Page 25 of Into the Dark
“No.”
He makes a frustrated noise and pinches the bridge of his nose. “What the fuck do you want from me here, Alex?”
“I’d like you to look at me for a bloody start!” I yell. “I’d like you to look at me and stop evading the details about what happened between us. About what happened that day.” I feel emotional again. I feel sick.
He whips around to look at me, his eyes as bright and hard and angry as a thunderstorm. “You think I’ve forgotten a single fucking thing about that day, Alex? Seriously? No, okay then, fine, you didn’t leave me. You told me to leave you. That was it, wasn’t it? Right after you told me how I disgust you, how you can’t love me. I remember the look on your face when you said it too. I see it every fucking minute of the day. So yeah, I remember it all quite fucking clearly, trust me.” The look in his eyes is too intense, too sad, and I look down, away from it.
“I told you already I shouldn’t have said those things. That I’m sorry I said those things.” It occurs to me then the memory of saying those words to him, the shame of having said them, will likely stay with me my whole life. Come to think of it, it’s the only thing I’ve ever said or done that’s made me feel ashamed.
“But you meant them, didn’t you? In that moment, that day, when you looked at me, that was how you felt about me.” He waits for me to answer, but I can’t find any words at all because I’m not sure I didn’t. In that moment he was a stranger to me. Someone I didn’t know. Someone I didn’t love. He goes on. “You saying that’s all changed now? Just like that? ’Cause I’m still that same person, baby. I’m the same guy I was that day. Trust me when I say I wish I wasn’t, but I am. I haven’t changed.”
I look up. “Well, maybe I have.”
He stares but says nothing, a myriad of emotion on his face.
“Maybe what I’m saying is that I didn’t know what the hell I was feeling that day. I felt a lot of things that day. I was in shock, I was scared, I was confused, I was angry. At you, at Mark, at myself.” One of them makes you a coward, and the other makes you a fucking liar. “I was a coward that day too,” I add quietly.
“A coward?” he repeats.
“Yes, I was scared and a coward, like you said.”
He frowns slightly. “I was talking shit. You’re the bravest woman I know. That day you did what you had to do. Which was to remove me from your fucking life. Now, Alex, I have to go. I can’t be here anymore. It’s too fucking hard.” He turns and reaches for the door.
“Jake, please don’t,” I plead.
He stops, taking another deep breath before turning to face me. The look in his eyes makes my breath falter. He looks so desperately sad. Because of me. I hate it.
I stand up from the bed but don’t go toward him. “Please don’t go. Please…stay the night with me.”
I can see the desire in his eyes, the pull between us still alive and strong, but then his expression changes. He shakes his head. “No,” he says. It’s firm. Strong. Unequivocal.
My heart plummets through my stomach. I think I hear it land on the floor. The burn of rejection creeps across my body.
“I’m not going to be that to you, Alex,” he says with a shake of his head. “I thought I could. When I came up here, I thought I could be with you tonight, that it would have to be better than fuck all. But I was kidding myself. It’d be worse—a lot fucking worse. Leaving you all over again tomorrow…would be fucking torture.”
I frown. Have I not made myself clear? Have I been talking in Russian? “Jake, I don’t want you to leave me tomorrow. I don’t want you to leave me at all.”
I see something move through his whole body: a tremor, his shoulders lifting, his back straightening. A crease forms over his eyebrows. “Alex, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re not thinking straight. You fainted and…”
I move closer to him then. With purpose. “I know exactly what I’m saying. And Christ, I haven’t thought straight since I met you, but it doesn’t change anything.” As the words leave my body, I feel a ton lighter instantly. My breathing eases and the weight that’s settled on my chest since he left me floats upward and away. “Every day we were apart I tried not to think of you. I tried. I’ve never tried so hard at anything in my life, but the harder I tried the more impossible it was. I mean, have you ever tried not thinking about something?” I ask. It’s rhetorical, of course, and he gets that because he just stares at me, hard, his eyes narrowed ever so slightly with concentration. “Well, it’s impossible. It’s impossible not to think of something or someone, because in order to do that you have to think of them and then un-think about them. It’s ridiculous, really. It’s like trying to teach yourself to un-breathe.” I’m aware I’m talking utter nonsense, sounding ridiculous, unhinged. I try to calm myself, reordering my thoughts into piles—or at least one pile—before I go on. “I knew who you were, and I know who you are. I know you, Jake. Because you never lied to me about that. You never lied to me about us.” I look down. “But I did… I lied when I told you I can’t be with you and I can’t love you. Because I can, and I do love you. I loved you that day and every day since, and I can’t live without you anymore. I don’t want to.”
He doesn’t speak right away. He just stares at me hard, the cogs of his brain working fast and hard behind his turquoise stare. Then, “How many times are we going to do this?” he asks.
I blink. “Do what?”
“This. How many times do I have to lose you, Alex? I mean, just so I know. So I can prepare myself. How many fucking times do I have to let you go?” His voice is cold. Angry.
I shake my head and move closer. He takes a step back. “Jake, listen to me. This was the last time…”
“Really, baby? Because didn’t we already do this twice?” He strokes a hand over his mouth and beard a few times, agitated. “After you found out about Caleb I let you go because you said you needed space. Then you took me back and told me you loved me. I told you I was trying to change, to be good enough for you, and you promised you’d let me try to make you happy. Do you remember that?”
I have to bite back the swell of tears as I nod. I know what’s coming next because his eyes go dark again.
“Then the very next day you told me I disgust you and you can’t love me, can’t be with me, that it hurts to just fucking look at me. You remember that bit too, right?” He nods, nostrils flaring.
“Jake, please—”
“But now you don’t want to be without me. When did you realize this, exactly? Tonight? In the past ten minutes? ’Cause I’m not sure I trust that, baby—not with your past form.”