Page 7 of The Burning
He nodded and I led him back to my room. When we stepped inside the small space, he felt even bigger to me. So big that I had to look up at him when I spoke. I turned the music on and circled around the table to light another candle on the shelf.
“Besides your lower back, do you have any problem areas for me to focus on?”
“My head,” he said, and I waited to see if he was joking or not.
He smiled a little and looked way less murderous when his cheeks dimpled.
“They don’t pay me enough for that, so anything else?” I smiled back at him, and he shook his head. He wasn’t so scary after all.
“And for pressure? Do you want more Swedish, Thai style? Light, medium, deep tissue?”
He looked confused. “Don’t know the difference, but I guess medium? I’ve never gotten a massage before.”
I groaned internally. I would either turn him into a regular or ruin his first experience. I hated the pressure. Self-inflicted, yes, but it still made me anxious. Why did I always have to be like this? It was exhausting.
“Okay.” I forced a small smile. “I’ll give you a few minutes to undress to your comfort level and place your personal items in the basket. Go ahead and lie face down under the sheet and blanket when you’re done, and I’ll be back in about two minutes or so. Take your time.”
I walked out of the room and tied the curtain closed. I found myself on my phone again, this time rereading my last one-way conversation with Austin. Threewhere are you?messages and oneif anyone should be pissed and not answering, it’s melater and still nothing. My twin brother and I had been through our share of fights and there had been times that we didn’t speak for weeks, but this was different. He’d done something that he knew would put a huge crack in our relationship and didn’t seem to give a single fuck about it. Unanswered calls, even more unanswered texts. He completely ghosted me. His audacity was at an all-time high.
He was a fucking liar now—no longer just a boy who fibbed sometimes to get what he wanted from our parents or from girls. He was a man now, one who fucking lied to me and joined the Army with the help of Kael, whom I should have known better than to trust in the first place. But of course I was charmed by him, just like he’d planned, and I allowed myself to be used in the game he was playing with my father. A game more involved and way more intricate than I could even think about right now. I scrolled the conversation all the way up to when Austin was on his way here from his short-lived stint in North Carolina with our creepy uncle. Everything had changed so much since then, it felt like a completely different reality.
“Uh, ma’am?” The voice scared me enough to jump from right where I was standing in the hallway back to reality.
“Shit,” I whispered to myself. How long was I out in the hallway? I had no idea.
“Coming!” I peeped, instead of just playing it off like he had been waiting the appropriate amount of time.
Pulling back the curtain, I rushed over to the table to attend to my neglected new client, who for sure was never coming back, not even to murder me, let alone to get another treatment.
“How is the headrest? Are you comfortable?”
He nodded and I pulled the sheet up to cover his entire back to begin. As my hands slid across his shoulder blades, my mind wandered out of the room, down the hall, and out the front door to the same place it always went lately.
Chapter Four
I got home just after ten. Thomas, my new client, was the last of the day. He rebooked with me for two weeks out, and I thanked my lucky stars that he didn’t leave unhappy. The hour went so fast, while my mind ran through an entire lifetime, yet when I got home, time dripped as slow as room temperature honey. Elodie was asleep on the couch when I got there, so I turned the TV off, sat down on the chair, and stared into the darkness of my living room. I used to be so afraid of the dark and sometimes still ran and jumped over the side of my bed to avoid anything that could possibly be hiding under there. I wasn’t as afraid of the ghosts anymore or the man who hid under the bed in the little girl’s room in thatUrban Legendmovie that scared the hell out of me as a teenager, but that eerie feeling still hadn’t fully disappeared. I spent my life with ghosts, alive and not.
Elodie lay there fast asleep. I was relieved as I’d tried to avoid conversation with her about all my drama these last few weeks. But I wondered how things were with her husband, Phillip, and what fruit her baby was the size of this week. I’d been working and sleeping and not doing much else. Of course I knew that I tried to detach from Elodie purposely—my pride was stronger than my curiosity. So I made plans to go on my own to my favorite little craft store the last two Saturdays and had then spent both Friday nights talking myself out of going the next morning.
The clock on the wall chimed. It was ten and I was both tired and wired. My body was exhausted, but my mind wouldn’t stop moving. I sat back in the recliner as my head pounded. The house felt empty, even with Elodie on the couch.
Maybe it was me who felt empty? I’d had a lot of realizations lately,thatbeing one of them. And also that I didn’t have many friends, and truthfully never had. My closest one was pregnant and spending more and more time with her Army wife friends, which I understood, but it just helped exacerbate the feeling of loneliness that was already consuming me. I didn’t have family at that moment. It had been weeks since I had seen or spoken to my father; the recent rupture in our relationship was far from repaired. Yeah, my brother and I were twins, so we would be bonded for life, but he was nowhere to be found, as per usual when he fucked up.
Time was another thing. Three months ago, my life felt completely different. Austin was in North Carolina. My dad and I had a functional if stale relationship. Kael was a stranger to me. And that was easier, simpler. It seemed impossible that I had known Kael for such a short amount of time and yet he’d managed to fuck up so much of my life. Even as I sat in my dark, lonely living room, he came to mind. I just couldn’t stop thinking about him and it sure as hell wasn’t doing me any good. I barely knew him, and the him I knew was a fucking liar. Why couldn’t I get that through my thick skull? I kept repeating the same thoughts, ruminating on the fact that my life had been turned upside down, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of a solution and stayed in the vicious cycle.
It had only been two weeks since I found out that Kael had helped Austin secretly sign up for the Army—literally the worst possible scenario for me, and Kaelknewthat. He just didn’t care.
My knees started shaking and I ran my fingers through my hair. The clock had barely moved, yet I had played through the entirety of our time together, from our first meeting to our last. The way the rain pounded against my skin that final day was never going to leave me, no matter how hard I tried to forget. Ironically, I could imagine that over the next few months, I would ultimately spend more time remembering Kael than I did knowing him. How fucked up.
I used to be good at forgetting things—sometimes I even made myself forget that I had a mother who ran out on us and didn’t look back. I was that good. But there was something about Kael that just wouldn’t leave me alone, and I was torturing myself with it. I’d never counted days before or stared at a clock just begging for it to move. I was becoming obsessed with time, I could feel it. I worried about becoming fixated, trying not to be as obsessive as my mother, but somehow that only made it worse.
I just ended up fixating on trying not to fixate and inevitably wound up back at the kitchen table, sitting and staring at the clock again, wondering if time would ever speed up. I hadn’t had an appetite and had been living off a few bites of toast that Elodie forced me to eat earlier today, and a couple bites of Mali’s noodles. Mali had watched in disapproval as I sat in the break room, slowly chewing while staring at the wall. I told her I had eaten before my shift, but she always knew when I was lying. I just couldn’t stand how disappointed and pissed off I was at myself. I felt like a total fucking idiot around everyone. Elodie especially, but also Mali. Even with my clients who knew nothing of the situation, my mind convinced me that they did, and that they knew how gullible and just completely stupid I had been for falling for Kael’s lies and bullshit. I hated myself even more for missing him, for spending hours every single day thinking about what I would say to him if I ever saw his lying face again. I loathed that at night I missed the warmth of his body and often woke up with tearstained cheeks and swollen eyes.
I wanted to get to the next phase of heartbreak, the one that everyone on Instagram claimed would compel me to go out with my friends and drink wine and laugh until we cried. Since I wasn’t much of a crier, and I didn’t have any friends, really, all of that seemed unlikely. If I could just get to a point where I didn’t look at his Facebook or didn’t think about the way his sweat tasted on his lips when he kissed me . . .
I pushed myself up out of the chair and went to the kitchen. My stomach growled at the sight of the fridge. I couldn’t remember when I ate last. I grabbed a bag of bread from the counter and sat at the table. It was so dry, but not really having an appetite, I didn’t care so much and at least Elodie wasn’t here to overtoast it.
What felt like an hour later, I blinked out of a memory of Kael on my front porch speaking to me in poetry as we just stared at the stars and talked about them. It felt kind of good to remember those moments because they were some of the few memories from my life that I was happy to revisit, even knowing the pain that would follow.
