CHAPTER394
All I can think of is the years of memories with him, the trust and bond between us. The happy times and shared moments; the bad ones and how he wiped away my tears. The pain I felt when he told me he was leaving, and the hatred when I met Natasha for the first time and realized this one was different for him. She wasn’t temporary. The overwhelming pettiness and dislike for a girl I assumed just annoyed me endlessly, while all this time it’s been heartbreaking jealousy because she has him in a way I never can.
The past eighteen months of simultaneously pushing him away with my behavior to punish yet clinging to him with need. I have spent the entirety of his relationship with her trying to regain my hold on him in stupid ways, smug when it works, devastated when it doesn’t. Lashing out at him for it, and it’s all becoming painfully crystal clear to me in this face-slapping moment of clarity.
The way everything was turned upside down in my life slowly after he was gone, and trips to see him were less frequent as his life got in the way. I started pulling away from him, rejecting his care and wisdom. My own life lost any sense of purpose, and I slowly drifted into obliviousness without him as my grounding force. I cannot deny what is hitting me square in the face with resounding force as it clicks, rendering me speechless and numb.
I am in love with my best friend.
And I never even knew it.
“We take this from another angle … We don’t deal with the past issues again; we deal with how you feel about him and give you tools to cope.” Emma is moving into counselor mode, mentally working out a route of therapy needed, and dealing with the problem like a checklist of things to do. Cutting out the emotional side and just focusing on this as a problem to overcome, as she does with her charity kids, but her noise is almost non-existent to me.
All I can do is keep running over and over in my head all the reasons I cannot be in love with him and meeting all the blinding obvious answers that I am, and probably have been for a long time. Too stupidly blind and immature to even realize it. It’s all too much while she carries on acting and talking like this is some simple problem that a few therapy sessions can fix, and not the absolute worst tragedy of my entire doomed life.
I shake my head violently, standing fast and unaware of when I even sat back down. I scrape the chair across the marble floor loudly. Words fail me as tears pour instantly and my head becomes a blurry mess or conflicting chaos. This is too much to handle.
“I can’t … I just need … space.” I try to breathe, gulping air as a full-blown panic attack hits me like a punch in the gut and I’m not prepared for it. It had been building up and now consumes me with all the aggressive violence of having a plastic zip-tied bag over my head. I try and gulp in oxygen, fear gripping me so tight my stomach tenses and I struggle to get anything at all. My lungs constrict, like they are about to collapse with the effort and my heart begins to hammer. I could be trying to breathe in sand right now as it would have the same effect. Everything starts to darken, arms splay out desperately, trying to catch onto something in terror, as it hits me hard.
I’m pulled to Emma’s touch on my wrist and then on my arm, her heat by my side, but all I can see is panic inducing darkness as the room closes in on me.
“Take slow breaths, Sophie. Slow and easy, try to calm your breaths and breathe through the attack. Lean down, head lower for me like a good girl.” Her voice is distant and faint like she’s so very far away in the darkness. I try to cling to her voice in the haze, but there’s only burning pain and terror that I’m suffocating slowly, sure I am going to die as I just cannot inflate my lungs at all. Emma’s arms come around me, guiding me down to my knees on a cold surface and then my forehead is on the cold flat too, and I lose any sort of orientation about how my body is. For all I know I could be hanging upside down by my legs. Dizziness and blinding fear having consumed me, so that my senses do not know what’s up or down, or even where I am anymore.
“Sloooow. In and out … don’t try and fight against yourself. Stop gasping and try to aim for one inhale. Listen to my voice, just focus on me and not everything going on inside your head.”
Emma’s voice is around me; pure concern crying out in every precise word. Emma has dealt with my attacks in the past and hasn’t seen one in a long time; neither have I, and I seem to have lost the ability to get through it myself. I cling to her voice, her directions, and the calm presence she is being for me. I slowly manage to get a few quick gulps of air, and then a few more. The blackness pushing back as I start to gasp in enough to be able to inflate my lungs partially.
“Can’t … love.” I struggle to formulate what I feel, reverting to another bout of struggling gasps to fill my lungs again.
“Don’t talk … Just breathe and try to calm yourself. It’s going to be okay, Sophie. You’re going to be okay. It will pass.” Her serene and grounding voice is all that’s holding me steady as the haze lifts with more oxygen in my lungs. I realize I am kneeling forward with my face on the floor, and her body is half wrapped around me protectively. Seeing the gray marble come into close focus and getting my bearings once more, I notice the pools of water by my nose, small little puddles of tears, and it seems so ridiculous for a second that I giggle. I don’t even know why, other than relief that I can inhale once more, and I no longer think I may black out. “Keep breathing, slow and steady. Good girl … That’s right.”
Emma is still soothing, while I just stare numbly at the floor. Suddenly nothing but emotional exhaustion consumes me, making me too tired to sit back up as numbness overtakes, and yet I know I cannot stay face down on her kitchen floor like this. I move to try weakly as she helps me slowly and surely and nestles my head against the curve of her breast, against her throat. Arms around me tight and stroking my hair back off my face, the tears still running down my cheeks as heat floods my skin.
“Emma?” I cry brokenly.
“You’re okay. I got you, Sophs … I got you. We’re okay.” Emma soothes while rocking me back and forth in her arms, like she would Mia, with gentle soothing words and I have no energy to do anything but cry. Lost in this maternal embrace, I start to sob, hopeless silent tears.
“You don’t get it … it’s him … it’s Arry.” I whisper brokenly, burying my face in her neck not wanting to go anywhere else but right here, right now. I cling to her desperately. Like my world has just come crashing down.
“I do get it. I’ve been there. I know what this is like.” She still rocks me to and fro, a soothing motion of a momma rocking her child, and it’s lulling me into submission, despite the torrent of chaos inside my head.
“Jake was crazy in love with you too when you figured it out. He was all for being ‘the One’. Arrick walked away from me this morning. He left me again. He’s in love with someone else and I’m supposed to do what?” I burst into heartfelt sobs, pain overtaking where panic was and I wrap my arms around her bump securely, inhaling the perfume and comforting smell that is uniquely Emma. My second mom, my savior, my hero.
“It’s okay, we’ll get you through this, and we’ll find a way. You’re strong and you are surrounded by love. We will find a way, my precious girl.” Emma’s trying to keep me here, console me, but I’m already unraveling. That inner wall that protected me from years of pain is slowly growing inside and the urge to push her away is starting to expand. I hate that I am this way, but I can’t help it. The inner me is taking control, and even clawing onto her with my fingertips cannot stop that younger me from pulling out of her arms and scooting away towards the kitchen unit on my butt backwards, to be alone with myself and my raw pain. It’s a defensive instinct to be solitary, to protect myself this way and not share my anguish. Emma lets me go, knowing me, knowing my needs, and stays seated in her own slumped position on the floor, watching me with genuine heartbreak in her eyes.
“How can it be okay?” I ask her pleadingly. “How can it ever be okay again? You don’t get it … If I am, then what chance do I have of ever getting over him? Arrick isn’t some stupid teen crush, or a boy I dated who hurt me. He’s been my everything, my world, and my support. He’s my best friend, and he would never do anything to make me want to stop loving him. He isn’t capable of doing anything to me that would make me do anything but love him! I’m doomed. There’s no way out of this and I can’t see how I’ll be able to get past this.” I cry out, in both rage and sadness, a crazy mix of desperation.
I am in love with Arrick Carrero.
Not a childish, teen crush that involves butterflies and flowers and silly girl fantasies, but the real, complete dependency and inability to exist without the other half of me kind of love. The kind that’s been ripping me apart into tiny pieces and sending me down a long, dark tunnel of hopeless oblivion with the absence of him. This isn’t some empty hole of nothing that has been eating me away, it’s the all-consuming ache of knowing the one I want to be with is never going to be within my grasp, even if I have only just realized it.
Emma slides across the floor towards me awkwardly, considering her bump, as I crumble once more. Tears and overwhelming pain hitting me from every direction, and I cannot fight it. I don’t stop her from tugging me into her arms again. I don’t fight when she pulls my head into her lap and strokes my hair soothingly. She sits silently and lets me sob out every single piece of heartbreak I have been carrying around for as long as I can remember, now that I can put a label on exactly what this is.
Maybe it was better when I didn’t know."
