Like Gravity (31 page)

When we finally fell asleep, spooning
like little girls in Lexi’s bed, a solitary tear slipped from my eye and rolled across the pillow. I thought I’d lost everything when I lost him, but I’d been wrong. I still had Lexi. And, more importantly, I had myself.

It had been a tough week, but I knew deep down that Lexi had been right – it doesn’t matter that you get knocked down.

It’s how you get back up and carry on that matters.

***

After that day, I forced myself to start living again. Eating regular meals, sleeping semi-normal hours. Piece by piece, I picked up the discarded fragments of my life and tried to find myself within the chaos.

I threw myself into my schoolwork, which was a good thing considering how many classes and assignments I’d missed during my week of hibernation. I had a lot of ground to make up academically, especially with finals and the end of the semester approaching.
At least my professors had been understanding.

Dr. Angelini was a different story.

To say she was frustrated with me would be an understatement. Not that she showed it, or anything –outwardly, she appeared as calm and collected as always. But the storm of emotion raging behind her eyes gave her away.

So, to appease her, I told her everything.

“I found the trigger,” I said as soon as I sat down in her office.

“Pardon me?”

“The trigger. It was Finn.” I swallowed. “He’s the boy of my dreams.”

“Finn is the
little boy from your dreams?”

“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?” I asked, growing frustrated.

“No, you said, ‘he’s the boy of my dreams,’ which has an entirely different connotation.”

“So help me g
od, doc, if you even
think
the words ‘Freudian Slip’ I will leave this office and never come back,” I grumbled.

Dr. Angelini hid a smile behind her coffee mug before taking a sip.

“So Finn is the trigger,” she prompted, gesturing at me to continue.

I told her everything, then – about the dreams I’d had, the memories I’d uncovered on the Ferris wheel, and
our breakup afterwards. I glossed over my activities of last week, apologized for skipping our sessions, and prepared to leave. When I stood, Dr. Angelini stopped me.

“So that’s it?” she asked, as close to incredulous as I’d ever seen her.

“What’s what?” I was confused.

“You
’re just going to give up on Finn? On all the progress you’ve made? On yourself?”

“What do you mean?”

“Four months ago, if you had a problem, you’d bury your head in the sand like an ostrich, and either wait for it to go away on its own, or run like hell until it was a tiny speck in your rearview,” Dr. Angelini said. “Isn’t that exactly what you’re doing now?”

“
Did you seriously just equate me to an ostrich?” I asked.

“Look, I’m probably overstepping my bounds as your therapist
here, but I can’t help but feel that you are going to regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t deal with this. That moment people look back on when they’re lying in their deathbeds, wishing they’d chosen differently?
This
is that moment.”

“He lied to me!” I
pointed out defensively.

“I know that, Brooklyn,” Dr. Angelini said quietl
y. “But aren’t there things you’ve kept from him as well?”

Of course there were, but I wasn’t about to own up to it.

“Humans are flawed creatures – selfish and cowardly most of the time. We lie, cheat, and steal better than we do almost anything else. We hurt each other with words, actions, and omissions,” Dr. Angelini sighed. “There is a one hundred percent guarantee that the people we love most will let us down. That’s the risk you take, when you open up your heart.” Dr. Angelini paused for a moment and leaned across the coffee table to look at me intently.

“B
ut at some point, you have to decide which ones matter more than the pain, and forgive them for their mistakes.” She placed one hand on mine. “So, if you love him, I guess the only real question you have to ask yourself, the only question that matters is, at the end of the day, is he worth the suffering?”

***

For the rest of the day, I wandered in a daze, thinking over Dr. Angelini’s words. I drove out to the lookout point Finn had taken me to in August, sad to see that it had been overtaken by winter. Frost clung to the fronds and grasses near the riverbed, and the stream was flowing sluggishly under a thin sheet of ice. There were no fireflies; there was no life at all, here – not anymore. It was difficult to believe the hard, frozen ground would ever bring forth new flowers; that the trees would blossom again; that the animals would return to this barren place.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been looking for when I decided to come here – answers, I guess – but I definitely hadn’t found it.

I’d turned to go, depressed by the much-changed landscape, when a cardinal – red and majestic, defying the wintery chill in the air as it soared between deadened trees – burst from a nearby bush, startling me. Clutching a hand to my chest, my eyes tracked the bird’s flight and a genuine smile bloomed on my face. It felt odd, unnatural on my lips after weeks of frowning, and probably looked more akin to a grimace than an actual grin – but at least it was there.

There was life out here after all.

Even in the most desolate place, when it appeared nothing would ever be the same – there was hope.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through my contacts to a name I hadn’t pressed in weeks.
Typing out a quick message, my fingers quickly went numb in the chilly air.

Do you remember when we were kids, and you told me the story of Princess Andromeda? How her parents sacrificed her to the sea monster to save their country?

His response was instantaneous, as if he’d been waiting by his phone.

Of course I do.

I typed back quickly, afraid if I didn’t say this now, I’d never
find the courage again.

I never understood how A
ndromeda could forgive her parents so easily for that, after Perseus saved her. All my life I’ve thought about that myth, thinking it didn’t make any sense and wondering what I was missing. But I think I finally get it now.

Get what, princess?
he asked.

Holding my breath, I hit send.

When you love someone,
truly
love them – more than your pride, more than yourself, even – you can forgive them anything, no matter how much they’ve hurt you. And maybe I’m an idiot, but I still love you. I’ve loved you since I was six years old.

My phone rang.

“Hi,” I laughed into the receiver.

“I’m coming over,” Finn said
without hesitation, his voice demanding. I could hear noises in the background, as if he were pulling on his boots and jacket.

“Don’t,” I told him. “Not right now anyway. I’m not home.”

“Well, where are you? I’ll meet you somewhere. Anywhere.” Hearing his voice was a balm to my desperate soul; I let the sound wash over me, reveling in it like some kind of addict who’d been denied her fix for far too long.

“I’ll be home tonight. Come over later – let’s say eight? We can talk then,” I said. I could hear the smile in my own voice.

“But it’s only three, now,” he grumbled.

“It’s been two weeks,” I shrugged, though he couldn’t see it. “
Are a few more hours going to kill you?”

“Yes,” he said immediately. “I’ll be pacing my living room for the next
four hours and forty seven minutes.”

“Not that you’re counting,” I
laughed. “And don’t pace – you’ve got nice carpeting. It would be a shame to ruin it.”

“I’ll see you soon, princess. Don’t make
any other plans. Tonight, you’re mine.” His voice held a dark promise that sent a thrill rushing through me.

“Counting the minutes,” I
breathed, before hanging up.

I raced back to the Victorian, eager to shower and clean the
apartment a bit before Finn’s arrival. I stopped on the way home to grab some groceries for dinner, feeling light and happy for the first time in weeks.

I couldn’t wait to see him. Sure, there were things we still needed to discuss. But now that I’d decided to forgive him, everything seemed
easier – like a giant weight had fallen from my shoulders and clattered to the ground at my feet.

I walked through the front door, whistling under my breath with my arms loaded full of groceries. The apartment was quiet – Lexi and Ty were spending the weekend skiing with another couple at a mountain range three hours away.
Conveniently, Finn and I would have the apartment to ourselves to get reacquainted. I blushed in anticipation, hoping all the stories I’d heard about the wonders of make-up sex were true.

I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I didn’t have a sense of foreboding, or a gut feeling that something was deeply wrong. I was happy,
with a goofy smile pasted on my face, when I walked into my bedroom.

I took two blissfully unaware steps into the room, before the images
in front of my eyes registered and I came to an abrupt stop.

Horror – that’s the only word I can use to describe what I felt as I
stood frozen in place, scanning the walls of my bedroom.

There were photos covering every surface of the room. They plastered the walls, a morbid collage of images; they hung from strings on the ceiling; they littered the floor and the surface of the bed.

And every single one was a photo of me.

There were snapshots taken from far away, as I made my way to class or ate at the campus student center. Here, an image of me laughing with a classmate as we entered our Criminal Justice lecture hall. There, a photo of me sitting under a tree on the quad, munching an apple as I studied for Media Law.

There were close-ups of my face, multiple shots taken from every angle and in every light. His lens had captured each emotion – happiness, joy, sadness, grief, frustration, doubt, anxiety, fear. He’d gotten photos of expressions I hadn’t even known my face could make.

None
of those were as scary as the ones that had been taken from inside this very apartment. I wasn’t sure how he’d gotten in without Lexi or me ever taking notice, but there they were – unquestionable proof that he not only had access to our living space, he’d made himself fully at home.

There were shots of me cooking, singing along to the radio as I stirred pasta or checked the oven. There were images of Lexi and I taking shots of tequila.
Laughing as we put on makeup and got ready for to head out for the night. Hugging tightly, with matching smiles on our faces.

They only got worse, the more I looked.

Hundreds of shots of me naked, as I changed clothes in my bedroom. More images than I wanted to count depicting me in the shower, fully exposed and vulnerable.

I had been t
he unknowing and unwilling subject of every image captured by his camera lens.

The
most terrifying photos were the ones of Finn and me. In each of those, Finn’s face had been harshly scratched over with sharpie or cut out with scissors. Several of them showed his face with a huge gun-sight target drawn over his face.

In a daze, I pushed the hanging photographs out of my way as I walked
over to the bed, my feet sliding as they searched for traction on the slippery photos covering the floor. There was a box sitting on top of my comforter amidst a pile of images, wrapped in shiny black paper. The lid was fixed with a matte black bow; I tugged on it lightly and it tumbled loose with ease.

I reached out to lift the lid of the box,
bracing myself with the knowledge that whatever was inside was probably even more horrifying than the Brooklyn-collage on my walls.

I held my breath as I flipped back the lid, eyes scanning the contents disbelievingly.

He’d planned this carefully, no doubt wanting it to have maximum impact on my emotions. To simultaneously terrify me and confirm that all my suspicions had been correct.

He succeeded.

The box was full to the brim with black rose petals. Resting atop the sea of macabre flowers, there was a note. It had been written in formal calligraphy, the flowing black lettering beautiful in an archaic, timeless sort of way. It had been scribed on a piece of thick off-white cardstock, the kind used by the wealthy in the days of old when they’d send out handwritten invitations to their balls and galas.

It felt heavy in my hand as I lifted it from the box and read the slanting message.

A gift for you, since I ruined your last one.

Beneath the not
e and the petals, there was a beautiful dress folded inside the box. I recognized it’s green bodice and elegant beading immediately; this wasn’t any dress, it was
The Dress
. An exact replica of the one I’d worn the night I was attacked outside Styx – newly purchased and, terrifyingly, the correct size.