She patted my hand then yanked me up. “But first, hygiene.”
I showered because as Rosie said, I did reek.
I let the warm water attempt to melt away the grime over the memories I’d been trying to escape. To try and loosen the tension from carrying around blame and doubt.
It didn’t work.
By the time I’d gotten out and dressed, the smell of food had radiated through my small apartment.
Rosie had ordered enough to feed a small country. Despite how hungry I was, there was no way I’d eat it all. I made a mental note to run it down to Ed, the homeless guy who was usually down the street from my building.
Rosie was true to her word.
She didn’t make me spill about what I knew she’d been curious about for over a year. Since things between Heath and I became too obvious to ignore. For everyone around us at least. I did a wonderful job of pretending to ignore what it was. How it was tearing us both apart.
“So,” Rosie said, putting down her half-eaten cheeseburger. “Tell me everything about your trip. How many Italians did you romance? How many times did you almost get kidnapped?”
I smiled because she was being serious. Apparently you weren’t “part of the awesome bitches club” until you got kidnapped.
“None,” I said, opening my veggie burger with a rumbling stomach.
Rosie sighed. “You’re young, there’s still time.” She paused. “Tell me everything else then.”
And in between bites. I did. I told her everything about the trip and nothing about the truth behind it.
She was Rosie so she knew how much I was holding back. But she didn’t push.
Because she was Rosie.
She left, eventually.
After promising she wouldn’t get in touch with Lucy and tell her I was here yet. She was a loud person. So was I, on the outside of course. But Rosie knew when to keep quiet. Even when she didn’t like it.
She’d been very vocal about how much she hated keeping quiet about how everything went down with Craig.
But she’d done it.
For me.
Because she was a good person.
The best.
“I know you don’t feel like talking yet,” she said in the doorway. “And I know there’s so much more to the story than you’ve let on, and I’m absolutely gagging for it, I won’t lie.” She winked before her eyes went sad. “But I do know a little something about not being able to talk about things that have touched our souls. People that have done that. People that have destroyed our souls.” She gave me a look, one that betrayed knowledge of things I hadn’t told. “When those people are the people we see in the mirror.”
I gaped at her. “What—how?”
She smiled. “No, I’m not a mind reader, and I have to clarify that because I know you believe in that shit.”
I frowned. “It’s not shit. It’s people who are so in touch with the universe they vibrate on the same level in which we project our thoughts.”
She raised her brow and smirked in that smile her and Lucy had reserved for me. The ‘oh Polly’s done or said something again, just grin and humor her and then set fire to the car of the latest man who has broken her heart.’
She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. “Honey, sometimes it’s not about vibrations or the universe.” She paused as she leaned back. “Actually, it’s never about that. It’s just the simple fact that we see in each other what we hide in ourselves.”
The world moved under my feet at Rosie—my Rosie—uttering something as profound as that.
Then she winked again. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ravage my husband so he can’t walk straight in the morning.”
And there it was.
She blew me a kiss.
“Don’t get into trouble. Not without me at least.”
I didn’t plan on getting in any.
No, I planned on somehow trying to make my life trouble free.
Peaceful.
Which was going to be a feat since I didn’t know what peace looked like.
It was three in the morning.
I was in the bath.
Mostly because I loved baths. I had every single kind of bath bomb imaginable, every bath product, I had a tray that could hold wine, books, and snacks that fit across the tub.
A speaker was shoved onto the small and cramped countertop, there was always music coming from it. Usually, it was peaceful piano.
Now it was ear-splitting rock.
Because I needed something like that to drown out the silence.
Silence was always loudest at three in the morning.
The witching hour.
It was the time many of my Wiccan friends believed that black magic was most powerful. It was the peak of supernatural activity. All of the demons and ghosts were most powerful.
And they were right.
But not the ghosts and demons that were tangible, that came from horror movies and great TV shows.
No, they came from the inside. Clawed their way up when our minds were trying to dream and woke us up brutally.
I had been jerking awake at this exact time for well over year. I had never been the best sleeper. My dad said it was because my mind was too busy to be clutched by dreams for too long.
“You dream while you’re awake, baby girl. So you don’t need to sleep like the rest of us.”
He and my mom never tried to change me. Never told me to go to sleep when they found me wandering around a quiet house in the middle of the night. They accepted me.
I came from a loving and supportive home.
Had great friends.
My health.
A roof over my head.
Food in my belly.
I shouldn’t have these demons.
Yet here they were.
Heartbreak was so much uglier than whatever movies portrayed it to be. There was no carton of ice cream, bottle of vodka, one-night stand and an amazing rebound guy type of combination that worked to cure that ache in your chest.
And it wasn’t an ache. It was a sharp, stabbing, consistent agony. And it wasn’t in the chest. It was everywhere. You ached for the person who hurt you. Who ruined you. Who broke down every part of what made you you. Craig did all those things and it was horrible and painful and so soul destroying that it took a punch in the face to make me leave, but still, there was the pain. The agony.
It was that much worse because now, I knew all of this, what a bad person he was and I still loved him. I couldn’t just turn something like that off. The violence, the ugliness of his true character was enough to make me leave him, but that wasn’t enough to make me forget him.
When you give your heart to someone, it remains in their possession, at least a piece of it anyway, no matter what they do afterward.
So I was here, curled up in the bath, not cradling wine and listening to empowering music and reading Eat Pray Love. No, I was clutching my knees to my chest, curled up in the darkness of the room, sobbing violently and silently. Pain wracked every single cell in my body.
And in that moment, I wanted him to save me from this. Not Craig. Not the man who’d punched me in the face that I still loved with a part of me. But Heath, the man who’d punched through my soul when I’d torn his apart. Who I still loved with every aching cell in my body.
I stared into the water, my eyes swollen.
My fingertips trailed over the surface of the water, thinking about how such a thing could give us life, something we needed to continue living, could also kill us if we completely submerged ourselves in it.