Hell on Heels(21)

We were wounded because of him.

“You’ll be okay,” Henry promised.

Lifting my cheek from my bedroom floor, I shook my head. “What if it never heals?”

“What if what never heals, Charlie?” He lifted me into his lap.

“My heart.”

What makes a man want to break a heart with ease? I wish I knew.

Just seeing his profile in the light made my insides bleed.

“Get out.” My voice came out quieter than I meant it, so I tried it again, and this time it was like a low growl. “Get out.”

I’d caught him off guard and he spun around to face me, sliding the phone into the front pocket of his jeans. “Charlie, let me explain.”

“You have no right to call me that,” I hissed.

He took a step towards me, and I recoiled like I’d been shot with a hollow point bullet.

“I didn’t know.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know you live here. I wouldn’t have…”

Rising from the sofa on shaky legs, I pointed towards the door. “Get the f*ck out.”

My pulse was pounding in my neck and I could barely see the outline of his body now. My vision came and went with my equilibrium in its pocket.

I was grateful.

Seeing him up close would probably make me pass out again.

“Let me explain.” He stepped towards me again and I put the length of the sofa between us.

My knees threatened to buckle and I gripped onto the back of my armchair. I would hold myself up if my life depended on it.

“Explain what?” I snapped. My voice had reached a pitch so high I didn’t even recognize it.

He held his hands out in surrender, taking caution at my tone and stopping his pursuit. “You need to let me explain why I left. You owe me that.”

I scoffed.

I owed him shit.

I could hear everything like I was underwater. The way my heart beat like the echo of a foot drum. The way my eyes closed like the white noise of an old television set. The erratic way air pushed out of my lungs like the extinguishing of a fire.

I could hear it all.

“I will call the police if you don’t leave right now!” I shouted at him.

He took a step towards me and then stopped again, sizing up my intentions.

I looked at my purse on the ground.

He looked at me.

I looked at him.

He looked at my purse on the ground.

I ran and so did he.

Tripping over my own feet, I dove. My fingers reached the straps of my purse first, but before I could grab my phone, he hauled me upwards by the armpits.

The skin under where his hands touched burned through my sweater and I screamed, “I hate you!”

I did.

I hated him so much.

“Charlie, please,” he begged, but I fought him like a woman possessed.

I elbowed him and hit him like a woman scorned.

His arms wrapped around mine from behind, securing them like a vice to my sides, so I kicked hard and connected with his shin.

He cursed.

I didn’t let up. I shook and flailed as years of suppression ignited in my veins.

Oh, how the wounded did burn.

He moved us, pushing my front up against the wall, so close my forehead touched it and I was trapped. Breathing so hard against the drywall that my lungs burned.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” he scolded, and I bucked aggressively. “Jesus. Stop it.”

His body was bigger than mine, like it had been back then, and he didn’t move.

“Get. Out,” I demanded.

“We need to talk.”

I laughed and it was bitter.

So ugly, even I winced.

“Charlie.” He changed tactics abruptly. “I’ve missed you.”

My body slumped against the wall.

It was a cheap shot, a sucker punch, and it worked.

It hollowed me out.

“It’s been almost a decade. You don’t get to miss me,” I told the eggshell paint I’d picked out for this wall last spring as I spoke. I liked it then. I hated it now.

“Charlie—”

“Stop calling me that,” I hissed, as the first tear fell from my eyes. “This isn’t a Nicholas Sparks novel, Dean. You didn’t disappear because you were called off to war with some valiant or noble reason not to communicate with me. You just left. You abandoned me.” My mind couldn’t keep up with my body’s distress signals and I was burning. “But I’m all put back together now, so you don’t get to call me that.”

He pressed into me harder from behind, but the fight was syphoned from me and I was starting to shut down.

“It isn’t that simple.”

“It doesn’t matter. Cowards don’t get the girl.” I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

It was a mistake.

The smell of his cologne had always been a trigger for me.

“But—” he started to argue.

“But nothing.” I choked against the sob suffocating my throat. “Get the hell out of my apartment.”

He shoved his face into the mess of my hair and inhaled. “What did I do to you?”

My limbs gave way completely. The only thing now keeping me upright was his body.

“No one likes a martyr,” I whispered, trying to push away from the wall.