“I see you’re still in a bad mood,” she chirped, and somehow pushed her way into my room. I couldn’t help the nausea that overtook me with her and I being in a space, so close and alone. So I found myself stepping outside my own room to keep that distance.
The only reason I always partook in the after-flight drink ritual with everyone was so they would leave me alone, and it wasalwaysin someone else’s room because the second my drink was empty, I was saying my goodbyes and making my way to call my girl.
It also helped with some of the heckling they gave me, since I had become such abore—their words, not mine. I’d just stopped building a life with them in it. All I wanted was my life with Bonnie, and they were downgraded to background noise, coworkers, no longer even friends.
They didn’t understand, and that was okay. I didn’t need them to. I found that I didn’t care about how they felt and how they lived their lives, as long as they kept me out of it. I let them be assholes, let them ruin their own lives. I only had to see them and put up with them at work, and even then, I’d cut down our interactions so much that I really had no idea what was going on with any of them. I found I much preferred it that way.
“E?” She-satan all but stomped her foot to get my attention, and I realized I’d forgotten she was still in my room.
“What are you doing here, Tiffany?” I barely managed to get out.
“You didn’t answer us or come to my room for drinks. I was worried about you.” She giggled and waved a bottle of champagne she must have brought in my face. I hadn’t even noticed she had it with her, like that was an acceptable reason for her to be in my room.It wasn’t.
“I didn’t go because I didn’t want to,” I told her. She looked shocked by my words, but tried to play it off as she closed the distance I had created between us with her free hand. She squeezed my forearm before I could stop her, and I had to swallow the bile in my throat.
“Don’t touch me. You need to go,” I told her, and I did the last thing I wanted to do—touch her. I couldn’t see any way around it. She had to go, and gonow. I put my hands around her arms, lifted up as gently as I could, and deposited her on the other side of the door. “Go away now, Tiff,” I said quite plainly, and shut the door in her face.
Good riddance.
Chapter Seven
Bonnie
Utterly brilliant.
A goddamn masterpiece.
The best tree on this side of the Mason Dixon.
Fuck that, the best tree on both sides of the Mason Dixon.
Ellie was flying around the tree as I placed each ornament, taking fake pictures, screaming her praise like paparazzi, which had me laughing through the tears as I carried out the last part of my plan. I was unsure if it was my best friend, the alcohol, or the entire concert that we’d had—the guests of honor being my collection of snow gnomes. She had assembled them around us as we crafted my plan, danced out all of my pain, and sang the lyrics to ABBA loud enough that my entire neighborhood probably got a front-row seat to my heartbreak.
Once I filled Ellie in on what I had conjured up and what I wanted to do, she got that mischievous glint in her eye—the one that had gotten us arrested one time. She would argue that since it was only one time, it didn’t count. But that one time was more than enough to scare me straight. I had wilted like a weed, but not Ellie. She almost had the questioning officer admitting that he was the one who spray-painted a penis with the wordsmomma’s boyon her ex’s car. My only job was to be the lookout, but when I say I panicked, I mean I panicked in every sense of the word. When I saw the lights, I froze, and I all but screamedthat we were guilty when he shone his flashlight in my eyes. I had given us up without one word, while Ellie just shrugged, told them she regretted nothing, and started debating with the officer about wrong and right, and that actions had consequences. After her tirade, the officer promptly put us in cuffs, and we spent the night in jail.
100 hours of community service was what we both got when we saw the judge.
Luckily for me, my plan had absolutely nothing illegal about it, even if I did see Ellie shopping for tarps on her phone randomly throughout the night when she thought I was otherwise preoccupied. I would have laughed and teased her about it if I weren’t spending the night choking back my tears.
I spent an absurd amount of time making the paper ornaments, cutting them out in perfectly imperfect shapes, with pictures of our relationship blending into the back of them, the words of hisfriendsin big, bold letters over them. There was something poetic about the beauty of each picture being marred by such ugly words. Such ugly words aboutme.
I hung them with care, had everything spaced out perfectly, and left some blank, wordless, pictureless.Silent.
I collected all the presents we had been adding beneath the tree and tossed them into a closet. Who cared if they broke or shattered?Not me,I told myself as I wiped away the tears that fell for what felt like the hundredth time that night. I forced myself to pack up all the Christmas decorations we had put up around our place, and stuffed my suitcase full of the essentials because of course, Ellie wouldn’t hear of me staying in a hotel. I was staying with her for as long as I wanted. The only problem was that I didn’t want to be staying with her. I wanted to be decorating my and Elijah’s house like Christmas threw up on it. I wanted to be adding the new blow-up sled to the yard when he got home. I didn’t want this.
I took one final look at the tree that held my heartbreak, my shattered illusions of a happily ever after, and placed the final piece of my broken heart underneath it. The iPad. I had wrapped it neatly, and stuck to the screen was a perfectly placed sticky note with a number on it.
213.
“You ready?” Ellie asked.
“Yeah. I’m leaving it all under the tree.”
With a final glance around the home that, just twelve hours before, was my safe space, a lone tear streaked down my cheek, and I closed the door.
Chapter Eight
Elijah
