It’s high noon.
She needs out.
She needs fucking out.
She hasn’t run in ages, but the instant burn in her lungs, the screaming push of her muscles, are something close to what she needs. She slips through the gates, down the road. Uneven pace, too fast, but she pushes further and further under the beat of the sun, high above.
There isn’t any breeze off the sea. It’s too hot, no cars out on the road—this far up, in the hills, the houses are few and far between. She runs faster. It’s hot—so hot, a fever—it’s a fever, letting herself fully think about him, unable to blink away that photograph on the page, fresh and clear and instant, consequences careening further and further out from her actions.
Don’t you care? Don’t you care about what happened, what you did to him—
Faster, her pulse pounds harder, feet faster, like panic finally running free, wreaking havoc on her lungs, rabid heart rate building with abandon; escaping—escaping the sear of her own decisions, biting at her heels—her ownactions—
At the thought, anger slams into her again—it hits so hard; at herself, and with such clarity, now. For the loss of it, the shape of all she’d almost had, the definition building, what they’d been building, what could have been hers.Angertoo fucking little a word, for the directionless, raging emotion trapped in her skin, flushed and sweating. That she did this,that she did this to herself,and now a door, it’s closed, he’s gone—
A wave of nausea assaults her, so strong that she almost stumbles, just making it onto the side of the road before she starts retching.
Hands on her knees: dry heaves, desperate seizes of her stomach, with nothing to give, nothing to vomit; the acidic burn of coffee rising back up, because she hasn’t been eating, has barely touched food.
Damp palms cold with sweat. A cry scrapes inside of her chest, the deepest sob she’s tried to suppress for weeks.
I didn’t see myself marrying her.
Because one day—maybe already—she’ll be a woman he says that about.
The shock of it, in the rain of New York, late evening after the gala, offhand words, his suit jacket around her shoulders—how she’d clasped his hand between both of hers, in the car, holding on, unable to believe it, unable to see it as anything but potential hurt, a definite catastrophe waiting for her: that he’d give her this, and then take it away; be with her, and then leave her. That she’d be worse off for ever thinking she could have him, for days stretching into years; that she could deserve that, the type of happiness that puts down roots, that would be real.
It breaks her heart now—bent over the side of a road in a foreign country, shaking—as she realizes, as she sees, she did deserve it: happiness, andhim. She deserved him, and she let him go—pushed him away, with both hands, with the type of hurt no one should have to weather. And she wonders, does it change you irrevocably? Hurting someone who she wanted to be everything to, who could have been—who was becoming—everything to her; all the terrifying, immense fear and hope of that possibility now crippled by her own actions.
Actions.
He’s a man who speaks, and speaks well—who spoke with her, hours of thoughts, of books and ideas and arguments, theories and contradictions and heated debates—but more than that, he’s a man who acts. Keys left in her bag, an empty museum, a home open to her, schedules rearranged,I’ll be back tomorrow night.A toothbrush in the bathroom, a Polaroid in his wallet.
They would have gotten there, she thinks. They were already getting there, the edges of their lives smoothing against one another; accommodating, shifting, growing into the potential for a shared life. Now instead, he’ll have it with someone else.
Lili starts vomiting again. Bile does come up, this time.
She struggles to breathe, but it is clear, it is finally clear—through the blur in her gaze, tears wet on her cheeks: He is leaving her, already, and one day soon, he will be gone. She will be a person that knew him once, he will be a person that knew her, at one point—but not really, not truly, not any longer. Not as they become different people, maimed by what she did, but also—simply—changing as their lives continue, separate. Moments they’ll weather without each other, bad days unknown to one another, moments of joy unshared.
The white-hot sun is blinding above her; the oppressive hum of insects, dry grass, olive trees pressing in; Lili tries to gasp around the stitch in her side, the failure of her vision, as the unspoken hope she’s been carrying, so tight, finally fails.
She wants him; she wants him so badly, but she has to let him go.
And so, this is heartbreak.
And, too: the release.
She needs to move on. He already has.
And maybe sometime, somewhere, she’ll see him again. Across aroom, in the street. They will watch each other, they will not speak; the world will move around them, for that held moment of breath.
And then they will leave.
There is nothing else for them, there.
Between their two bodies.
She knocks on their bedroom door.
