I never said I was ready for this.
I never said I wanted this.
“I can’t do that,” I tell him, drawing the line.
Dinner? Fine. Being seen in public together? Okay. This? Absolutely not.
“Oh, you can,” he says. “And you will.”
“Or what?” I ask, challenging him. My face is as serious as my question and my hesitation.
“Or I’ll throw you over my shoulder and carry you to that stage myself,” he says, just as seriously.
And the unfortunate part is I know he isn’t joking. He really would do that shit.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. “I don’t want to do this.”
“Because I believe in you. And I want to hear every sad word even if it hurts me, if it means you’ll finally open yourself up to the world.”
I shake my head, frightened tears threatening to spill.
“Come on, Kitty. You can’t hide forever,” he says. “Now, are we walking in calmly, or am I carrying you?”
When I don’t respond, he moves to pick me up.
“Okay! Okay. We’re walking,” I say, reluctantly.
As we reach the outside patio, there’s a string of white lights stretching from the back of the building to the front. There’s a long dock nearby leading out to the water, with an even longer section of the beach in close range. I see people walking along the water’s edge, sitting on the sand. Couples star gazing and enjoying the summer moon.
Someone is on the mic, reading a piece they’ve written. Performing, really. It’s theatrical, impressive, and very…beyond whatever skill level I may have achieved, if you can even call it that.
There’s a signup sheet in the far corner that Joey damn near pulls me to. I stand in front of it, staring, and he interrupts my daze by handing me the pen.
My hand is shaking as I write my name on the list, and then it’s fumbling through my crossover body bag to find my phone as I follow Joey to the small crowd.
There are tables on the patio, filled with patrons and other poets, I imagine. Knowing I’m in the presence of other writers, about to read my work aloud, gives me a certain sense of discomfort and fear that I’ve never known.
Please tell me I have a decent poem saved in my notes in here to read.
I am frantic and scrolling, reading over my words that now seem so juvenile, so cliché.
I don’t know if I’ve been searching for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, when my name is called on the mic.
I hardly have time to make a quick decision as I pull up the one haphazardly labeled “Beach” in my phone. And I just pray it’s decent, or relevant, or god, just not that fucking horrible and embarrassing.
Joey is clapping loudly, and whistling, as I make my way to the mic.
I step toward it, trying not to trip over myself, probably looking like a nervous idiot already. “Hi,” I mumble into the mic, lowering it so it reaches me. “Um, I’m Kitty Bordeau. The piece I’m about to read for you is called The Beach. I hope you enjoy it.”
I bring my phone to chest-level and then, I don’t think. I don’t have time to. I just read.
“I wrote about you through the pain, through the loss, through everything you left behind in me.
I breathed you in through every memory, felt you in every heart palpitation left in your absence.
I never wanted your phantom hands to stop touching me, in every way, on every day.
At some point, they did.
The memories became dreams I almost couldn’t remember.
Some things were always better left unsaid.
‘I miss you’ was one of them. Wasn’t it?
But it still lingers on my tongue, with every other unspoken word in my mouth meant for you.
I swallow them on the good days, choke on them on the bad.
Your razor smile doesn’t go down so easily anymore.
It’s a struggle, a scene, a laceration that doesn’t quite stick.
Yet somehow, one I can’t seem to heal from.
The wounds become wonders and you, the assailant, the surgeon, the savior.
Somewhere, you are still on a beach, waiting for me.
And I am waving hello or goodbye, I can’t quite tell which anymore.”
As I finish and look up, I see a woman’s figure on the beach nearby, a short distance from the bar. Is that Sophie? I squint to see her better, but with the dim lights, I can’t tell. I can just barely make out a male figure hovering close enough to her that they might be together.
But it can’t be Sophie. If she was seeing someone, I’d know. She would have told me.
I realize I’m stalling my exit, so I put my phone down and look back up at the crowd, muttering a “Thank you” into the mic before rushing off the stage, where Joey scoops me up in his arms.
16
JULY 27, 9:49PM
“You did amazing, Kitty,” I tell her, holding tightly onto her once I finish swinging her around. “I’m so proud of you.”
I set her down and hold her a few paces back from me, so I can really look at her. I’m studying her face, her posture, her aura…
And she interrupts me and says, “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m just trying to see if you look different with all that brave all over you,” I say.
She smacks my arm and it doesn’t hurt at all. “Shut up!” she whines. “I hate you for making me do that, you know.”
“Do you now?” I ask.
She’s always been a shit liar.
“I do,” she insists, but the gleam in her eye says otherwise.
“Uh huh. Well, the crowd didn’t hate it.”
She smirks and tilts her head in mock adoration. “Oh, stop. You flatter me.”
I slide all jokes aside and look at her. “I’m serious. It was really good. I think you should do this kind of thing again.”
“You’re biased because you like me,” she says, avoiding the serious bit in conversation like she usually does when it pertains to her.
I grab her by the belt loop in her jeans and pull her closer to me. “First of all, I don’t like you, I love you. Second of all, the spotlight looks good on you. I think that’s where you should be, and I think I can share you with the rest of the world. You and those beautiful words.”
She smells like flowers and shampoo and I feel like holding her this close to me forever. As I finally exhale, she wraps her arms around my neck.
“Sorry to break the spell, kid, but I’ve read an awful lot, and my words aren’t that beautiful,” she says solemnly. “They were just typed on a whim after a dream. They weren’t even meant to see the light of day.”
I shake my head and let out a disgruntled sigh. “It kills me that you don’t know how special you are,” I tell her.
She smiles at me but it’s full of sadness, her eyes full of self-doubt and self-consciousness. “No one’s special, Joey. They just think they are. That’s the trick.”
“What is?” I ask, confused.
“Once you start thinking you’re special, that you’re really someone, you lose any magic you may have had. You become just another person thinking they’ve earned something. That you’re entitled to whatever good happens to you.” She pauses. “I never want to be one of those people. So please, for my own sake, don’t ever try to convince me I’m special again.”
Judging by her somber tone, I decide not to argue with her on this one. Only she has no idea that viewing the world in this way makes her that much more impressive in my eyes.
“Fine, Kitty. You’re not special. You’re regular. So fucking regular,” I say.
Then I grab her and pull her toward me and kiss her, so she can feel how much she means to me. And right now, I don’t give a damn who’s here. I don’t care who sees, if they tell her sisters, if they think we’re together or back together or if she’s smack dab in the middle of a new mistake with me.
I just kiss her.
For as long as she lets
me.
17
JULY 28, 10:18AM
Depression is a great white shark.
It feeds. It feeds.
Depression is a vicious host.
It needs. It needs.
Depression is a stark white room.
I clean. I clean.
I’m tidying up the bookstore when I stumble upon a book by one of my favorite authors, Kat Savage. I pick it up, opening to a randomly selected page.
I read a few passages and my heart fills when I stop on one in particular.
“I start to think about all the people who have disappeared from my life. Sometimes with a goodbye, sometimes under a cloak of darkness, and sometimes without even looking in the rearview at what they left behind. I’ve been destroyed by too many goodbyes with no one nearby to build me back up. People don’t stay. We are nomadic at our cores.”
I dog-ear it for the next reader, then close it and put it back on the shelf.
These words, I think. These words are beautiful.
Mine could never compare.
Comparison is a plague, I know. My sisters have told me so. But I can’t help it. The authors I admire, the ones I respect, I don’t know where their talent stems from. How it flows from them so naturally. They make pain and beauty feel effortless.
I can’t help but envy it.
Even when I convince myself it’s a waste of time. Even when I know, deep down, that I’ll never be like any of them.
After the open mic, I felt different things.
Elated.
Proud.
Stupid.
Embarrassed.
Invincible, despite it all.
When I left Joey’s this morning and returned to the watchful and caring eyes of my sisters, I felt something else entirely.
Guilt.
Treachery.
Foolishness.
Lucy was making a cup of tea as I walked through the front door as quietly as I could. She said nothing to me as I made my way upstairs to the bathroom closest to my bedroom. I didn’t give her much choice, hightailing it out of her line of sight before she could ask me where I’d been.
I’d sent the courtesy text the night before, letting her and Sophie know I was okay. But somehow it didn’t feel like enough. In my heart, I know it’s not right. Keeping this from them. Hiding away the truth where they can’t see it. Knowing that I’ve done the exact thing they warned me against. That I’ve let my heart lead me to where my head can’t save me.
I just wanted to wash the feelings of inadequacy away. That annoying burn of remorse and wishing you were never born.
I don’t know why it comes. I never have.
One moment, I can be fine.
The next, I am miles away from fine, searching for a street sign to point me in the right direction.
I never find it.
This is when I often find myself writing. The worthlessness, it grabs ahold of me, rings me by the neck until that’s all I believe in.
I try to scribble it out. I jot words down, trying to appease the little monster. It becomes a show and tell of my worst fears and thoughts, audience of one.
The applause never comes.
The curtain never drops.
No flowers at my feet.
And I am left standing there, alone on the stage, wondering where to go next.
Depression is a greedy thing, a blood-thirsty guest.
And how can you tell someone you love that something is wrong when you can’t pinpoint it yourself?
Instead, you search for the venom. In your veins. In your very core. In the parts of you that you cannot even reach.
And the monster turns around—you can feel him smiling at you, where is he?—and he laughs at you for trying to find him.
He laughs and he laughs, and as you hear the echoes getting farther away, you start over again.
On a brand new day.
In the same place. In the same crawling skin. With the same face.
I’ve always convinced myself it had something to do with my youth. I let my sisters in my head enough times that I think everything will get better with age. That every bad thing will fade in time.
That my immaturity will run out at some point. That just maybe, it might really grow legs and run away from me.
I don’t believe in the tooth fairy but I believe in my sisters, faeries in their own right. Those two little magical beings with wisdom sprouting from their heads. I believe in their words. The things they tell me in effort to make me believe that life will get better, easier, as time goes on.
Sophie is twenty-eight years old now, with some therapy under her belt for her own personal strife and grief. She constantly reminds me that we can overcome these things if we put the effort in. But real effort, not just wishing for it to change and not doing anything about it.
Lucy, twenty-six, says that life has a way of humbling you before kissing you on the mouth. And that every answer she ever needed could be found in a book.
I imagine our mom would have told us that life can be anything we make it.
Our dad probably would have told us to go out there, grab the mold, and break it.
I hardly remember them anymore.
All I have are memories my sisters reminisce over without me, seeing as I was too young to recall them, and photographs I stare at by myself, creating memories of my own.
The illusions are almost as pretty as I imagine our lives were once, before it was all ripped away.
Before the monster came to play.
“Kitty!” Sophie calls out, interrupting my unwelcome spiral. “Get your little ass in here, please? I need your help with this sign.”
“Coming,” I reply. I grab the duster and head toward her voice, recognizing it as the safety it is.
18
AUGUST 1, 7:29PM
It’s been days since I’ve heard from Kitty and I wonder if she’s rethinking this, or if she’s in one of her phases. Where she doesn’t want to talk anyone, see anyone, even me. She has a tendency to slip inside herself occasionally, retreat from those she cares about. She hasn’t shown up here, and she made it clear that I can’t show up at her house.
Correction, I wasn’t supposed to show up at her house.
When we were together, I’d try to pull her out of herself. Sometimes, it worked. Other times, I simply had to wait it out.
Earlier today, when I knew her sisters would likely not be home, I slipped a letter in their mailbox for her. I tried to disguise my handwriting, knowing Lucy would probably tear that shit up before it ever reached Kitty’s hands.
But I had no other choice. Kitty’s been refusing to give me her new number, and still has me blocked on the few social media apps we both have, insisting that we need to take this “slowly” or we run the risk of becoming attached to each other’s hips again.
I disagreed, but went along with it to appease her. Personally, there’s nothing more I’d like than to be attached to her hip. Or another body part of hers that I adore. But if time is what she needs, it’s a small price to pay for the massive fuckups I’ve stacked in the past.
The note was short and to the point.
IOU. Panty shopping tonight. 7:30PM?
She probably figured I’d forget, but the sound of those stockings and her thong tearing is something I doubt will ever leave my mind for good.
I’m sitting here, remembering the way her ass bounced in the air as I entered her from behind, when there’s a knock on my door.
I smile at the old ridiculous tune she still knocks to and yell out for her. “It’s open.”
In she walks, like she owns the place, and she might as well. She still owns me, that’s for damn sure.
“Panty shopping?” she asks with a smile, walking over to where I sit on the couch.
I grab her and hoist her onto my lap, kissing her slowly, madly, before I stop to finally respond. “Yeah. Panty shopping on a Thursday. It’s totally normal. Don’t make it weird.”
She laughs.
“Are they for me or for you?”
“Me, duh. I want something that says…I want you, but not too desperately. Something racy, but sophisticated. After all, I’m not that kind of girl.” I turn my head like I’m whipping hair I don’t have.
“You’re an idiot,” she says, then she grabs my face and brings it back to her and kisses me again.
“You gonna try ‘em on for me?” I ask her when our lips part, reaching my hands around to cup her ass.
“No,” she says, breathing a bit heavier before removing herself from my lap and now growing erection at the thought of her in nothing but underwear. “We better get going before we get distracted.” She eyes my hard dick.
“Oh, this old thing?” I point at my jeans.
She laughs and grabs my hand, pulling me up. “Come on, Joey. Stop trying to seduce me.”
“Why, Kitty?” I whisper into her ear, before kissing her neck and gently nibbling on her earlobe.
She exhales and puts her hands on my arms. “Because it’s gonna work. Now let’s go.” She releases her hold on me and walks toward the door, turning around as her hand touches the knob. “Do you have your keys? Let’s take the bike. It’s beautiful out.”
I grab my backpack, keys, and her helmet and we head outside. I start up the bike and wait for Kitty to situate herself behind me. When she wraps her arms around my waist and squeezes, signaling that she’s ready, I grin.
There’s nothing better than having a beautiful woman on your bike, holding onto you like this. And that woman being the love of your life, well, it’s something every man dreams of. I look up at the clear summer sky, wondering how the fuck I got so lucky, before I swing us around and pull out of the driveway.
When we reach the store, I park the bike and wait for her to hop off. She hangs her helmet on the left foot-peg and I grab her hand as we head inside.
“How fancy you tryin’ to get?” I ask her, eyeing up the lingerie once we make entry.
A blush unfolds on her cheeks and she says, “I’ll make you a deal. You can pick out one thing you want to see me in, but I choose the undies.”
Ruin Me: The Summer of Secrets: Part 1 Page 6