107
I’m completely numb when I finally say goodbye to Rosalie. I’ll have no excuse ever to come this way again. I’ve packed my personal things, and she’ll send anything else to my new office in Carrero Tower later today, the HQ across town.
Jake stayed in his office the whole time I packed up, and no matter how many times I stared at that door, willing him to come to me and beg me to stay, he did not. My heart is broken into a million pieces, and I’m amazed that it hasn’t killed me, that it still beats, that I’m still upright, yet I’ve nothing left to live for.
I manage to leave via the stairs. I don’t want people to see my scrubbed-clean, bare face and puffy eyes. My hair hides most of it as I walk from the building with my box file containing everything personal to me, everything that connected me to him, even his dumb novelty souvenirs from our many trips.
“Miss Anderson?” I’m startled out of my sorrowful reverie by Jefferson, Jake’s driver.
“Yes?” I ask quietly. I must look nothing like my usual self, but he smiles at me gently, a hint of sympathy in his wrinkled gray eyes. He’s been there so often with Jake and me, yet I barely know the man, rarely acknowledged him, the elderly looking man with a warm face and impeccable manners. This will be the last I will see of him too. So monumental.
“Mr. Carrero told me I was to wait for you and take you home, Miss.” He leans forward, relieving me of my box. I haven’t got the energy to argue, so I allow myself to be ushered into the back of the SUV and driven home, back to Queens, back to the emptiness of my room and my own bed. Back to a Jake-less life and an endless, empty future.
Sarah isn’t home when I open the door to the apartment. I don’t even care; I don’t want to see anyone. I dump my belongings on the kitchen counter, and as I move through to the living room, I set about taking off every piece of PA Emma that is on me, hating her, loathing her. Anger builds from some deep place and takes over as I turn to frantic clawing to decloak my nemesis.
I hurl my shoes across the floor in rage, then rip off my jacket and skirt, throwing them down dramatically and kicking them away. Panting and wild with exertion, I strip off, piece by piece, every clothing item, every jewelry item, stockings, lingerie, and stand naked in my living room, bawling my heart out. I want to rid myself of every cold, controlled, ice maiden piece that contributed to me losing the only man I have ever wanted. I want to scream and rip my hair out by the roots one strand at a time.
I reach for the quilt on the couch and wrap it around me, trying hard to bring back the memory of being in his embrace. I feel like I’m dying. The pain is so acute, so overwhelming; all I can do is crumple onto the couch and let it overtake me.
I’m making up for a lifetime of bottled-up tears and emotions, pain and rejection, heartache, abuse, and neglect. Jake cut through all of it and found a beating heart somewhere in the darkest depths of me. He kept trying to bring it to the light, and I fought him every step of the way.
Look where it got me - alone and broken and losing the only man I was ever capable of trusting and loving.
He has a child on the way; maybe he will try again with Marissa now that I am no longer a thorn in his side, a constant distraction to ruin his day.
I am toxic to him. He called us toxic. Hearing that hurt the worst. It struck me like a knife to the gut.
What does that even mean? I slowly poisoned him somehow until he couldn’t bear it anymore?
I finally drag myself to my bedroom and pull on some pj’s. I haven’t worn anything like this in so long. I am amazed I still own a pair. I climb on the bed, moving aside the giant bear Jake won for me at a street carnival on one of our trips. It causes a new slash of pain across my chest, and I sob into the bear’s stomach, slumping across it pitifully.
I can’t take this. I should have said something to him; I should have tried to tell him how I felt. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t be here now crying into a stuffed bear’s fluffy belly, the only thing I have of him that I can hold this way. As something dawns on me, I sit up and dry my eyes.
What would I have said to him? I love you, Jake? Why not? It’s true! What if he doesn’t feel the same way?
Who am I kidding? He sent me away. He doesn’t feel the same way about me.
I think back to every time he tried to get me to open up, every kiss, and having sex with me. I let myself wonder if it was all ever about the challenge and it smarts.
Had I just been something to conquer?
No, I don’t think I had been. I learned to trust him and saw more than just the Casanova playboy. I saw the real Jake, the caring, funny, and sometimes vulnerable Jake. He told me everything about his life. Our bond was real, our friendship. He’d been affectionate and attentive when no one else cared for me, and he looked after me the way he did. I refuse to believe that none of it was real.
I pick up my iPad and scroll through the massive list of songs we sent one another over the past few months, the jokes, the apologies, the hidden meanings, trying to see the truth behind it all. I stop as my gaze falls on an unfamiliar song, and my inner anguish pauses as confusion fills my head.
“I Know You” by Skylar Grey.
I wonder when he sent this?
It’s not one I remember ever being gifted to me. I’ve no memory of it as I sift back through our time together, and I can’t recall him sending me this song. Sometimes he just added music to my iPad for me when we were bored or on a flight. He would sit and leave me songs as a joke or just because he cared because he knew I would listen to them.
Was this one of them? I click play on the music file and lie back on my bed to listen to the lyrics intently.
The haunting melody drifts over me soothingly, but it’s the words that strike a chord deep inside. Each word is like a message from him, so accurate in every way, asking me to let him in, to give him a chance to love me, that he knows I put myself through so much pain because of my past, begging me just to stop pushing him away. I long to see this as a tangible form of him communicating with me. The lyrics cause my soul to ache as a new flood of tears rolls silently down my face.
What does this mean? Why hadn’t I listened to this before? Why now when it’s too late?
When the music fades away, and my sobs silently subside, I sit up and take my iPad in my hands without hesitation. Sniffing, I scroll iTunes purposefully; there’s a song that I listened to a dozen times when we were apart. I need to send it to him now. It says more than I ever could: a girl telling a guy that she loves him, that despite her walls, she cares, her memories of him and what he means to her, that she misses him and all his crazy ways. She will do anything to be with him.
Maybe it isn’t too late! After all, he put that song on there for me to find. Perhaps he thought I already had and never told him that I ignored it.
Had that hurt him? Been part of the reason he has withdrawn?
Finding the one I’m looking for, I forward it to Jake’s email before doubt can creep in to stop me before talking myself out of it with logic and sense and fear.
“Wish You Were Here” by Avril Lavigne.
It says everything I want to say to him.
I sit frozen, staring at my mailbox, chewing my lip anxiously, waiting, watching, praying he opens it and listens to the song. Every lyric is equally able to pass on my message as his song just has for me. Tapping my foot nervously, I pray I’m not too late.
I’m aware of every noise in my room and the world outside as the minutes drag on endlessly. Like a weird countdown of torture in my airless cell, I hold my breath, and even my heart has stopped beating.
The ping startles me to flinch and gasp. I finally get an email notice just as my page times out. I scramble with fumbling fingers to touch it on and bring it back to life. With clumsy hands and loss of coordination because I am so damned scared, I slide my screen cover aside, lighting it back up. I’m shaking violently as I open the email to read the subject: Jake Carrero has gifted me a song! Even seeing his name appear at the top of my screen makes my chest constrict in painful suffering, my heart pounding through my chest, my breath halting.
“Always an Avril fan.”
I inhale sharply as I scan the following line, the blood draining from my face as the realization hits home. Crushing agony consumes my heart and soul. He couldn’t be any clearer.
“Let Me Go” by Avril Lavigne.
My world tips into darkness as pain overtakes me, and I collapse onto the stuffed bear again, the iPad sliding to the floor while I wail out in hellish anguish like someone dying horribly.
He doesn’t want to know. He’s gone, and I’m sure I’ll die.
END OF BOOK 1 BUT BOOK 2 FOLLOWS ON
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