Baby? Seriously? I’m not his fucking baby.
I dash to my room—his room, technically—enter and slam the door shut. I turn the lock just as he reaches and bangs on it. “Open the door, Strawberry.”
Oh,fuck him! Is he really going to call me by that name? All because I told him the other night I hated it when he called me by my name that night at the club. Does he really think it’s going to melt me?
Well, no, it’s not. I won’t let it. So I step back from the door and keep stepping back, lest I get the urge to open it. “No.”
“Just, please, all right? Just open the door and let me explain,” he calls out, still banging on it.
“There’s nothing to explain,” I say, the backs of my thighs hitting the bed, stopping my retreat. “You’re an asshole.There. That’s your explanation.”
I hear him emit a large puff of breath. “Yeah, I’m an asshole. I know. Just… please, all right? Just open the door and let me talk to you.”
I curl my hands into a fist. “I don’t want to talk to you. You’ve made me so mad that I don’t want to do my favorite thing in the whole world:talking. Congratulations, you’re the biggest asshole in the world.”
“Look, I know I fucked up,” he says through the door, and I swear I can somehowhearthe grit of his teeth, the clench of his jaw at this, or maybe I’m just so attuned to him that I can hear things he doesn’t say, and I hate that in this moment. “I know that. Just give me a chance to fucking explain and?—”
“Actually,” I call out, glaring at the door. “Why don’t you call me on my phone?”
“What?”
“Yeah, call me on my phone and leave an explanation in my voicemail.”
I hear him sigh. “That was shitty. I know that, baby, okay? I just?—”
“No, wait, call me on my phone and see if you even getthroughto my voicemail.”
“What?”
This time hiswhatis said in a soft, thin tone, and it makes my heart flinch for some reason. Still, I push through. “Yeah, try it. I dare you. Idareyou to call me, asshole, because I blocked you. And you know what”—I move away from the bed and stride over to the window on the opposite wall, the one I saw him through the very first time—“I also just locked the window.” I throw the latch as I continue, “You kept saying, didn’t you, that if I wanted to keep you out, I should lock my window. So again,there.I did that too. You’re blocked and locked out of my door and my window. And myfuckinglife. Because I’m done, you hear me? I’m fuckingdonewith you, so whatever it is you think you have to say to me, I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want your explanation. And I don’t want your flowers, and I don’t want you to call mebabyor Strawberry. Because I’m not your babyoryour Strawberry. I’m not youranythingexcept your newly discovered stepsister and the half-sister of your half-sister, okay? So just go.”
Okay, so I’m exaggerating a little bit. As in, I’m not done with him. Sadly, I’ll never be done with him, no matter what happens or what he does to me. All I need is a little space, but it just came out. Plus I’m so angry at him right now. I don’t want him to barge in here with flowers, looking like a wreck because he realized he’s fucked up. I can’t let him make my heart race and my belly quiver when his realization is right. As in, hehasfucked up.
Except I haven’t heard from him in the last couple of minutes and I don’t like that either. Has he really left? I can’t even hear him moving around out there or breathing or growling or any number of caveman things he does when he’s pissed. And despite myself, I dash back to the door. I put my hand on the wood and lean in. I press my ear to it, trying to ascertain if my suspicions are correct, when I feel something.
A prickle on the back of my neck, and I spin around.
I see him through the glass, standing far back, at the furthest corner of his backyard, right opposite the window. I notice his chest moving even faster now, punching his t-shirt, swelling so high up that it might tear the fabric as he stares at me. With an intensity, dark and thick, that makes me press my spine to the door. He doesn’t have his flowers anymore, no, but he does have something in his hand.
A soccer ball.
His soccer ball that he kicks around sometimes in the backyard, playing by himself. Snow would sit on the steps and cheer him on while I’d stay away, in the kitchen or upstairs, because I was trying to do the right thing.
He’s spinning it between his hands now, between his long, dusky fingers as he stares at me, and for a few seconds, I don’t really understand why he would have a soccer ball in his hands while staring at me through the locked window.
And then it hits me.
It hits me even before he throws the ball up in the air. He lets it come back down and ricochet up. Which is when he moves. I’ve seen him do this move a hundred times before, on the field, before he scores a goal. He steps back, kicks his leg up in the air and hits the ball sideways. And he hits it so hard that the ball rends through the air, wrecks the very molecules of it, flying toward the net to score the winning goal.
Only in this case, the net is my locked window, and the goal is the giant explosion of the glass shattering.
It really feels like a bomb went off in here, the sound of it so loud and blaring. I even act like it because I put my arms over my head and duck down. Even though I know there wasn’t any need for it. The spot where I’m standing is away from his path of wreckage. From the path of the ball that shatters the window and hits the wall, knocking down the picture of a black and white soccer trophy. Which also shatters as it hits the floor.
I stare at it in disbelief. I stare at the floor in disbelief, pieces of glass scattered around. Not only on the floor but also in my bed. On the nightstand, the dresser by the window. The armchair. Somehow though, they haven’t made their way over to me. They’re on the floor around me, within arm’s reach but they somehow haven’t touched me. Like he planned it that way. Like when he decided to bust a soccer ball through my window at the speed of however many miles per hour, he also told the glass how to shatter and decide where the shards may fall.
This is… This doesn’t happen in real life, does it? People don’t have their windows explode by a man who then reaches in and unlocks it, never once breaking eye contact with me.
Never once looking away, he puts his hand on the sill laced with jagged pieces of glass, and I flinch when I see blood ooze out of his palm. He doesn’t seem to feel it though, the cut, because he doesn’t even blink. Then, heaving himself up, he lunges inside, his feet thudding on the floor. And I think he’s so smooth about it, so graceful, that if not for the glass crunching underneath his boots, I wouldn’t be able to hear him come in at all. Like I wouldn’t back then, when he’d sneak into my room in the middle of the night.
