CHAPTER SEVENTEEN – WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
“My hands are tied
My body bruised, she's got me with
Nothing to win
and nothing left to lose”[24]
M elissa reached into the pocket of her overcoat as she felt the cellphone vibrate. She was so distracted with everything around that she forgot to call Angela. She should have, at least, sent a message. Now, she would hear a complaint.
She walked away from the party. With the loud sound, she could hardly hear her thoughts, let alone the friend on the other end of the line.
She ran to a reserved corner and finally pulled the cell phone out of her pocket. She didn’t check who was calling, after all, she only received calls from Angela... or from her mother when she was made from her husband's punching bag. She hoped it wouldn’t be the second option, she didn’t want her night ruined by her mother's fights with her stepfather, who were then minimized.
“Hello!” She answered in a lively voice. She had so much to tell that she could spend the rest of the party there, in the quiet corner, on the phone. Gabriel was right. It was all so much more fun than she imagined and couldn’t wait to tell her best friend everything.
"My princess..." Lissa felt her legs tremble and the air lacking as she recognized the thick voice on the other side. "You left me alone in our day."
If she had eaten anything, the girl would be able to vomit where she was, because her stomach was wrapped up.
She was miles away and he still terrified her.
"I'm so disappointed. Like every year, I flew over here to watch the fireworks with you and, of course, I wanted to stay until your birthday... You know we always celebrate. And when I arrive, I discover that you have traveled.”
She wanted to yell at him, curse him, but as always, she couldn’t say anything. She remembered all the New Year Eves she passed beside him: always so lively, following him around the house, grateful that after a year away he was back... He was her favorite person in the world, whom she trusted most. The one she loved as if he were a father, since she never had one.
She counted the days for his arrival and when she saw him, she did not want to leave him any longer. And he was always so excited to see her too.
Since Melissa remembered, he was there. As a child, he pampered her with gifts out of order and sweeties when her mother denied her and hidden walks. She still remembered how he was spinning her in the air, playing and as she always put her on his lap and together they watched the fireworks burn in the new year.
The ritual remained the same when she stopped being a little girl and became a teenager.
She liked to wear the short dresses and bikinis he gave her, and she didn’t mind letting him comb her hair, hearing the compliments. She loved the way he called her princess.
She didn’t realize until it was too late that his comportment wasn’t look like of a loving uncle who loved her like a father, that his hands on her legs during the burning of fires weren’t innocent touches, that the nights in which she caught him in her room in the middle of the night was not just to see if she was okay.
She must have realized, she should have stayed away. And if she hadn’t become so close to him, that six-year-old New Year would not have gotten the worst birthday celebration that could have come when she turned 16.
He destroyed her life and then made everyone doubt her and think her crazy. Then he came back the next year, acting as if nothing had happened, and everything was repeated... And even now, thousands of miles away, he was still there as if he were normal, annoyed that she wasn’t within his grasp.
“I hate you!” She shouted into the phone, forgetting where she was, feeling her chest ripping once more. "I will not let you do it again."
"My princess..." He laughed softly. “This again? You know nothing happened... No one ever believed”.
Lissa wanted to throw herself on the floor, cry, scream for help, throw herself from the window where she was next... Anything. But strangely, the tears didn’t come, nor even her legs move. She was still standing, her phone taped to her ear, listening to his breathing.
She hated him with all her force, just as she hated herself.
"I'll let it go because I know you're as sad as I am because we lost our New Year. Did you miss seeing the fireworks with me in my lap?” She shuddered and leaned against the nearby wall. Why did not he forget her and leave her alone? There was nothing else he could get out of her. "But I'll still be here for our celebration. Less than a month for your birthday, my princess. I've prepared something special for you. I know you will come, and this time you will leave this nonsense to dye the hair and all that makeup unnecessary from outside, right? You don’t want me to get mad at you... So you're going to be a good girl to me.”
"Leave me alone ..." she whispered to the phone.
"Less than a month, Mel”. He answered her, reminding her why she hated that nickname. "Mommy's going to travel with my brother, we'll have the house just for us ... Let's have so much fun. I can’t wait.”
The fingers of the free hand folded, making her nails to cut through the skin of the palm of the hand. Her mother would leave her alone with him willingly once more, if she was home. It wasn’t some new. No one ever believed in her.
She would always be left alone even if she was surrounded by people.
She let the cell phone go to the floor and put her hands to her face. She had no tears to dry, only a sharp pain in her chest that seemed to choke her.
"There you are..." Gabriel's excited voice startled her. It didn’t look like the voice on the phone, but for a second, it was as if he was there beside her.
Automatically, she pulled away and charged him. She watched as he bent down and picked up the cell phone that was lying on the floor and offered her the device.
"Come with me, I want to show you something, my princess”. He held out his hand to Lissa.
“No!” She answered harshly, and her voice was so glacial that Gabriel looked like it was in front of a glacier. “Never. Never again. Do you hear me? Do not ever call me that wat again.”
“Mel...”
“Shit! How many times do I have to say? It's Melissa or Lissa, if you want to continue to pretend we're close.”
"What's the matter with you?" Gabriel asked in pain, confused and irritated. After the troubled afternoon, the night was going well and she was smiling less than 15 minutes ago. And now she was there, attacking him for no reason. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
"You. And this damn contest and all that's in your baggage. I'm tired of pretending.”
Gabriel looked at her, registered her pale face even beneath her makeup, her trembling hands gesturing to him. He tried to understand, but he couldn’t, and at that moment, and after a tiring and stressful day, he didn’t even want to.
"So, we're two..." he replied, shoving his hands in the pocket of his pants, unconsciously holding the cellphone she had dropped and she had not taken from the singer's hand when he tried to return. "Because I'm tired of you and your constant mood swings too. And regretful, I’m fucking regretful to have chosen you, to have embarked on this farce, to be..." Taking a deep breath, Gabe fell silent and decided to leave before he could say something that would make him regret in the next minute.
Melissa watched him turn his back on her, leaving her alone before finishing the sentence.
Then the tears that had refused to come when she spoke to with who had destroyed her life, came. They came with everything, they came because Gabriel was tired of her, and regretful to have her around and because he left her alone.
Like her mother and everyone she had ever loved. It wasn’t news, but it still hurt.
And with Gabriel it hurt even more.
Out of breath and with her vision blurred, she groped for the corner of the walls. Her head lowered, preventing anyone from seeing her
She didn’t know how, but at some point, her bodyguard had appeared and guided her away from everyone.
When she noticed, he was looking her, visibly preoccupied, with the door of her room open. He said something she was not able to process, then the girl entered the room, slamming the door as if a demon pursued her, locked herself in the room and collapsed on the floor.
Her heart was beating too fast, her hands sweating, limbs trembling, pain growing in her chest. She looked like she would die, but she knew better. It would be so easy if she would just die and everything would end, but nothing was easy for her.
She crawled on the floor until she found the suitcase she hadn’t bothered to undo and tossed her clothes to the floor until she found a little old music box that could no longer play when it was opened. It had been a gift from him, on her 16th birthday… the night he ripped off her life and left an empty, traumatized shell to deal with the aftermath.
She tossed the box away, and she doesn’t matter if it broke or not, as soon as she felt the icy contact of the steel of the little razor she hid there.
She didn’t think of anything at all as she lifted the overcoat and dress she wore and automatically allowed the blade to run down her thigh. But she thought of Gabriel, in his hurt look when she told him not to call her Mel, when the blaze of the cut was felt.
"No, no, no..." She repeated, looking at the black pantyhose from which the blood spurted. And though she repeated the negative word, she allowed the razor to find another point on her thigh, cutting even deeper. She wanted more pain than was consuming her.
She didn’t find it, but she kept on trying until she felt her thigh burn with the cuts and her trembling, blood-soaked hand couldn’t do any more injury.
Only then she fall to the floor, trembling, still crying, still suffocating, and wished that this time she had finally cut too deep, for the last time.
It was not. She realized when the first rays of sunlight invaded the room and she still trembled, cried, choked... breathed.
She didn’t move, she continued on the ground, huddled like a wounded animal, for what must have been hours, until, moaning with pain and fatigue, she forced herself to get up, to collect her scattered clothes and get ready.
Since she was still there, at some point someone would appear and she would have to pretend again.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - ON MY WAY
“A tear must have formed in my eye
When you had your first kiss
(...) So leave a space deep inside
for everything I'll miss
Cause I'm on my way”[25]
T he chords of Stay Alive, his song's most successful, echoed through the room, making Gabriel Voss wake up feeling his head about to explode, dry mouth and eyes burning. It had been a horrible night when it was hard to fall asleep, and when he finally fell asleep he went to dream about Mel.
Melissa Bittencourt. The girl who hated being called Mel, princess, and who knows what else, and who apparently hated being close to him.
Thinking about the girl made the singer roll over on the bed and cover his head with the pillow, ignoring the sound that he wasn’t sure where he came from. He just wanted to get some sleep and, hopefully, wake up again without thinking about the phony fan.
Although he continued to party for some time, socializing with his band's musicians and his family, he couldn’t stop thinking about Melissa, what she had said, what he had said, and the fact that she had simply disappeared of the cocktail.
As he was a bigger brand idiot, he couldn’t help but ask Arthur for her when the two friends left the party. According to the assistant, she was back at the hotel a few hours ago.
"She's a strange girl, is not?" Arth commented with a giggle. He clearly had drunk too much, different from Gabriel, that had barely managed to swallow something after to have disagreed with Lissa. "But I'll confess, just for you, Gabe, she's fun sometimes.”
The singer did not answer. He did not even nod in agreement. He was still so upset with the girl that he could speak what he should not.
He just went to his room and, of course, stopped in front of hers, thinking of hitting and talking, but without know what they might have to talk. He gave up because she might well have argued, and after all, she was clearly not in a good mood and neither was he.
The trouble is that even after taking a bath, lying in his bed and rolling back and forth relentlessly, he was still thinking of her.
Maybe he should have knocked on her door, maybe they'd fight and then they'd understand or maybe they wouldn’t fight because the girl was bipolar... Maybe now she was in a good mood again.
He never knew how he would find her: melancholy, smiling, unfriendly, caring, coarse... And that was driving the musician crazy. She was too fickle and he was really getting tired and irritated at being constantly mistreated.
If the girl hated being so close to him, it would be better let her stay away. It would be easy if he hadn’t been so involved with her.
He, who hadn’t felt anything special for anyone for so long, had to have become in love of a girl so troublesome and irritable? It could only be punishment and it would be a well-deserved punishment, he thought, if it were the way to make him pay for the consequences of a broken heart he had in his past.
The music echoed through the room again and, grunting, Gabriel left the bed and searched for the source of the sound. It wasn’t his cell phone ringing, since the set was on the nightstand beside the bed, off.
It didn’t take much to find out where the music came from. Surprisingly, it was the ringtone of Melissa's cell phone, the device the girl had knocked over, and in the midst of an exchange of offenses, Gabriel had put it in the pocket of his pants.
For someone who had no admiration for their songs, it was surprising that soon the most famous was chosen as a ringtone. But the singer got the choice of ringtone to come across a picture of the troubled girl next to her best friend. It was a call from Angela, that was an avowed fan, someone for whom Melissa did everything, including lying and embarking on a farce at his side.
He closed the call without answering it. He was upset with the two girls that morning. Lissa's motives might even be noble, but it didn’t change the fact that he had been deceived, and even accepting to keep the farce, he was continually rejected and disowned. It sounded too dramatic, but the singer was feeling used.
The damn cell phone rang again and the rocker watched the photo appear on the screen. It didn’t look a recent photo since Angela wore long brown hair and looked quite healthy, laughing excitedly... Melissa already had the unmistakable black hair and dark makeup that was already her trademark. In the photo she was even thinner and, although she had a small smile, her eyes were opaque.
She was an unknown. He understood the sister's love for her best friend, after all, he considered Arthur as a member of the family, and there was a time when the two had the company of a third soul brother. But he couldn’t tell if he would sacrifice himself for the assistant as Lissa did for Angela. Maybe she had no one else... The idea caught Gabriel's mind as the ringing stopped again, after all he had never seen her comment on the family and she hadn’t called anyone during Christmas or the night before, in the New Year Eve.
Frustrated, the singer threw the cellphone beside him. He wanted to know everything about her, including how she was after they'd failed, but he didn’t want to humiliate himself and crawl behind her.
When the phone rang again, he didn’t think about what he was doing, just picked it up.
“Lissa... finally!” Angela began to talk hurriedly, before the rocker could say anything. “Listen, he's here... He was here at home, so I think it's a good thing you're touring with Gabe.”
"Angela..." Gabriel interrupted her. It seemed absurdly wrong to hear her, though he had been curious to understand what the fan was talking about. "A pause to breathe would do you good. “
“Gabriel?” Angela sounded surprised at first, then, continued nervously. "Where's Lissa? Why did you pick up her phone? Something has happened, has not it? Damn it! I knew this was not a g
ood idea and...”
“Calm down!” He cut her again. “Nothing happened. Melissa forgot her cell phone at the party last night, I haven’t had time to return.”
“Are you sure?” The girl asked suspiciously. “I've been calling for a while...”
“I'm sure.” He nodded. “The phone stayed with me and I was sleeping, I didn’t hear a ring”. He lied. He had heard, he just didn’t want to answer and he wasn’t sure that he had made the best choice when finally giving in to his curiosity. "I'm going to ask someone on my team to deliver, so you can talk to her."
“Ah... OK. Sorry to wake you up”. Angela paused. "I didn’t think she could be without the cell phone."
“Alright, there's no problem”. Gabriel tried not to sound annoyed. It was true that he was annoyed, but he didn’t want to discount the wrong girl. “How are you?”
"I think I'll survive another year..." The girl mocked. "By the way, happy new year, Gabriel! My first call of the year and I'm talking to you. Sounds like a good sign. Maybe this year will finally be able to fix me... "She laughed lightly.
"I'm rooting for it”. He assured her sincerely.
“Thanks! I will not disturb you again... I'll call again later to talk to Lissa.”
"No, Angela. Wait ... Can I ask you something?”
“Of course!”
"Why doesn’t Melissa like being called Mel?"
The line was silent for a moment and Gabriel had to check to see if the call had not fallen.
"She used to like it. It was as everyone called her..." The girl sounded melancholy.
"And why she don’t like it anymore?"
"Only she will be able to tell you..." Gabriel put his hand on his face, frustrated. Did he even think he could get information like this? It might have been Angela's idol, but Melissa was her best friend. "But if you want to know, deep down, I think she likes it when you call her that."
"I doubt..." He laughed, humorless.
They were silent for a while longer. He wanted to ask more, but he knew he would have no answers. Maybe Angela felt that because instead of ending the call, she stayed on the line.
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