Page 62 of Not Another Yesterday
Alex makes no attempt to get up, raising his hands. “Okay, man, sorry. It’s all good.” He staggers upright and away from me and Ronan, leaving me to face Ronan, whose attention is squarely on me.
My heart rips at the edges with the devastation in his green eyes. For a moment we just stare at each other. Regret, guilt, and shame flood my insides with ice as the moment begins to catch up with my drunken self and I realize what I just did.
I cheated on the one person I love most in this world. I cheated on Ronan.
A jumble of words demand to be released from my mouth, but the only thing I manage to express is surprise at his presence. “What are you doing here?” I whimper.
The edge in Ronan’s tone makes my blood run cold. “Are you drunk?”
Hot tears prick at the back of my eyes. My heart beats so wildly I can feel it in my temples. I nod. I’m so ashamed. I know myself better than to allow myself to get this out of control, to drink to the point of losing all inhibition, of risking situations I’m not prepared to handle.
Ronan opens his mouth as if to say something—
“Ran! You made it after all,” Vada cries as she arrives at the scene of the crime, her arm hooked under Tori’s. Both are oblivious to what just happened. Vada takes one look at me, then Ronan, and her expression falls. “What happened?”
Ronan’s eyes remain pinned on me. “Vada, how much have you had to drink?”
“Nothing, why?”
“I think you should take Cat home. And probably Tori, too,” he adds with a softer, more evaluative look at a swaying Tori.
A shiver runs down my spine. Ronan’s tone is too cool, too calm, too collected. The tears collect on my waterline, rising with each second. I want him to yell, want him to be pissed; he’d have every right to be. Instead he acts detached, distanced, putting a cavernous gap between us. It’s crushing.
“Hold on, Ran. What’s going on?” Vada asks, no doubt thrown by the suffocating silence between him and me as we continue staring at each other.
“Have Cat tell you what happened,” Ronan says.
Without another word, he turns and walks away, leaving me standing there in the middle of a crowded party, stone-cold sober and drowning in shame. This time, I know I’m completely at fault.
All I want is for the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
Sunday, January 29th
Ronan
I have the worst headache. It travels all the way down from the back of my head to my neck and shoulders. I’m tense and stiff.What a shocker. I had a piss-poor night with sleep so light I’d be surprised if I logged any REM time. It was all tossing and turning. No rest. I’m hungover without having had a single drop of alcohol.
I don’t even remember my drive home from Greenwich last night. I was dazed, the image of Cat’s lips sealed to another guy’s mouth branded into my retinas as though I stared into the sun too long. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I still can’t, and fuck if it doesn’t strangle me from the inside out.
I hadn’t planned on going to that party, but I found myself working through my class work surprisingly fast, churning out one assignment after another, and in just over three hours I was caught up. Given how sparse my time with Cat had been over the past week, and the festering impasse we had found ourselves at just days ago, I decided not to wait until today to see her.
I was over the tension between us, the small talk on the phone. I wanted to see her, pull her into my arms, kiss her. I wanted to move past our disagreement in a real, substantial way.
Now I wish I had never left my apartment; then I’d still be blissfully unaware, my heart would still be intact, and I wouldn’t find myself in the position I’m in right now.
I’m run-down, drained, and achy. If I didn’t know better, I’d say I’m coming down with whatever virus plagued Shane last week. But Idoknow better, know that what ails me is psychosomatic rather than physiological. I’ve been here before, recognize the signs, thatdeep fatigue that demands I seek sleep. I fight it. My body is merely manifesting the emotional pain.
It’s only eight a.m. I usually sleep in on Sundays—my one true rest day—but I’ve been up for thirty minutes already. I have nine missed calls and fifteen text messages from Cat. All the texts and seven of her calls are from last night, two from this morning. I didn’t talk to her after leaving her with Vada and Tori last night, and I also didn’t read or respond to her messages. I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t want to hear what she had to say to me—not in that moment, when she was obviously impaired. And we were both in a heightened emotional state, which can only lead to disaster. Not that today won’t be equally as destructive…
I shower and get dressed, but none of it feels real. Seeing Cat with some dude pushing up against her felt like an out-of-body experience, like I was just witness to someone else’s life, and that feeling has not subsided in the past eleven hours. Maybe this is just a dream, one of my too-vivid nightmares, one of those I can’t wake up from myself. Fuck, I wish it was. I wish Cat or Shane would yank me out of my dream already, would tell me to wake the fuck up, that all of this was nothing more than a night terror. But it isn’t. I know it isn’t, even though it sure as fuck feels like it.
Vada did as I asked last night—she drove Cat home, then dropped Tori off at the apartment where I was desperately trying to think of a way to shut off my brain. In true Vada fashion, she immediately wanted to discuss the incident with me, wanted to hash out the painful details while Tori was in the bathroom throwing up. I just told Vada to go home, making it very clear that I wouldn’t discuss anything with her that night. So, she left.
I checked on Tori, helped get her into bed, then sat on the couch trying to figure out what to do. I aptly ignored my phone each time the screen lit up with an incoming call or text from Cat. She stopped trying to get ahold of me at two in the morning.
Shane got home just before three, obviously unaware of the shitshow that had unfolded earlier that evening.
“Tori’s asleep. She’s trashed,” I told him. Shane chuckled knowingly, but my next words wiped his grin off his face. “Cat kissed some dude at the fucking party.”
