Chocolate

by Mares, Maggie

  “Hey, great show man!”

  “Nice!”

  “Loved your new stuff!”

  “Hey it’s Luke Davies!”

  “Luke!”

  Their praise faded further and further into the background as I maneuvered my way toward the theater door. Just as I pushed out into the cold, I heard one last “Lyssa wait!” from somewhere inside. Not fucking likely, I thought as a biting wind blasted me in the face.

  Once outside, I scrambled into the first cab I saw and gave the driver my address. After the noisy chaos of the concert hall, the quiet solitude of the taxi was practically deafening. Or maybe that was just the ringing in my ears. I couldn’t get the image of what I’d just seen out of my head. Luke and that girl on the couch. Again and again it replayed in my mind. I couldn’t breathe. I felt sick. And I was desperately fighting against the lump in my throat that was threatening to break out in a sob. Not that I was necessarily worried about the cab driver seeing me cry. I mean, he shuffled drunk girls around on a nightly basis. I was sure I wouldn’t have been the first to break down in his backseat. But still, I’d never been the type to lose it in public and I wasn’t going to start now. Unfortunately, I had to hold it together a little longer than I’d planned. The winter wind had finally decided to blow in some snow, which made the roads slick and traffic come to a standstill. A drive that should have only taken five minutes ended up stretching into a fifteen minute crawl up Clark Street.

  When we finally pulled up to my building, a familiar black SUV was double-parked right out front. My stomach dropped. Shit, how did he get up here faster than me? I threw a twenty at the driver and didn’t bother waiting for change. I’d probably regret that in the morning, but right now, I didn’t care.

  Luke was standing at the bottom of my stoop. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said as I brushed past him. I honestly couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather talk to less at the moment.

  “Well that’s too bad because you’re going to.”

  I unlocked the front door and tried to slam it on him but he was too quick and stopped it with his hand. “I swear to god Luke I will pepper spray you!” I threatened.

  “Oh yeah? Go ahead,” he invited.

  I actually didn’t have my pepper spray on me, but I’d be damned if I was going to admit that to him. Instead, I turned and started marching up the stairs. “Go away!” I shouted behind me when I heard him follow me.

  “Not until we talk about this!”

  “I told you I don’t want to talk to you!”

  “And I told you I don’t care!”

  Once inside my apartment, I threw down my coat and purse and whirled around to face him. For the first time, I noticed that he wasn’t wearing a coat, just the t-shirt he’d performed in. He must have left the theater in a hurry to get here.

  A million thoughts raced through my mind as I looked at him. There were so many things that I wanted to yell at him for that I didn’t know where to start. So rather than figure it out, I just said, “Well, you said you wanted to talk, so talk.”

  “I –” he sputtered, clearly caught off guard. Yeah, I bet you thought that I was going to start yelling too, didn’t you? “I’m sorry about what you saw,” he said. “It wasn’t what it looked like.”

  “Really? Because it looked like she was about to shove her tongue down your throat.” I hated how jealous and juvenile I sounded, but I couldn’t help it. “And I swear to god Luke Davies, if you want your balls to stay attached to your body, I had better not hear the words ‘we were on a break’ come out of your mouth.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” he said defensively. “And she wasn’t going to kiss me. I’ve known her for a long time and we’ve never hooked up. We weren’t going to tonight. We were just talking. We’re friends. I’m not going to apologize for having female friends.”

  If I was honest with myself, the scene that I’d walked into tonight hadn’t necessarily been scandalous. They were just talking. But Luke had been so cold toward me lately that I couldn’t be blamed for my reaction to what I saw. It was this justification that prompted me to stubbornly say, “I don’t believe you.”

  I could tell that pissed him off. “Can I get a little credit here?” he asked angrily. “Have I ever given you a reason to not trust me? Have I ever cheated on you?”

  “That’s the thing! I don’t know. I don’t what you do or who you’re with anymore because you never tell me!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said derisively. “Have I not been reporting in to you sufficiently? Have I been failing to ask your permission before I leave my house?”

  I was so outraged, I was literally seeing red. “Don’t you fucking dare turn this around on me! Don’t you dare stand there and pretend that everything’s fine and I’m just being crazy! You’ve been acting distant all week. I’ve barely spoken to you, let alone seen you. Did it even register with you that I left your apartment two days ago? Did you even notice that we haven’t talked since then?” My questions were obviously rhetorical. “Do you want to know how I found out about your concert tonight? It wasn’t because you invited me. I got asked to cover it for work!”

  “I –”

  “– And then I find you backstage with another girl?” I was on a roll and not about to let him interrupt. “I mean, did you think I was going to be fine with that?”

  “I already told you that nothing was going to happen! And I don’t know what’s fine and what’s not. I don’t know how to do this,” he gestured back and forth between us. “Am I supposed to make you a part of every little thing that I do?”

  “Every little thing? No. I don’t want to be a part of every little thing that you do. I have my own life. But the big things? The ‘I’m-debuting-my-new-album-to-a-packed-concert-hall’ things? Yes, you’re supposed to make me a part of that.” My voice started to waiver and I had to look away. A moment passed before I could speak again. Then I said softly, “You wrote those songs about me. I heard them.”

  “I know.”

  We were both quiet for a while. Finally, I asked, “So was any of this real? Or were you just using me to find inspiration for your next album?”

  “Of course it was real.” He sounded hurt. “I can’t believe you would think that it wasn’t.”

  “It just seems like as soon as you got what you wanted out of me, out of us, you shut down. You were just…gone.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then what’s it like?”

  He turned his head away and neither of us said a word. I knew I wasn’t going to get a response out of him, so I just stepped closer and leaned against the wall. Gazing up at him, at his face that, despite everything, was still my favorite face that I’d ever seen, I willed his eyes to meet mine. I wanted to demand that he tell me why he was pushing me away, why he was deliberately acting like such a jackass, but that line of questioning had so far proved fruitless. Plus, I was getting dangerously close to crying. So instead I simply asked, “Luke, what are you doing?”

  His expression was pained when he looked at me. “I don’t know,” he said, and I could tell that he meant it. But that didn’t make it a good enough answer.

  “Well, then I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” I said. “I can’t live like this. I can’t sit around hoping that you’ll get over whatever is going on with you and let me back into your life.” It was so sad to actually admit it, but it was also so true.

  For a split second, I thought I saw a deep sadness spread across his face, but it was immediately replaced by a fiery anger, if it was ever there at all.

  “So that’s it then? You’re just done with this?” He practically spat the words at me.

  “Hey, you checked out of this long before I did,” I accused.

  “Just answer the question Lyssa. Are we done?”

  “I…yeah. We’re done.” I felt like there should have been more to say, but at the same time there just…wasn’t.

  “Fine.” He turned and threw ope
n the door. I heard him storm down the steps and slam the front door behind him before his car sped away.

  His abrupt departure left me reeling. Everything had happened so fast tonight. Like a car accident. I was blindsided. Shock soon gave way to anger and before I knew it, an intense fury crashed into me like a tidal wave. Too bad I had nothing to take it out on except my apartment door. I slammed it shut so hard that it bucked in its frame. If I were a stronger person, I’d have broken it off its hinges for sure.

  The next several minutes were a blur of me throwing shirts and shoes around my room in a rage-fueled rendition of my normal bedtime routine. I couldn’t stand to be in my clothes any longer. The garments that I’d chosen so hopefully only a few hours ago now seemed to be mocking me. My makeup had to go too. The curled lashes and pink cheeks that I saw staring back at me in the mirror only served as a reminder that there was no one here to appreciate them.

  After brushing my teeth vigorously enough to make my gums bleed, I shoved my toothbrush back into its holder so violently that the whole thing toppled over and rolled off the counter. I reveled in the tremendous crash that the hard plastic made as it hit the tile floor.

  Then I stalked over to my bed and ripped back the covers. I was still fuming when my head hit the pillow. But after a few minutes, the anger slowly began to ebb, and I was left with nothing but a sick sense of loss that made me feel empty inside. Curling into a ball in the darkness, I finally stopped fighting the swell of emotions that had been building up over the past week. And although I hated myself for doing so, that night I cried myself to sleep.

  You Could Be Happy

  The next morning, I cracked open my eyes through the dried crust of fallen tears. It took a second for me to remember what had caused them to spill onto my cheeks in the first place. When I did, a wave of sadness seized my chest and made me pull my legs up into the fetal position. I shoved my face into my pillow and groaned. Fuuuuuuck. The bright sun streaming through my bedroom window provided a stark contrast to the dark cloud that seemed to have descended over my head, and all I wanted to do was block out the daylight.

  Too bad my cotton pillowcase couldn’t also block out the memory of last night’s Euripidean-style finale. Instead, the tragic scene played in loops over and over again in my mind. But no matter how many times I relived it, I couldn’t figure out how I’d gone from hearing odes to hearing doors slam within the span of an hour. It just didn’t make any sense.

  Eventually, I gave up trying to divine what he-whose-name-I-would-no-longer-utter could have possibly been thinking and instead turned my attention to my own thoughts. It seemed like the more useful endeavor, since I could not only understand, but actually influence those. The thing was that I wasn’t even all that surprised by what had happened. I’d come to accept that when something seemed too good to be true, it usually was. Especially when it came to relationships.

  I flipped onto my back and started to rationalize with myself. Come on Lyss, this isn’t your first breakup. You know that it sucks at first, but sooner or later you’ll get over it. Wallowing in self-pity isn’t going to make it any better.

  When I was in my early twenties, a no-holds-bar, drop-the-gloves type of explosive breakup like last night’s debacle would have resulted in me spending the whole of the next day in bed, alternating between sobbing and eating double-stuffed Oreos. But as a mature, emotionally-stable woman in my late twenties, I knew that the healthier and more effective route was to get my ass out of bed and go about my day as normally as possible. Sure, in my head I knew this, but that didn’t mean that pulling the covers back and swinging my legs over the side of the mattress wasn’t the most physically taxing thing that I’d done in, like, my entire life.

  Still, I somehow managed to stand up, throw on some spandex, and go for a run. The cold snap that Chicago had been enduring for the last week had finally broken, so it was relatively warm outside, with the midday sun melting away the last of the snow that had accumulated on the sidewalk the night before. With my blood pumping and my endorphins up, I even found the strength to swing by the grocery store to stock up on some much-needed essentials…and also a few non-essentials. Hello Ben & Jerry. Wanna be my new roommates? Whatever, I would not apologize for allowing myself one little cliché.

  Back at home, I put away my groceries and took a shower. I decided to tackle the mess that I’d made in my bedroom and bathroom last night at another time because, after all, I was only human and couldn’t be expected to do that many productive things in one day, whether I was post-breakup or not. Then, unable to think of a better distraction, I flipped open my laptop and dove into some research for an upcoming article that I hadn’t planned to start until tomorrow.

  For the next couple of weeks, I followed roughly that same routine every day: sleep, run, work; sleep, run, work; sleep, run, work; lather, rinse, repeat. I left my apartment only to exercise, restock my fridge, and interview people for the magazine. When I got hungry, I ate. When I got tired, I drank whiskey until I fell asleep. I did not turn on the TV, I did not put on music outside of what I had to listen to for work, and I did not go on any form of social media for fear of being reminded of the existence of a certain singer-songwriter who could go jump off a bridge and die, as far as I was concerned. I also steered clear of Seth’s advice, which had been to go out and have no-strings-attached rebound sex with a stranger. It wasn’t that that same thought hadn’t crossed my mind. It was just that I didn’t think it would actually make me feel any better. But, all in all, I was the poster child for the fake-it-’til-you-make-it attitude, and I was confident that one day soon I would be able to stop pretending that I was happy and actually, you know, be happy.

  The good thing about focusing on literally nothing but work was that I was making enormous strides professionally. I was churning out pieces left and right. I was volunteering for projects and taking on topics that were challenging me and forcing me to grow as a writer. I even submitted a couple of op-eds to a national publication. And I was being rewarded for my efforts in terms of both reputation and exposure. Who would have thought that career success was just a broken heart away? The only thing that I couldn’t bring myself to write was the review of the concert from that fateful night at the Metro Chicago. I was afraid that the piece would either turn out acerbically spiteful or pathetically maudlin, so I turned my notes over to one of my co-workers and refused to read the finished product.

  Near the end of February, the weather turned brutally cold and windy once again. And even though I had come to accept my new existence as a workaholic hermit, I was made painfully aware one evening that there were other people in my life who had not. While this particular evening was largely indistinguishable from the fourteen evenings that had immediately preceded it, one tiny, insignificant detail set it apart from the rest: It was my twenty-ninth birthday.

  Buzz. Buzzzzz. My front door buzzer echoed throughout my otherwise silent apartment. Oh what fresh hell is this? I looked away from the piece that I’d been working on all day to the clock at the corner of my laptop screen. 8 p.m. I wasn’t expecting anybody so I ignored it. I figured that someone had probably just pressed the wrong button for one of my neighbors. Buzzzzzzzzzz. This time is was longer. Suddenly, there were voices shouting up from the street.

  “Lyssa Lyons you’d better open this door! It’s freezing out here!”

  “We know you’re up there!”

  Seth and Alex. There was no mistaking those two. I hesitantly walked over to the door to let them up. I already knew why they were here and I wasn’t thrilled about it. I had hoped, perhaps naively, that I was going to be able to make it out of this day without having to acknowledge its significance. Celebrating my birthday was not my favorite thing to do under even the best of circumstances. All that attention made me want to hide under a table. And in light of recent events, I was extra special opposed to the idea. But nobody’d asked me what I wanted.

  They bounded up the stairs and burst through my apart
ment door, with the subzero temperatures from outside still clinging to their thick outerwear.

  “We’ve come to bust you out of your fortress of solitude, Anne Frank,” Seth declared.

  “There are too many metaphors in that sentence,” I retorted. “And they conflict in a pretty insensitive way.”

  He shrugged. “That is why you are paid to write and I am not.”

  “But you’re a lawyer,” I challenged.

  “I’m a litigator,” he corrected. “I talk. My paralegals write.”

  “Anyway,” Alex interjected. “The point is that we’re taking you out tonight. It’s your birthday and you can’t spend it at home alone.”

  “I beg to differ,” I said, but I knew that I was fighting a losing battle. Seth would probably hogtie me and carry me out of here if it came down to it.

  They stepped into the living room and threw their various coats, scarves, and gloves onto the couch. “We talked to the crew and they’re all meeting us out on Hubbard Street later,” Seth informed me. “The crew” referred to a group of our friends from college who had thus far resisted the urge to procreate and move to the suburbs. We usually got together at least once a month to drink heavily and make bad decisions. The prospect of seeing all of them did make the idea of leaving my hovel seem more appealing.

  “And don’t worry,” Seth continued. “Nobody’s going to sing to you or anything. We’re just going to get drunk and have fun.” My long-time friend was well aware of my aversion to the spotlight.

  “Alright fine,” I conceded and trudged back to my room with the two of them close behind me.

  “Uh, Lyssa?” Alex said as he stepped over the threshold. “No offense, but this place is a mess.”

  It was true. I hadn’t put my clothes away in…well, since the night that I was trying to erase from my memory. My bed was unmade and there were dirty towels on the floor, not to mention the plethora of old cups and mugs that were probably about to start growing things.