Page 10 of Sucker Love (Sugar Pill Duet #1)

Delivered turns to read and my heart stumbles over the next few beats. I wait for him to respond. Another few minutes pass. Nothing.

It was bad, the night we broke up, the worst it ever was. I won’t pretend it wasn’t.

It started with the phone call from my mom, which of course upset and pissed me off.

And I don’t just feel things like a normal person, or so I’m told (apparently it’s not normal to feel burning rage or crushing despair in place of regular anger or sadness).

I was already heightened when I asked Jordan if I could borrow his car and run over to the house in Malden to give my mother a few hundred bucks in cash.

It was supposed to be simple, quick. I didn’t even want him to come with me.

He made it clear, early on in our relationship, he wanted nothing to do with my family. Understandably.

“No,” he said, sliding his headphones around his neck.

“No?” I echoed. “What do you mean, no?”

“Just what it means. N-O. Spells no. Complete sentence. Get it?”

He went to put his headphones back on, but I grabbed his wrist. “Jord, I need your car. You don’t get it. It’ll be over an hour if I take the T. I’ll be back in literally thirty minutes.”

I remember, clearly, the annoyed look on his face. “You know your mom’s not actually going to kill herself, right? She’s just pretending so you’ll give her drug money.”

I stared at him dumbly, trembling with an emerging fury that was rendering me almost half-blind with its hot intensity.

I couldn’t even tell him that I had been going through this since I was a kid.

That she couldn’t pay the bills to keep a roof over our head because she spent her paychecks on pills, and that was the whole reason I’d started doing commissions in the first place.

“You know what enabling is?” he went on in that smug, condescending voice he affected whenever he thought he was right about something. “You’re the whole reason she can get those pills in the first place. I bet if you stopped, she would stop.”

Just like that. Just that easy. That’s how addiction works, isn’t it?

You can quit whenever the fuck you want to.

I took a deep breath and tried to remember everything I learned in therapy to stay cool, but it was going out the window fast , papers blowing in the wind.

“I’m not giving her pill money,” I said, slow, measured, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. “It’s so she doesn’t lose the house.”

“We both know where that money’s going.”

We did—but that wasn’t the point. “It’s just a half hour.”

“I said no, Noel. Find your own way if you want to throw your money away so fucking bad.” With that he dismissed me, replacing the headphones upon his ears once more. “I’m not helping you with your junkie whore mom anymore.”

This was where I messed up, where I lost all that hard won control.

I grabbed the headphones off of Jordan’s head—an expensive pair, Bose—and before he could stop me I hurled them at the wall with as much strength as the adrenaline pumping through me could muster.

The plastic snapped, and they clattered to the floor in pieces.

The tinny music had stopped. There was a dent in the plaster from the impact.

“You’re an asshole!” I raged at him, the tears spilling forth.

“You’re a fucking asshole! Do you even care?

Do you care about anything? Do you care about me ? ”

And I didn’t stop at the headphones. Because it wasn’t enough.

Didn’t quite convey my fury properly, the depth and breadth and all-consuming nature of it, how it was a scalding, driving rain in which I was drowning.

I spun and smacked the lamp on the side table over beside him, sending it crashing to the floor where the bulb shattered.

I tore the thrifted Morrison print from the wall and spiked it onto the floor.

I swept the contents of the tiny coffee table, including Jordan’s beer, onto the rug before I upended the entire thing.

All throughout this destruction of the living room I was screaming, raving, incoherently sobbing, and there was the tiny still-rational part of my brain crying out at me to stop, that it was too much, too far, just fucking stop.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t make myself stop.

There was only this, the breaking of things and my disconsolate savagery.

And then I turned back to him, panting, shoulders heaving, my face soaked with snot and tears. He raised his face to mine. Our eyes met.

Jordan was—and is—historically impossible to get a rise out of.

He treats most of my tantrums and tirades with nothing more than disdain.

I have cried, screamed and even bled myself to get his attention.

I have begged him to care and never gotten it.

I never did figure out an approach that could make him care, not really .

That night, I finally got a reaction. There was, in his eyes, unmistakable disgust and maybe even hatred.

He grabbed my shoulders. “You’re fucking crazy,” he hissed at me. “You are an insane piece of shit, Noel. You really fucking are. You’re as crazy as your fucking mom.”

Already I was caping, capitulating, please don’t be mad I love you so much. “Jord, no. I’m sorry. I lost—I’ll buy you new ones. I’m sorry .”

“I’m done with this,” he snarled at me. “I’m done with your bullshit. Do you hear me? I’m fucking done. ”

Even now, after everything, after knowing I am the one who did this to us, I still have that urge. To break things. Because I must break something. I have to destroy a thing because there’s nothing left to destroy inside me, because they all get sucked into that hole.

I’m rubbing my face along the inside of my bruised bicep when my phone vibrates and I turn, excitedly, to see if it’s Jordan who has finally replied.

I’m already fantasizing about his reply when I know damn well it’s not going to be anything good.

I’m figuring out how I will tell Luca the room isn’t available anymore (a pang there, strangely) and thinking about how funny and annoying it’ll be to get Jordan’s things back in here when he moved out only days ago, but that’s on him after all, for moving out so quickly.

Silly. But everyone makes mistakes. I know that personally.

And even though when I do finally see Jordan’s reply and it is not a surprise, it’s still a sock to the gut. As physically painful as a fist in my ribs, fingers worming their way through bone and sinew and digging under my sternum to claw at my heart.

I’m not doing this shit with you Noel. I’m blocking you. Move on.

I nearly drop my phone onto my face. Already I’m furiously replying, my fingers flying across the screen, oblivious to the fact that he said he’s blocking me.

you’re a real fucking scumbag I hope you know that

you fucked me over SO FUCKING BAD. SO BAD

i literally hope you rot you stupid asshole I hope your tiny excuse for a dick falls off

None of these go through because he’s blocked me already, but I don’t notice because I’ve already thrown my phone at the wall.

Later, I’ll find only a tiny corner of the screen cracked, a testament to the case I put on it after losing so many phones to the same treatment.

I rip the collar of my long-sleeved shirt down so violently I can hear the stitching tear and my upper arm is bared and at last I sink my teeth into my purpled flesh as hard as I possibly can until I’m tasting my own blood. The tears pour down my pathetic face.

At the end of the day, there is no one I despise more than myself.

No one.