Authors: Kels Barnholdt
I can feel it.
He knows about the wellness center.
Nathan walks right past me and inside the hotel. He doesn’t even look at me, like I don’t exist to him at all. It’s hard to explain the beating that takes place in your chest when a feeling of anxiety washes over you. It’s like your heart is beating at the speed of light, and no matter how many times you tell yourself to breathe, or to calm down, your body won’t listen. It’s what’s happening to me now, with each step that I take after him toward our room.
Nathans sitting on the bed with his head in his hands, not moving. I close the door behind me, the only sound coming from the beating of my own heart. I can feel the adrenalin that fills the entire room, like at any moment things are about to blow up.
Seconds pass, maybe even minutes, but it feels like hours.
“Please say something,” I say, barely above a whisper.
He finally looks up, and I immediately wish he wouldn’t have. His eyes are filled with such intense pain that it’s almost hard to look at him. He’s looking at me like he knows me even less than he thought he did, which wasn’t much after everything.
“What can I say? What the fuck can I say, Victoria? What the fuck happened? Yeah, I think I’ll start with that. What the fuck happened? Please tell me that lady is just a crazy bitch, please tell me you weren’t in some mental hospital, tell me this isn’t really my life right now?” His chest is beating so fast up and down that he looks like he’s about to explode.
“Nathan,” I try to keep my voice as even as possible, “if you just let me explain.”
He stands up now and starts pacing back and forth in front of the bed. “Explain? Explain? What is there to explain? You go away to some mental ward for three months, and you don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t do shit!”
“You think that was my choice? They wouldn’t let me call anyone! You think I wanted to get dragged out of bed in the middle of night and taken away from the few people I had left?” My voice is getting higher now, I’m trying to stay calm but it’s hard when I’ve been keeping this from him for so long.
He stops pacing now, turning to look at me. “You mean you didn’t go willingly?”
“Of course I didn’t go willingly!” I take a few steps closer to him, but stop when I see the same wounded look on his face, like he’s about to break at any second.
“Then how did you?” Realization crosses over his face. “Jesus, you mean, my mom and your dad?”
I nod, unable to speak.
“Why would they do that? Why the fuck would they ever do anything like that?” His eyes are wide. He’s barely blinking, looking like an absolute crazy person.
I feel my heart start to race even faster, and I can feel a headache starting to form somewhere in the back of my head from all the emotions I have washing over me. I can’t believe this is happening, I had imagined this exact situation so many times in my head, but now that it was actually here, I didn’t feel ready for it at all. I was having a tough time actually dealing with it, actually having to come to terms with everything that had happened to me.
I take a deep breath. “They found out about us.” I look down at the ground immediately after I say it, terrified to see the look of pain that’s sure to continue growing on his face.
“Are you saying this is my fault?” His voice is small again now, so small that I almost have trouble hearing him.
I force my eyes to meet his again, and again immediately wish that I didn’t. The amount of confusion and hurt that resides there would be too much for any normal person to take it, especially with all the pain I was feeling myself. “No, no, it wasn’t anyone’s fault…it just happened…” I trail off.
Nathan’s not paying attention anymore, instead looking around the room frantically. His eyes are darting in every which direction, and then my eyes land on what he’s looking for at the same time that his do. His phone.
“Nathan, what are you doing?” I ask as he takes a few hard steps toward the front of the room and grabs his phone off the table in one rough motion.
“I’m calling my mom to find out what the fuck they did.” He’s pounding away at keys on his screen now.
“No! No! You can’t! Nathan, you can’t!” I’m practically on top of him in a matter of seconds trying to wrestle his phone away from him. “If you tell them you know they’ll send me back! I’m not allowed to tell anyone!”
Nathan freezes, his hand still wrapped around his phone, ready to keep dialing at any moment.
“I can’t go back there, please, you can’t tell anyone.”
The amount of rage that consumes his body is like nothing I’ve ever seen before, not even in the wellness center. In one swift motion he takes his phone and throws it across the room, it hits the wall on the opposite side of the room and immediately shatters into a bunch of pieces.
I stare at the place where the phone made contact with the wall, too shocked to speak.
“And what? You just came back and decided to not tell me anything? You thought you’d just come back and go along with everyone else’s story? You didn’t think I deserved to know the fucking truth?” If Nathan’s shocked that he just threw his phone across the room, he’s not showing it. Choosing instead to keep spitting question out at me. It feels like he grows more and more angry by the second.
“I couldn’t tell you! Didn’t you just hear what I said? I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone!”
He shakes his head, not taking his dark gaze off of me for even a second. “That’s a bullshit excuse and you know it. You know me. You know we would have figured it out. We could have…we could have…”
“We could have what? We could have nothing! There was nothing I could have done!” I had done a pretty job at keeping myself calm up until this point, but I could feel my emotions starting to unravel now, tired of being bottled up for so long.
“Of course we could have done something! It’s me, it’s us, there’s always something we can do! Did you even care? Did you even think about me at all?”
I close my eyes for a second, trying to let the anger slip back inside of me, but it’s hard, all I really want to do is scream and yell and laugh and cry and hit him and kiss him all at the same time. “How could you even ask me that?”
A look of realization passes over his face for the second time in the last few minutes. “Is that where you know your boyfriend from? You met him in that place?”
I roll my eyes. “Eric’s not my boyfriend, but yeah, he was in there, but-“
“Oh, it seems like he’s not your boyfriend,” he interrupts me, “that’s why he followed you home, because he’s not your boyfriend. Really seems like you were thinking about me in there with him.” He shakes his head again like he can’t believe how awful I am.
The room is spinning so fast around me, this was going so horrible, this was way worse than I had thought it was going to be. Of course I knew he would be upset and angry, but not like this, never like this. And how was he finding a way to be mad at me? He had no idea what it had been like in there, or how I felt everyday. He had no idea what it was like in there. And who was he to be giving me shit about Eric, who was really just my friend, when up until a day ago he had a girlfriend?
I feel like my mind is going to combust with all the thoughts I have swimming around in it, it’s been so long since I’ve had to be completely honest about everything I’m feeling, about everything that’s happened. And suddenly I feel just as angry as him, if not more. Suddenly, I decide I want to feel sorry for myself for once. I’m sick and tired of having to pick myself up and make the best of everything, even when everything inside of me is screaming that it’s not fair or right.
“Oh, please! You’re one to talk! You had a girlfriend! When I was locked up and miserable every day you were here! With her! Probably having sex with her and not thinking about me at all! You want to talk about being betrayed? Or being hurt? Look at yourself! Look to you!” I can feel the tears starting to stream down my face now, and I’m surprised how good it feels. I’m surprised how much I enjoy finally getting out everything I’ve been holding in for months. “And I would have waited! If it was me, and you were in there, I would have waited! I would have known something was wrong! And even if it wasn’t I would have waited for you! And what a joke that would have been!”
I’m really losing it now, and I find myself pushing him, or trying to push him. He’s way stronger than me, so it doesn’t really work, but I keep trying anyway. Pushing him harder and harder, until he finally takes hold of my hands and walks me slowly backward toward the bed, sitting me down. Not in an aggressive way, more in a way that tells me I better get myself under control. And then, with the same empty look in his eyes, he leaves me on the bed, goes into the bathroom and slams the door behind him.
I immediately pull out my phone and send Angelina a text.
Nathan knows everything, we had a huge fight, I pushed him and he’s locked himself in the bathroom of a hotel next to the diner! Call me Asap! 911!
This was bad, really bad.
***
Two hours later when Angelina pulls up in front of the hotel, Nathan’s still in the bathroom. Angelina had called me back right away, and had insisted on coming up here, she figured if worse came to worse and Nathan was still too pissed at me to let me drive him home, he would go with her. I had been surprised she was awake at five in the morning on a Saturday, but I was too relieved to ask that many questions.
But as the engine cuts, I suddenly wish I had, because she’s not the one driving, Eric is, and they’re in some fancy sports car I’ve never seen before. As if somehow things weren’t complicated enough, now I had to worry about Nathan walking out at any moment and finding Eric here, somehow I don’t think that would help the situation that much.
They both get out of the car at the same time, practically racing to where I’m now standing with my hands crossed. How had they gotten here so fast anyway? They must have floored it. How the hell had she gotten in contact with Eric anyway? I thought she couldn’t stand him.
“Are you okay?” Angelina looks frazzled, like at any moment I might need an ambulance to be called and take me away to urgent care. She’s wearing a pair of gray sweat pants with an oversized sweatshirt and sneakers. This might look normal to someone who didn’t know Angelina, but I knew her, and I knew she literally must have run out of her house in what she was sleeping in. Her hair is kind of frizzy, flying in all different directions, and there’s not an ounce of makeup on her face. She still looks pretty, she has the whole natural thing going on.
“What’s he doing here?” I hiss, glancing over my shoulder to make sure that the door to our room is still safely closed, and that Nathan is nowhere to be seen. I relax a little bit when I realize he’s still locked inside the room, or the bathroom, or wherever.
“Hey!” Eric says, growing defensive. Unlike Angelina, he looks completely put together. His hair is styled perfectly, and he’s wearing a pair of dress pants with a plaid button up shirt, and a dressy black button up sweater over it. He looks like he just came home from a fancy night out. Ugh.
“No offense! It’s just, this is a sensitive situation, and I think Nathan might think there’s something going on…” I wave my hands back and forth between the two of us, “between the two of us.”
Eric laughs loud, shaking his head back and forth. “That’s ridiculous.”
In fact, he laughs a little too loud.
“It’s not that funny,” I say, a little annoyed at him. I mean, there could be something going on between us! There was nothing wrong with me!
“No, it’s not that, it’s just-“
“Whatever!” Angelina interrupts, “totally off topic here! What the hell happened?”
“I don’t know! One minute I’m in the shower getting ready to leave and the next Nathan is over there talking to Stephanie’s mom! Finding out everything!”
I think I expect some kind of crazy reaction, like maybe Angelina and Eric are going to freak out on the outside just as much as I am on the inside. Instead, I get nothing. No big show, no jaw dropping expressions, or gasps of shock, nothing. Just blank expressions, actually, Eric’s looks kind of blank, Angelina’s looks almost happy. Figures, she’s thought I should tell Nathan the truth since the second I got back.
“Hello!” I say, a little louder this time, “did you hear what I said? He knows! About everything!”
Eric scowls, shaking his head back and forth. “You mean he has no idea you were in that place? You didn’t tell him!”
“She wasn’t allowed to,” Angelina says slowly, offering up a tiny bit of help, at least.
“So, you’ve just been lying to him!” Eric’s looking at me like I’m the worst person in the world, like he has no idea how I could be such a liar. Well, clearly he has no idea what I’ve had to go through since I got out.
“Not lying,” I hiss, looking over my shoulder again, “just leaving certain things out.”
“Well, that’s horrible, you should have told him first thing. If a girl I was into ever did that to me, I wouldn’t ever forgive her for as long as I live.”
“Hey!” Angelina says, shoving him a little in the arm, as if she can read my thoughts of horror. “I said you could come if you were supportive! That sounds pretty unsupportive to me.”
Eric rolls his eyes and takes a step closer to her. “Oh, please, you practically begged me to come along. Not that I blame you, you had no idea what you were walking into.”