blinked they ran down my cheeks. “I won’t look for pain from another man’s fist to release me from what hurts so much in my head. I’ll tell you what hurts instead. I won’t use sex with other women to hide from my pain. But I’ll give it to you if it’s what you need from me.”
I walked up to her, and she just watched me. Her body looked rigid with tension, and I could see the tendons in her neck strained tight. I stood just in front of her, not willing to touch her until she gave me permission.
“I want all of you, regardless of the fact I deserve nothing from you. Things can’t go on this way with us. It’s tearing me apart. I put myself in your life, because I wanted to see who you were now.” I shook my head as I stared off beside us for a moment. “I didn’t realize it would be so … powerful. Powerful enough I want to give it the chance to rewrite the direction of my life.”
I stood there gasping in shock at the words I was saying, and more than that at what they ultimately meant for me.
Her eyes moved down to settle on my chest, but she didn’t respond.
“We deserve to go back and be us again. Not the us that came after that night. The us before. We were good for each other. I was good for you once—even if no one else in the world saw it or understood that.”
She took a deep breath, but she still stared at my chest.
“I need to be near you, and I don’t know what that looks like. But I do know I need it. Please give me another chance.”
Her eyes remained down, but they were swollen and pink, and her cheeks were streaked with tears. “Okay,” she whispered on an exhalation. When she inhaled again, the air rattled through her lungs as though that one word had sent a rush of something palpable through her.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
We stood there staring at one another’s chests. My brain swirled with that notion again—such a beautiful notion. Was I really going to unbind myself from the shadows? Could I do that for her?
We were silent as we walked out to the parking lot. We must look ridiculous, as though we’d just left a funeral rather than class, and when we’d pass someone in the hallways, we’d lower our heads in tandem to hide the puffy, bloodshot eyes. I didn’t touch her, and we kept a modest six inches between our bodies as we walked. But when we reached her car, she turned to me.
She looked exhausted, and I took her briefcase from her, opening the car door and setting it on her driver’s seat. I wanted to touch her, but I waited for her to make the first move. She eventually did. She stepped right up to me, gripped the sides of my waist with her hands, and let her forehead drop to my chest.
“We’re going to be okay,” I said as I wrapped my arms around her. I had no doubt she could be okay all on her own without my presence in her life. But I also had no doubt I never would be without her. “We’re going to be okay,” I repeated.
She’d said those words to me once. A monster had hurt me, and I’d given up for a while. But she hadn’t. She’d been in pain and scared, and she’d still curled herself around me and reassured me, letting me feel her warmth.