Page 51 of The Way I Hate Him
I glance over at him. “Chill? What is that supposed to mean? You’re not trying to be my friend or something, are you?”
“I have enough friends,” he answers. “I don’t need another. But Jesus, you don’t have to have your guard up all the time.”
“Says the guy who has his guard up twenty-four seven.”
“You don’t know enough about me to make that assumption.”
“Don’t I? You’ve been an ass to me ever since I walked up to your house.”
He shakes his head as he turns toward me. “You have no idea the kind of man I am.”
“Then tell me something about you. If you’re not so guarded, tell me one thing that isn’t sarcastic or made up, or some stupid way to impress someone with everything you’ve accomplished.”
“You want something?” he asks. “Okay. Take a seat.” When I don’t join him on the sand, he tugs on my hand, forcing me to sink to the sand and pebbles with him. Facing the ocean with his legs pulled in, he says, “You want something? Well, here’s something. I can’t write a song to save my goddamn life right now. Everyone thinks I’m this amazing songwriter, brimming with ideas, but in reality, I’m a guy with a guitar and an empty notebook.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel bad for you?” I ask.
He looks over at me. “No, but it’s real.”
“Is it, though? The rich musician can’t think of a song to write?”
His eyes narrow. “Music is the one thing that helped me escape everything awful in my life. It helped me breathe air into my lungs. It allowed me to get out of the place I was in and never look back. And the fact that I can’t feel that same feeling, I can’t taste the melodies or tap out a rhyme, a thought, anything . . . eats away at me. You might not think it’s a big deal, but to me, it’s as if a small piece of me is dying.”
Oh, huh . . . that does seem like a big deal when he puts it like that.
I feel that. I understand what it’s like to have a piece of you die.
I know the guttural feeling of not being able to breathe, like you can’t get enough air into your body because of the outlying factors around you, controlling your life.
And I don’t like that.
I don’t like that I can relate to him. I don’t want to relate to him.
I don’t want him buying me pickles, sitting down with me on the sand after my sister pretty much abandoned me, and I definitely don’t want to be able to share the same sort of feeling as he does.
And why? Because he’s supposed to be awful. That’s what I’ve been told nearly my whole life. And if he’s not awful, then that opens the door for other things . . .
Things I shouldn’t even be thinking about.
Like how his deep, sultry voice captures my attention every time he speaks.
Or how he looks hot with a backward hat on, but how I love it when he wears no hat at all.
Or the automatic curl in his large hands when he walks around, almost like he’s walking around with the neck of an imaginary guitar in his palm at all times.
No, I can’t think about that at all.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You don’t understand.” He shakes his head.
“No, I do,” I say, breaking out of my thought. “Is that what you’ve been trying to do while I sort through your mail? You’re trying to write a song?”
“Yes,” he answers. “And before you ask, I’ve come up with nothing.”
“Maybe it’s because you’re forcing it,” I say. “You can’t force creativity.”
“You can when you have studio execs breathing down your neck.”
“Do you?” I ask.
