Page 72 of Your Fault

Ten minutes later, he rounded a corner and stopped at a gas station.

“Don’t move,” he ordered me without looking back, hopping down and going inside to pay.

I didn’t miss my chance. I got off, threw the helmet to the ground, and ran off, not wanting to even look at him.

“Noah!” he shouted. I heard him coming up behind me, and when I looked back and saw him, I ran even faster. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want him to touch me, to shout at me. All I wanted was to be as far away from him as possible.

That night, it was he who had crossed the line, not me.

I ran until I reached the back of a building under construction. I pulled on the door to the fence and snuck inside. Nicholas couldn’t squeeze in if he tried, so I stopped, and when I heard himoutside, I looked through the grating and saw his eyes looking out of control.

“Come out.”

“No.”

He grabbed the fence and started shaking it. He was angrier than he’d been in the entire year we’d been going out.

“You think I can’t climb right over this fucking fence?” he challenged me. It was obvious he’d already thought about it.

“And what are you going to do once you get over it, Nicholas?” I asked, raising my voice and feeling my body tremble from the cold. The adrenaline was draining, and Nicholas’s words were resounding in my skull.

He stopped for a moment. I guess he didn’t know.

I rubbed my arms with my hands. I was freezing, I wanted to go home, and I didn’t want him to take me there.

“Fuck, Noah!” he shouted, finally exploding. “I told you to leave! You never do what I say! They could have caught us today, we could be in a fucking cell right now, and I’d be going crazy thinking about what might happen to you!”

“Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only one who gets to call the shots in this relationship? That I worry about you, too, and that I’m tired of you lying to me and leaving me out of things?”

“I know how to take care of myself. You have no fucking idea!”

I opened my eyes wide. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“I don’t know how to take care of myself?” I roared, walking close to the fence. “What the fuck do you know about taking care of anyone? I’ve taken care of myself and my mother since I was five years old! All you’ve done is get drunk, take drugs, and fuck around with criminals even though everything in your life was served to you on a silver platter!”

Nicholas stepped back, obviously surprised by what I wasshouting, but I couldn’t control it. I had been afraid for him that night, afraid for both of us, because he had risked it all, every single thing we had, everything I had never even dared to dream I could have.

“I’m trying to protect you! But you won’t let me,” he responded, evidently hurt.

I brought my hands to my head. “Maybe you’re the one I need to protect myself from,” I whispered, in tears, shocked to be expressing aloud things I had kept to myself for months. “You keep saying you’re going to change, that you’re going to stop doing all this, but then you don’t, Nicholas!”

He looked at me, like he was unable to believe what I was saying.

“At least I try! I left it all for you, I tried to be better, but you put yourself in danger on purpose. You don’t trust me, you don’t tell me things, and you think I don’t know?”

“Are you talking about my ‘bullshit trauma’?”

He sighed and closed his eyes, and when he looked at me again, I knew we had crossed a line. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

I laughed mirthlessly. “But you think it.” I turned around and walked off.

“Noah, come out of there, please,” he begged as my fears piled in my chest and tears welled in my eyes and I could do nothing to stop them.

“Fuck!” I sat on the ground and wrapped my hands around my knees, burying my head there so he wouldn’t see me cry.

“Noah!” he shouted desperately, and I heard the fence shake as he kicked it. “Come out!”

I lifted my head and looked at him. He appeared frantic, but so was I, because I had so much inside me that I hadn’t said, and I wasn’t sure he’d love me the same if I let it all out. Everything he did just made me retreat deeper inside myself.