Exotic

~ wits end ~

A heavy weight pinned me to my bed on Tuesday morning, like a dumbbell pressing down on my chest. My mouth was dry and cottony, my eyes crusty with sleep. Which was ironic, considering how little I had slept the night before. One sweaty arm was crossed over my chest, stinging with pins and needle, and the other hung off the side of my bed. Behind my ribs, the cavity of my chest ached. I wasn't failing Biology so excessively that I knew that it wasn't really a broken heart, but the hollow feeling had remained since Caleb had abandoned me in the rainy carpark.

I had determined that I would never move again. No matter how many times Reece knocked on my door.

He thought I was a drama queen? He hadn't seen anything yet.

The first thing I'd done upon returning home – the walk from school to my house was forty minutes, and in the rain, it should have been horrendous, but I'd barely felt it go by – was wipe my life clean of Caleb Proust and everything that came with him. That meant blocking and deleting his phone number and, upsettingly, Lauren's as well. I blocked his account on Instagram – as if it made a difference since he wasn't following me in the first place – and dug out the clothes I had never returned to him, after that first night, and throwing them in the bin at the curb.

An unknown number had rung a couple of times that night, but I had ignored it. Lauren left me a voicemail at six pm, to which I had only listened to five seconds.

"Hey, Miles, are you with Ca –"

And, delete.

I felt bad ghosting her, but thinking about her brother made my body shake. And I wasn't about to make her choose. Family always sided with family.

You're not my type.

Had I not felt the way I did about Caleb, that sentence would have meant nothing. But it did, because I did. He knew that. He knew it would break whatever we had clean in half. Maybe he didn't know it would leave me in the state it had, but my situation was a consequence of his vindictiveness, whether he knew it or not.

Memories of the kiss blended messily with his blank expression, his harsh words, and left me wondering if any of it had been worth it.

All I wanted to do was crawl into my closet and smother my feelings in makeup until it was an inch thick, masking everything ugly from the word. But Sephora was in hibernation. She was crouched over in a cave somewhere, licking her wounds, and cursing the name of Caleb Proust under her breath. I knew if I drew her over my current expression – brow pinched, lips quivering, eyes glassy – she'd come out looking all wrong. The only thing worse than not having Sephora available to me was having a deflated, miserable version of Sephora, lacking her confident aura and glow. I didn't want to look in the mirror and see the Sephora who had come out of my mother's death.

I had curled up on my bare mattress, legs tucked into my chest, and waited out the night. The tiny part of me that wanted to shrug off the entire conversation as inevitable and the best thing for me was choked out by the overwhelming sense that I had been broken up with and gaslit into believing I'd never been in a relationship in the first place.

Heavy boots paused outside my door. Reece negated knocking and went straight for opening the door. Usually, I would have snapped at him, snatching my covers over my bare chest, and telling him I would be out when I damn well felt like it. I couldn't even make myself sit up.

"It's seven-thirty," he informed me. He was wearing his work uniform, brown shorts smeared with grease but ironed.

"Yep," I said absently. "I think I'll stay home today."