I walk into my apartment, just wanting the warm cozy feeling it always gives me to be home.
I want to be surrounded by my own things, in my own space, with my friends, and no thoughts of what lies outside of these brick walls that encase us all here together.
I let the door swing shut behind me and I drop my bag down hard onto the cold floor.
I take in a deep breath, ready to be filled with that happy feeling, but all I smell is leftovers sitting in the sink and my own airport funk.
The cabs, the plane, the airports...it all blurred together. Like I was just a shell of a human, pushing through the fog to get back to the place that would make me feel like me again.
But I don't.
I look around the dark living room and over into the kitchen and I can tell I've missed some sort of party.
Cups still sit across every visible surface and the couch pillows and blankets are all thrown about the floor.
Leftover pizza boxes and Chinese food containers litter the counters and the trash beside the fridge is overflowing, something green and unidentifiable leaking down the side of it.
I can't stand this.
It isn't right.
I needed home to be what it was when I left, but it's all wrong.
I shrug out of my jacket, laying it on top of my bag and then begin walking through the living room and kitchen, flipping on all of the lights as I go.
I'm not even sure where to start at.
I go to the couch first, trying to fix the cushions and pillows back into place but I find a paper plate stuffed behind one of the cushions and then have to go to the kitchen to grab a trash bag out from under the sink.
But once I grand the bag, I look at all of the dishes already piled into the sink and I flip on the hot water, trying to get some of the food soaked off before I can wash those.
But when I reach to move some of the bowls out of the way, I remember the trash bag in my hand and I walk back to the living room to start grabbing the cups and trash from in there to toss into the bag.
But when I do that, I notice the crumbs everywhere.
So then I move back to the hallways closet to dig out the vacuum, searching for an unused plug to use.
"Jesus Christ." A man sighs behind me. "It's just Hayden."
Mark, Ella's man friend, or fiancé or whatever is standing in the hallway in his boxers looking at me like I'm an insane person when he's the one walking around the place in his undies like he lives here or something.
"This place is a wreck." I say, turning back to the task at hand, which is to find a damn plug in this freaking apartment.
"Hayden?" I hear Ella shout back to Mark, then I hear her rushing into the room.
"Hayden!" Gabby's voice shouts from her room before I hear her door swing open, banging against the wall. "Dude, what the fuck?"
"We thought someone had broken in." Mark says, his tone sounding annoyed.
Well, buddy, that makes two of us it seems.
"Yeah, right." I say over my shoulder, finally finding an empty outlet and plugging the vacuum cord in. "Like someone would just break in to clean?" I stand, turning the red switch on the vacuum and feeling it buzz to life in my hands. "If only there were such criminals out there. This place would be the first one they choose. So much for them to do with their dirty gotta clean now madman hands."
I maneuver the vacuum back and forth over the rug, getting a little delight from the crackling sound it makes as it finds a nice pile of crumbs to suck into oblivion.
"Go back to bed, babe." I can just make out Ella saying behind me, presumably to Mark, unless something else has changed here since I left just a few days ago.
"Hayden," Emma says, definitely to me now, since as far as I know, I'm still the only one with that name currently in the room. "What are you doing home?"
"And why the hell didn't you tell us you were coming?" Gabby yells over the whirring of the vacuum. "We could have picked you up."
"I'm not a child and I can get home all by myself and without having to let people know my every single move. I'm an adult."
I can feel their worried eyes digging into my back, but I can't think about them right now. All my mind can do is worry over everything I cannot control and since that's all my head wants to do, my body is doing something it most certainly can control, and that's getting rid of this mess.
Around me I can still hear the water running in the sink in the kitchen and I know I've still got the half full trash bag in my other hand as I'm vacuuming so that I can then put the pillows and blankets away.
I know I look insane to them, but I can't find it in me to even care, all I want to do is make this place what it was supposed to be.
I jump as I feel a hand land on my arm.
I turn my head to meet Ella's piercing blue stare.
I've known this girl forever.
She's been there for me through literally everything and yet, when I look at her now, I can't find the words.
She stills my hands, gently taking the vacuum away from me and turning it off while Gabby goes to the kitchen to shut off the water and comes back to stand at my opposite side.
"What's going on, Hayden?" Gabby asks softly, running a hand up and down my back.
"Nothing." I shake my head, not wanting to look them in the eyes.
"Hayden." Ella says with her motherly tone she only saves for me. "You show up here in the middle of the night, and you're cleaning. You cannot possibly expect us to believe that there isn't anything wrong."
"I can clean." I snap. "You both always treat me like a baby."
"Hayden." Ella says again. "You're not mad at me." She says. "And you're not mad at Gabby." She pulls me over to sit on the couch while she and Gabby sit in front of me.
I feel the tears I've been refusing to shed begin to well up in my eyes. "I know." I say, tugging my bottom lip into my mouth.
"So why are you upset?" Ella puts her hand on my knee and I stare down at the glittering solitaire diamond on her ring finger.
"I just needed to come home." I sigh. "I needed everything to just be normal. Not this fever dream I've been in the last few days."
"There isn't anything normal about ADHD cleaning an apartment at three in the morning." Gabby says.
"Well, it didn't feel right in here and I needed to fix it." I shrug a shoulder.
"When did you decide to come back?" Ella asks and I flop back into the couch's uneven cushions.
"After Ben's mom showed up." I say and they share a glance.
"Do I need to kick someone's ass?" Gabby perks up. "Because I'll whoop up on a old woman, don't think I won't."
I know she expects a smile, or a off beat joke out of me, but I don't give either.
"No, seriously," Gabby says. "What did she do?"
I briefly sum up what had happened between us and I watch as Ella and Gabby both go red in the cheeks.
"You're kidding!" Gabby snaps first. "That fucking hag of a sorry ass old bitch doesn't know you or anything about you and had no right to talk to you like that. Her sorry ass son is the one-."
"He defended me." I cut her off. "He told his mom to back off and she did."
"Oh." Gabby sits back a little. "Ok...and did she?"
"I guess." I shrug. "I could still feel how much she didn't trust me though." I say, but then sigh. "But I mean, I get it. I understand where she's coming from."
"Hayden," Ella sighs. "You always take too much guilt and pressure onto yourself. Sometimes you don't have to give someone the benefit of the doubt or try to understand. Sometimes people are just shitty and it's ok to say, hey that person said shitty stuff to me and I'm not ok with it."
"I guess so." I nod.
I don't entirely disagree with her, but at the same time it's not something I've ever been good at. I can't ever seem to separate peoples actions from what led them to those actions.
I've always gotten myself caught up in the psychology of why people do the things that they do, or what forces draw them to things, or what traumas they carry that now cause them to act out in certain ways.
I've never been able to turn it off.
I can't ever say, yeah that girl was a bitch. It always comes back to well, what was her day like today? Maybe she's upset because something bad happened to her and she's just lashing out. I'll always find a way to give a person some sort of an excuse because I don't believe anyone truly goes out wishing to cause malice and harm on others.
But, then again, there are so many people who do exactly that. Serial killers for one, it's literally what they do. But even they have numerous studies on them to try to understand what made them the way that they are.
"Hey, where'd you go?" Gabby taps my leg.
"Serial killers." I give a half smile.
"Sounds about right for you." Ella laughs. "So what else?" She asks. "I know that unhappy jackass of a woman didn't run you off. You said Ben told her to back off and she did, so why are you home in the middle of the night?"
I think back onto my final hours back in Texas. I think about baby Elizabeth. I wonder if she's awake or asleep. I wonder if she's still taking her bottles easily or doing skin to skin.
I wonder if Ben is playing her his guitar, or if he's sitting in her room watching her sleep in her crib like we had done.
But then I remember.
That's their life, not mine.
He has his mom with him now to help out in all of the ways that I did. Elizabeth has her own little family who loves her. The people who are going to be there with her every day to watch her grow and learn and become a beautiful person.
My place is here.
Cleaning a filthy apartment.
My phones pings in my pocket and Ella and Gabby both watch me, waiting for me to pull it out.
It pings again.
And then again.
And once more.
"Who is that?" Ella asks when I don't make a move for it. I shrug and Ella slumps me over to pull my phone from my back pocket. "It's Ben." She says, looking at the screen while Gabby peers around her to look too.
Their eyebrows both scrunch together before looking up at me.
"What do they say?" I ask, chewing the inside of my lip.
I knew he'd been texting me, but I couldn't bring myself to read them. Not until I was home. Far, far away.
I didn't trust my own resolve to come home. Not if I read the messages. Because, if I'm being really honest with myself, I don't know what my resolve even is.
When Gabby and Ella ask me why I came home, I can't give them a clear answer, because I don't have one.
All I knew was I didn't belong there.
So I left.
And now I'm here.
Wishing I wasn't.
Missing the smell of the top of Elizabeth's fuzzy head.
Missing the way Ben would glance at me and I'd be able to tell everything he was thinking in the smallest of looks.
I already miss them.
I miss our routines and how everything was so chaotic but still just seemed to work.
I wait for them to read me the messages, but Ella slides the phone over into my lap instead, the text conversation opened to his name.
She scrolls it up a bit and I start at the first message.
Ben: You really didn't have to go. I could have found a way to make it work. I don't want you to feel like you're not welcome here because that's not the truth at all.
Ben: Are you going to a hotel or home?
Ben: I hope you didn't go home
Ben: I'm starting to wonder if you gave me the wrong number
Ben: Did I do something wrong?
Ben: please just let me know you're safe, wherever you are...
"Well?" Ella asks. "Did he?"
"Did he what?" I ask, confused.
"Did he do something?" Gabby chimes in.
I shake my head too quickly. "No, of course not." I argue. "Look, he's literally perfect. He's possibly the nicest person I've ever met, he didn't do anything."
"So....?" Ella raises a sharp brow at me, needing more.
So I give them more.
I tell them what happened before I left.
How it made me feel to have him there for me, to have him hold onto me, for him to listen to me and actually care what I say.
"It was too much." I say. "I just felt overwhelmed and confused and like I didn't belong there because I don't." I say firmly. "Elizabeth is my niece, not mine. She's Alice's baby. Ben is Elizabeth's father. My niece's father." I drag out the word. "So, I got my stuff, and I left."
"But you didn't tell him why?" Ella prompts. "You just left?"
"And did you tell him you know him?" Gabby asks me, eyes wide.
"Of course not." I huff. "That would only complicate things so much more than they're already complicated!"
"And what do you feel is complicated?" Ella asks, staring at me hard.
I start to think about it, but then I do what I always do.
I shove the uncomfortable feeling away.
"Let's just drop it." I say, right as my phone pings again.
Ben: Hayden?
"You need to at least tell him you're safe, Hayden." Gabby tells me. "He seems worried."
Of course he is. That's the sort of person Ben is. The perfect kind of human who actually cares about people. So fucking rare in this world these days.
Even more rare?
Finding him after all of this time.
Fucking cruel?
He's the father of my sister's child.
None of the other stuff matters.
I'm here and he's there.
End of story.
I let my fingers slide across the screen.
Hayden: sorry, forgot to take the phone off of airplane mode. I'm home! Don't worry about it, you didn't do anything! Was just time for me to come home :)
I add the stupid smily face to make it all seem ok, when really nothing feels all that ok to me right now.
I try to put away the phone but he texts back immediately.
Ben: glad you made it home. Elizabeth misses you already.
He sends the message along with a selfie of him sitting in the rocking chair In Elizabeth's room, holding her little body against his bare chest.
It makes my heart hurt to see them both.
"Holy shit, dude." Gabby gasps. "I'm not even into guys and can tell he is like literally so attractive."
"Wow." Ella says, glancing now too. "He seriously is."
Yeah, thanks, I know.
I exit the text and toss my phone onto the couch.
I stand and stretch my arms and look down at my friends where they still sit on the floor and I fake a yawn, which turns into a real one.
"I think it's a slumber party kind of night." I say and they both laugh.
"Yen and Mark are here." Gabby reminds me but I shrug.
I look at Ella. "Chicks before dicks." I remind her, then turn to Gabby. "And pals before gals."
"She's got us there." Ella shrugs at Gabby and I help them both up as we head to my bedroom.
We all three climb into my too small bed and I try to find the comfort in them that I so desperately need right now.
"I'm really glad you're home, Hayd." Ella tells me as she flicks off the bedside lamp.
"Me too." I say, but it couldn't feel further from the truth.