CHAPTER FOUR
1161 Words
2:17 a.m. – Her apartment
Lena is sitting on the bathroom floor when she calls him.
Back against the tub, knees to chest, mascara carving black rivers down her cheeks. The black dress is twisted around her thighs like a tourniquet. One strap has slipped off her shoulder and she can’t find the strength to fix it.
The night is a smear of sound and colour she can’t piece together properly.
Marcus had been perfectly nice.
He’d opened doors, asked questions, laughed in all the right places.
He’d tasted like the red wine they drank and the mint he popped after dinner.
When he kissed her goodnight outside the restaurant, his hand warm on her waist, she had kissed him back with the desperation of someone trying to prove a theorem.
It lasted four seconds.
Four seconds of pretending she was a woman who could want this, want him, want anything that wasn’t Eli.
Then she’d felt it: the nausea, the guilt, the suffocating certainty that she was committing a sin she hadn’t even named yet.
She’d pulled away, mumbled something about a headache, practically ran to the Uber.
Marcus had looked confused but not angry.
He’d texted once: home safe?
She hadn’t answered.
Now she is here, on cold tile, phone clutched in both hands like a lifeline and a noose.
She stares at the call screen while it rings.
Eli picks up instantly, voice rough with sleep and something that sounds a lot like prayer.
“I’m sorry,” she says before he can finish saying her name. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t know who else—”
“I’m coming,” he answers, already moving, already running, like he was born for this exact moment. “I’m already coming.”
She drops the phone onto the rug and folds forward until her forehead touches her knees.
The sobs come hard enough to c***k bone.
She is crying for so many things at once she can’t separate them.
She is crying because Marcus’s mouth felt wrong and Eli’s has never touched hers and both facts feel like crimes.
She is crying because she spent the entire night trying to become someone who could live without Eli and discovered she doesn’t want to be that person.
She is crying because every time she closes her eyes she sees the rooftop again: Eli’s face when he said I love you, the way hope and terror fought for space in his eyes, the way he looked at her like she was both the answer and the wound.
She is crying because she meant it when she said pretend it didn’t happen, and she hates herself for meaning it.
She is crying because the only thing that has ever quieted the noise in her chest is the sound of Eli breathing on the other end of a phone at 2:14 a.m., and tonight she needs that sound more than oxygen.
She is crying because she is the reason he will never sleep properly again.
She is crying because she is too much of a coward to let him love her out loud.
The intercom buzzes.
She startles so hard her elbow cracks against the tub.
He’s here.
Two minutes and forty-three seconds from the moment she called.
She stumbles to the speaker, presses the button with a shaking thumb.
“It’s me,” he says, breathless, barefoot, perfect.
She buzzes him up without speaking.
While she waits she tries to fix herself in the mirror (wipes the mascara, splashes water on her face, pulls the strap of the dress back onto her shoulder like armor that doesn’t fit anymore).
It’s useless.
The knock is soft, tentative, the way he always knocks when he thinks she might be asleep.
She opens the door.
He looks wrecked: hair wild, T-shirt inside out, eyes red like he’s been crying too.
He smells like cold night air and the detergent they both use and something uniquely Eli that makes her knees want to stop working.
For one suspended second they just stare.
Then she breaks.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and it’s the hundredth time tonight but it still doesn’t feel like enough.
He steps inside, closes the door behind him, and pulls her into his arms without asking.
She goes willingly, desperately, face pressed to his chest, hands fisting his shirt like if she holds tight enough the world will stop spinning.
He doesn’t ask what happened.
He doesn’t ask about Marcus.
He just holds her the way he has a thousand times before (steady, warm, safe) and lets her cry herself hollow against him.
When the storm finally quiets to hiccups and shivers, he walks her to the couch, sits her down, kneels in front of her like she’s something sacred he’s afraid to break.
She can’t look at him.
“Lena,” he says gently, voice scraped raw. “Talk to me.”
She shakes her head.
He waits.
She breaks again, smaller this time.
“I tried,” she whispers. “I really tried to be normal. To want normal things. I kissed him and it felt like dying.”
Eli flinches, just once, but he doesn’t let go of her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, tears spilling fresh. “I’m so sorry I keep doing this to you.”
He brings her knuckles to his lips, closes his eyes like he’s praying for strength.
“You’re here,” he says against her skin. “That’s all that matters.”
She starts sobbing again because that’s the worst part: he means it.
She wants to tell him everything (every terrified, selfish, aching truth).
She wants to say: I love you so much it’s killing me too.
She wants to say: I’m scared that if I let you in I’ll ruin us both.
She wants to say: Please don’t stop saving me even when I don’t deserve it.
Instead she leans forward until her forehead rests against his.
They stay like that, breathing the same air, hearts hammering against each other’s ribs, the closest they have ever been and still nowhere near close enough.
After a long time she whispers, “Can you just… stay? Until I fall asleep?”
He answers by kicking off his shoes and lying down on the couch beside her, pulling her into the curve of his body the way he has done on a hundred other nights when the world got too loud.
She curls into him like she was made to fit there.
His arms tighten around her.
She listens to his heartbeat and pretends, for just a few hours, that this is allowed.
She falls asleep to the sound of him whispering into her hair, so quietly she almost misses it:
“I’ve got you, Len. I’ve always got you.”
She dreams of rooftops and almosts and all the things she’s too afraid to say when the sun comes up.
- Writer
