by J. Sterling
“I wish it made me not like him,” I whispered at the passenger window, but Britney heard me.
“Come again?”
“I still like him. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pissed and I’m hurt, but I still like him. And I hate myself for it. Why can’t I hate him?”
“Because our hearts don’t work like that. Our heads do, but our hearts are never on board with our heads. That’s why they’re always at war, and we’re always torn between the two.”
Isn’t that the damn truth. Life would be so much easier if our heads and our hearts were on the same page, but they so rarely were.
“I’ll get it together. I’ll be fine eventually,” I said, not knowing who I was trying to convince, myself or Britney.
“I know you will. But it’s okay to feel everything you’re feeling. It just happened. And I still think there’s no way he goes another twenty-four hours without contacting you.”
I pursed my lips and kept quiet. My heart wanted to believe Britney, but I couldn’t let myself go there. Believing in things that ended up not happening would only hurt me, and I was hurting enough already.
When we walked through the doors at work, I was thankful for the reprieve of thinking about Frank. Pushing aside my emotions, I settled into my office and pulled up my calendar for the day. I planned to keep myself far too busy over the next several hours to even think about him, what he’d done, or the fact that he wasn’t trying to contact me.
Briefly, I considered turning off my phone again like I’d apparently done the night before, but decided against it. My willpower wasn’t strong enough to go quite that far. The moment Frank did contact me, if ever, I wanted to know about it.
I hated that he hadn’t reached out.
I hated that the hours continued to tick by without a single word from him.
And I definitely hated that I cared so much and couldn’t stop checking my damn phone.
• • •
Hours turned into days, then a week, and it became clear that Frank had done the unthinkable. He’d ghosted me, disappeared without a trace.
Of course, I knew exactly where to find him, but I couldn’t bring myself to face him if he didn’t want to talk to me. Britney had tried to convince me to show up at the bar and demand an explanation, to put him on the spot and make him uncomfortable, but I couldn’t do it.
Forcing Frank to be uncomfortable meant making myself uncomfortable as well. I cared about him so much that any pain I might inflict upon him would cause the same pain in me.
Why the hell would I want to do that?
And what if the answers I demanded from him weren’t the ones I wanted to hear? What if he said that I was a mistake, or that he had no feelings for me? I wasn’t ready to hear any of that. As weak and pathetic as it sounded, I simply wasn’t ready, even though I knew I should be. My pride was wounded, my ego sulking.
“Stop wallowing,” Britney said one night as we binge-watched a television series everyone had been talking about.
“I’m not wallowing,” I insisted, but it was a lie. “Ah, hell. I am wallowing.”
“I know. It’s annoying. And completely unlike you.” She kicked her feet on top of the coffee table and settled deeper into our couch.
“I don’t know where my anger went. I was so pissed, but it was short lived. Now I’m just so sad. And a little pissed off when I start thinking about it all, but I’ve gotten pretty good at compartmentalizing.”
And I had. I didn’t realize how good I could be at tucking Frank into a corner of my mind and locking him there. I still thought about him every single day, though, and it still hurt that he hadn’t tried to talk to me. But the second the pain started to kick in, I turned it off and went about my business. I convinced myself that I was fine, moving on, and didn’t need Frank Fisher in my life.
Britney shook her head. “You shut it off, all right, but it still affects your emotions. You wouldn’t be wallowing if you were as fine as you acted.”
“I miss him. And it’s stupid, I know. I shouldn’t miss him. I should be plotting his demise and wishing his dick would fall off.”
“Yes, you should be. I hope it falls off in small pieces and takes a really, really long time.” Britney gave me a wicked grin, and I laughed.
“You’re evil.” I tossed one of our small throw pillows at her but she blocked it, knocking it onto the floor.
“Yup.”
“I can’t believe he’s never called. I wouldn’t have thought that he would be like that, you know? He seemed like such a together guy. And mature, a real man. The way he’s acting now, though, is cowardly. And what the heck?” My blood pounded in my ears as my irritation rose. “I am not attracted to cowards.”
When I thought about Frank in that way, disgust multiplied inside me like a virus, poisoning everything in its path. Frank didn’t deserve my thoughts to be only of him as the kind of man I wanted him to be when he was proving to be anything but.
“He is a coward,” Britney said. “And a jerk. It almost feels wrong to describe him that way, but his actions say everything. Or his lack of actions, anyway.”
Something deep inside me that felt a lot like self-respect stirred to life.
“You know what? I deserve an explanation.” I sat up straighter on the couch as a door in the back of my mind flew wide open, allowing new realizations to pour out of it. “I’ve made this so easy on him by going away. He hasn’t had to deal with me, or what he did to me, at all.”
Maybe my emotions did have a switch, after all. It might not have been the on-off kind, but there was definitely now an array of feelings to choose from. One simply replaced the other in the space of a heartbeat.
Britney turned toward me, narrowing her eyes. “Nope. You’ve let him sweep it under the rug like you never happened. Like you didn’t even exist. He’s had absolutely no consequences for his actions.”
I bristled at that comment, but she was right. In all my self-imposed pity, anger, embarrassment, and sadness, I’d left Frank alone, thinking I was doing myself a favor, but I wasn’t. Not having any answers made the situation even harder on me. I’d willingly walked away as my pride hoped he’d chase me, and my heart silently cried out, begging to be healed.
My staying in the background had given him an easy out, and that wasn’t fair to me. I deserved so much more.
Abruptly, I stood up. “All that ends today.”
“Today?” she asked, leaning forward and plucking the pillow from the floor.
“Yeah. Right now.”
I reached for my phone to send Frank a text. It was time to start the conversation I’d been so clearly avoiding.
Silent Treatment
Frank
The past seven days had been absolute torture. Between the weight of my guilt, which only multiplied by a thousand tons after the night Shelby arrived at the bar, and Claudia not responding to my texts or voice mails, I was a fucking wreck.
All I wanted to do was explain things to Claudia. I needed her to understand the situation I was in, and how sorry I was for involving her in it. It was wrong of me, I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself when it came to her. Everything I felt for her was genuine, and she was probably sitting at home thinking it was all some sort of game for me, or a lie. It killed me to think about the suspicions that might be going through her head when I knew they weren’t true.
I needed to tell her everything, but I couldn’t tell her anything at all because she refused to talk to me.
I didn’t blame her, but I didn’t want to give up. I just didn’t know what the hell else to do.
“You look like shit,” Nick said when he walked through the office door. I had been sitting there with my head in my hands, staring at the same inventory sheet for the last forty-five minutes.
“I know.”
“Frank, this isn’t you.”
“Which part?” Honestly, I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore. When had things gotten so far gone that I failed to recognize who I w
as supposed to be?
“When you heard about everything that was going on in my life, you told me to man up. You were pissed for me, pissed at me. You wanted me to take control of my situation and stand up for myself.” Nick’s voice rose, and I suspected he was getting emotional at the memory of his not-so-distant past.
“What’s your point?” I demanded, but my tone sounded more defeated than anything.
He walked around the desk and clapped a hand on my shoulder, giving it a hard squeeze. “I’ve got to give you the same advice, bro. You need to stand the fuck up for yourself. You can’t keep living like this. Do you really want to spend the rest of your life miserable and unhappy? Why? Who benefits from that? I promise you that everyone will be better off—and I do mean everyone—if you would just end things with Shelby. I know it’s not easy. But sometimes you have to make the unpopular decision and do the hard thing because you’re the only one who will.”
I wanted to shout that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, wanted to grab his hand and throw it the fuck off my shoulder. But I didn’t do either of those things.
Because he was right; my baby brother couldn’t have been more right. And I was only pissed off at him for it because I was mad at myself. I had let things go too far and for too long, and I had no one to blame but myself.
I had done this. I had created the life I was currently living, and it was up to me to either get out of it once and for all, or to shut the fuck up and be happy. The decision was the easy part. It was the follow-through that was painfully difficult.
Defeated, I dropped my head in my hands and mumbled, “You’re right.”
“I know. Can I ask you one more question without you wanting to kill me?”
“Depends,” I said cautiously, glancing up at him.
Nick dropped his hand and leaned against the edge of my desk. “On what exactly?”
“Just ask already,” I said on a huff, and he cleared his throat
“Have you called Claudia?”
My stomach dropped at the sound of her name. “Only about a hundred times.”
“And?”
“She doesn’t answer.”
“Try texting?”
“Try texting.” I mimicked him like I was some idiot who didn’t know how to get in touch with a woman. “Obviously. She’s not responding to those either.”
“Go to her house then,” he said with a shrug.
“I don’t know where she lives. And I can’t pull that kind of shit while I’m still not available.”
He nodded. “True. No grand gestures until you’re single,” he said with a grin. “But when that time comes, make sure you ask me what to do, because apparently I’m pretty good at them. I got my girl back.”
His tone was cocky and annoying, and his shit-eating grin made me want to hit him or hug him. I wasn’t sure which.
“Get out of my office,” I growled before staring at my phone, wondering what the hell else I could do to get Claudia to talk to me before I completely fell apart.
I dialed her number one last time and waited.
Messages and Confessions
Claudia
I pulled up Frank’s contact in my cell phone as I prepared to send him a well-worded, albeit pissed-off, text message. As I wrote it, the words flew from my fingertips like magic, but then a notice popped up when I hit Send.
“You didn’t even let me see what you wrote before sending it,” Britney complained as I stared at my phone in confusion. “You should always get approval first.”
My cell phone informed me that in order to send the text message, I needed to unblock Frank’s contact. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the small circle with a line through it next to his name, and my throat instantly thickened.
“Britney,” I choked out, hardly able to speak through my surprise and confusion.
“What? What’s wrong with you?” She leaned closer so she could see what I was staring at.
“His number’s blocked.”
Her jaw dropped. “What? When did you block him?”
My head spun, my thoughts swimming around before drowning. “Did you block it?”
“Me?” she sputtered. “Why the heck would I block his phone number? Give it to me.” She grabbed the phone from my hand and stared at it. “Crap. It’s definitely blocked.”
Duh. I searched my memory, trying to remember when I could have possibly blocked him. I couldn’t remember doing it, the same way I hadn’t remembered shutting my phone completely off that first night. Maybe I’d done it then in some sort of angry, sad, sleep-deprived haze?
Then it hit me. I had blocked him quickly in the moments after I left the bar, but once I was in my car, I’d unblocked him just as fast.
“Oh my God, I did it. I blocked him, but I thought I undid it right afterward. I must not have.” I shook my head in disbelief. “He’s been blocked this whole time.”
“You know what this means, right?” Britney tossed my phone back and I glanced at his name, noticing that she had unblocked him.
“That if he has tried to reach me, I’d never know it,” I said.
When you block a contact, all their text messages are sent into a void in the universe, never to be delivered or read. Their phone calls never get through either. But someone could leave you a voice mail, and although you’d never be notified that one was left, it still existed on the server and could be accessed.
I frantically dialed my voice mail, putting my cell on speaker so Britney could hear the messages, if any even existed. Sending up a silent prayer to the relationship gods that there would be at least one message from Frank, I waited. After everything he’d done, I still held out hope. I still wanted Frank to care that he had hurt me, and I still wanted him to want to fix things between us, or at least explain just what the hell he was thinking.
What kind of person does that make me?
“You have eight new messages,” the robotic voice finally said, and I did nothing to hide my shock as my jaw dropped.
“Eight!” Britney shouted as the first message started to play.
“Claudia,” Frank said as a breath escaped into the phone. “I’m so sorry. It’s not what it looks like. Well, it is, but there’s more to it than that. It’s complicated. My situation is just really complicated. Fuck. This isn’t coming out right at all. Please, please, call me back. I know you probably hate me and never want to see me again, but please give me a chance to explain. I really am sorry.”
I looked at Britney as she covered her mouth with her hand, waiting in silence as I pressed Save on the message and the next one played.
“Claudia.” When he said my name again, my entire body chilled. He said nothing more for a moment, and I almost thought he’d hung up until he spoke again. “There’s so much I need to tell you. Please call me back.”
Saving that message as well, I let the next one play as Britney and I both stared wide-eyed at the device in my hand like it was magic.
“Your silence is killing me.” He took an audible breath and I waited, holding mine. “And I get it, I do. I just really want to talk to you. Can you at least text me back if you don’t want to call?”
Everything shifted inside me as I listened to the messages. Frank sounded so desperate, so sad. Normally, that would have turned me off, but when it came to him, I was anything but.
It hurt me to hear him pleading with me in this way, regardless of whether he deserved my pity. My heartbeat quickened with his words, taking pleasure in the fact that he wanted to talk to me, wanted to explain things.
God, this entire time I’d thought he hadn’t tried to get in touch with me at all. I’d been so angry that he could walk away from me and treat me with such blatant disrespect and disregard.
But I’d been wrong. He’d been trying to reach out the whole time.
“So he has been texting you,” Britney said, her words mirroring my thoughts.
“Guess so.” I wished I had the ability to pull those texts
from the void and bring them back to me. I really wanted to know what they said.
“Play the next one. I’m dying to hear the rest,” she insisted.
“I don’t know how else to reach you. I don’t know what else to do.”
That one was short, almost abrupt in its desperation, then the next message played.
“Claudia, I know that you must be hurting and angry, and you’re probably disgusted with me. I deserve all of that, but I never meant to hurt you. If you don’t believe anything else I say, please believe that.”
Pressing Save again, I held my breath as I waited for the next one to begin.
“It’s stupid, but I miss you.” His tone was so sincere that my eyes immediately filled with tears. I believed him.
“I miss the way your accent would come out whenever you got all riled up or excited about something. I miss our conversations and the way just being with you made me feel more alive than I’ve felt in years.” I could hear the smile in his voice, and felt myself smiling along with him. I missed him too.
“I know I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but if you’re not going to call me back, then I need to tell you these things here, on your voice mail, because they need to be said and you need to hear them. I know you hate cheating and cheaters, and you probably think I’m no better than your dad.” Frank sucked in a breath as if saying the words caused him physical pain, and I felt my heart catch.
“And maybe I’m not, but I’d like to think that I am. I’d like to think that if you knew everything about my situation, you might not hate me as much as you do right now. Maybe you’d . . .” He paused for three heartbeats before ending the message with, “Maybe you’d understand and actually be able to forgive me.”
He sounded so choked up at the end, it almost broke me to hear him lose it.