by Geneva Lee
"I don't want to talk to you," I said. I kept my eyes cast back toward Garrett's. Jess would save me any moment, but the longer I looked at the door, the more I didn't want her to come. Confusion churned like a bad night of drinking in my stomach. I wanted Liam to go. I wanted Liam to stay.
"You've made that clear," Liam said in a wounded voice. "I guess it doesn't matter to you at all what I want."
"It was never going to work," I started into the speech I'd been practicing for this moment. The one where I laughed off his heartbreak and reminded him that we'd started as a fling. I'd said it to myself in the mirror a dozen times, but when I tried to do it now my words flatlined, drifting into the night surrounding us.
"Why? Give me one reason it won't work."
"You're going back to Scotland," I said. It was as good of a reason as all the others that floated to mind.
"It's the twenty-first fucking century, Jillian." He took a step toward me, and I pressed myself against the cool metal of the pole. "You don't have to take the Titanic to cross the Atlantic anymore."
"I watched Cassie try that with a guy back home. You know what's a helluva lot closer to Washington than Scotland? Texas. You know how long it lasted between them? Two weeks."
"You've seen one failure and that's it?" Liam turned away from me, loosing a hollow laugh. "The thing is I know that's not it. What aren't you telling me?"
"I'm fucked up, Liam. Is that what you want me to say?" I screamed at him, forcing him to face me. "And that's all I know how to do—how to fuck things up."
“You’re hiding things from me, Jillian, and that hurts." His voice dropped and he moved closer to me, his body inches from mine. "Because I want all of you. The sexy part and the funny part and especially the fucked up part.”
His body drew me toward him. His pull on me magnetic, unescapable. I clutched the streetlamp behind me to stop myself from folding into him. He gripped the pole, dropping his face close to mine. His breath was hot and laced with whiskey as he hovered there. I took a deep breath and muttered, “That’s twisted.”
He looked at me like I had slapped him. “That’s love.”
The swelling in my chest burst with a trembling flood that rushed through my body. My knees buckled and I clutched the pole to keep myself upright under the weight of his words. He held my gaze and I couldn't look away from him, our eyes were locked together, each of us unsure what the next move was in this wicked game we were playing.
"You don't know me," I whispered. "You saw though. I'm sick."
"I saw the pills. You can't cover things up with Chiclets, Jillian. I don't care about that." His words were thick on his lips—his perfect, kissable lips.
"You can't fix me, Liam. I have early-onset Parkinson's. In a few more years, it will get worse."
"And you think I'll just walk out?" he asked.
"If you're smart, you'll leave now. The memory will be better than any future we could share together," I said through the haziness caused by his proximity.
"I never promised you forever, Jillian. I'm not asking you to promise me that either. I just want a chance—a real one."
I melted under his eyes, trying to keep my hands from pulling him to me.
"I can't give you that," I whispered.
He dropped back, and I missed the heat of his body, the closeness of him, immediately.
"You want to know the truth? I knew the second I met you that I should walk away. I knew you'd shred me, but I couldn't stay away. But if you can, maybe you're stronger than me." He paused and ran a hand through his hair. A memory of fisting my fingers through his hair flashed through my mind, and I grew warm, praying he would break me. Needing him to hold on.
"I don't think you're strong though. Not anymore," he continued, his voice growing in strength. "I think you're scared, and I deserve more than that and you do, too."
Gravel crunched nearby and we turned to see Jess approaching us cautiously. She held her phone in her hand and she looked to both of us, waiting for a signal to stop. I ducked away from Liam and ran to her.
"Ask her," Liam called to me. "Ask her what she thinks of you running away from your problems."
Jess caught me and held me close to her.
"Stop it, Liam," she ordered, her eyes fierce. I knew Jess agreed with him, but some bonds couldn't be broken. My best friend would never side with him, even if she knew he was right.
"I want to go home," I told her in a quiet voice. She rubbed my arm and guided me away.
Liam didn't follow us, but he called out as we walked away. "Goodbye, Jillian."
My name died on his lips, and part of me died with it. I wanted a goodbye with Liam. I'd imagined it in the dark of the night. But in those fantasies we made love and he got on a plane. In those dreams there was laughter and teasing and kissing. That was how I wanted to remember him, but for the rest of my life all I would hear were those beaten, final words.
Chapter 22
The world was gray and it bore down on me, weighting me to the mistakes I’d made. I was bound to an onslaught of memories that I couldn’t erase. All the color sucked from life as I stood in my room trying to sort my feelings into something I could understand. There were no boxes that fit the strange assortment of emotions waging a war in my head. Liam was the worst thing for me, because I didn’t want to feel this. Not when life was already too complicated. We were both better off. But even as I thought it, it didn’t make sense. I didn’t make sense without him. And yet, his life could never make sense with me in it.
That truth left me cold and desolate. At my center, a blackness crept through me, eating away at me and leaving me so hollow that I could barely stand.
My bed was empty and I couldn’t force myself into it. It sat staring me down like an abyss that would swallow me whole, as memories of skin and flesh blinked in and out of my mind. If I closed my eyes I felt his lips on my neck and my stomach and my breasts, but when I opened them I was alone, stripped to the soul.
I wanted to sleep and forget, hoping that in the morning the sun came out again. But I couldn’t count on that any more than I could expect the world to keep spinning. I could see the splinters growing all around me, threatening to collapse the comfortable lie I’d sold myself until they became real, shattering and cracking the walls I’d built to hide behind.
I slapped myself again and again and again, trying to concentrate on the sting left by the palm of my hand. I was stupid. I was worthless. Broken. Feeling the hate coursing through my veins like slow burning poison was better than the numb chill that threatened to overpower me.
But there were things that I couldn’t run away from. I could run from Liam, but my own body was my worst enemy and it turned on me. The tingles started in my hands and stretched into my arms as I ran for the bathroom. I slowed with each step until I fell against the sink, reaching for a medication that could stop the paralysis spreading through my limbs. But I could barely pick them up, let alone open the childproof caps. I screamed and threw them against the wall as the trembling shook my body, and I dropped to the floor. I was an earthquake. Uncontrollable. Unstoppable.
“Jills!” Jess appeared in the door and knelt to hold me.
I heard a litany of curses bursting from me in my voice but I couldn’t stop any more than I could control the episode taking over my body. My fingers hooked and stiffened. I was frozen, my limbs locked and gnarled like the branches of a dead tree. Jess pressed her fingers to my wrist and checked my eyes.
She leapt to her feet and started pulling medicine bottles from the shelf. She tried to force a pill into my mouth but I couldn’t swallow. My body was giving up. It was about damn time. I’d given up a long time ago.
“Jills, come on, you have to get this down,” she coaxed, but I couldn’t relax enough.
“Where’s your injectable?”
I answered her but my words were a slur of consonants and vowels.
Jess had trained to give me a shot when we moved into together. My doctor told us it was only a prec
aution, but one Tara insisted on. There was no way she would let me live on my own if there wasn’t someone there to handle a worst case scenario, so Jess had been tapped. Because she was good and dependable and everything I wasn’t.
But she wasn’t ever supposed to do this, because twenty-one year-olds didn’t have off episodes like this. It was Tara’s paranoia, not my reality. I wished Liam was here so that he could see me like this, because then there would be no chance that he’d promise me anything afterwards. And as my body broke down, it reminded me of one thing, I was saving him from this.
I clung to that as I willed my arms to move. I tried to remember how to stretch my fingers or push myself onto my feet, but my brain fought against me, pinning me to the ground.
“I’m going to give you a shot, because I can’t leave you like this,” Jess said in a soft, reassuring tone, but I heard a tremor hiding in her voice. She blinked back a tear as an impassive calm stole over her face. This was Dr. Jess, the girl who had a future I would never have, and she deserved it, because there was no one else that I would trust to see me like this and still love me. It was the blessing of our friendship, and our biggest curse. I wondered for a moment if she would even be studying pre-med if she hadn’t been forced into it, but I couldn’t feel sorry for her. She was alive and empowered.
When the syringe appeared in her hand, a siren blared in my head. She dropped beside me and tapped the syringe with her finger. Jess blinked back another tear and brought the needle to my arm. Neither my mouth or my body were working, but my mind was, and I knew that Jess had to be seriously worried if she was taking it to this extreme. I tried to push her hand away but I couldn’t force my arms to move. An injection was a last resort, because we both knew it would interact with my current meds. I screamed again as she carefully injected the medication into my vein and then everything went black.
Chapter 23
A persistent beep edged into my dreams, awakening me to drab green walls. I blinked as a whiteboard swam into view listing a schedule of care. I tried to sit up, but I found a collection of IVs had me tangled in my bed. It took a second longer than it should have for me to realize I was in a hospital room. Jess was curled into a ball, asleep on the couch next to me. I opened my mouth to discover it was cotton-dry and that I was too parched to speak. Fumbling, I hit the red call button attached to the side of my bed and waited.
A nurse bustled into the room a few minutes later in Hello Kitty scrubs. She didn’t look much older than me, but as she leaned over me to to turn off the call button, I got a whiff of stale coffee and cigarettes that matched the circles under her eyes.
“Miss Nichols, how are you feeling?” She flipped through my chart, casting a few glances toward me.
Jess stirred at her words and sat up, rubbing sleep from her eyes. It only took her a few seconds before she was fully alert and hovering by my bedside.
“Are you okay, Jills?” Jess brushed my hair back off my face and peered down at me with concern.
“Water,” I mouthed.
“I’ll bring in a pitcher,” the nurse said absently as she checked off something on my chart.
Jess disappeared and reemerged a second later with a cup. The nurse frowned at her but continued her assessment of my vital signs while Jess held the cup to my lips. The water swept away the dry feeling in my throat.
“Help me sit up?” I asked Jess.
“Of course.” She maneuvered an arm under my back and shoved a pillow in the gap she created.
“How long was I out?”
“Only a few hours,” Jess reassured me, adding another pillow under my head.
I didn’t have to ask why I was here. The events of last night while hazy as fog on the sound were clear enough. I remembered the crippling pain spreading throughout my body and locking down my limbs. The lead-up to Jess’s injection were vivid. While the most concrete memory I had from the previous evening was the magnetic force between Liam and I when he confronted me. But I couldn’t remember any thing after the shot Jess administered.
“Please tell me that you didn’t call Tara.”
“I didn’t.” Jess paused and bit her lip like she always did when she was about to spill bad news. “But the hospital called when they were admitting you.”
The nurse took the opportunity to slip in her explanation as she handed me a Dixie cup full of pills. There were a lot more in here than normal.
“We need you to take those,” the nurse instructed me
“What are they?” I wasn’t keen on taking any more pills than I already was, but I also wasn’t excited at the idea of staying plugged into a hospital bed.
“The on-call doctor is adding an anxiety medication immediately,” the nurse told me.
“Is that safe?” I blurted out. There had been numerous times when I wanted medication to help me deal with the stress of controlling my anxiety levels, a feat which usually ended poorly. I was still an amateur when it came to compartmentalizing emotions, my own and those around me.
“It’s safer than another one of these off episodes,” the nurse said.
I swallowed the pills one by one with long swigs of water. It had been so long since I drank anything with my meds that I almost spit a couple back up. The nurse appeased by my willingness to take the medication disappeared into the hallway, leaving Jess and I alone.
Jess held out my cell phone. “Call him.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t going to be that girl. The one that called her ex at the first sign of trouble. It was too relationship-y.
“He’s going to find out, Jills. He should find out from you.” Jess sat on the edge of my bed, her arm still extending me the cell phone.
“How would he find out? This is hardly Facebook status news.” There was no way I was going to call him, and Jess couldn’t make me.
“Because I will tell him, if you don’t,” Jess said in measured tones.
I balked at her. Jess was my best friend. We were practically sisters. “You have no right to tell him.”
“Liam is in love with you, and he is scared. You can’t keep pretending like he doesn’t matter. Look where it’s gotten you.”
“This didn’t happen because of Liam.” I knew it was a lie as much as Jess did. “Besides he’s over me.”
“I saw you two last night. He’s not over you,” Jess said. She slid the lock screen off and started paging through my contacts.
“Don’t tell him,” I said. “Maybe you’re right, but I can’t face him right now.”
“You can’t run away from life.” Jess’s sentiment echoed Liam’s argument from last night. Why couldn’t they see that I wasn’t running, I was protecting myself. I was protecting them.
“I don’t want him here.” My words were full of fire, sparking Jess to look up at me in surprise.
“Maybe you’re right. You clearly don’t trust him,” Jess said. “Maybe Liam deserves more.”
She could have punched me and it would have hurt less. I tried to keep my face impassive, but I knew I was failing. Hot tears were burning at the edge of my eyes, and I blinked against them.
“Not now,” I said finally.
“For what it’s worth, Cassie agrees with me.”
I groaned. “You told Cassie I was here.”
“How do you think I got you to the hospital? You were out, Jills.”
“By the way, worst girls night ever,” I said, switching the topic before more panic could build in my chest.
“Not by a long shot,” Jess disagreed. “Don’t you remember the devil tequila?”
We both fell into laughter, remembering the night freshman year when Cassie and I had split an entire bottle of Jose Cuervo. Poor Jess had spent the whole night holding our heads over the toilet and rubbing our backs. For the rest of the year, the bottle said with “666 DEVIL BOTTLE” scrawled across the label. I was pretty sure I still had it somewhere. It was probably the only night worse than this one in our entire shared history.
“You hungry?” J
ess asked me. “You should probably eat something with those meds.”
As soon as she said it I became aware of the gnawing pit where my stomach once was. I nodded emphatically.
“I’ll sneak down to the cafeteria and bring you something.” Jess leaned over and kissed my forehead.
“Bring pudding. But not the sucky kind.”
Jess paused in the doorway. “Oh, and if anyone asks, we’re sisters. That’s why they’re letting me stay with you. Visiting hours were over hours ago.”
“Got it.” Whoever bought that slender, super-blonde Jess and I were sisters must be blind, but I was grateful. I couldn’t think of anyone else I wanted here with me. In fact, there was no one else I’d ever want to see me right now. Jess had seen me in much worse situations.
She returned in record time, but when I looked up Tara was standing there. Her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail and she wore no cosmetics. She looked unusually casual in jeans and sweatshirt, not at all like the Tara that showed up to my apartment ready to stay. But then I realized that my Aunt’s house in Spokane was over three hours away. She must have jumped in the car immediately. A rush of guilt waved over me. First, Jess had to deal with this and now my mom. She stopped at the foot of my bed and regarded me with what looked like tears in her eyes, which wasn’t possible. Tara was not a cryer. Then she rushed me, pulling at the IVs, as she hugged me.
“Ouch!” I yelped.
Tara pulled back and disentangled herself from the tubes. “I knew I shouldn’t have left.”
“It’s not your job to stick around babysitting me,” I said in a sour voice.
“I’m your mother. That’s actually exactly what my job is.” Tara sat next to me and picked my hand up in hers. “What happened, Jills?”
“Just a bad reaction to some medications.” I purposefully left out the fight with Liam and the tequila shots and the general sense of hopelessness weighting me down even now.
“You should come home. Your father will call the school and set it up. You can transfer to San Diego. It’s only ten minutes—”