Page 102 of Riot Reunion
The ongoing refrain in my head works for the most part. Keeping up the mantra doesn’t leave much room for anything else. I play my part well and grin and smile as I read the names attached to the gifts and give them out one by one. Everybody’s presents are super thoughtful and beautiful. Dash buys Carrie jewelry, exactly her style, as well as a stunning polished brass antique telescope that makes her eyes light up the moment she unwraps it. She gifts him with a monogrammed leather folder for all of his sheet music, and tickets to see a concert pianist play, who apparently sold out seven months ago. Wren receives art supplies from Elodie and a first-edition signed book of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wren has to show Elodie his main gift to her in a photograph: a massive,seriouslybig gilt-framed mirror mounted on the bedroom wall in their new apartment, obviously too big to have wrapped and brought to the UK. Elodie squeals when she sees it on his phone. She discovered it in an antique restoration store in New York months ago, but they’d been living out of a hotel at that point and hadn’t had anywhere to keep it. Wren had bought it in secret and paid the shop owners to store it until they had a home to hang it in. He also surprises Elodie with a gorgeous black silk dress with a plunging neckline and a pair of new shit-kicking Doc Martens to wear with it.
I am showered with all kinds of gifts; I think they overcompensated a touch to make sure I didn’t feel left out. Makeup, perfume, and all kinds of chocolate. A new green silky shirt that makes my hair pop, and so many books. Books upon books upon books.
I come to the last gift, wrapped in plain black paper, bound together with a gold ribbon, and find that there’s only one name on it: mine.
“Who is this from?” I ask, holding it up.
“Your dad mailed it to us to bring for you,” Elodie says sheepishly. “He said he wanted to make sure you had it today, but he didn’t want to have to ask you to bring your own present.”
That definitely sounds like something Dad would do. He said we’d have our own little Christmas when we both got home, though. It seemed like he went to an awful lot of trouble for this one present. I open it, ripping the paper with abandon, and my heart stops in my chest. It’s another book. Plain black cover with gold foiling.
(UNTITLED)
By Presley Maria Witton Chase & Pax Davis.
This gift is notfrom my father. There’s no way. This isn’t a book he could have bought in a store or ordered online. This is the book…
I flip it open to make sure. Yes. The words leap out from the page, so familiar.
This isourbook. The book Pax and I wrote when I was first trying to bait him into being my friend. We’d been partnered in our Advanced Creative Writing class. Our teacher, Jarvis Reid, had challenged us to finish a book, going chapter for chapter with our project partner, and this is what we’d created.
I’ve never seen it formatted and bound like this, of course. I’ve only ever read the words on a laptop screen. Leafing through the chapters now, it all comes rushing back to me. How many hours I spent crafting my chapters, determined to craft something that would impress Pax. Reading his chapters, hooked on every word, reading so much between the lines of his words. I’d never been prouder when we finished the project in our own time.
Inside, the dedication on the front page catches me off guard, making my breath catch in my throat.
“Sometimes the pathof least resistance isn’t a straight line. It’s the way home.”
Oh my god.What…whatisthis? Why would he send this? The hurt is a brand searing into my flesh; it burns bone-deep, taking my breath away. The villain I was obsessed with back at Wolf Hall was capable of something like this. He’d have planned this out for months and taken great pride in the chaos he wreaked with such a cruel gift. The man I fell in love with would never do something so spiteful and downrightmean.
A hand at my back startles me, snapping me out of my downward spiral. Elodie stands next to me, exuding sympathy. “Sorry,” she says. “We wouldn’t have brought it if we knew it was from him. Your dad said you were gonna love it. I’m so confused.”
“It’s okay. I—maybe he thought it was—I don’t know. Maybe he wrapped the wrong book or something.”
“You okay?” Carrie wraps her arm around my shoulder, pulling me into a side hug. She’s just trying to be sweet, but I can’t handle the physical contact at the moment. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be fussed over. I can’t stand the idea of everybody looking at me, feeling sorry for me, knowing that it wasn’t enough for the guy I love to leave me, but now he seems determined to torment me from afar, too.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, guys. I’m feeling a little out of it, to be honest. I think I’m just gonna go to bed. I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.”
No one stops me as I get up and leave. The walls of Dash and Carrie’s beautiful flat resonate with pity as I make my way to my room; by the time I close the door behind me and lean my back up against it, my heart is racing like crazy and a river of tears are chasing down my cheeks.
When will it stop hurting so bad?When? I don’t know how much more I can take of this. It took weeks and weeks for my body to start healing from my surgery. I’m still nowhere near a hundred percent; the progress has felt glacially slow and incredibly frustrating, but at least I’m slowly bouncing back. The wound Pax has left behind is as deep and fresh today as it was the moment he inflicted it. I’m still bleeding out from it. Still dying from it every day. It will fester and grow worse until it destroys me, I’m sure of it.
Numb, outside of my body, I get ready for bed.
Wash my face.
Brush my teeth.
Plait my hair into braids.
I haven’t yet changed into my pajamas when the knock comes at the door—a fact that I am very grateful for when I open it and discover Wren on the other side of it. He looks a little chagrined, awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck. “Hey, Presley. Uh...”
He holds up the book. Black cover. Gold foiled title. I left it on the couch. I didn’t want to make a scene by throwing it in the trash; that would have looked melodramatic, and I wouldn’t have been able to keep my cool while I did it. I fully planned on grabbing it in the morning before anyone else got up and tossing it in the fire grate.
“I need to apologize,” Wren says, sighing. “Elodie doesn’t know that I switched your dad’s gift out for this. She would never have let me do it.”
“You switched it out? Why would you do that?”
