Page 75 of Heartbeat

“I woke up at the hospital. They had to pump my stomach; it was this huge event.”

He looked at me without saying a word, yet he spoke volumes. It was sort of similar to what Dr. Foster always did. Only, in his case, it didn’t make me want to throw anything around. It felt…comforting, which I suppose is why Dr. Foster did it too. Except, she didn’t really pull it off; she mainly just annoyed me. Ethan, on the other hand, made me want to keep talking.

Why I thought he’d somehow understand, seeing as everyone else in my life hadn’t, why I expected him to succeed at what every other person I knew had failed, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to explain. I just did. I wondered if he knew how much I was about to judge him—and for something he had absolutely no obligation whatsoever of understanding.

I couldn’t help it.

“No one believed me,” I quietly confessed, making sure I did so in a way that didn’t make it obvious I’d given the matter a second thought, but probably failing miserably.

“What do you mean?” He furrowed his brow.

“When I said it was an accident. I mean, I just wanted to sleep—”

“How come nobody believed you?”

“No one did.” I shrugged.

“After everything you’d done to help?” he asked, appalled.

“To be fair, no one knew I was having trouble sleeping.”

“Someone who hasn’t slept in days doesn’t need to announce it to people. Especially those closest to them,” he said bitterly.

“It doesn’t matter. They just didn’t.”

I didn’t want him thinking I was like those spoiled kids who would spend years clinging to that fact and never let it go. It wasn’t like that. Sure, it wasn’t the best memory, but it wasn’t like I dwelled on it.

“I would’ve,” he said, softly. “I would’ve noticed it.”

It was the kindest thing he could’ve said.

“And I definitely would’ve believed you,” he continued.

Second kindest, definitely.

It made me smile, regardless. Though I didn’t know if he noticed it or not because during the time it took me to tell him all of this, it had become harder and harder to look him in the eye, so I was mainly looking straight ahead that whole time.

“That’s when it started. The monitoring, along with the therapists and the drugs and the wrong dosages and all the shit that came with it and…here we are.” I casually skipped over the part where I’d started to grow fond of the blade.

He stopped walking. I took another step before doing the same. I didn’t turn to face him though; I couldn’t. I found myself dreading that he was going to ask me to elaborate. Make me dissect it, relive it all. I knew it was something that, if it ever came to it, I’d do gladly. He deserved to know these things if we were expected to have any sort of…whatever it was we were morphing into. I just really—really—didn’t want to feel any more exposed than I already did.

I couldn’t lie. I didn’t want to scare him off either. Truth was, I was scared. I was so scared to look at him. Not because I couldn’t, certainly not because I didn’t want to. I…I was afraid of finding out how he was looking at me. I didn’t think I’d be able to keep walking had I turned to him and found that the way he looked at me had changed.

Fifteen to twelve.

I checked my phone again. I’d been doing that all night, increasingly so. I’d always had this theory that if I didn’t check the time with any sort of regularity, it would sneak up and rush by. But if I checked it every now and then, sometimes it would move a bit slower, and it was possible—sometimes—to fool it, squeezing every second out and living with more awareness. It wasn’t airtight and it certainly didn’t hold up to further scrutiny, but it was enough to trick my (very troubled) mind.

“This is us,” Ethan finally said, glancing at the brownstone to my left.

I made myself face him.

Nothing had changed.

*

We walked up the stairs in silence. Ethan led the way, turning back every few steps, as if to check I was still there, following him. At the very last floor, the fourth, we stopped by the only door that had a number on it. Ethan pulled out a small key chain in the shape of a tiny silver wing with a short string that held two golden keys at the very end of it.

It wasn’t until he closed the door behind us and flicked the switch that I realized how big the apartment was. Unlike our house, it was obvious this place had been professionally tended to. Nothing seemed as though it had been gathered through time; there was absolutely no intimacy to it. Everything had a proper place, from the way the couch seemed to rest at the exact distance the gigantic TV required, to the countless books that seemed sorted by size and color—rather than subject and author—on the wall-to-wall bookcase that took up most of the living room. The room was quite beautiful, yet extremely impersonal. Shades of gray and brown contrasted perfectly with empty items of crystal that decorated almost every surface. It was oppressive, cold, and distant. Everything Ethan was not.

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