Write Me A Letter

47 | eigth and ninth

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN | E I G H T A N D N I N T H

BRIE SLID IN THE PASSENGER SEAT of Paula's Beetle without a word. She shut the door without glancing at her friend and let the click of her seatbelt fill the heavy and tensed silence between them.

It was sunny today, and the roads seemed to be alive with cars and people loitering around with their pets and hopping kids, almost as if everyone was sharing a joke among themselves and Brie was casted out.

It was probably the case. Lately, everyone seemed to be happy except her.

Heart heavy, she kept her head straight ahead and stared blankly at the wide road that stretched on for miles in front of them. As expected, Paula was torn between keeping her eyes on the road and checking up on her friend.

"You've been crying," Paula stated the obvious. Her slender fingers slid down smoothly to the bottom of the wheel and she kept them there with a sigh. "What happened?"

So many things did, Brie wanted to tell her friend, but she looked out the window instead.

"Leave." That was the word that left her lips when Ollie couldn't respond to her question. She stood there in her room in just her robe and with bare feet. She was close to being naked literally, but in that moment, she was bare to him in the aspect that mattered. Turned out, learning the painful truth would leave you more bare than stripping down your actual clothes; learning that the person you cared about had been lying to you, and begging them silently for it to not be true was the same with slicing your chest wide open and offering your heart with blood-stained hands.

She wasn't innocent—god, she was as sinful as everyone else, but she never used him as an extra. She never chose anyone else when she decided that it was him that she wanted. Sadly, torturously so, she couldn't say the same for him.

"Brie." Paula's fingers drummed on her steering wheel, and the car slowed down a bit. A forlorn look pulled at her light brows and pinched at her cheeks. "What. The. Fuck. Happened?"

Pursing her lips, Brie thought hard on how to tell Paula. Ever since that day at Wes's party, she promised herself that she'd bother Paula less often. She had been a selfish and dysfunctional friend, and it was high time that she tried to figure out her problems on her own instead of fixing her friends' lives when they didn't need it.

At the same time, her heart begged to be listened to—she needed a friend. She needed to breathe. "You know," she started with a low and steady voice. "I thought that people with icy hearts are just cruel; that their hearts are so cold because they're just wired that way. Turns out that their hearts are crying from the numbness brought by the ice around them."

For the first time, Paula was silent and Brie appreciated that. "They're ruthless because they're numb, they're numb because the ice that coated their hearts was thick. They had ice around their hearts because they weren't able to melt it when they still had the chance. Deep inside, they're just begging to be saved."

Paula looked both confused and worried. "Brie... I still don't get it. What's going on?"

She didn't mean for a humorless chuckle to escape her lips, but it did anyway, and the sound it left was painfully audible in the small vehicle. "I thought Ollie could melt the snow on my chest, but he turned it to ice and now I can't feel anything but the cold."