Page 153 of As the World Falls

“Do what?”

“Cover up your feelings to spare mine. I’m a big boy. If something is bothering you, then you need to get it out, and you need to go back in there and finish talking to her.”

“I don’t want to go back in there. I don’t want to go there ever again.” I didn’t need a therapist. I was quite capable of sorting through my problems on my own. I’ve done it my whole life. Of course, I think people can greatly benefit from having one, and I appreciate what they do, but it’s just never been for me—especially that specific one. I only did it as a favor to James. Hewas scared that I wouldn’t handle things well and begged me to talk to someone regularly. I could see how it was eating at him, so I put my opinion aside, and that’s how I ended up here. But there is only so much I can take.

“You are directly in the middle of emotional chaos, Cecilia. You need help to cope with it all. I want to help you, but I have no idea how so you need this. You need to do this.”

“I am not in the chaos anymore,” I shout at him. “I am getting out of it, and you are trying to keep me there by sending me to this place. You want to help me? Just freaking be there and listen to me. That is all I need. You asked me to let you care for me, and then you faltered under the pressure. You barely talk to me anymore. You can’t even look at me longer than thirty seconds, and God forbid you touch me.”

“Jesus, not this again,” he says, sounding fed up. Well, guess what? I was, too. “You were stabbed, Cecilia. You were fading away in my arms, and it felt like I was dying right there with you. I feel like I can’t be anything but careful around you. I almost lost you, and I’m trying not to do it again. I’m trying to handle this the right way,” he shouts.

I let out a hard breath, my body heating with anger and keeping me warm as the winter weather rolls in. We argue for everyone to hear right on the sidewalk. I didn’t care, though. We’ve been walking on eggshells around each other since I came home from the hospital. Things were bound to come to a blow at some point. It needed to.

I understood where he was coming from. Truly, I did. He was scared. He almost lost me, and now he doesn’t know how to handle that or me after coming so close to death. But it’s the fact that he won’t listen when I tell him I’m okay. He doesn’t trust himself to be all I need when I can. He’s not pushing me away, but he’s keeping himself at a distance like I was glass, and I’d break if he made one wrong move around me. I hated it morethan anything because if there was one thing I could always count on James for, it was to never hold back. Now, it seems like that’s all he did.

“You’re going to lose me,” I murmur now, my anger fizzling out into pure sadness. He looks back at me, his gaze hard on me like he couldn’t understand what I just said. So, I try to make it more clear for him. “You will lose me if things continue this way. If you keep doubting my ability to handle myself and the amount of strength you have to see me through it, you will lose me. Because that is not the man I fell in love with. I need your touch, and I need your disinhibition. I can’t deal with you restraining yourself from me because it’s never who we were.”

He shakes his head, looking down at the ground now. “You were dying in my arms, and you’re asking me not to restrain myself around you?” He looks up at me again, a new softness to his eyes that forms a knot in my throat at the raw sight of it. “I feel like I can’t even breathe around you. I am constantly aware of every move, every sound, every breath you take. Of all of your surroundings, all so I can make sure you are safe. I don’t have time to be anything but restrained.”

Tears fill my eyes, but I blink them away. I wouldn’t cry. I’d be strong. He would see that I was strong. “Then I think you’re the one that needs to go in there,” I tell him, looking over to the office behind us where I had just run from.

“All I need is for you to be okay. Nothing else matters,” he replies sternly.

I shake my head, becoming frustrated with him. “You know what? I’m going to take a cab back to my apartment. We need some space. You’re clearly not going to listen to me, and I won’t hang around being ignored and treated like I should have a fragile sticker plastered across my chest.”

He steps toward me, attempting to grab my hand, but I take a step back, his hand catching air instead. His eyes crease insurprise, and the shock in his features feels like an arrow to my heart. “No. What are you even…Get in the car, Cecilia. I’m taking you home.”

“No. I need to be alone tonight.”

“Like hell,” he rasps out, attempting to close the distance between us again, but I put a handout, letting his chest collide with it.

“I said no. I am going home. Alone.”

“You can’t…” he struggles to find his words like he couldn’t think straight. “You can’t,” he repeats like it’s all he knows to say. My throat burns with unshed tears as I take another step back and go to stand on the curb, waving my hand out for one of the cabs passing by to stop. Thankfully, one stops the moment I do, and I step off the curb, keeping my gaze on James as I open the door.

He doesn’t say anything. He just watches me, like a statue whose face was carved of the hardest stone, perpetuating a man whose heart has just been broken. I'd probably let him take me home if I didn’t get in the cab right this second. I’d let myself get lost in the shards of himself that he picks and chooses to give to me. It would be wholly unsatisfying, but it would be a taste. It was a cycle that needed to be broken if we were going to move on from this.

I tried smiling at him, letting him know this was okay—that I was okay. He is who I was waiting for. This wasn’t over if he didn’t want it to be. He just needed to move, say something—anything that didn’t make me feel like a shell of a person he was scared to hold.

But he doesn’t move. He stays there, his cold stare never leaving me as I sit inside the cab and shut the door, separating us for the first time in what feels like forever.

The second the car pulls away from the curb, my body shakes with sobs that fling from me like a beast trying to escape aprison. I was fully aware of the uncomfortable cab driver up front, shooting me awkward glances in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t care. This was more painful than being stabbed. I mean…not really, but it was close.

I give the driver a generous tip for subjecting him to my emotions before I leave the cab. I look up at my apartment building, which I haven’t been to in what feels like years. I walk slowly inside, taking my time to climb the stairs, memories of all the times Lance and I walked these halls together floating through my head like a damn photo album I couldn’t keep closed.

I walk into my apartment and mindlessly go to the fridge, which holds two different pictures of Lance and me under magnets. One was our graduation, where he had one arm around me, the other raised John Bender style, and another from one of my birthdays, where I made us wear adult onesies to a high-end restaurant. I laugh, painful tears building in my eyes as I remember the good person he had been most of my life. I decided it was how I was going to remember him. I didn’t think I’d make it any other way.

I stare at the pictures, the green fifty-dollar bill I never took down just beside them. I try to feel some kind of peace. Some acceptance. But I can’t. This sucked…so bad. I wanted to go home, but this wasn’t it anymore.

A small knock hits my door, and I see Tobias slowly walking inside.

“James sent you, didn’t he?” His mouth flattens and presses together, answering my question. I roll my eyes. “I have never met someone as frustrating as he is. He’s all over me yet so distant all at once.”

“I’m not even going to try to understand what you mean by that. You guys need to deal with your shit,” he says, walking toward me.

“I know that. He won’t deal with it,” I gripe. I open my fridge and pull out a soda can, taking three long swigs. Sugar was always helpful in any situation.

“Cut the guy a break. He’s never had to deal with anything like this before.”

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