But it was what was beside that, that gave me pause.
More than a dozen, probably more than two dozen, hairs lay on a dark washcloth. They were laid out, neatly in a row, and when I picked them up between two fingers, it was enough to pinch and not have my fingers actually touching one another. I could make out the almost-clear bulbs on the ends. These weren’t from shedding. They were from pulling.
I thought of all the times I’d seen her pulling on her hair—in the car, in the hotel room, even in the park.
“Lotte, what’s this?”
She didn’t answer me at first, so I turned around, facing the shower curtain. “Lotte. There are a few dozen hairs—hairs that belong to you—on the counter.”
She still didn’t answer immediately, but the water shut off and I listened as the remaining drops slid down the drain.
The white towel that hung over the shower rod disappeared on the other side and seconds later, she pulled the curtain back and faced me.
She looked a little different, that’s what I noticed first. Had she been crying? A punch rapped my stomach at the thought of her crying alone in the shower.
“Well?” she asked. Her voice didn’t sound quite right.
I held up the hairs. “What’s this?”
“My hair.” She wrapped the towel tighter, and I imagined it as an armor for her.
“I know that. I’m asking why. Did you pull it out?”
“Don’t you see me? I mean, really see me?” She took a step out of the shower and swatted me away when I tried to help her. She braced a hand on the wall and her hand flew over her face. “Take a good look.”
I didn’t know what she was going on about. But I could see her favoring her leg, and I wanted to help her until her boot was secured. “Come here, Lotte. Let me dry you off.”
“No!” she yelled, and that time her voice cracked. “Look at how ugly I am, Sam. This is who I am.” She ran her hand over the skin above her eyes. “I’ve lost almost all of my eyebrows. And my eyelashes, too.” Her eyes were glistening, her bottom lip trembling. Now that she’d pointed it out, I did see how patchy her eyebrows were. And I understood that her eyes looked swollen because she was missing her eyelashes.
She took a step toward me, and it was wobbly enough that I reached out and cupped her shoulder. She tried to wrench away from me, but I placed my hand on her other shoulder, holding her still.
“Let me help you,” I said, not understanding what she was trying to tell me. I let go of the hair I still held, and Lotte watched as the pieces floated to the floor. “Let’s get your boot on, and then we can talk this through. Okay?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. This is what I look like, Sam. When the fake lashes are off, when the eyebrow pencil is washed away. This is me.” Her voice trembled right along with her jaw, and I knew she was holding herself up, trying to keep from crying. She could barely look me in the eyes.
I was pretty sure I was watching her heart break on the hotel bathroom floor, because I was positive the pieces of mine mixed with hers.
“Why?” I asked, needing to understand what she was saying, and why she was telling me, too.
“I’ve been doing it since I was little, but it’s gotten worse since my mum and Mal died.” She was looking at the floor, and I knew what she was telling me was something big, something she’d been holding onto a long time. She couldn’t lift her face, not even an inch. “It’s gotten so much worse.” Her voice was hoarse, splintered with hurt.
A drop hit my foot and that’s when I noticed the stream of tears on her cheeks.
“Hey.” I lifted her chin, up and up, until she was facing me. But her eyes closed and her mouth went in a wobbly line. “I’m so sorry, Lotte.” I wiped at her cheeks and she squeezed her eyes tight.
“I’m so ashamed. This is how you’re seeing me. Hairless.” Her throat bobbed with a swallow. “Ugly.”
“You’re not ugly. God, Lotte. You can’t believe the things you’re saying.” I wanted her to open her eyes. I’d say anything to get her to look at me, to see the truth in what I said.
“I do.” She rubbed her lips together. “I’ve pulled out all the things that made me pretty. It’s a miracle I still have hair on my head.”
Her fingers were in fists, and I sensed she was resisting pulling now. “You’re not ugly. You are more than this flesh. More than this hair. I don’t look at you and think of your hair.” I tucked her soaking wet hair behind her ears, mentally willing her to open her eyes. “When I look at you, I see your creamy, milk-white skin. Your bottomless blue eyes. I see your grace, your kindness, your humility. I see you. Why don’t you?”
Her eyes opened a little.
“There you are. Look how beautiful you are, Lotte.” Her eyes were shimmering with tears, the blue dark and deep.
“I’m not Della,” she said, emitting a hiccup.
I frowned. “Della? No, you’re not. Thank fuck.” I rubbed my thumbs under her eyes, encouraging her to open them a bit more.
“Della is beautiful.”
“You are beautiful.” I didn’t want to talk about Della, at all.
“I know she’s messaging you.” She tried to pull herself from my hold. “I saw it. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I looked at it in the car, while it was in my lap.”
“She’s nothing to me, Lotte. I swear to you. I want her out of my life. Forever.” I couldn’t put enough feeling into my voice to express just how vehement I was about ridding Della from my phone, from my life. It was my fault Lotte had seen that text. My fucking fault that Lotte saw my moment of weakness, when I’d blown up on Della. It was my fault Della had blabbed to Ames.
I wanted to punch myself in the face. What a dumb fuck I was.
“If she’s nothing, why does she message you? Why do you still see her?”
“I don’t see her.”
“Don’t lie to me, Sam. The day I fractured my leg, Ames told me that you were hanging around her again.” I hated how betrayed she sounded when she said that to me.
I couldn’t hold her as gently as I was, when I was internally at war with myself. This was my doing. I couldn’t stay away from the one person who caused me so many problems. Not because I wanted her—far from it. I wanted the ease of access to pills, knowing I wouldn’t have to shame myself in front of anyone else. It was a million times easier to be ashamed in front of someone you didn’t actually care about.
“You’re right. I lied. But it’s not what you think.”
She made a sound like a sigh and scoff and tried to free herself from my hold. “Is that so?” she asked. “Please let me go.” She said that so softly, with so much resignation, that I actually felt her slipping from my grasp.
“I don’t want to let you go.”
“I don’t want to be second. I won’t be second—especially not to her. She’s beautiful and she has some kind of power over you that I’ll never, ever have. And,” she pumped a fist by her waist, “I want to have some kind of power, Sam.” She met my eyes briefly. “I’m ashamed of it, but I do. I want to be the person you keep coming after. You have power over me, and I have nothing. I want to be enough. You’re perfect, and I’m not.”
“You think I’m fucking perfect? I’m not. Jesus, I’m so imperfect that if you knew, you would run so fast out of here that I couldn’t catch you.”
“What’s to stop me now?” A tear slid down her cheek, catching in the corner of her mouth.
This was going to hell, and fast. I had no choice, even though the thought of coming clean to her made me want to pummel my own face; I had to tell her the truth.
“Fuck,” I said, shoving my hands in my hair. I hated that I had to do this. She’d seen me unblemished, and I was about to fuck all of it up.
The thought of losing her if I didn’t tell her was the only reason I did. Even though telling her could spell the same fate.
“Della supplies pills for me.”
Lotte just blinked at me.
I stepped outside of the bathroom,
dug into my bag and produced the bottle of pills she’d given me. I held them up, shaking them so they rattled in their plastic cage. “These are painkillers. I have been taking them for years now.”
She looked confused and held her hand out for the bottle. Reluctantly, I handed it over, feeling like I was cutting myself off at the knees for this. She was the only person—besides the witch herself—who knew my secret. And in handing her the bottle, she was one of the only people that I worried would walk away from me for this.
“These aren’t prescription?”
“They’re not my prescription. I had a script once, but the doctors cut me off when I didn’t really need them anymore. I buy these from Della.”
“I have these.” She looked at the shelf by the toilet and back at me.
I swallowed. “I know. I…” Fuck. I shoved my hands in my hair, trying to anchor my thoughts so that I’d be able to say something clear. But the truth was muddy, and she deserved to hear it. “I almost stole them.”
“Almost?”
“I went so far as to pour some into my palm, but at the last second, I put them back.”
She walked over to the shelf, picked up the pill bottle.
“You can count them if you don’t believe me.”
Her head shot up, her eyes wide with shock. “I believe you. I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of these.”
I let go of a breath. “You don’t need to do that.”
“Why? Why do you need them?” She looked so small, so young. For the fifteenth time today, I hated myself. Not just for my weakness, but for exposing Lotte to it.
“I hate thinking I need them—because I don’t. But, at the same time, I do. Because I’m addicted.” I swallowed and sweat prickled my brow. “Della hit me—like I told you—but it wasn’t just my foot she injured. She was pissed when she hit me. I landed, shoulder first, on the windshield. This isn’t an excuse,” I told her, hating that she was several feet from me, staring between me and the bottle as she listened to me. “But after the accident, my shoulder ached all the time. I couldn’t even lift my arm to draw, to paint. I was limited from doing the one fucking thing I loved, and it wasn’t until I took the first pill that I was numbed enough to lift a pencil again. Not long after, it seemed like I couldn’t function without them.”
“You’re still addicted to them.”
“I am.” I was so full of shame that it must have been leaking from my pores as I bared myself to Lotte. “The only reason I ever see her is to get more. I’ve been trying to cut back on them, but it’s fucking hard, and I’m bloody weak.” The last bit came out hoarse. I’d admitted my faults to myself years before, but to reveal them to her was undoing me.
“That’s what I saw you take this morning, in the tent?”
I nodded. “I have been taking one, but this morning a second one spilled into my palm, and I took them both. I know, I’m fucking stupid. I drove on them. Again, this isn’t an excuse, but popping them is like popping ibuprofen now. It has such a small effect.”
“But you can’t stop, anyway.”
“I should be able to.” I heaved a breath, wishing I was across the room, in her arms. She’d kept her face neutral the entire time, which was a feat for her. Her feelings had always been so plainly on her face, I’d always seen her feelings before she’d revealed them to me. “I hate Della, Lotte. I’m ashamed that someone I hate has such a hold over me, but it’s not because I miss her or want to be with her. I’m tied to her because I’m weak.”
“You called me her name once.”
You could’ve heard a pin drop in the silence that immediately followed her saying that. I’d held this secret for years, and now was as good as any to be honest about that, too. “I know.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You know?”
I took in a deep breath. I felt like everything was falling apart around me in this little bathroom, but Lotte deserved more than lies—lies were for Della. “The night I kissed you. The night, well, when your sister died. I called you by her name.”
Finally, Lotte’s face showed something other than placidity. Her mouth opened, formed an O.
“I’ve been lying to you ever since then.”
“You knew it was me, when you kissed me?” she asked. Her voice was barely above the sound of a whisper.
“I knew.”
“Why’d you call me her name then? You know that you broke my heart, hours before that night became the worst night of my life?”
The hurt in her eyes was echoed in me. “I worried I had, but after Mal passed away, there just wasn’t a good time to mention it.” I was burning up standing in front of her, exposing myself for who I really was. I wanted to hold her, some kind of physical connection, but I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to her.
“Why’d you call me Della, Sam?” she asked again.
“I was drunk and high out of my mind that night, Lotte. I couldn’t feel any of the pain I should’ve rightly felt. I was numbed to it all. Until I kissed you. I took advantage of you.”
“No, you didn’t. I knew who I was kissing. I was lucid.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t. That wasn’t fair to you. I was high, Lotte. I wasn’t right, and it wasn’t right for me to kiss you. I wanted to keep on kissing you. I didn’t want to stop.”
“So, you called me Della?”
“Coward’s way of pushing you away. I won’t apologize for pushing you away, but I do apologize for the way I did it. I wanted to keep kissing you. I truly did. But you deserved someone who wasn’t high, drunk, and an addict, to kiss you.”
She nodded slowly, looking down at the ground. “So, all this time, these last few years, you knew. You remembered kissing me.”
“God, yes. And it was all I thought about for far too long. I tried to stay away from you, keep you at arm’s length. But then the night at your farewell party happened, and once again I acted like a total wanker. You’re pure, and I’m tainted. You’re Ames’ sister and I’m his best mate.”
“I’m not pure, Sam.” She ran her fingers over her eyebrows, over her eyelids.
It pained me that she saw herself as flawed, because that wasn’t at all how I saw her. Even after admitting her own problems, all I saw was her—the woman I’d thought of for the last few years. “You are.”
The tears that had filmed over her eyes were dry, now, but there was still visible pain in them. “I’m not. You can’t put me on a pedestal I don’t belong on. You’re looking at me, the real me. You have your demons; I have mine. I just wear mine on my skin.”
I wanted to rip the words from her mouth, to throw them in the rubbish bin. “You’re not the girl you think you see, Lotte.”
“Maybe you’re not looking at me the way you should.”
“All I’ve done is look at you, for the last three years.” Admitting that was like unloading a weight strapped to my chest. “You’re the one I look for in a room, before anyone else. I tried not to, but like I said before, I’m weak.”
She stood before me, still in the towel, looking me clear in the eyes. There was complete transparency between us now. She knew my secret, she knew more than anyone else in the entire world.
And still, she stepped toward me. One step, then another, and then a third until she was standing in front of me. She placed her hands on my chest and moved up slowly, until her fingers laced behind my neck.
“You’re not running,” I said, frozen with disbelief.
“There’s nothing for me to run from.” She tilted her head, looked at me with the eyes that cut me right in the gut, and asked, “Where do we go from here?”
I ached to touch her, to wrap my arms around her and pretend that the rest of the world didn’t matter for a little while longer. “I don’t know,” I told her. I didn’t. I didn’t know what she was doing, what she was feeling.
She stepped closer until she pressed against me. “Let’s not go anywhere then. Let’s stay right here.”
It was all I wanted in the world.
I circled my arms around her and released a deep breath. “I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
But we’d have to.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I didn’t know I could love anyone as much as I loved Sam, but when he stood before me in the bathroom and bared his soul to me, I knew that there wasn’t anyone who could come close to having the same space in my chest. He was everywhere—the spot I’d reserved for him hadn’t been enough.
He knew my secret, and I knew his. As I tried to put my lashes on, he’d stopped me without a word, spinning me into him and out of the bathroom. He helped me get dressed and slide the boot back on in the same way he did everything else, with so much care and tenderness that it was virtually impossible for me keep the love I held from him a secret. ‘I love you’ lived on the tip of my tongue and I bit it back every time. I was still afraid. It was still a secret that was only safe for whispers. And he was the only one who could touch me where it hurt the most.
So much had changed between us, had deepened and grown and become more than I actually thought possible. I knew he couldn’t feel for me the way I felt for him, and withholding it from him was the last bit of safety net I had left.
In the last few days, I’d learned that secrets could be loud, yelled in anger. They could be soft, whispered along someone’s skin as they slept. But the secrets that stayed silent, that were far too fragile to ever pass my lips: those secrets weren’t disposable. And Sam had taken the one I’d never shared and protected it.
We ordered room service and ate chicken tenders and chips in bed while we flipped through television shows until we found a movie that we could settle on. It was so normal, so natural. And I felt so calm, but at the same time, I wanted to discuss the things we’d spoken of in the bathroom; I wanted to know more.
“How many pills do you have left?”
His hand in mine tightened briefly, but I rubbed my thumb along his skin. “Not very many. Maybe five or six.”
“How many did you used to take, before you started slowing down?”
“Too many. It didn’t matter the number, because it was never enough.”
The Sounds of Secrets Page 21