Hey guys! More than 500 people have read this story and it is CRAZY! Thank you so much for reading and sending me you messages! This chapter is coming later than I expected, but I was busy with IRL stuff. I think the next one might come next week.
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-AGA-XX
ROCKY START. CHAPTER 4
"I don't know"
"You don't know if you want to go to the party?" He looks at me, separating his pen from the notebook.
"I mean, I do want to go, but at the same time, she is going to be there, what if she doesn't want me there, I bet she doesn't."
"But you still want to do this for Minkii?"
"Minkus." I correct him "Minkii is the plural."
"Of course it is" he says in a sarcastic tone, then he sets his notebook with the pen on the table next to him and folds his hands together over his knee. "Look, you have to stop hiding from her, I think enough time has passed for you to move on with your lives"
"I can't. You know how hard I've tried to forget her, but I can't, the guilt was eating me alive and when she finally forgave me I still couldn't close that chapter of my life. Because if I do that, if I let her go...if I take everyone's advice and move on, that wouldn't be love and it wouldn't be worth fighting for and I know that what we have is."
He stays silent for a minute, analyzing my rant, I hate when he does that. "Okay Lucas, I get it. But what do you have?"
I open my mouth to answer, but my mind is point blank, what did we have? What do we have now? I look at my therapist, baffled, I don't know what to say, because I don't know the answer. We can't go back to just being friends, we are no good at that, we can't go back to being together, not until the water between us is clean again. We used to be in a good relationship, we had our fights and our differences, but we made it work. This is what I miss the most, having someone to carry my baggage with. Somehow, two broken people fixed each other. Oh God.
"I broke her" I say, almost in a whisper, looking at the wooden floor of his office.
"What was that?" He asks, searching for my eyes.
"I broke her." I repeat, louder and stare at my doctor with a bewildered look.
"Lucas..." He starts, trying to calm me down and put some sense into me, but I know I'm right.
"No!" I get up and start pacing across the room. "For the first time in her life she felt like she was whole again, with me. After her father, I thought I would fill that empty space in her heart and I just..." My voice breaks, a knot is in my neck and the stabbing pain in my chest is back. "I left her... like her dad. I'm no better than him, I thought I was saving her from me, but I fucked up."
"I don't know, Riles!"
"Are you going to tell him not to come?" She asked me from the bed.
"I don't know that either." I was doodling in my sketch book, making big lines from different points on the page, it seemed like a huge mess, I should name it 'My Life' by Maya Hart. "What does he even care if I'm here?"
"Maya! You know he still cares for you, a lot." She scowls me from her bed. "He wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable and neither does Farkle, that's why he asked you first."
"Well what was I supposed to say? Tell him he couldn't see his best friend for his birthday because it's awkward for me?" I snap back at her.
She lifts her shoulders and throw her hands in the air. I get it, she doesn't want to be in the middle of our mess. I know it was hard for everyone when Lucas left New York, it felt like I was keeping the custody of our children after a divorce, even Zay. After he moved back they only spent time with him a couple times a month and it was killing them being torn apart, the dynamic never felt the same.
"He can come" I sigh and close my eyes for a second.
"Really?" Riley asks, setting her computer aside and sitting on the edge of the bed.
"I'm trying to make things right... but it's hard for me to keep up with your expectations that everything will be back to normal."
"Maya, the last thing I want is for you to feel like that. We may have overreacted a little when we heard you guys talked..."
"A little?" I scoff and look back at her.
"Just a splash... this is very exciting for us too. If you ever feel like it's too much for you we can lock ourselves in your bedroom and stay there until everyone leaves." I laugh, she comes to sit next to me in the bay window and hugs me. "Uhh, that's a beautiful magnolia." She says pointing at my sketch book. I look down at it, the senseless lines I was drawing turned into said flower opening its petals.
"How are your nightmares going? Are they still consistent?" I'm watching through the window of his office, people look small and insignificant from up here. I don't turn to him, my head still filled with rage, Maya is the only clear object in this hurricane of thoughts. "Lucas?" He presses. "We still have a good 36 minutes."
"Sometimes" I say coldly.
"And what do you do when you get them?" He is writing in his notebook.
"I write it down and make the breathing exercises."
"Do you think that method has worked?"
"I guess" But I don't want a temporary fix, I want them gone. My nightmares started a few days after I had left the hospital, I woke up sweating with a stabbing pain in my abdomen that didn't leave for a couple of days. It was always the same sequence, I was trapped in a store, the aisles never ended as I ran them at the top of my lungs, leaving me breathless. Suddenly, shotguns and screams sounded from different parts of the place, people in agonizing pain asking for help. Every now and then I found a body lying in the floor covered in blood, eyes wide open staring back at me. I never got to them in time to stop the bleeding. I ran until my lungs couldn't take another breath, that's when he found me, but my legs wouldn't move and without hesitating he pulled the trigger. Then I would wake up, after cleaning my face I couldn't go back to sleep, so I changed the sweat-covered sheets, I washed them, I watched T.V, studied or did homework, I would do anything to get my mind focused on something else.
"Do you ever dream about her?" he asks me, he finally catches my attention and I turn to him, he is expecting an answer.
"I do, yes. I think those are the only times that I sleep through the whole night." He nods as he writes that too. "Do you think it means anything that I dream with her?"
"Well, repetitive dreams formulate from a source of anxiety in your mind. Just like you are having the same nightmare after an accident that is very traumatic, you can have dreams about your ex-girlfriend when the break up was clearly devastating in an emotional way for you."
"It's funny, I've been dreaming with her since I was living in Texas. My friends would tell me that I just needed to take her off my head. They would drag me to clubs and bars and I would leave with a random girl. After I had sex with her, we were laying in bed and it's funny because I would go to sleep next to a woman wishing it was Maya the one who visited me that night in my dreams."
"Lucas, just like your nightmares, dreaming like this about her is not healthy and I would recommend the same exercises if you ever have them again."
"They are the only thing I have left from her, I know it's bad, but why can't I let go?" I ask in desperation.
"Maybe you need to understand that there is a difference between moving on and letting go. The past is in the past, you can't fix it, you can't change it. She is giving you the opportunity to start in a fresh page, but you are refusing to do so, instead you are filling this new start with the same stains of before. Aren't you tired?"
"Yes" I manage to say, tears itching in the back of my eyes.
"Start over, when I say this, it doesn't mean that your relationship starts from zero. You can't reset that, what I mean is that this chapter is closed, you are done with it, now is up to you to start a new one."
For the first time in a long time I feel relieved, that annoying pain in my chest disappears and the nagging little noise in my head stops. I let go and tears start coming out of my eyes, without any warning everything I had holding up bursts out of me. The fog of my thoughts settles down and she is still in the middle of them, crystal clear.
"Hey why did you crumpled it up? It was great!" Riley exclaims picking the ball of paper off the ground.
"I didn't like it..." I say closing my sketchbook "the shadows were wrong." I try to justify, then I put the book and the rest of my things in my bag. Riley approaches me and hands me the crumpled paper.
"Keep it, so you can fix it, you don't want this to go away." She moves the drawing around until I take it and stuff it deep in my backpack. She smiles at me, like she just won a little game.
"I gotta go or I'll be late for the train."
"Okay" she says sadly, she throws her large arms around me and pulls me close. I laugh and hug her back. "I'll call you tomorrow, so we can talk plans for Farkle's party."
"Sure, see ya!" I say as I step out of the window of her room.
On my way to the station it felt like I was carrying an explosive in my back and if I opened it, the whole thing would take me with it. I didn't want to think about it anymore, but I had forgotten my headphones and with my luck the train was 20 minutes late, it was a 46 minute ride that I spent figuring out a story for every person in my cart, when I finally got home it was already dark outside.
"Maya? Is that you?" My mom screamed from the kitchen.
"Yes mom!" I yell back.
After that, Shawn appeared coming down the stairs.
"Hi kiddo! How was your day?" I smiled at him, this was what I had always wanted, to come home and have both parents there to receive me.
"Good, Riley and I are thinking of a place where we can throw Farkle his birthday party." I told him as we walked towards the kitchen, my mom was sitting in the set table waiting for us. I went and kissed her cheek, she smiled at me.
"And did you see Cory?" Shawn asked.
"Yes, Cory sent you a hug and he said that he misses you."
Shawn smiled and sat next to my mother. "I don't know how Topanga dealt with the two of you her whole life." I headed to the door whilst they exchanged goofy looks. "Babygirl, where are you going? Aren't you hungry?"
"No, I ate at the Mathews's house." I lied "I'm going to paint." I disappeared through the door and went directly upstairs. I was still carrying my backpack, I had to take the doubt out of my head, I had seen it before and I had an idea of where it came from but I was scared that it was true. What would it mean? Does it mean I still miss him?
I grabbed a little stool from my room and with its help I managed to reach the cord that hid the ladder to the attic. I climbed them and turned the lights on. This space of the house had become mine since I found it a little after we moved in, every time I wanted to paint I would do it here. My materials were here, Shawn had installed a huge white cover for the floor which was stained everywhere and there was a window where I sat and drew the sunsets.
There were some boxes in here as well, I opened one of the cabinets and took out a small metal box that once brought delicious homemade grandma Joy cookies. I took a deep breath and opened the box. Inside there were a lot of papers, notes we used to pass around in class, tickets to concerts we went to, letters written by him, polaroids of us happy, hugging, him carrying me on his back, our Halloween pictures, prom night, everything was here. A pressure settled in my chest as I fought the urge to cry and rip all of them, but I knew far too well I wouldn't do that. After digging in memory lane, I finally found it, it was his history book, the front and the back were filled with doodles I made in class. This was the moment, with dread I opened the book on the page where there was little separation between the pages. A brown old flower laid in the middle of the book, delicate as paper, I grabbed it and started to cry. I held in my hand the same magnolia that was crumpled in my backpack.
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