Chapter 24: : Chapter 24

me before her brows arch into an empathetic, almost sorrowful, face.

“Kai,” she sighs, her mouth open like she doesn’t know how to respond as she pulls away from me.

“I’m in love with you, Johanna. You don’t need to respond. You don’t need to say anything back, I just…I just needed to get it out,” I say, attempting to pull her back into me.

Her hands find my wrists and she softly pushes them down, away from her. The small movement feels like a knife to the chest.

“I’ve never said it before. I don’t just…do this. I’ve never even come close to feeling this way about anyone…but you…” I pause, trying to find the words to match the feelings I can’t seem to express. “You make me feel these…things.”

She bites her lip, looking worried, before running a hand through her hair and sitting down on the edge of the bed.

“I don’t…I don’t think you understand,” she says calmly.

“Understand what?” I ask, sitting down next to her, looking at her as she stares at the floor.

She gazes at the tiny cut on her hand, rubbing a finger over it, and I can almost hear the internal battle going on inside of her head.

“I can’t do this.”

Like a timid mouse caught in a trap, she blinks her eyes as she looks up at me before rubbing her forehead with her forefinger and thumb.

“Do what?”

“I can’t be that person for you. I shouldn’t have—” She sighs. “I can’t keep hurting you like this.”

“Hurting me? How are you hurting me?” I ask, leaning down to capture her eyes again.

She stares at me for a moment, almost attempting to get her thoughts together so I’d understand.

“I’m sorry, Kai. You should be with someone who can make you happy. Someone who isn’t so complicated. You deserve that.”

“What?! Are you…are you fucking kidding me?! You! You make me happy, Han.”

She’s infuriating me with her calmness and her incessant need to tell me what she thinks I want.

“Sure, it’s easy to say that now. We just fucked like crazy and you’re buzzing off that high. But I am who I am, and I’ll keep disappointing you. You deserve more. A Brynn. Someone who makes sense.”

“That’s shit. That’s a fucking cop-out.” I glower at her.

“It’s the truth, Kai. I’m not right for you. I’ll never be who you need me to be.”

“Well, why don’t we just set the bar low, Han, see the glass as half empty? Is this what we’re doing now? Jesus…” I scoff again, rolling my eyes as my hands find my face.

“I’m not someone you want to love. I’m the girl you can hang out with, fuck around with, have a good night with, get high, and get off with…not the one you fall in love with. It’s just not me.”

“I’m not going into this with expectations of who I want you to be, Han. I love you, that means all of you. I love that you are obsessed with death, I love that you bend time to avoid it. I love your crunchy plants, your obsession with gummy worms, the way you stare off into the night, searching for the deeper meaning to life. The things I love about you have nothing to do with what you can do for me or who I want you to be, I’m obsessed with who you are as a person, how your past has formed this mysterious, alluring, phenomenally captivating woman through the experiences you’ve unfortunately endured.”

“Well, I don’t feel the same way,” she blurts out coldly, staring directly into my eyes.

It’s as if another person replaced her. The fake Han is back. She’s hiding behind her because the real one, who was just crying during our intimate love making, is too much for her to handle. It’s frustrating the fuck out of me, her remaining so calm and robotic. I want to shake the living fuck out of her and wake her up.

So, like the psycho I am, I grab her, roughly pulling her up off the bed and squeeze her upper arms into a firm hold. She sucks in a breath as my frustrations take over.

“A minute ago, you were…you were crying!” I stutter, trying to get her to understand what I know. “I thought…I mean, I knew what you were feeling! I saw it in your fucking eyes Han, I felt it in your kiss! Quit doing this to yourself! The self-destructive bullshit is pathetic!”

I shake her in my grasp as I talk, before cursing to myself, dropping my hold as I pace the room, folding my hands on top of my head.

“Kid, I know you’re only saying that because you’re hurt, and I’m sorry,” she responds calmly.

“Kid, oh, now it’s Kid,” I scoff, dropping my hands to my thighs with a slap.

“This is who I am.” She shrugs, shaking her head like she can’t help it.

I stare at her with a look of disbelief. The lies she tells herself just to keep things easy. It’s disgusting. Especially when it results in losing someone who genuinely loves the fuck out of you for all the reasons you could ever want them to.

“You know…it’s funny,” I begin, actually chuckling to myself. “The person you’ve attempted to become in order to deflect your trauma is not who you actually are. Can’t you see that?”

“You should go.” She walks around the bed, finding my pants, holding them out to me.

She’s kicking me out for telling her I’m in love with her. This is awesome. I feel myself losing control as I stare at her through lowered lids.

I grab her again, pushing her up against the wall behind her, forcing her to look at me so I can change her mind, attempting to revert her back to the Han that was falling for me. She gasps, her mouth parting as I stare dangerously into her. Her eyes fall to my lips and back into my glare again as her pulse rises, pounding through her delicate little neck I feel the incessant need to wrap my hand around.

“You love me!” I growl, my face inches from hers.

Her sudden look of shock and half-lidded, lust-filled eyes disappears in a blink, the hazy, glossed over expression back again like it never left.

“I don’t,” she says calmly, her quick blinking, and the rise and fall of her chest, the only thing telling me she isn’t the soulless robot she’s portraying. “I can’t.”

I ignore my head and listen to the horrible instinct that tells me to kiss her. I forcefully place my lips on her, praying she wakes up from our connection.

She allows the kiss, but as I attempt to push my tongue into her mouth, she pushes me off of her lips, panting. “Stop.”

I wince my eyes at her words before opening them and seeing her turned face, her eyes closed tightly, blocking me from her vision.

“No, tell me. What fucking happened to you? Why are you constantly pushing away the possibility of anything positive and real in your life?!”

I can’t stand this. This barricade, holding her from me. Whatever was in her past needs to be confronted. This is her darkness, but she’s embracing it like she loves it. She’s gotten so comfortable seeing in the dark that the crack of light I’m bringing into her life feels foreign and unfamiliar. She’d rather submit herself to her shadows, staying complacent where everything’s easier for her to control.

“It’s time for you to leave.” She holds my pants, pushing them into my chest as she brushes past me, walking towards the door.

I crossed the line, but I’m struggling to understand. She doesn’t talk about her past, her mother, or her passing. Never addresses it, just lives surrounded by it in this apartment of death in hopes it’ll blend its way out. But it never does.

“Tell me. Open up to me. Let me into your dark. I want to see what you see. I just want to understand,” I beg, reaching out for her, pushing my luck, knowing that I’m already losing her to herself.

She says nothing. Just stands with her hand at the door, brushing off my attempts, opening it wider as she nods her head, dismissing me.

“Don’t do this,” I whisper, shaking my head as I plead with my eyes. “I won’t come back.”

The words are a threat. A threat that I know I don’t really mean. But I can only imagine that maybe the possibility of losing me forever will spark something in her, make her realize she’s being ridiculous.

“It’s probably best for you if you didn’t,” she whispers, an empathetic look in her eyes.

I scoff in disbelief, shaking my head at the floor as I flex my jaw that’s become ridiculously tight. I go to walk out of her place into the hallway, only to stop myself, turning to face her one last time.

“You told me I was the only person who made you want to stay…”

She looks down at the floor, biting the inside of her cheek while I feel the emotions flood behind her eyes at the memory.

“But I don’t want you to stay. I want you to go. Go and do what you need to do to set yourself free from the pain and eternal torment you subject yourself to. Disappear again, like you always do. Maybe when you come back, you’ll see that I’ve finally listened to the lies you’ve told and realized I am too good for this.”

“Goodbye Kai,” she says abruptly, closing her eyes tightly as she closes the door.

I stand there for a minute with my pants in hand, fully embracing the feeling of my newly revived heart tearing in two, one half left behind the door of this apartment.

It hurts. It hurts so fucking bad.

How do you love someone who doesn’t even love themselves? She doesn’t feel worthy of love. She thinks she’s too complicated for it. She is. She complicates it herself. She thinks she doesn’t deserve it. She does. But, she’s ready for love to leave her, because it has.

“Fuck!” I scream, punching my fist into the wall outside of her apartment, not giving a damn who hears me.

“Hey! What are you doing?!” A large woman with a wrap around her head, wearing an old dingy bathrobe, peeks her head around her door at the noise. “Get out of here before I call the police!”

I flip her off before shrugging into my pants and making my way to the stairwell. I trot down the cement stairs, falling back onto my ass on the last step. My elbows find my knees and my head hangs between them, feeling deprived of an escape from this newfound prison.

The flickering fluorescent light above me goes out, leaving me in the dark, echoic hole of my own emotions, a hilariously timed metaphor symbolizing Han shutting the only visible light left out of her darkness like a dull bulb.

I hold my head in my hands, feeling the weight of the closure she’s thrown at me as I rip into my hair, my chest heaving with anger as the rage of not being in control takes over. I love someone I can’t have.

I can’t breathe. I’m having a panic attack. I need pills.

I stumble up, walking my way out of the apartment complex to a sight that has me scratching my head. There, pulled up next to the curb, sits Sidney.

He’s looking at his phone in his wooden station wagon before he glances in my direction.

“Ah! Hey man! I’m like, here to pick you up and shit!” He laughs, shooting off fake cowboy guns with his fingers at me.

I stare at him with my hands dropping loosely against my pants.

She called Sidney to give me a ride back to my car. I don’t even know how to feel anymore. I want to fucking hate her. I want to hate her.

I want to hate her.

I reluctantly get into the car with Sidney, huffing in frustration as he begins the trek back to his place.

“Got plans today?” I ask, staring at my sad looking reflection in the side mirror, the reds of my eyes a stark contrast to the ice blue that Han once told me she loved.

“Ah man, you know I’m about to be out on those waves, letting Mother Earth have her way with me again.”

“Wanna get fucked up before she fucks you?”

My plan for the day is to numb this new hurt with drugs and alcohol. Classic Kid move, right? Fuck it all. Fuck work, fuck Han, fuck everyone but Sidney at the moment.

“My man…” His grin tells me he’s in.

I check my phone as we drive, hoping to see a message from her, telling me she made a mistake and to come back. That she’s sorry she closed up on me and to be patient with her as she tries to navigate this new territory full of emotions she’s never felt for someone. That she loves me, but doesn’t quite know how to love yet. I’d message her back, telling her I’d always be patient with her because I understand her. Reminding her that my love for her won’t go away and I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her in my life. Make sure she’s protected. Make sure she never has to worry about being herself again, that I’m here to let her be free and wild, just as the world intended.

But, of course, like everything else in my life, reality hits and the fictional mirage I’ve created in my head needs to be snuffed out against the rough concrete like the burnt end of a fucking roach.