Pain. Sadness. Misery. Heartbreak.
None of those words come close to describing how I feel.
Kason speared a hole through my heart, and I’ve been bleeding out ever since.
It’s been two days since I drove to his apartment. I had wanted to talk to him about what happened New Year’s Eve, which was why I had unlocked my car door that afternoon. I tried, but there were too many emotions swarming me, and I needed space. The smell of him alone strangled me. I could barely breathe.
Driving away, I cried.
But when he drove away on New Year’s Eve, it was so much worse. He took a noose, secured it around my heart, and then slammed his foot down on the gas.
I didn’t know when I showed up at his door that my life source had already been torn from my chest.
In the time it took me to realize that I didn’t want what happened between us in bed to end our relationship, Kason had already cheated on me. He destroyed all the trust I had foolishly given him.
Stupid me. I can’t believe all the times he told me he loved me, I actually believed him.
The doorbell rings, and I hesitate to answer, but it’s Micah’s truck in my driveway and not Kason’s Camaro. I haven’t returned to school since I told Kason I hated him and never wanted to see him again. Knowing how close he is to Micah, and how many times he’s tried calling me these past few days, I’m pretty sure Micah’s here to relay Kason’s attempted apologies.
“I know you’re in there, Guppy. I can see your shadow through the glass.”
“I’m not in the mood to talk.”
“No shit. You’ve been ignoring all my texts. Now open up.”
My reflection in the entryway mirror is far past dreadful. With swollen eyes, hair piled on top of my head, and homely sweats, there’s nothing quick I can do to improve my ghastly appearance.
He begins ringing the doorbell in rapid repetition, hollering, “I can be annoying about this or you can just open the door.”
“Okay, okay,” I grumble and let him in. It only takes him two steps to stop in his tracks.
I turn my back, embarrassed that he’s seeing me like this and head into the living room. He trails behind me and joins me on the couch when I plop down.
“So, what is it? Why have you been avoiding me?”
With a pausing breath of confusion, I wait a beat too long to respond when he pushes, “Ady, what’s going on?”
“Kason didn’t tell you?” My heart constricts the second his name touches my lips.
“Tell me what?”
Dropping my head, the intensity caged inside grows, and it takes everything I have not to let the tears fall—the same tears that have been falling incessantly for the past two days. But strength abandons me, my chin trembles, and Micah’s arm reaches around my shoulders.
I’ve become so accustomed to touch because Kason gave it in abundance, but I’ve been without when I’ve needed it the most. I slump over and another arm comes around me. And somehow, even though Kason shattered me into ruins, I manage to crack once more.
“Ady, what happened?”
Covering my face with my hands, I cry into my palms, fearing the pain that will come when I try to speak around my emotionally seized throat.
“What did he do to you?”
“He cheated on me.” And like a switchblade to a vein, I’m forced to endure the pain of Kason’s betrayal all over again.
Micah lurches back, in shock. “He did what?”
Curling into myself, I wipe my cheeks with the sleeve of my sweatshirt and struggle to look at him through my wounded spirit. “I feel so stupid.”
“Why?”
“Because I trusted him and—”
“Yeah,” he bites, cutting me off. “You trusted him to keep his dick in his fucking pants. You have no reason to feel stupid.”
I shrug in defeat, because no matter what he says, I can’t help the way I feel, which is foolish and embarrassed, because I wasn’t good enough for Kason to want me so he had to go cheat.
“No. Don’t fucking do that. He’s the one who should feel stupid. There’s nothing you could’ve done that would justify him fucking another girl.”
“Then why?” I cry as the blood from the rip in my heart seeps out, but I already know the answer. I was too much of a prude for him, and he lost interest. I sensed it this past summer when he started struggling to get an erection with me. In the beginning, it barely took a touch from me for him to get hard. But then he started pushing my hand away because he didn’t want me feeling that I no longer affected him that way. It’s so beyond mortifying when you can’t even turn on your own boyfriend.
Micah pulls me back into his arms, and I cry on his shoulder, wishing I could expel the heartache and humiliation. Wishing I didn’t still love him when I hate him so much. Wishing I never got involved with him in the first place. I knew better than to trust some guy when my father showed me first-hand what jerks men are.
I’m two for two for being hurt by a man I loved.
I take the comfort Micah is offering, but it doesn’t comfort at all. He lets me cry until I tire, and when I’m nothing more than stingy eyes and a stuffy nose, I exhale deeply.
“So, this is why you haven’t been at school?”
“What am I supposed to do? We have three classes together.”
“Fuck him,” he says. “He’s the one who should be hiding out, not you.”
I draw back and rest the side of my head against the back cushion. “Easy for you to say.”
“It should be easy for you, too. He’s a dick wad.”
Micah’s right, he is a dick wad. I’m hurt and I’m angry, but I also miss him. I hate myself for missing him as much as I do. I hate myself more than I hate him because I can’t seem to simply hate him! That hate is tangled with so many other feelings that I get confused, and that’s when I find myself breaking down and crying.
“I’m in one of those classes you have with him. You and I can sit somewhere else, then all you have is two classes with him to get through.”
“Two feels like a million.”
“But it’s not. It’s only two.”
I’m completely drained as I stare at Micah, and when he takes my hand, his voice is sincere when he says, “You want me to talk to him?”
“No.” My response comes instantly. Closing my eyes, I shake my head, repeating, “God, no. That would make everything worse.”
“You want me to kick his ass?”
A sliver of a smile cracks my lips for the first time since Kason left my bed on New Year’s. “He’s your friend, Micah.”
“Is he?”
“Micah . . .”
“You’re my friend, too, Ady,” he says, opting to ditch his nickname for me.
“Still. I don’t want to be the one to throw this drama between the two of you.”
“He did that, not you,” he stresses. “Why are you blaming yourself for something he did? This is all on him. The guy didn’t even have enough balls to tell me what happened when I asked why you weren’t in school. Dude knew why and didn’t say shit.”
I don’t blame him for not telling Micah. It’s human nature to avoid acknowledging when we do something wrong. But this is another thing that I find so conflicting: Kason could’ve easily avoided telling me the truth, but he didn’t. He told me right away, knowing that I would break up with him.
He cowered on the floor, cried out in his own misery, and told me the truth.
Why?
Why not lie to keep me?
Did he even want me?
But if he didn’t want me, then why did it kill him to lose me? Why did he bleed his tears and beg me to love him, not to leave him before I turned my back and walked out the door?
I can’t make sense of any of this, and that makes everything so much worse. I wish it were simple, that he was just a prick. At least then I would be able to understand.
“We’ll park in the lot behind the auditorium tomorrow so you don’t have to see him before your first class together.”
“Who says I’m going to school tomorrow?”
He pushes his fingers through his long hair and, with the slightest hint of a smirk, tells me, “You’re going to school tomorrow. I’ll walk in with you. We’ll leave campus for lunch. Whatever you need.”
“Like a babysitter?”
“Like a friend.”
And that’s exactly what he does when I show up to school the next day. He’s already there waiting for me in his truck. With way more concealer under my eyes than what I typically wear, I step out of my car, dread rifling inside my every cell. I wanted to bail on him today, but I knew he’d only find his way back to my house and ring my doorbell until I couldn’t take the dinging anymore and let him in.
“You ready?”
“No.”
He smiles, and I thank God that at least I have him so I don’t have to bear this day on my own.
Micah slings his arm loosely around my shoulders. “Come on, Guppy. Time to swim with the big fish.”