To endure your heartbeat - Part four
Bashing it down doesn’t really work. Grace avoids him for like a week. He hears her on the phone the next morning cancelling her date and then he hears her go out to class without coming in to check that he’s awake or offer him coffee or say goodbye. When he gets home that night he can hear music in her room and see the light under the door, so he knows she’s home, but she doesn’t answer when he knocks, and the food he leaves outside her door stays there until morning.
It continues this way for about four days, until they meet by accident outside the bathroom door one morning. At last, he thinks, contact. But his relief is short lived, because by the time he’s had time to register her presence and come up with something to say she’s walked down the hall and her door is shutting behind her. That’s when he decides to literally try and bash down the door.
She doesn’t respond. He’s banging for like 40 minutes and he shouts himself hoarse trying to get her to come out and talk to him. He’s rewarded with silence and sore knuckles. By the time the weekend comes to an end he’s about to go crazy. He misses her, and he knows it’s ridiculous because she lives here but he misses talking to her over dinner and bugging her while she studies and generally just being around her. He wishes he could just take that stupid conversation back and go back to how it was. Except he doesn’t really, because he thinks maybe he doesn’t actually know her at all, this girl he lives with, whom he thought he knew pretty well. He thinks maybe she’s been hiding herself and that makes him uncomfortable. He always felt like, no matter what else they were to each other, they were honest, their relationship was real. And now he wasn’t so sure. So he doesn’t really wish he could take it back. But he does wish she would just fucking talk to him! But she won’t, so he goes out and gets drunk for the first time in ages. Just down stairs to the bar next door, but still, it feels good, the beer sliding down his throat, cool and savoury, the warmth in his head making everything just a little less bright.
His dad used to warn him about this feeling. It’s hereditary. And he doesn’t indulge it often. But by God when he does it just feels so right, so good. It feels fucking virtuous, this feeling he has right now. But he knows that the virtue won’t last, and eventually it’ll start to feel like sin, in the worst possible way. Not the good kind of sin, all dressed up in lace and dark lipstick, the kind that has you stumbling home at 5am on a Thursday, not knowing where you spent the night or how you got there in the first place. That’s the sin that makes you want to make everything stop, just end, you don’t care how. That’s the destination of this train, and everything else is just a mirage along the way.
So he drags himself home before it gets too good, because he knows that right after it gets real good, it starts to get unbearable. He stands outside her door and listens to her not talking to him for at least five minutes, probably longer considering the state he’s in. He probably mumbles something at her through the door, he can’t remember if he did, or if he just thinks he did. And if he did he can’t remember what it is.
“Grace...I just...I fucking need you to talk to me ok? Just like, say something. No, you don’t even have to say something, you just have to like, look at me or something. I’m drowning here. I feel like I’m drowning...I can’t...fuck...I need you...I miss you...do you miss me? You’re right there, but I miss you anyway...what is that?...Grace?”
He doesn’t remember getting into bed still wearing his overcoat, or setting his alarm for stupid o’clock (8.30) in the morning. He just knows he wakes up and she’s there. She’s fully standing in his room with a glass of water and some pills, turning the ringer on his clock off, which he is totally grateful for.
She smiles at him weakly, and he wonders what the hell he did as she helps him up and hands him the medicine and the water. He doesn’t want to ask. Doesn’t want to risk ruining it, but he’s desperate to know. He drinks the water all the way down and pinches the bridge of his nose. Oh yeah, this is the other reason he stopped getting wasted. The older he gets the worse the hangovers get. Ouch.
But she’s still there and she’s smiling at him like he’s some kind of idiot, which he probably is, if only he could remember, and he feels like he should say something. But then her hand is on his and his skin is like, humming or something, and she’s still smiling, so he smiles back, albeit weakly. And then with a brief squeeze of his knuckles under her palm she’s gone, hurrying out the door saying something about class and extra credit and she’ll be back later. And he must fall back asleep because he wakes up about eleven, just in time to shower before his shift and he can’t figure out whether it was a dream or not. But when he gets up there’s coffee in the pot, and there hasn’t been for days, and he knows that it was real.
When he gets home from work that night she’s planted in front of the tv watching Perry Mason reruns and annotating her poetry book, and she smiles at him as he wanders in. He cracks open a beer and she makes room for him on the couch, and it’s honestly just like nothing ever happened. He can deal with that for now, he thinks as he tugs on her hair a little during commercials and she swats him away without even looking up, he can definitely deal with that.
Part five