Page 38 of Open for Negotiation
My entire body is aching by the time I leave the gym, long after the sun has set. I shoved my earphones in and lost myself in the endorphins and rock music. I drive home with the same music blasting from the speakers in my car.
Luckily, I was able to distract myself for the rest of the day once Jackson and I were finished talking. Work needed to prevail, and it did.
What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to see a petite, raven-haired woman, who was once the love of my life, to be sitting on my front porch waiting for me to come home.
I stop the car outside of my garage, not even opening it because I don’t want her to think she can come inside, because regardless of her issues, she’s not welcome in my home anymore.
She looks up at me with tears in her eyes when I climb out of the car, still dressed in my basketball shorts and white tee I worked out in.
“Please don’t send me away, and please don’t be angry with me,” she says quietly. Her voice raspy from yelling or crying. I can’t tell which.
I halt my steps just on the other side of my car, not taking another step toward her.
“I can’t believe you pulled a stunt like you did today and have the audacity to come here and ask me to not be angry at you.” This only makes her bottom lip tremble even more. “Did you stop taking your medication?” I hate to ask that question. It makes me feel sick to my stomach, but it’s a fair question.
“It makes me sick, Max. I can’t take it.”
“Then go see your doctor and get new ones. Christ, Miranda, you can’t keep doing this to yourself… or to me… or to everyone around you.” The tone of my voice raises, but I lower it immediately. “You know you need to be taking something.”
She looks at me with hurt written in her features. “I’m not crazy.”
She’s right. She’s not crazy, but she is sick. Mental illness is a mean motherfucker and it needs to be taken seriously.
“I know that, Miranda.” I finally walk over to her and sink down to sit on the concrete step next to her. I half expect her to scoot closer to me, but she respects my boundaries and stays over on her side of the step. “I never said you were crazy.”
“You look at me like I am sometimes.”
“I think you do crazy things, but I don’t think you are crazy.”
“Then why are you leaving me? Why is all of this happening?” She wipes her face with her hands and sniffs back.
This is her routine, the emotional roller coaster she takes herself, and me, on every time she has these episodes. It’s never her fault. She never takes responsibility for her actions. She just blames and blames and blames.
“I am not doing anything to you. I am trying to take care of myself and that’s what you need to do too. You need to take steps to better yourself.”
“I thought I had done that with you.”
“No, you were masking the hard truth with an intense relationship and financial security. You were using those as crutches to ignore the real problem that started long before you even knew me.”
“Don’t talk to me like some fucking shrink, okay? That’s not why I came here.” She twists her body around to face me.
“Then why did you?”
“Don’t you remember when we were happy?” She tries to reach out and touch my face, but I recoil from her touch.
“Miranda, I remember being happy with you once upon a time, but that’s tainted now. That’s gone, and I’m sorry… but it’s the truth.”
I can see fat tears welling in her eyes, but she brushes them away quickly.
“I don’t want you to cry…”
I stop when my cell phone, which I laid down on the concrete at our feet when I sat, begins to vibrate loudly. The screen illuminates brightly and one name flashes across the screen.
Scarlett.
It’s like a switch is flipped in Miranda’s eyes when she looks down and sees the screen, sees Scarlett’s name.
“You know what? Fuck you,” she seethes through gritted teeth. “I should have known better than to think you’d ever care about me. You never did. I hate you.” Her words fly from her mouth in rapid succession. She doesn’t even sound like herself anymore. The woman who broke into my home, the woman who came into Fortress and caused a scene is back.
