Disclaimer: Not mine.
Chapter Twelve
EPOV
I watched her walk away, the crowd shifting and moving as she glided out the door and away from me.
She was leaving; it really was over.
"Goddamn it!" I roared, picking up the chair behind me and slamming it into the side of the booth.
"Edward, calm the fuck down, man!" Jamie wrapped his hands around my arms and tried to pull me toward him.
Fuck him.
"Fuck you." I wrenched my arms free. "Did you hear her? Did you hear what the fuck she said?" I pointed at the door as I stepped closer to him, our faces almost touching. "Don't fucking tell me to calm down."
"Let's just get out of here. C'mon, people are staring―"
"Do you think I give a fuck about these people?" I laughed angrily, sweeping my arms out in front of me. "None of you motherfuckers mean shit to me. None of you. Do you hear me? Huh? Do you?"
I grabbed the glass on the table behind me and launched it across the room, my jaw clenching with satisfaction when the glass shattered and several people cried out.
"The only person that matters just walked out the motherfucking door." As soon as the words left my lips, my entire body stiffened. She'd just walked out the door, she said she was leaving town...and I was still fucking standing here.
I bolted for the exit, ignoring the groans of protest and angry voices as I shoved my way through the crowd. I burst through the door, my head whipping from side to side trying to catch a glimpse of her, my heart pounding so hard I thought it might break a rib.
I spotted her about a half a block up from me as she opened the back door of a cab. "Bella!" I shouted, pushing past people and moving toward her. "Bella!"
She turned her head, her eyes widening slightly before they slid shut. She shook her head and climbed in the car, the door slamming closed behind her. I ran harder, the pills making me clumsy, but the whisky and adrenaline pulsing through me pushed me forward.
I reached the back of the cab just as it pulled away from the curb and smacked my palm against the trunk. "Stop!"
The brake light flashed briefly until Bella leaned forward and said something to the driver. The car accelerated again, but traffic was tight, so I was able to catch up to the back door where Bella sat by the window.
"Bella, please, stop. Talk to me. Please." I pressed my palm flat against the glass as I jogged alongside the car.
She kept her eyes forward, not even allowing me to see her face as the car began to gain speed. "You can't leave, Bella. Please, God." I sucked in a deep breath, my lungs burning from too many cigarettes and not enough exercise. "I can't do this without you. How am I supposed to do this without you?"
I smacked my hand against the glass over and over, my pulse thundering in my ears. "Bella, please, please―I love you. I'm so fucking sorry, baby. Please, just fucking look at me!"
And when she did, I wished she wouldn't have, because if the tears spilling down her cheeks weren't enough to fucking break me, the heart-wrenching sadness in her eyes as her face twisted and crumpled would have.
She lifted her hand to the glass, pressing her palm flat on the opposite side of mine before mouthing, "Goodbye, Edward."
It was the last thing I saw before she pulled her hand away and covered her face with both hands, her shoulders jerking with each sob that choked her breathing. The car was gone, and I stood motionless on the side of the street, my heart aching as my chest cracked wide open.
Cars horns blared as I stumbled to the sidewalk. I slipped into an alley between two buildings and fell to my knees, the exertion of chasing after her, along with the mix of booze and lack of food, doubled me over until the ground was covered with Jack Daniels and stomach bile.
"Fuck." I rocked back and forth as my mind tried to comprehend her not being here, tried to imagine a life of which she truly was no longer a part of―I vomited again.
"C'mon, man, I've got the car," Jamie urged, pulling me to my feet. I didn't protest. I didn't care anymore― about anything― because my everything had just severed her final tie with me.
There are many varying degrees of the unpleasant sensation known as pain. Words like mild, moderate, and severe. But what I felt the moment she pulled away and left me on the side of the street, or the times I called her phone or stopped by her apartment only to have her ignore me, was nothing, nothing, compared to the all-consuming agony that lacerated through my body when I walked into the apartment we had shared for years to find it completely empty.
I'd knocked on her door, determined to talk to her, to plead with her, to get on my knees and beg her not to go, to stay and give us a chance to fix all that I had broken. But when I knocked and the door pushed open, my heart began hammering in my chest, my thoughts immediately going through all the reasons it was not only unlocked, but open. Had she been robbed? Was she hurt?
A million scenarios flashed through my mind in a matter of seconds, each one worse than the last. None of them were as bad as what I actually found after bursting through the door and running inside―Mr. Mallory talking to a contractor about what needed to be replaced and repaired for the new tenant.
The new tenant.
I stared at him open-mouthed as he instructed the guy to wait for him in the kitchen before turning to me, a sad smile on his face. I didn't remember much, only bits and pieces of the conversation registering, things like 'I'm so sorry,' 'she turned in her keys yesterday', and 'flight left this morning.'
They all translated into the exact same thing: the person I'd been with for the last eight years didn't exist anymore; she'd just ended me...us.
In a blur, I stumbled out of the empty apartment that was now nothing more than a shell that housed years and years of the best times of my life.
"Bella, where are you?" I yelled, banging the door shut behind me.
Silence.
"Bella?" My anger flared that she wasn't home after all the dirty shit she'd sent me today.
I stomped toward our bedroom, pulling my shirt up as I walked through the door.
"Hi."
I jerked in surprise, ripping my shirt over my head, tearing it slightly in my attempt to get it the hell off.
And fuck me.
"What―what are you doin', baby?" My eyes were wide as they traveled over her amazing half-naked body, covered in some shit I'd only seen in Playboy magazines.
"I told you I planned on celebrating our first year living together in style." She laughed, her words breathless and sexy as hell.
"So that's why you tortured me with dirty texts all day with pictures of you that were innocent and anything but?" I smirked, popping the button of my jeans and toeing off my shoes, my eyes heavy.
"Maybe?" Her answer was flippant, her tone sly and coy. She was totally messing with me, and doing a stellar fucking job of it.
"Bella, you know I couldn't concentrate for shit after you sent me those texts today. I probably bombed my Chemistry exam." I crawled onto the foot of the bed, licking my lips and turning my face toward her silky-smooth legs, but I kept my eyes up, completely focused on her.
"You were a bad girl today." I nipped her ankle before moving to her knee and kissing her skin softly.
"Maybe that was the plan; maybe I wanted to be bad." Her voice, fuck, it was sultry and low and just...perfect.
"So I get to punish you?" I laughed, sliding my hand over smooth black silk and ending with soft warm skin.
"Baby," she whispered, cupping my face with both her hands, "you're my forever. You can do whatever you want to with me for as long as I'm breathing."
Fuck it. I was done. This pain, the agony, the hurt...I couldn't deal. And what the fuck did I care anyway? She was gone.
I grabbed a few things from my house and left. I couldn't be there. I couldn't look at everything that was supposed to be but never was, that never would be. I checked into the first hotel I passed, pulling the heavy drapes closed as soon as I entered the room, immediately engulfing everything in darkness. Maybe the dark would be better. Maybe the blank, lost feeling that consumed me would make me understand how I was supposed to live this life without her...because right now, living was the last thing I wanted to do.
Weak light filtered under the bathroom door. A thick haze of smoke cast an eerie glow in the dark, dank room. The coffee table was littered with empty liquor bottles, smashed beer cans, and ashes carelessly flicked into the air.
The pungent odor of melting leather burned my nostrils as the cherry from my cigarette lay discarded on the couch beside me. I flattened my palm over the red-hot ball of fire and pressed down. What should have been a searing pain as my skin absorbed the heat was only a mere sting to my drug-laden senses.
She'd left.
I thought she had been fucking with me, trying to make me feel an ounce of the pain that I'd inflicted on her. And I deserved it; I knew that. But never did I let myself believe for one second that things were really over.
I moved my hand from the sofa and wrapped it around the bottle of whiskey between my thighs. Lifting it to my lips, I pulled three large gulps down my throat before letting the empty bottle fall limply to my side.
My head fell back and I closed my eyes as I tried to keep the memories at bay. It was better this way, easier to keep my mind quiet, drowning in a sea of booze and pills and whatever else I could find.
But some nights, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I drank or how much I smoked, I couldn't get her face out of my mind. Her large brown eyes that once looked at me with love and trust, now full of nothing but pain and anger.
"Edward, baby, I can't believe you got these!" Her smile was wide, her eyes bright, happy.
"Of course I did, crazy girl." I grinned and twisted around to face her, giving her a playful wink as I wondered for the millionth time how I got so fucking lucky.
"Weren't they expensive?" She flipped the concert tickets over and over in her hands, inspecting them like there was some hidden secret printed somewhere.
I shrugged and kissed her. "Nothing's too expensive for you."
She crawled in my lap, her knees settling outside my hips. "I love you."
"Yeah?" I pushed my hands under her shirt, pressing my fingers into her soft skin.
"Oh yeah," she whispered before slipping her tongue into my mouth.
"Fuck!" I yelled, my foot shooting out and crashing into the side of the coffee table, glass shattering against the floor as wood splintered and flew across the room.
"Fuck!" I launched the bottle in my hand at the wall in front of me, the sound of breaking glass doing nothing to calm the boiling rage blazing through me. A humorless chuckle passed between my lips as I pulled another cigarette between my teeth and lit it, the room momentarily brightened from the glow of the lighter.
The destruction of the room was absolute, and it twisted my stomach. I flicked the lighter closed and tossed it on the couch as I felt around for the bottle of pills I never let get too far from my reach.
I was fairly certain I wouldn't stop until my destruction was just as absolute as this shitty room.
A/N
Sigh.
Thanks to my people, I love them.
And big birthday wishes to Lolapops whose was yesterday, and Suzie55 whose is tomorrow. A little EPOV sandwich for y'all. I know how you dirty h00rs like it. ;)
See y'all soon!
~Liv
