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She answers back with a text telling me she misses me, and she hopes I’m living my big-city-life dreams and maybe one day she can come down to see me. I have to read it all through glassy eyes. We’ve never been a super close family, but I that doesn’t mean I don’t love them all.
I get back to my building and go through the lobby as fast as I can, my head down. If Graham is in here today, I don’t want to see him. My phone buzzes with a text, but I don’t look at it. I throw myself into the elevator.
It’s empty and I shove myself into the corner of it.
The hall on the eighth floor is empty too, so nobody sees the tears start to fall as I fumble to get my key in the door.
I slam it behind me and kick off my shoes, drop my purse, and go for my clothes. I don’t want to be in the skirt suit for another second.
“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” I say out loud. “Don’t.”
But I do. I feel sorry for myself, for my cousin, for my aunt. I feel sorry for my family that they have me to deal with.
My chest aches, my head hurts, and it’s all gone wrong.Again.
In the bedroom, I fall on the bed and cry. The sheets and blankets Kevin and I picked out together feel awful, but they’re the ones I have. At least they shelter me a little while I cry into the pillow.
It almost feels like the world got together and decided to put me in my place. Let’s be honest, it’s what I deserve. For so long, I wanted to believe that the world was on my side. It seemed too sad to think that we live in a universe that doesn’t care what happens to us.
It’s true, though. The universe doesn’t care what happens to us. It doesn’t care about anything, and no amount of finding the silver lining will change that.
My phone buzzes three more times, and finally I push it off the bed. It lands on the floor, muffled by the carpet. What does anybody want from me? They don’t want to sit on the other end of the phone and listen to me cry about the mistakes I’ve made in my life, and theydon’twant to come over.
I don’t want Graham to see me like this.
I don’t want anybody to see me like this.
I don’t even want to see myself like this.
Every time I think I’ve cried all of the feelings out, more tears come. It starts to seem like one long pattern. Everything went wrong before Kevin. It went wrong when I got cocky about my abilities in life. It went wrong when I thought I could come back from any breakup, any setback. It went wrong when I just kept pushing ahead into the next thing instead of taking stock of how I was causing all the troublemyself.
I don’t know how long it’s been when someone knocks at the door.
Shit. I didn’t lock it. I closed it, but I didn’t lock it, and now anybody could walk in.
Only I know that it’s not going to beanybody.It’s going to be Graham, coming to see me at my most pathetic. My stomachturns. He could fix all of this, but I’m done asking to be bailed out. I’m not going to sit up on the edge of the bed and tell him he can fuck me in exchange for fixing…
I don’t know. All of it. Kenzie’s situation, my situation, my aunt, the apartment.
And that might mean I can’t enjoyhimanymore. So it’s not just all this bad news in one day, it’s him, too.
He keeps knocking, and I don’t say anything. My throat feels too rough to answer him. My body feels too heavy to get up and answer the door, much less push the covers off, so I just lie there.
He’s going to leave, eventually. That’s what always happens in the end. People want you for one thing, and the second you don’t give them exactly that, they’re gone.
I don’t even blame him.
I’m the one who pushed for all this. I’m the one who thought it would be okay.
I keep waiting for Graham to leave and for the knocking to stop. Instead, after a while, I hear the door to my apartment open, then close.
It’s quiet for a while longer, and then soft footsteps come toward the bedroom. He’s passing the sitting area where we fucked the first time. I wonder if he thinks about it.
I hope I can stop thinking about it.
The bedroom door creaks a little on its hinges. Even the door is a sign that things aren’t going how they should. Doors in an apartment like this shouldn’t creak, which means I should have called maintenance to make sure the hinges were oiled or whatever, and I haven’t done that.
It’s a tiny failure, barely even a mistake, but it makes more tears leak out of my eyes. I try to wipe them away.