GIN AND JUICE pt 15

–Rapid, pounding heart rate–

You laid your hand flat against the door, feeling the lock click into place, unable to hear it over the sound of your heart beating hard against your ribs. Feeling it in your palm, a fluttery, uneven rhythm through the door, calling him back, begging him to stay, even as you shut him out. The blood pumped fast and furious through your veins, hard against the valves struggling to control it in your chest. You didn’t know if the beats were pounding out seconds ….minutes ….hours.

Time stood still.

All you knew was that he was gone and he wasn’t coming back after what you did. After what you said. You leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.

–Numbness or tingling sensation–

Instead of fire, the pain trickling down your spine was like ice, drenching you in a cold so intense you couldn’t move. The numbing sensation crept up your arms and down your legs, locking you into an upright fetal position. Your fingers clasped around your knees. Your forehead pressed against your thighs. You squeezed yourself so hard you thought your lungs might collapse and held it there for seconds ….minutes ….hours.

Shortness of breath or tightness in your throat.

Your chest expanded and contracted with each labored breath, catching in your throat and threatening to crack you open. You felt bare, exposed, like your skin was flayed and your organs were on display for everyone to see. Except no one was here. You’d pushed away the only person in your life that might actually understand you, might respect you, and be willing to love you despite all the fucking bullshit in your brain. You drew in a harsh breath, trying to fill your lungs but feeling something blocking the air, something squeezing your neck tighter and tighter, pulsing seconds ….minutes ….hours.

–Fear of loss of control–

You thought things were fine. Everything was going perfectly. Shawn was perfect and he wasn’t drinking and you were trying to be okay with being with him and then suddenly this article and the game and the interview and everything just came crashing down. But why?! It was easy to blame it on him. What he said. What he didn’t say. What he stood here in this room and spat at you. So I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t? You knew that what he said after was true. You knew he would wait as long as you needed to. But you didn’t know how long that might be and he deserved so much more than that. He deserved a girl who wouldn’t crawl into her bed for two days at the mere thought of him telling a reporter that he has a girlfriend. He deserved a girl who wanted to hold his hand and walk to class with him. He deserved a girl who would not only press her lips against hers in the sunlight but would relish the moment, would throw her arms around his neck and hold him to her and hope the moment lasted forever. But you were never going to be that girl. You could never be that girl. In this room you could lock the door and hide yourself and him from them, the people outside who might see you, curse you, hate you for loving him and being loved by him. All of those eyes. And questions. And tweets. The weight of the entire campus and their eyes. They were so heavy that you collapsed. They pressed your shoulders to the floor, your cheek against the tile. Your lungs could barely hold the oxygen begging to enter your bloodstream.

It reminded you of the sweet burn of Shawn’s body holding you down after he came that first time, when all the walls between you shattered and you welcomed the shards of his broken facade into your heart. Those pieces of him shook inside you now, rusty from disuse. You had thought that when you let him go things would feel far away, empty, removed from you, like the world was before you met him. But now, in this moment, laying here on the floor, you realized that you had been mistaken. You hadn’t accounted for the joy in those seconds after, when you’d laid in his arms and felt such overwhelming intimacy, more intense than ten waves of pleasure. You hadn’t accounted for the way he took your breath away when he ran ahead of you in the dawning light, his passion and thirst for life overpowering the demons of expectation. You hadn’t accounted for those quiet moments when he held your hand in the car and looked at you like you were the only person in the world that knew him, that felt him, that could ever be present with him. All of that joy, passion, and knowing was now imprinted on the fragile fragments of his old life and they were never going to let you forget.

Your phone buzzed in your pocket.

–Feeling of unreality or detachment–

It’s funny how words don’t look like words but you somehow know what they mean.

Shawn: I cna’t belivbe u woyld do thos to mE

He was drinking again.

Shawn: whatnebr i siad let me mrke it uP  two u

He was drunk again.

Reading his messages was like trying to hear someone screaming inside a soundproof room. It was muffled, confused. Your brain was protecting itself. If his words couldn’t reach you, he couldn’t hurt you. You couldn’t hurt yourself. He didn’t understand that you needed this, that he needed this distance. You were so fucking stupid to not have seen that this might happen. That this could happen. That this was always going to happen. Without you to take the weight he couldn’t bear, somewhere you had to have known that he would retreat back to his old habits, his old life, just like you were trying to.

The texts stopped for awhile and your mind went wild. Was he passed out on some rank bathroom floor? Would someone else, someone who knew him, walk in and find him? Would no one find him? Would he lay there passed out all night and wake up in the morning still feeling the same way? Like there was something he could have done to keep this from happening?

You choked on a sob. That’s the truth of it. There wasn’t anything he could have done. It would have happened eventually because no matter what he did to change, you did nothing. You felt the cold realization that this really was your fault. All of it. You had pretended that the little bubble you’d created with him was helping you, that just one contact outside of yourself was enough to sustain, to grow, but all you’d done was draw him out from himself and into you, replaced his addiction to alcohol with an addiction to you, to the intimacy you shared. It was a beautiful rose with poisonous thorns. There was no way to fully touch it, experience it, without the damage it did to both you and him.

Bzzz.

You breathed a sigh of relief when his name flashed on the screen.

Shawn: I c u ebrywhre

Oh, God. The pieces of him still lodged in your chest shook again. The more he called out for you, the more they wanted to go to him. Your muscles tensed around them, holding them in. It was a struggle. You were weary, trying to hold on to him for as long as you could.

Shawn: soooooo mch blu

It was killing you not to answer but your fingers were stone, hardened and frozen against the light of the screen. He was so drunk he was seeing things, probably stumbling around hoping, praying he wasn’t, praying that you were really there. But you were glued to the cold floor of your dorm trying desperately to cling to whatever you could keep of him. They rattled in your chest, in your heart, the strongest muscle in your body failing to keep them in.

Your phone pinged again.

Shawn: wht perfm do u wear…i cn smell u everyyyywhere

A wail escaped your throat when they finally broke free of their sinewy prison. It was like an explosion. Except instead of filling the holes with debris, the escaped fragments of Shawn’s armor left a void, a vacuum, an expanse that felt so hollow you couldn’t breathe. It was as if you could feel the air of the room passing through you, like without him, without any piece of him, you had passed into an incorporeal state.

You struggled to type out a message.

Come back to me.

But you didn’t send it. The pain you felt now was incomparable to what you would feel if he came back and decided to leave on his own. You knew it would only be a matter of time. He’d figure it out. I’m never going to be able to give him what he wants. It was easier this way. It would be easier this way. It had to be easier this way. Even though it felt like his shattered armor had shredded your heart in its escape, clawing and scratching a gaping hole in the center of your chest that wouldn’t stop bleeding, you knew that eventually it would go away. Eventually, you’d feel nothing again.

As invisible blood, thick with memories, ran from your body and onto your dorm room floor, you thought about the first time you saw Shawn, when he had poured half a red solo cup of beer on you but you couldn’t be bothered because he was the most beautiful boy you’d ever seen. You thought about the possibilities that could have come from that meet cute. What if he had just been a regular college boy? What if you’d ran into him later a little drunk and giggly and he was a little drunk and giggly and you’d exchanged numbers? Could you have done it then? If he wasn’t the star quarterback that every girl on campus was in love with and every boy on campus wanted to be?

What if you’d never seen him again?

It didn’t matter. The possibilities that could have been, weren’t. The moment you stepped into that bathroom and found him laid out on the floor, helped him get up, talked him through the night before he fell asleep on your shoulder, your fate was sealed. Leaving your number on his hand just cast it in iron. Loving Shawn Mendes, the boy you’d uncovered that night, was easy. In that bathroom, in the library, in his room, in your dorm, all of those safe spaces that you’d created for yourselves were filled with memories of the two of you being free. Free of expectation, free of anxiety, free of the world’s eyes.

But it wasn’t sustainable. It never was. You’d been foolish to think that it ever could be.

He wasn’t just Shawn Mendes. He was Shawn Mendes, star quarterback. Heisman candidate. College football poster boy. All those titles terrified you as much as they weighed on him, but those things were never going to change. He was never a regular college boy. Just like you were never a regular college girl.

It was doomed from the start.

Then overwhelming emptiness, the feeling that your body was devoid of him, of blood, of the memories you’d shared, all of it smeared on the floor beneath you…

Bzz. Bzz.

Shawn: Hey, this is Zubin. I know you don’t know me, but Shawn is in trouble and I thought you should know. He’s had a lot to drink. They’re taking him to the hospital.

Oh, God.

It finally happened. Everything he’d always feared.

A searing heat, pain more intense than anything you’d felt so far, anything you’d felt in your life, cauterized the hole in your chest. The tears dried, crusty and flaking on your cheeks. Feeling returned to your limbs. Your fingers flexed. The pressure sitting on your shoulders released. You sat up and re-read the text.

It’s funny how words look exactly like words but you somehow don’t know what they mean.

Your fingers dragged across the screen, a letter for every quickly returning heartbeat. When you pressed send, it was as if you were watching yourself from above. Like even if you hadn’t wanted to send it, your fingers would have moved of their own volition. Your will was no longer your own. You body was on autopilot, your brain overriding your heart to save you from yourself. You had to to do this. Even if it took everything from you.

You: Thank you for letting me know.

Cold. Calculated. You stared at the response for seconds ….minutes ….hours.

Your fingers refused to move to type out a conflicting response. In your head, you were screaming. 'I’M COMING. HE CAN’T DIE. DON’T LET HIM DIE.' But all you could do was stare at the letters that didn’t make sense. The physical and mental exhaustion closed in, ready to overtake you. Just before you succumbed to the fatigue, before you let your phone fall to the ground, before you laid your head on the floor, your heart won one last battle.

“I love you, Shawn.”

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Some hours later, when the early hours of the morning were peaking through the blinds, Caroline stumbled into the room.

“OH MY GOD. I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL THAT SON OF A BITCH.”

You shot up off the ground, rising to a sitting position. Your joints creaked and your head split open. It was too loud. Too bright. You scrubbed at your eyes and looked up. Caroline’s head was about six inches from yours. She was bent over and looking down at you, inspecting you for any physical damage. You can’t imagine what you must have looked like. Splotchy, sallow, hollow. No descriptor could possibly have been adequate for what you felt.

“Well, you seem to be okay physically. Are you going to tell me what the **** he did? What did he say to you?” She crouched down and sat cross-legged across from you. You leaned against the wall and took in a deep breath, the first full breath in hours. Oxygen filling your lungs brought flashes back from the night before—the regret, the pain, the resignation, the text. Your eyes blew wide.

Oh, God.

You scrambled for your phone, but it was dead.

“Goddammit!” You shouted, crawling to the pristinely made bed you never made it into last night. Plugging in your phone, you impatiently tapped the screen, waiting for it to power up. Caroline just watched you, confused, occasionally looking at her own phone. When the screen finally lit up, you quickly pulled up your messages, wincing at your own words. They were the last in the chat. He hadn’t responded. Panic flooded your system again, threatening to dissolve into another episode.

“Holy shit,” Caroline whispered, looking over at you.

“WHAT,” you shouted, prepared for the worst and yet unable to imagine the worst coming true.

“It’s Shawn…he was in the hospital last night,” she said, but not with enough despair for the worst to have come true. You gasped in relief, silent tears rolling down your face. He’s alive. Caroline looked at you like you had grown three horns in the last five seconds.

“Babe, it was just a concussion check, I kinda overreacted tbh,” she spelled out the T-B-H on the end. Oh, ****, right. You had forgotten that she didn’t know. The tears kept streaming, unable to be controlled. You couldn’t stop them even after hearing the cover story you knew they would have fed the press, like the hand story when he’d punched Brian.

“Caroline,” you walked back over to her and slid down the wall into a sitting position, “if I tell you something, can you keep it a secret?” You reached out and took both her hands, holding them in your lap. Her eyes welled up, shocked at your gesture. You almost never touched her.

“Y-yes,” she stuttered, “you’re my friend, of course. I haven’t told anyone about you and Shawn. Not even Naomi.” You smiled at her, she was so earnest it was impossible not to. Shawn would have called her wholesome. You just called her your only friend.

Taking a cleansing breath, you opened your mouth and everything came out. All of it. From the beer spill that she witnessed to the bathroom later that night. From the lie over text to the lie in the library to the house party and the kiss and the scream and the date and the sex, sex, sex. From the running to Pride and Prejudice. From all the things she knew and all the things she didn’t. From telling him to leave to passing out on the floor after the text that he’d drank himself into an ambulance. When you were finished, you were squeezing her hands to your chest and sobbing into her chest.

She listened. And listened. And cried.

“Shhh,” she cradled your head and rocked you both back and forth awkwardly on the floor, “it’s going to be okay. He’s okay.” You knew she was right. He was okay. He was alive. That was all you could have asked for. But you couldn’t shake it, that feeling in the back of your mind that threatened to drown you in panic again, “but Caroline, it’s my fault.”

“No,” she stopped rocking you and pulled you back to look at her. She cupped your face in her hands. “Did you put the bottle in front of him? Force him to drink it? No. You cannot take credit for his foolish actions. I refuse to let you.”

You sniffed, refusing to look at her. The wounds were too fresh to think about erasing them right now. Her words of affirmation were starting to sound like they were coming from underwater. They couldn’t reach you. You went lax in her hands.

“Hey! Stay with me!” Caroline shook you a little, surfacing. You were so tired. All you wanted was to crawl in bed and sleep. Too much had happened and too many questions were still unanswered. You wanted so badly to text him, but you knew you shouldn’t. You couldn’t. You’d closed that door and locked it. Another choked sob escaped from your throat.

“Okay, babe. It’s time for bed.” Caroline got up and held out her hand. She ushered you over and turned down the comforter. You slipped in between the sheets, cold without Shawn’s body heat to keep you warm. I’m so fucking stupid. Caroline moved your phone to the nightstand. You thought you saw her fiddling with it but you didn’t think anything of it. Turning over, you sniffled a few more times, cried your last tears, and drifted into a dreamless sleep.

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KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK.

A fist hammered loud on the door, waking you from the dead. The sun was setting outside. You must have slept through most of the day. Caroline scampered to open the door. Through your weary haze, you could hear voices. You expected the second voice to be Naomi or one of Caroline’s umpteen other friends but it wasn’t. Wasn’t any of them. It was warm and comforting and familiar. A voice you hadn’t heard this close in months. A voice you didn’t know you wanted, you needed, until this moment. You leapt out from under your heavy comforter and blinked bleary-eyed at the door.

“Mom?!”

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