If I'm a body, you're a blanket on me
If I'm a forest you're the field at my feet
If I'm a comer that the dark backs into
You're the darkness that this comer clings to
If I'm a mountain with the moon above me
I, the mountain, choose the moon to envy.
It was like my breathing had disappeared completely, leaving me behind as well as my body, so that nothing was there but a hollow shell. My heart was pounding so loudly that I was sure everyone around me could hear it. I couldn't speak at all; I just stared aimlessly at the two of them in front of me. Porter was trying to speak but I couldn't make out what he was saying. I couldn't bring myself to look at his face. I knew I was in the middle of having a very, very bad panic attack, but it wouldn't show on the outside.
"He's full of shit, isn't he?" Porter gritted his teeth. "Alexa. Say something..." His voice trailed off, and I could hear Dallas scoff beside him.
"She's just in shock right now that I'm out of jail. Right, Alexa?" My eyes traveled up to meet his, stopping slowly at the small stubble that covered his chin. His face had changed from a small smirk to a full on jeer. "Wait a second - are you really surprised? Is it that hard for you to realize that I bailed myself out? I think you must be forgetting that I have a couple million dollars in my bank account. It wasn't that hard to explain that my dad owns several hotels in the city."
He shifted confidently in his spot, his face almost mocking. His words bounced off of my thoughts, like I hadn't comprehended them yet or even acknowledged them. Everything seemed hazy and far away, like I was truly living in a nightmare. How? How did he get here? How did he end up at this party, and how did he recognize Porter? I hadn't seen him in so long, almost 2 months, yet he looked almost the exact same, maybe a little better. I was so taken aback.
Porter frowned, his voice loud and accusing. "Listen dude, I don't know what the hell is wrong with you, but I suggest you leave us alone before I let one of the security guards know you're in here."
I heard a burst of laughter come from the boy on the other side, causing groups of people beside us to begin to stare. Curious eyes glanced at us for a second, before Porter got quiet, trying not to attract any more attention. Dallas, on the other hand, seemed to not care at all.
"You should probably watch your back, "dude," Dallas spat in a deep, mocking tone. "Things are about to get really shitty for you."
He whipped out his phone. Before I even knew what was happening, he was thrusting the phone over to Porter. My stomach was in knots all of a sudden. Anxiousness provoked me to look up towards the phone, which Porter was now holding. His eyes skimmed over the image of whatever was displayed on the screen. The expression on his face transitioned from one of disbelief, to horror, then anger.
"Get the fuck out of here," He growled. "You're sick. Why would you feel the need to photoshop naked pictures of her?"
Oh god. The breath I had been holding escaped my mouth, and a wave of nausea and fear ran through my veins. I felt like everything I ate was going to come right back up.
"Now why on earth," Dallas muttered in a low voice. "Would I feel the need to do that?"
He reached his hand over, pressing the screen softly. I looked on, petrified. His finger swiped from photo to photo, each picture concealed from my point of view. Porter's face seemed to mirror the emotions I was feeling right now. I was frozen in place, on the verge of collapsing. His lips trembled slightly, and right when I thought I was gonna puke, his eyes glided over to mine.
"...What is this?" Porter said, his eyes painful and horror-struck. "What the hell are these pictures? You told me he had hit you."
My palms were drenched with sweat. I tried to open my mouth to speak, but all that came out was silence and a wordless plead to understand me. My eyes widened as I tried to convey this message to Porter, but no sound escaped my mouth. I dug my nails into my wrist and forced myself to speak.
"I haven't been honest with you," I choked out, my voice cracking near the end.
Porter dropped the phone in his hand. In a fraction of a second, it was cracked on the floor, pieces of the screen shattered completely. I jumped, his reaction taking me fully by surprise. The number of people who had been staring at us earlier multiplied, as dozens of pairs of eyes trained on the broken phone on the ground. The room erupted in silence, and the air was tense in astonishment.
Porter cleared his throat, hardly glancing at me before shoving the phone in Dallas's direction. His face conveyed nothing more than disgust and disgrace. "Please leave," He spoke in a low voice, almost a sad whisper.
I stepped backwards, tears forming in my eyes, blurring the scene in front of me. Dallas is shrugging at his broken phone and at Porter, who is beginning to walk away and leave the two of us together. He disappears into the crowd, a blur among the people just beginning to resume their conversation. It leaves me broken, disentegrated, like an old dusty book thrown to the back of the shelf, humiliated and filled with grief. My limbs that were frozen solid a few minutes ago now refuse to sit still, and I try to move them forward towards the door. There are no words that I can speak to Dallas, nothing I could do or say would change the inevitable fact that I was hiding something monumental. I would be lying if I said that what Dallas did wasn't wrong, but at the same time he did the right thing. Honesty is unavoidable, facts are facts. Revenge wouldn't be the right way to go about things. This was purely my own fault, and it was unavoidable, bound to happen. The only realization that I would have to face was the feeling of remorse, and that I had put myself in this situation.
The thought struck my mind that I probably looked insane running down the street, my hair flying out behind me and my dress brushing against my thighs. The cold air ripped at my bare arms since I was too shaken to go and retrieve my jacket from the door greeters. I wondered if the party was just getting back to normal or if everyone was still gaping at Porter and Dallas, while their faces displayed the emotions that I had last seen on them. Porter was undoubtedly embarrassed by me, since I had basically ruined his night at the least.
Shame coursed through my veins as I arrived at my apartment. What was I supposed to do now? Wait for Porter to call me in total vindication, as if I had just forgot to mention crucial detail that would make or break things between us? It was time for me to face facts. I had left the past like it was, and instead of talking about it I had tried to pretend that it didn't happen at all. I had never felt more stupid or more heartbroken. It was too much to handle in one night, but one thing I knew for certain - Porter was done with me. The thought that Porter and I were completely over crowded my mind and I collapsed inside my apartment, unbearable sadness seeping into my bones.
PORTER's P.O.V.
Sometimes in the middle of a crowd, I'll feel completely alone. Not really because I dislike anyone there, I just feel out of place. There's some situations you just can't get out of in life. Some can be in my control - others can't. As I stood in the ballroom in the middle of Manhattan on a Friday night, I never felt more out of place. Everyone was looking at me and Dallas with wide eyes, as if any second I was going to strike out and start a fight. But I wasn't that kind of person. If anything, I was the opposite. I held in my emotions and grief as I stood on the outskirts of the ballroom, the crowds of people milling around immersed in conversations, flutes of champagne in hand. I must have looked like a minnow in an ocean full of sharks.
I decided to leave shortly after that. Alexa had left already, and apart from her there was no one I was really familiar with. I had come out here with her and her only, and now... now there was no reason for me to stay. I had talked to Elisabeth briefly again, explaining that it was a small misunderstanding and that everything was alright now, but I would be heading home in a few minutes. She had nodded, clearly relieved that the party-disrupter would be on his way.
A wave of nausea mixed with excruciating anguish and frustration enveloped my body as I waited for the car to pick me up. People walked by me, laughing as they made their way home from clubs or parties or whatever they did on Friday nights. I looked on at a girl clasping hands and giggling with a guy, pushing him gently away, and remembered that was me and Alexa almost an hour ago. That was before everything had gone so horribly wrong.
I gripped the bench in front of me in my hands, never feeling more heartbroken or frustrated in my entire life. God. I wasn't sure what to believe right now. Alexa had always seem so honest with me, always the one to spill what was going on in her mind or any problems that were perceptible. I was still so shocked, in disbelief that this must be a joke of some sort, like Dallas had made a master plan to ruin everything between us. And how did he bail himself out? Was he being honest when he spoke to us? I was having a hard time soaking all the events and information in; it just didn't fit right in my head. For some reason, I just knew deep down that what she said was true. Even if she did keep that one big crucial thing from me for almost eight months, what she said was honest, and it was tough for it to sink through my skull. To think about the past year and all of the lies she could've said would be too agonizing to even try to think about. The pain after seeing the pictures gripped me again, and I felt nauseous just thinking about the two of them, together... I gagged, my breath fogging up the dark night in front of me, and gasped for breath soon after. I let my head fall into my hands and I took deep breaths to steady my beating heart,
trying to figure out why she didn't tell me. What hurt wasn't the fact that she didn't give us the whole truth - it was simply that she had lied about what she was really doing. Dallas had told us that she had gotten money from him for almost three months. Was he the only guy she had had sex with for money? Or was it more than that, some elaborate scheme where she chased after boys in clubs, waiting for her fee, using that as a nighttime job?
Disgust filled my stomach once again and I shuddered, refusing to throw up. It wasn't purely out of the repulsion I felt. It was my obliviousness to the whole situation until now. It was the fact that the one person that I had loved with every ounce of me had lied and done something I couldn't even imagine her doing. A pang of sadness hit me as I thought about all the times she might've left a guy's house in the morning, money in hand and hair disheveled. Did the guys treat her like shit? Did they take her out to dinner before they threw her down on the bed and use her as a token in a game? How did she even get the bravery to put herself out like that? I had so many unanswered questions, but one really struck me hard.
Did she have anyone there for her? Could I have saved her if I had known?
My hand fumbled out to call her, reaching down to type a message, anxious to get my questions answered. We could work this out. It didn't have to be this way. I clasped my phone in my hand so hard that I think I almost bruised it, but bruising wasn't half as bad as calling her back and telling her that it was just all a big misunderstanding. What she did was wrong. I couldn't let myself fall victim to someone who had lied to me our entire relationship.
My car pulled up to the curb, waiting patiently for me to hop in, interrupting the violent war of thoughts screaming in my brain. I shuffled from one foot to the other, then without thinking about it any longer opened the passenger door and shut it behind me.
ALEXA's P.O.V.
I don't know why I was expecting someone to call me. The days stretched out in front of me, hours spent lying in bed, staring at the screen on my phone until my eyes hurt. I cried so much, I think I burst every blood vessel in my eye. Over Porter, the shame I felt, the guilt, his face as he saw those pictures. I thought so much about the events of the night, the emotions rewiring themselves into my brain once again, making me recoil into a ball in my comforter. I would do anything, anything, to erase what I did last winter. The guilt made a home in the pit of my stomach and I spent some time throwing up too, sometimes out of anxiety, sometimes out of sadness and regret. I wanted to be with him again, even if he hated me now.
I reached for my phone again, scrambling to press his name on my contact list, then pulled myself away. I would need to do something else to get in touch with him. The first step would be apologizing to him. In person. Not just apologizing, really, but explaining how much he means to me and how I'd never felt this gut-wrenching feeling so much in my entire life. How I'd never loved anyone like this.
But how was I gonna talk to him when he refused to even see my face? No one wanted to see me right now. I couldn't even begin to imagine the pain Tess felt when she found out. I pressed my nails into my wrist subconsciously, where marks were beginning to form. I missed my friends. I couldn't just lay here any longer. I had to do something.
My bones ached as I pushed myself out of bed, my feet hitting the floor softly, cold and bare. The silence of the past few days were interruped by my echoing footsteps as I walked down the hallway leading to my kitchen. The night was already in full swing, and I could hear music blaring from an apartment above mine, electronic music awaking my senses. I didn't recognize the song, but it didn't sound all that great. My stereo sat quietly in the corner of the room practically begging for me to play something better to drown it out. I scrolled through my playlists on Spotify, found the best one to fit my mood, and hit shuffle.
As I stepped away from the stereo, my elbow brushed against something, sending it toppling to the floor with a crash. I reached down to pick it up, and realized it was a small notebook, gone unseen or misplaced and forgotten about. I didn't really have a use for notebooks anyway, so there was really no explanation for it to be in my apartment. I thought about tossing it out, but that would be a complete waste of paper, so I just decided to shove it back in the corner for another few years until I knocked it over again.
Before I set it back, a thought entered my head, and I stared at the empty pages wordlessly. Hold on a second.
I went to grab a pen and then sat down at the kitchen table, the notebook open in front of me.
Porter, I began with shaky hands.
The words practically wrote themselves.
I know you have no reason to forgive me. I get it. I've done something absolutely terrible that I myself am ashamed of. You want to know something? I'm not just ashamed. I am horribly fed up with myself, for hurting you. I will never be able to forgive myself. I'm not that type of person.
I scribbled out the words, frustrated.
When I was younger, my father and mother were unbelievably in love. They cuddled each other constantly, and always shared secret smiles when anyone else was in the room. I'm surprised they still do the same thing now, but with a different kind of air, one that's lasted through years and years of trouble and complications, arguments and hurt. I wanted a love like that ever since I saw it for the first time, one that could outlast anything. I don't know if you feel the same, but I know I feel it when I'm with you. You're always the one to listen to me and to hold me regardless of what's happened. I never really thanked you for everything you've done. I fucking hope this isn't the end for us, but if it is, then I want you to know that you made the past year the best I've ever had. Everything with you I've experienced is, to put in one word, home.
I was so fucking lonely in high school and for the past few years. Makes sense with my anxiety and all, I just didn't have the confidence to talk to anyone, and everyone just assumed that I was shut off from the world. I spent days alone in the confinements of my room, listening to music and being in the company of me and me only.
I paused, the pen hovering over the paper.
If the world was in my hands, I would make sure no one should ever have to feel lonely ever again. We're constantly surrounded by people who are all the same, but they can make us feel like we're different from each other. I wish that feeling didn't exist.
One night when I was younger, I couldn't sleep. I didn't know what else to do, so I just went outside for a walk down the street, exploring new places in the city I grew up in. There was a nightclub downtown that was moderately popular, but I had never been. Out of pure boredom and curiosity, I went inside to see what it was like. And while I was there, a guy talked to me. He was a few years older than me, probably around 19. He bought me a drink and before I knew it, we were headed back to his place. I didn't know what I was getting into. All I knew was that I wanted this never-ending loneliness to subside.
I lost my virginity that night. To the wrong person, in the worst kind of way. He wasn't aware of my age. I wish I was older. I wish it had been with you. I wish all of my firsts had been with you.
I started doing it a lot - spending my nights this way. Just the feel of a human with me, lying beside me, made me feel like I was normal, or worth something. It made the emptiness go away. Soon money entered the spotlight. It put a different spin on things. It was suddenly more than the empty space in my heart being filled, and more of a method for me to get into college.
Then two years later, while this was still going on, I moved to New York City. I started college and found my way in clubs on the weekend. That's where I met Dallas. I know you won't want to hear this, but I just need you to know.
He offered me money to have sex with him, just like the others. I was trying to get rid of my old ways here. I met a new friend, Tess, and I wanted to become close to her. I wanted her to like me. But then I began to think: my rent was overdue, and I didn't have a job. So, on a drunken spur of the moment, I thought, why not?
It was the worst mistake of my life. He took pictures and videos of me without my consent. He hit me and called me names, ones that I will never be able to repeat to anyone ever again. Yes, I knew what I was in for, but people should never, ever, be treated as objects and allow people to make them think they are.
One day, I felt differently. I met this guy, one that acknowledged me and made me smile. I wanted to see him again after barely catching a glimpse of him. That guy was you. And suddenly, I felt lonely again in the bed with other guys. And I felt so incredibly whole around you - you were so much greater than any empty void in my heart. I started skipping nights to be with you over him. How much I wanted to be with you scared me. You had no idea.
One night, I came to Dallas's late, and he hurt me more than I'd ever been hurt before. The next day I told you, because you deserved to know, and you deserve to know all of this.
Everything I've ever known has been so lonely. Except for you.
I can't seem to get you out of my mind, and I hope you feel the same way, even after everything we've been through. This has been the hardest thing I've had to come to terms with, but also the easiest, because telling you these things are easy. And loving you is easy. (I swear to god that was unplanned).
So even if you decide to forgive me for my stupid ways, and even if you don't, I'll always love you. And the way you calm me down more than anything or anyone else. And the kisses you place randomly on my forehead before we fall asleep. And the impromptu pancake breakfasts we have at your place. And the bear hugs you give me because you're so much taller than me.
Anyways. I hope you're not lonely. I hope your heart is full of love wherever it comes from. Whether its from somebody else or me. I hope its me.
Alexa.
I seal the letter up with trembling hands, and stand up to get my coat.