Page 54 of Built to Fall
“That moment feels like drowning.”
There’s a shift in the air. The kind that feels like a response, even if no one speaks.
“I run because it’s the only time I don’t feel like something’s chasing me,” I whisper. “And yeah, maybe that’s backwards logic, but it’s the truth. It’s the only time my mind shuts up.”
I chance a look at him.
And I realize, a little too late, that I’ve given him more than I ever meant to. I’ve given him a bigger peek behind the curtain of the last year of my life than I’ve given anyone else.
Still not the whole story. Still nother.Or the things that happened to me in the days after her passing. But enough to crack something.
Enough for him to see the outline of my grief, even if I haven’t handed him the name of it.
He scrubs a hand down his face. “Lina.”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. Too quickly. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It is,” he says, and the words sound like they cost him something. “Itisa big deal, and pretending it isn’t is how you ended up here.”
I look away again. This time toward the monitors. The beeping doesn’t bother me. I kind of like it.
One night, when Kara was sitting in the living room with me, she told me the only documentary she’d be willing to watch would be a new medical docu-series that had just been released. In it, there was a fact mentioned about how the human heart beats about 100,000 times per day.
It’s hard to grasp how much work your heart does to pump that amount of blood through your body until you see it on the monitor in front of you. On any regular day, the fact that your heart is beating fades into the background of everyday life.
Today is not a normal day, though.
Seeing my heartbeat recorded on the machine is a reminder that I’m still here. Still alive. Still trying.
“I don’t need a lecture,” I mutter. “I understand what the doctor told me. I don’t need you to reprimand me just the same.”
“You seriously think I could lecture you right now?” He shakes his head, more to himself than to me. “You don’t have to tell me everything. I get that. But you have to let me in enough to help. You can’t keep throwing yourself off cliffs and call it coping, because I’m going to keep trying to catch you.”
I shake my head just the same. “You can’t help me.”
Nobody can force me to sleep. There’s no comfort to be found in someone else. Not anymore. Not after the last time I tried—when closeness became its own kind of betrayal.
When sleep stopped feeling safe beside someone who said he loved me and proved it wrong in the same breath.
So now I run.
Because stopping means remembering. And remembering feels like trusting all over again.
“You don’t know that.”
I refuse to make eye contact with him. Even when I can feel his gaze burn into me.
“You know what would help me?” I ask quietly. Rhetorically. “If you forget this happened.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LINA
Iwasn’t expecting to do anything for Halloween until I had five people standing in the doorway of my bedroom, begging me to go to a party with them.
“Lina, seriously, it’s the one time a year everyone can get shitfaced and no one bats an eye,” Kara tells me, her eyes pleading.
I’m tempted to ask about the partiesshefrequents with all of her high-fashion friends, but I don’t.
