Tear You Apart Read online

  How can I think of breaking this? And thinking that, I break. In the bathroom, in the stall, I cover my mouth with my hands. Press the heels of my palms to my eyes. I shake and shake, sickness like a hurricane rising in me, and the world spins.

  Outside the stall there’s laughter and the sound of rushing water, so I shake myself until I can stand. I wash my hands. I splash my pale face, avoiding the sight of my own eyes. I press my lips with color, my hand steady and unfaltering.

  The best thing, I think, and the hardest thing, are the same.

  Chapter Forty

  I am the architect of my own unmaking.

  I check my email ten times in as many minutes. Refresh. Refresh. My cell phone stubbornly doesn’t chime or ping or ring with an incoming message of any kind. No email, no text, no instant message, not even a fucking “thumbs-up” on my stupid Connex status.

  I delete him from my contacts so I won’t check again. I delete everything, every way I’ve ever had of contacting him. I put my phone in my purse, which is on the shelf in the closet, and I close the closet door and walk away from it.

  I want him.

  I want him so much it makes me shake, as if I’ve had too much coffee or run a race or gone without food for days. That’s exactly how it is, as if I’m starving, only it’s not food I want and need and crave, but Will.

  I want him the way I want a cold drink on a hot day or a soft place to sit when I’ve been standing for too long a time. I never took up the habits of smoking or liquor or drugs. I’ve never had an addiction, but I think I understand now what it must be like. I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want him.

  More than anything else, I want him to want me.

  I know this is crazy, insane. I know it’s wrong. And as I pace, biting my thumb and feeling my stomach roil with tension, I don’t care. The phone in the kitchen rings. I can’t answer it. It won’t be him; he wouldn’t call me at home. I’m sure he doesn’t have the number, though it wouldn’t be difficult at all to look it up, if he wanted to. But he doesn’t, I think, as the ringing stops and the silence is louder than any phone could ever be. But not as loud as the sudden thunder of my beating heart as it fills my ears, and I put a hand on it to make sure it doesn’t beat right out of my chest.

  I can’t stop thinking about the taste of his skin. The smell of it. How smooth it was beneath my fingertips when I traced every rib. My fingers curl, remembering the jut of his hip bone and the thickness of his cock. I close my eyes and hear the soft hiss of his breath when I stroked him, up and down. When I sucked him until he came in my mouth.

  It’s been two months. Summer’s long gone. Winter’s on its way.

  I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by colors, sounds, smells that don’t “match.” But now the world is gray. No color. If there is a song, the notes have all gone sour. The space without Will is immeasurable, and I cannot bear it.

  No color. No music. No scent. I’m in a void, formless, nothing even to press against. Nothing to anchor me to this life.

  How will I live without my ocean?

  There’s nobody to share this with. I could tell Naveen, allow him to be the shoulder on which I weep, but I’m too aware of how he came to me once with this same pain, and how I’d been so harsh. Too, there’s the thing with Naveen that we never talk about, that unfinished business we’ve both agreed to leave forever undone.

  No, I carry this alone.

  It’s my pain, and I gorge on it, the blood-copper taste of it, the slicing, bitter sting. The venom. I glut myself with it, and I do it all in the stolen moments I have when I’m alone. In a bathroom, washing my hands. In the upstairs hallway as I carry a basket of laundry, and suddenly the floor tips and I stagger so that my elbow bangs against the framed pictures on the wall. Memories captured and held under glass. A trip to Disney, swimming lessons, weddings, graduations, christenings.

  Our wedding.

  The dress I didn’t love but wore to please my mother. My brother’s wife in emerald-green, Ross’s sister in the same color, identical dresses for very different women. And Ross in a black tuxedo with a vest and tie, his hair long in the back. So impossible now, looking at it, that we were ever so young.

  That we were ever so in love.

  As the nights come earlier and colder, I go to bed beside Ross at the same time, instead of waiting for him to be asleep by the time I slip between the sheets. Some nights he rolls toward me, hands roaming, and I give up to him. Some nights I crawl toward him over the bed and use my mouth and hands to get him hard. Make him come. So that I can pretend everything is fine, that this has not been undone. We have more sex than we’ve had in years, and yet I never come.

  As snow falls outside and the holidays come and go, I make mistakes at work and have to redo everything, over and over again, obsessively fixing invoices and order forms and invitations to shows. I take calls from Jac, who’s increasingly frantic about the planning, and make them to Kat, who’s uneasily silent about the entire process. I watch Naveen moon his way around the gallery, sneaking away for lunchtime trysts I’d be jealous of if I were capable of feeling anything beyond this dull nothing.

  “How much longer?” he asks me one day in late February, when I’ve spent the morning arguing with caterers and easing Jac out of a bout of hysteria because the shipping for the monogrammed chocolates she wants for the tables is more than the candy itself. He’s caught me at the coffeepot for my fourth mug of the day. I will never sleep tonight. “Until I get you back?”

  It’s the wrong question to ask, but maybe the right time. The coffee I don’t even want sloshes when my hand shakes, and I put the mug back on the counter. I take a breath to give him some lame answer, but all that comes out is a slow, sighing sob.

  We’ve been friends for a long time, so when Naveen pulls me close, I let him. I fit nicely against him, my face in the curve of his shoulder. He smells good. His voice, murmuring soothing phrases that don’t make much sense, nevertheless smells of cotton candy and caramel apples. Naveen’s voice is a carnival, and I need one.

  “What’s wrong, Betts? Tell me, love.” He nuzzles the sensitive skin of my neck, and I’m done for.

  Once, long ago, in a dark dorm room with The Cure playing low, Naveen kissed me. I hadn’t been expecting it then, and can’t say I’m expecting it now, but maybe this time I’m the one who kisses him. I can’t be sure. All I know is that our mouths meet, tongues sliding, his warmth against me where lately I’ve felt only cold. His hands rest on my hips, then slide upward to curl around my ribs just below my breasts. We kiss on the mouth and then he’s sliding his lips to my throat again. There’s the press of teeth.

  His hair curls like silk against my palm when I cup the back of his neck.

  We do not fuck.

  When he looks at me, finally, it’s with an expression I don’t want to see. Regret.

  “Betts, I’m—”

  “Don’t.” I extricate myself from him to straighten my clothes. The coffee from my mug’s spilled all over the counter, and I look for a cloth to wipe it up.

  “I’m sorry,” he insists on saying.

  My shoulders sag. I hold on to the counter, not looking at him. “Shh, honey. Don’t.”

  “No. No, I’m sorry. That was really shitty of me—”

  “I said don’t!” I lower my voice at once, though we’re the only ones in the gallery today and there’s nobody to hear. “I don’t want you to be sorry, Naveen. Please, God. Don’t...be sorry.”

  And then I laugh and laugh until I cry, because Naveen is my dear friend and I love him, and more than twenty years ago we almost-but-not-quite fucked and now here we were again. Almost-but-not-quite.

  When I cry, he holds me. It’s a different kind of release, but maybe one I needed more. I wish I could let it all go. Ugly snot crying. Sobs. But I can manage only si