just_muse_me | 33.5. Breakdown
Co-written with drzambrano
[Follows THIS]
It was absolutely teaming with rain by the time Chris pulled up out the front of Eva's apartment block. He was still in shock about what had just happened, and all he knew was that he had to go after her. He couldn't let it go like that. The longer it waited, the worse it would get. There was no hesitation back at MT1, he had just taken Serena's keys and jumped in her VW Beetle to go after Eva, with Serena assuring him she would get a lift back to his apartment with Tuck, despite the fact she was clearly as panicked and shocked as he was. They shared a very brief kiss in the rain before Chris got back in the driver's seat of her car and took off after Eva, only just catching Serena telling him to drive carefully before he closed the door. The windscreen wipers had been going furiously in the heavy rain, and despite the urge to speed after her to keep up, he wasn't stupid and kept to a slow speed in the rain. He had lost sight of her Jeep, and he could only hope she even went home at all. Who would really blame her if she didn't after what she just saw?
But she was there, running up the sidewalk from down the block with a medical journal over her head to try and shield some of the rain, but it was coming down too heavily. "Eva!" Chris called out to her, hitting the button on Serena's clicker to lock the doors. Thank fuck it worked the first time, considering how temperamental it was in the past. No cars were coming, so he bounded across the road to intercept in front of the apartment's entrance, his track shoes and the bottoms of his jeans getting a bath when he stepped in a huge puddle because he wasn't watching where he was going. Not that it mattered, he was already soaked through everywhere else. Damn Miami summer downpours could hit out of the blue. "EVA! STOP!" he shouted when she tried to ignore him. He was quick, though and caught her arm right before she got to the door and locked him out. "I'm sorry!" he said loudly so she could hear him over the heavy rain.
Eva pushed his hand off her arm and then swept her wet hair out of her face with her fingers so she could look at him in absolutely disbelief. "You're sorry?!" she cried with a humourless laugh, shaking her head. "Months, you bastard! The mysterious woman you're dating, you said it has been going on for months! Ir al infierno, capullo!" she spat and yanked the door of her apartment block open angrily.
Chris was too stubborn to just let her abuse him and walk away. At least, he assumed she was abusing him in Cuban. It wasn't like he knew the language and tended to fuck it up whenever he tried anyway. It was delivered with the air of being told to go fuck himself would be. Once they were out of the rain and in the foyer, he overtook her again and blocked her access to the elevators. "Stop. Please, Eva. I need you to hear me out. I know you don't want to listen and you don't have to, really, but I need you to. I've been planning on telling you for ages, and before that, okay, we kept it a secret but I... I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to lose my job... and I didn't want to lose Serena, either."
Eva looked at him furiously, though something might have faltered just a little inside her when she took in how he looked, standing there like a drowned rat practically begging her to listen to him. But it wasn't enough to shake how angry and hurt she was. She rested her hand on her hip and bit down on her lip with an exaggerated nod. "Of course," she said with a snort. "You covered for her, you got sent home for it. How could I have been so damn stupid that I missed this going on right under my nose? You two are just goddam golden, aren't you? Screw you both." She side-stepped him to hit the heel of her hand roughly against the up button, looking up and finding the elevator on the thirteenth floor. Great. Friday the Thirteenth, and it was on the thirteenth floor. Could this day get any worse?
Chris just came to stand beside her. Of course he was going to follow. "You're wrong. I covered for her before anything started with us. It was around the time Tuck got hurt that we started. We got caught up in the fear of it all. I'm not making excuses, Eva. You don't deserve that, and I'm not going to cheapen my relationship by even trying to. Because I'm not sorry it happened, and I'm not sorry I have been dating her for months. All I'm sorry is that I couldn't tell you. You would have tried to talk me out of it. I know you. I didn't want to be talked out of it. You said I looked happy when I talked about her, and I am, Eva. Through all the shit, Serena has given me something I wasn't sure I ever even wanted. I was scared someone or something would take that away."
"Why her, Chris? Out of any girl you could possibly have, in all of Miami, in Florida, beyond, even... why Serena?" Eva asked, turning to him again in exasperation. It felt like in discovering this piece of information that had been dangling in front of her face for ages now had suddenly torn a huge gap between their team, with Chris and Serena standing on the other side smugly watching the rest of the deluded idiots. "You're supposed to be mentoring her."
Chris closed his eyes and pressed a hand over his forehead. "And you wonder why I didn't want to tell you? That right there is why, Eva. That's exactly what I knew you would say. Why Serena? Seriously? I should ask you why you fell for College Dude, but I'm not that disrespectful. Why not Serena, huh?" he threw back defensively, taking his hand away from his head and throwing it up. "Is she too pure? Am I too much of a reckless bastard for her? Am I going to taint her? Well, I hate to break it to you, Eva, but if that's the case, it's her call and no one elses."
The elevator arrived with a ding and the doors swung open. As Eva stepped into it she found that she just had to laugh again, even if it was for no other reason than the fact she was hating herself right now. "I deserve this. The secrets. Half of me can't even fathom that you are even in a relationship that isn't more than a bit of a quickie with a waitress on the way to work, I can't even know how to process that you're dating Serena. I just... have no right to be pissed off at the fact you were hiding this from me and didn't tell me," she said resolutely. "No matter how much it hurts."
"What do you mean, you deserve it?" Chris asked in confusion as he stepped into the elevator with her, not even waiting to be invited up. It wasn't like this was the first time. They spent a lot of time just chilling out at their apartments. Of course, this was different. He probably deserved a smack in the face, not an invitation into her home. "And hey, that's going to start pissing me off. I know what I was like in the past, but did I ever once say I didn't want some sort of relationship? I'm not saying it's perfect, and I'm definitely not saying I'm perfect, or the perfect boyfriend. I'm friggin not, far from it. That doesn't mean I don't want to give it a shot with someone I've come to care unconditionally about. I wanted it, I just didn't know how to want it, or no one came along that I wanted like that. I didn't have time, but Serena, she--"
"Works with you, so it works," Eva jumped in, cutting him off as she hit the button for her floor with a sigh.
Chris growled and pressed his hands against the wall of the elevator, mimicking banging his head against the wall. "That is not the only reason this works," he argued. "It's... I... I don't have to stop being me with her. All those other chicks, they liked the cheeky surfie doctor... to a point. Then they wanted to change me. I don't want to be changed, and she doesn't want to change me. You would have even wanted to change me. You would have gotten to a point where you thought I should stop and start taking life more seriously. You're all with the serious more often than not. Hell, sometimes even at work I try to have a joke and you're just all about keeping patient focus. I can still be patient-focused without being serious one hundred percent of the time. Serena just... gets me. Like no one else does. Just because you haven't seen that with us doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means you haven't seen it. I wanted you to see it, but I knew you would want to go the serious route again. I'm not proud of the secrets, alright? It worked at first, but at first all it was was a bit of a quickie on the way to work. By then, not telling anyone just seemed the easiest thing."
Eva swallowed, her dark eyes on the illuminating numbers above their heads. She was quiet for a few moments before she lowered her head to meet his eyes again. "I'm not just anyone else, Chris," she reminded him. "If I was about the serious and trying to get you to see the other side of the coin, it's just because I care about you and don't want you to get hurt. But I guess you don't need me to telling you something like this could have laid your job on the line, so maybe you should have kept it from me. Maybe sometimes keeping secrets is protecting someone."
"YES!" Chris said with a heavy sigh of relief, pointing at her. "That right there, that's my point. This was something Serena and me were playing with fire with. It was our risk. We knew what we were doing, we still do, and I meant what I said that day, Eva. I do love her, it's serious. Very serious. This isn't just something I've jumped into on a whim."
"Like jumping down a sinkhole, huh?" Eva returned, glancing at him wryly. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and adjusted her bag over her shoulder, gripping the strap. She pressed her lips together, desperately trying to swallow back the emotions building and threatening to break like the thunder storm outside. But there were tears spilling over before she could stop it, though thankfully the elevator arrived on her floor and she stepped out, turning away from him so she could brush the dampness away before he saw. Once again, she was digging around in her bag for her keys. She needed to start wearing the bastards around her neck permanently.
Chris felt like he was trying to talk to a brick wall and he was getting frustrated. He expected her to be angry and upset, but at the same time, part of him desperately hoped she would understand and just get it so he didn't have to feel like he was doing anything wrong. That was something he felt a lot in his life, and he didn't want it to be something he associated with his relationship with Serena. In fact, he was fighting damn hard to avoid that. Yet, still, he followed Eva to her apartment door in an attempt to keep trying to convince her. "I'm going to just pretend you didn't compare the first relationship I've had in a long time to a giant and dangerous hole in the ground that nearly swallowed me alive," he told her, coming up behind her to wait while she sought out her keys. He never understood why chicks carried such huge bags when all they did was lose shit in them.
Eva spun around, the tears trickling down her cheeks. "I'm leaving, Chris," she told him with a gasp when the words tried to stick in her throat. "I'm leaving."
It was Chris' turn to feel like the rug had been whipped out from underneath him. His mouth dropped open and for a long few moments, he just gaped at her. He wet his lips, anticipating some words coming out of his mouth, but he had nothing, so he went right back to just staring at her, speechless when a strange chill crept over his skin and caused him to shiver a little. "L-Leaving... who-what-?" he stammered ineloquently, every thought he was trying to form really catching up like they were being caught in a mouse trap. He literally had no words, and that didn't happen to Chris Deleo very often.
"A month ago, I got a letter from Boston Medical Center..." Eva began to explain, but she was choking up herself. In fact, as she stood there watching him, noticing he had paled and looked close to tears of shock himself, she felt like she wanted to vomit and take back those two little words that meant everything between them wasn't ever going to be the same again. Instead, she fished the letter from her bag along with the employment contract and wordlessly placed them in his hands. When he had a hold of them, she shifted her hands, cupping them around his with a small, apologetic squeeze. "I need to be happy too."
Chris numbly started to read the letter she had slipped into his hands. It was pleasant, to the point, almost pleading her services. He turned to the contract, and it really didn't take a genius to see that it was an extremely generous offer. In fact, it was everything she hoped for with MT1 one day. Everything she hoped the day before Proctor arrived. "Why didn't you--" he began, but stopped. He couldn't ask why she didn't tell him when he had been harbouring secrets of his own. He sucked in a sharp breath when it suddenly felt like someone was squeezing his chest. "You're going," he whispered in realisation.
More tears spilled over as Eva just stood there for a lingering few moments before she found herself nodded slowly. "I'm going," she confirmed and then stepped forward to hug him, like she had wanted to do since receiving those documents. In fact, she had wanted him to read them, laugh, and tell her they were ridiculous... to ask her to stay. MT1 was her home, it was her comfort zone. If he asked her to stay, she would have. But she knew deep down in her gut that he wasn't going to. He never would have.
But Chris pulled out of the hug before she even barely embraced him. He shoved the documents back into her hands and with a wounded look, turned around and stalked back down the hall to the elevators. Luckily the cubicle was still on her floor and as soon as he hit the button, the door opened. This time it was Eva's turn to call out to him and try to stop him, but he hit the doors closed button furiously and they slid closed just as she appeared in front of them. He might not have told her about Serena, but at least he hadn't been harbouring a secret as huge as walking out on MT1 to move to another state. As far as Chris was concerned, she couldn't have issued a bigger proverbial kicked to the nuts to him than she just had. As selfish and as hypocritical as it was, he needed his friend with him right then, and as soon as the doors closed and he was alone, he rested his forehead against them and just started to cry.
Ir al infierno, capullo! = Go to hell, asshole! (Cuban)
Word Count | 2,774
[Follows THIS]
It was absolutely teaming with rain by the time Chris pulled up out the front of Eva's apartment block. He was still in shock about what had just happened, and all he knew was that he had to go after her. He couldn't let it go like that. The longer it waited, the worse it would get. There was no hesitation back at MT1, he had just taken Serena's keys and jumped in her VW Beetle to go after Eva, with Serena assuring him she would get a lift back to his apartment with Tuck, despite the fact she was clearly as panicked and shocked as he was. They shared a very brief kiss in the rain before Chris got back in the driver's seat of her car and took off after Eva, only just catching Serena telling him to drive carefully before he closed the door. The windscreen wipers had been going furiously in the heavy rain, and despite the urge to speed after her to keep up, he wasn't stupid and kept to a slow speed in the rain. He had lost sight of her Jeep, and he could only hope she even went home at all. Who would really blame her if she didn't after what she just saw?
But she was there, running up the sidewalk from down the block with a medical journal over her head to try and shield some of the rain, but it was coming down too heavily. "Eva!" Chris called out to her, hitting the button on Serena's clicker to lock the doors. Thank fuck it worked the first time, considering how temperamental it was in the past. No cars were coming, so he bounded across the road to intercept in front of the apartment's entrance, his track shoes and the bottoms of his jeans getting a bath when he stepped in a huge puddle because he wasn't watching where he was going. Not that it mattered, he was already soaked through everywhere else. Damn Miami summer downpours could hit out of the blue. "EVA! STOP!" he shouted when she tried to ignore him. He was quick, though and caught her arm right before she got to the door and locked him out. "I'm sorry!" he said loudly so she could hear him over the heavy rain.
Eva pushed his hand off her arm and then swept her wet hair out of her face with her fingers so she could look at him in absolutely disbelief. "You're sorry?!" she cried with a humourless laugh, shaking her head. "Months, you bastard! The mysterious woman you're dating, you said it has been going on for months! Ir al infierno, capullo!" she spat and yanked the door of her apartment block open angrily.
Chris was too stubborn to just let her abuse him and walk away. At least, he assumed she was abusing him in Cuban. It wasn't like he knew the language and tended to fuck it up whenever he tried anyway. It was delivered with the air of being told to go fuck himself would be. Once they were out of the rain and in the foyer, he overtook her again and blocked her access to the elevators. "Stop. Please, Eva. I need you to hear me out. I know you don't want to listen and you don't have to, really, but I need you to. I've been planning on telling you for ages, and before that, okay, we kept it a secret but I... I didn't know what else to do. I didn't want to lose my job... and I didn't want to lose Serena, either."
Eva looked at him furiously, though something might have faltered just a little inside her when she took in how he looked, standing there like a drowned rat practically begging her to listen to him. But it wasn't enough to shake how angry and hurt she was. She rested her hand on her hip and bit down on her lip with an exaggerated nod. "Of course," she said with a snort. "You covered for her, you got sent home for it. How could I have been so damn stupid that I missed this going on right under my nose? You two are just goddam golden, aren't you? Screw you both." She side-stepped him to hit the heel of her hand roughly against the up button, looking up and finding the elevator on the thirteenth floor. Great. Friday the Thirteenth, and it was on the thirteenth floor. Could this day get any worse?
Chris just came to stand beside her. Of course he was going to follow. "You're wrong. I covered for her before anything started with us. It was around the time Tuck got hurt that we started. We got caught up in the fear of it all. I'm not making excuses, Eva. You don't deserve that, and I'm not going to cheapen my relationship by even trying to. Because I'm not sorry it happened, and I'm not sorry I have been dating her for months. All I'm sorry is that I couldn't tell you. You would have tried to talk me out of it. I know you. I didn't want to be talked out of it. You said I looked happy when I talked about her, and I am, Eva. Through all the shit, Serena has given me something I wasn't sure I ever even wanted. I was scared someone or something would take that away."
"Why her, Chris? Out of any girl you could possibly have, in all of Miami, in Florida, beyond, even... why Serena?" Eva asked, turning to him again in exasperation. It felt like in discovering this piece of information that had been dangling in front of her face for ages now had suddenly torn a huge gap between their team, with Chris and Serena standing on the other side smugly watching the rest of the deluded idiots. "You're supposed to be mentoring her."
Chris closed his eyes and pressed a hand over his forehead. "And you wonder why I didn't want to tell you? That right there is why, Eva. That's exactly what I knew you would say. Why Serena? Seriously? I should ask you why you fell for College Dude, but I'm not that disrespectful. Why not Serena, huh?" he threw back defensively, taking his hand away from his head and throwing it up. "Is she too pure? Am I too much of a reckless bastard for her? Am I going to taint her? Well, I hate to break it to you, Eva, but if that's the case, it's her call and no one elses."
The elevator arrived with a ding and the doors swung open. As Eva stepped into it she found that she just had to laugh again, even if it was for no other reason than the fact she was hating herself right now. "I deserve this. The secrets. Half of me can't even fathom that you are even in a relationship that isn't more than a bit of a quickie with a waitress on the way to work, I can't even know how to process that you're dating Serena. I just... have no right to be pissed off at the fact you were hiding this from me and didn't tell me," she said resolutely. "No matter how much it hurts."
"What do you mean, you deserve it?" Chris asked in confusion as he stepped into the elevator with her, not even waiting to be invited up. It wasn't like this was the first time. They spent a lot of time just chilling out at their apartments. Of course, this was different. He probably deserved a smack in the face, not an invitation into her home. "And hey, that's going to start pissing me off. I know what I was like in the past, but did I ever once say I didn't want some sort of relationship? I'm not saying it's perfect, and I'm definitely not saying I'm perfect, or the perfect boyfriend. I'm friggin not, far from it. That doesn't mean I don't want to give it a shot with someone I've come to care unconditionally about. I wanted it, I just didn't know how to want it, or no one came along that I wanted like that. I didn't have time, but Serena, she--"
"Works with you, so it works," Eva jumped in, cutting him off as she hit the button for her floor with a sigh.
Chris growled and pressed his hands against the wall of the elevator, mimicking banging his head against the wall. "That is not the only reason this works," he argued. "It's... I... I don't have to stop being me with her. All those other chicks, they liked the cheeky surfie doctor... to a point. Then they wanted to change me. I don't want to be changed, and she doesn't want to change me. You would have even wanted to change me. You would have gotten to a point where you thought I should stop and start taking life more seriously. You're all with the serious more often than not. Hell, sometimes even at work I try to have a joke and you're just all about keeping patient focus. I can still be patient-focused without being serious one hundred percent of the time. Serena just... gets me. Like no one else does. Just because you haven't seen that with us doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means you haven't seen it. I wanted you to see it, but I knew you would want to go the serious route again. I'm not proud of the secrets, alright? It worked at first, but at first all it was was a bit of a quickie on the way to work. By then, not telling anyone just seemed the easiest thing."
Eva swallowed, her dark eyes on the illuminating numbers above their heads. She was quiet for a few moments before she lowered her head to meet his eyes again. "I'm not just anyone else, Chris," she reminded him. "If I was about the serious and trying to get you to see the other side of the coin, it's just because I care about you and don't want you to get hurt. But I guess you don't need me to telling you something like this could have laid your job on the line, so maybe you should have kept it from me. Maybe sometimes keeping secrets is protecting someone."
"YES!" Chris said with a heavy sigh of relief, pointing at her. "That right there, that's my point. This was something Serena and me were playing with fire with. It was our risk. We knew what we were doing, we still do, and I meant what I said that day, Eva. I do love her, it's serious. Very serious. This isn't just something I've jumped into on a whim."
"Like jumping down a sinkhole, huh?" Eva returned, glancing at him wryly. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and adjusted her bag over her shoulder, gripping the strap. She pressed her lips together, desperately trying to swallow back the emotions building and threatening to break like the thunder storm outside. But there were tears spilling over before she could stop it, though thankfully the elevator arrived on her floor and she stepped out, turning away from him so she could brush the dampness away before he saw. Once again, she was digging around in her bag for her keys. She needed to start wearing the bastards around her neck permanently.
Chris felt like he was trying to talk to a brick wall and he was getting frustrated. He expected her to be angry and upset, but at the same time, part of him desperately hoped she would understand and just get it so he didn't have to feel like he was doing anything wrong. That was something he felt a lot in his life, and he didn't want it to be something he associated with his relationship with Serena. In fact, he was fighting damn hard to avoid that. Yet, still, he followed Eva to her apartment door in an attempt to keep trying to convince her. "I'm going to just pretend you didn't compare the first relationship I've had in a long time to a giant and dangerous hole in the ground that nearly swallowed me alive," he told her, coming up behind her to wait while she sought out her keys. He never understood why chicks carried such huge bags when all they did was lose shit in them.
Eva spun around, the tears trickling down her cheeks. "I'm leaving, Chris," she told him with a gasp when the words tried to stick in her throat. "I'm leaving."
It was Chris' turn to feel like the rug had been whipped out from underneath him. His mouth dropped open and for a long few moments, he just gaped at her. He wet his lips, anticipating some words coming out of his mouth, but he had nothing, so he went right back to just staring at her, speechless when a strange chill crept over his skin and caused him to shiver a little. "L-Leaving... who-what-?" he stammered ineloquently, every thought he was trying to form really catching up like they were being caught in a mouse trap. He literally had no words, and that didn't happen to Chris Deleo very often.
"A month ago, I got a letter from Boston Medical Center..." Eva began to explain, but she was choking up herself. In fact, as she stood there watching him, noticing he had paled and looked close to tears of shock himself, she felt like she wanted to vomit and take back those two little words that meant everything between them wasn't ever going to be the same again. Instead, she fished the letter from her bag along with the employment contract and wordlessly placed them in his hands. When he had a hold of them, she shifted her hands, cupping them around his with a small, apologetic squeeze. "I need to be happy too."
Chris numbly started to read the letter she had slipped into his hands. It was pleasant, to the point, almost pleading her services. He turned to the contract, and it really didn't take a genius to see that it was an extremely generous offer. In fact, it was everything she hoped for with MT1 one day. Everything she hoped the day before Proctor arrived. "Why didn't you--" he began, but stopped. He couldn't ask why she didn't tell him when he had been harbouring secrets of his own. He sucked in a sharp breath when it suddenly felt like someone was squeezing his chest. "You're going," he whispered in realisation.
More tears spilled over as Eva just stood there for a lingering few moments before she found herself nodded slowly. "I'm going," she confirmed and then stepped forward to hug him, like she had wanted to do since receiving those documents. In fact, she had wanted him to read them, laugh, and tell her they were ridiculous... to ask her to stay. MT1 was her home, it was her comfort zone. If he asked her to stay, she would have. But she knew deep down in her gut that he wasn't going to. He never would have.
But Chris pulled out of the hug before she even barely embraced him. He shoved the documents back into her hands and with a wounded look, turned around and stalked back down the hall to the elevators. Luckily the cubicle was still on her floor and as soon as he hit the button, the door opened. This time it was Eva's turn to call out to him and try to stop him, but he hit the doors closed button furiously and they slid closed just as she appeared in front of them. He might not have told her about Serena, but at least he hadn't been harbouring a secret as huge as walking out on MT1 to move to another state. As far as Chris was concerned, she couldn't have issued a bigger proverbial kicked to the nuts to him than she just had. As selfish and as hypocritical as it was, he needed his friend with him right then, and as soon as the doors closed and he was alone, he rested his forehead against them and just started to cry.
Ir al infierno, capullo! = Go to hell, asshole! (Cuban)
Word Count | 2,774