Blazed (22 page)

My 'crying inside' look was easily detected by my friends and seldom discussed. It only ever came as a result of a feud with Hunter and their patience was exhausted where he was concerned. Chris and Esme didn't know him well enough to rationally comment on his behaviour, Jonathan knew him only as a student and Daniel kept a rigid silence on the matter. He was grateful for the acceptance he'd been afforded as a gay outcast in a society that championed conventional lifestyles and conformity but disliked his attitude enough to not jump to his defence. Not a single one of them had the energy to rehash old debates with me and only the hint that my latent tears were for someone else drove the curiosity.
 

"Hunter called the flat and Blaze answered. He knows the score now, he just doesn't want to sing from it." I scrunched my eyes up and flopped forward to bury my head in the crook of Esme's neck, haunted by the memories of standing just off stage, watching him with wide-eyed wonder. "And boy, can he sing."
 

A faint whimper rattled in Esme's throat. It was the kind of helpless noise she made when she was speechless over something she'd been expecting for a while. I'd heard it the last time she'd been told that a book she'd been chronically obsessed with had been delayed for release by six months.
 

"What did you do about the journos?"

"Plead the fifth, of course. I didn't want to give them any reason to whip their cameras out in here." As beautiful as she was, Esme's anonymity was as precious as mine. She'd turned down so much acting work in a bid to keep her face out of the public eye, preferring to just be a disembodied voice over the urban A-List goddess she could have been, all in the interest of keeping her mother away. I didn't even know if Esme was her real name, but her face was unmistakable to anyone. I couldn't imagine that she'd changed that drastically over the years to be unrecognisable.

"I would never intentionally screw up your privacy."

"I know, I was being irrational. And so are you. Blaze wouldn't—"

"He said 'I'll call you'." Trading glances with Daniel, Esme pulled me up straight by the shoulders, the stunted flow of encouragement trapped by her own flailing faith.

"He's a very honest man. I think he's earned your belief in him. And you're not going to like this, but I think you need to cut Hunter off." It wasn't something she'd needed to tell me for me to know it. The idea to blank him out the way I had recently done unintentionally had crossed my mind so many times before, but like I'd told Blaze, I didn't know what my purpose would be if it wasn't to moon after him. 

"I can't. It fucks with my head when he calls me because he's such a prick and I still want him for reasons I can't even explain anymore. But it's still there, that sense of needing him in my life. I hate and resent him, but he visits and I need him to kiss me, to love me obsessively like I do him. The sadistic craving for something that's done so much damage."

"And Blaze?"

"Just as sadistic." I shook my head at myself, recounting every other time Hunter had broken the lines of communication for a while and left me at a loss. Like the miles weren't enough, the emotional distance between us left a migraine-like ache in my skull until he called out of the blue and spoke to me like nothing had ever happened, leaving me confused and reeling from the abruptness of his turnaround. I never harassed him with correspondence in any form; he always came back to me and I was grateful for it. It was the delusion that he needed me as much as I needed him that kept me dreaming.
 

And that was exactly how it had played out with Blaze. I would wait and hope, counting down the days until I fell back into his good graces. And if it never came, I might still hold on, convincing myself to believe my own lies.
 

There was no way back once I'd put an emotional investment into a man, no matter how involuntarily. I needed them both like water and air. Not one without the other. All or nothing. Double or bust.

THE DAYS I felt like I was living on the periphery were always the hardest to get through. My lips would chap, stomach cramp, and I'd always end up run down and nursing a common cold because my immune system gave up before my brain did. My leukocytes were quitters. My appetite suffered and my body buckled under the strain of being sick and hungry. I was always cold, even in the sun, and walked hugging myself to keep warm. I'd been told that I'd been lucky to avoid any permanent damage from my eating disorder but I couldn't possibly see how these moments in my life were part of the best case scenario.

But whatever was going on inside, I didn't feel it. Just the vague sense of plodding on for everyone else's benefit when I wanted to do nothing more than curl up in bed and hibernate.
 I was in a bad place, but it wasn't 
that 
place. My bungee cord still had some spring in it but was granting me a reprieve before it yanked me back into the real world. This was just the eye of the storm, a place where I could wistfully sigh for no reason and nobody would pester me with questions about what was wrong.

MONDAY was the worst. Unable to sleep, I spent the early hours of the morning clearing the clothes and toiletries Blaze had left behind into a box. I'd get it all back to him Somehow. Someday. Washing my sheets would have come up on my list too if the flat hadn't been inexplicably tidied when I staggered back home from 
Esme's
. If he'd snuck back in to clear my bedroom of his blood stains as a consolation prize, I'd hate to be trading gifts with him at Christmas. 

I went to work exhausted, keeping one hopelessly optimistic eye on my phone, but still dragged myself to
 Esme's that night, chasing a higher level of numbness through intoxication and my usual meaningless fling. The minute I started breaking my routine was the minute I'd be beyond recovery.

The fatigue of Monday was the start of the nosedive. On Tuesday I woke in a cold sweat, racked with shivers as a fever set in. The four ulcers that popped up in my mouth overnight chased away any lasting inclination to eat. My body felt like lead, aching too much to move, but I still dragged myself through the usual day, taking Esme home with me that night. I wanted my daily orgasm, but I didn't want it at the hands of anyone else if Blaze wasn't there. The unproductive string of casual fucks I left in my wake had always felt like a betrayal to Hunter when I crept away from them, but I needed them to feel like I wasn't somehow faulty or deformed. The more I did it, the more I felt like he wouldn't want a woman so 'well travelled', but every man
— or woman— I laid became a faceless vessel for a fantasy that I was sleeping with him. 

Now, I couldn't act on it like I used to because I didn't
 
want
 to be wanted by anyone else. Nobody else fit me or knew my body like Blaze. Nobody appreciated the way my back arched more and more as I crept higher towards the climax he pushed me halfway to with a smile. 

On Thursday, I woke up after apparently seeing in Wednesday disorientated and incoherent. I slept like a corpse and couldn't be roused, setting off a mass paranoia over the state of my physical and emotional well-being. My doctor told Esme that my body just needed the rest, so my friends sat in on a bedside vigil watching over me like I was already dead. They sat around me on my bed playing cards over my unconscious body, occasionally disturbed by my conversational but wordless rambles and aimless stumbles to the bathroom.

I don't remember any of that. A seething Esme ordered me back to bed on Thursday morning, but I ignored her, red nosed and hoarse. I needed the normality of menial employment in my life and my job was hardly strenuous.

"You're over-reacting." She shot me a look that would have melted lead paint. Honestly, I didn't feel too bad now the fever had settled, at least I didn't until I picked up my phone and remembered what had made me ill in the first place.

The picture of Blaze and I still stood prize of place as my wallpaper, his eyes much brighter and greener than I remembered. Sunday morning replayed in my mind; a montage of still images pasted into my memory like some perversely masochistic scrapbook of regret and 'if only's. How had my life flipped so quickly?

"Call him." Esme pushed me down onto the couch to brush my hair, knowing that she wouldn't win the argument of me missing work again. Being largely unconscious and oblivious to breaking so many of my firmly set habits the day before stopped me from getting crazy about it, but I wouldn't give myself a reason to crack now I was lucid.
 

"Don't be ridiculous. Even if I was the type of woman to chase men, wouldn't he have called already if he'd meant it?"
 

"Maybe he's waiting for you to call him?"

I surprised her by laughing through gritted teeth. My scalp hurt enough to touch without the added insult of the knots that tangled my hair from root to tip. My whole body felt bruised. "I thought 
I
 was supposed to be the naive one. I may not be a seasoned pro at interacting with men beyond the bedroom, but I'm pretty sure thinking a woman has another man on her mind when you screw is a major turn off." Not that I wasn't guilty of inflicting that insult on four years worth of men.

"
Was
 Hunter on your mind?"

"No, are you crazy? In case you hadn't noticed, Blaze has a way of paralysing neurons and synapses with a look. It's easy to forget to breathe around him." Just thinking about him made me feel tired and bone weary. I didn't think we could really be classed as 'broken up' when we'd never really been together, but I suddenly understood why women were rendered whiny and insufferable even when they'd been the one to call it quits. I just wanted to talk about him, like recalling all his traits out loud would keep him alive, but I was sure that doing it was just as bad as my already unhealthy tendency to self-harm. If anything, my unwillingness to be
 that fucked up over a man again drove my motivation to not fall victim to old vices. To be that pathetic once in a lifetime was enough. Twice, and people would probably leave me to die shamefully. " 'We' didn't exist outside the bedroom. He hung around to stop himself being demoted to the same level as the guys I pick up every night. All we had was our wild animal sex and now that's tainted. What would bring him back? He's a hot guy, he only needs to blink to summon a bevy of fangirls ready to service him." Just thinking about how replaceable I was depressed me.

Esme sighed behind me and began to part my hair into sections. I thought that she might secretly be glad that to dress and preen me the way she hadn't been able to for weeks. Something about braiding and curling my hair relaxed her and made her feel like she had some use beyond reading scripts
— a purpose to me beyond being decorative. "It's not just sex between you, Emmy. Any fool could see that. It's just the only way you two can be on the same wavelength without scaring yourselves with words. You're both more scared of saying it than you are of hearing it and that's fair enough. You've fallen for the wrong guy once before and now you've done it again. But don't belittle him or yourself off by thinking this is just about being an available orifice when he has a spare evening. To use terminology you're comfortable with, you're on the same page in the same confusing book full of continuity errors and plot holes, but you're sure as hell not characters in a horror story. I have a good feeling about which three words your tale ends with."

I winced at a particularly sharp yank at my hair. " 'They all died'?"

"No! Happily ever after!" 
When were you lobotomised?
 It wasn't like her to churn out rose-tinted romantic clichés. Not even a little bit.

"Ugh, Jesus. I'll be sat right here waiting when you, strange alien imposter, return my dear unromantic, cynical Esme."

"Keep saying that. I'll be waiting to hit you back with my 'I told you so'."

MRS REYNOLDS ONLY had to have her offer of another day off sick with full pay refused once before she let it drop. Maybe it was a wisdom that came with age, but she knew the points of my personality that were negotiable and altering my routine was not one of them. Instead, she showed me the fridge full of orange juice she'd stockpiled to give me a vitamin C kick and relegated me to paperwork duties to keep me off my feet.
 

The tedious process of cross-referencing the stock information she'd complied over the week and the information we had on our system was just monotonous enough for me to get lost in it's rhythm. My head bobbed to the sound of Portishead I picked out from my MP3 player and soothed me to a state of near-hypnotism, moving almost automatically without thought. She always had me do something slow paced like this when she knew I was going through a rough patch, offering me an opportunity to shut down and recover when others wouldn't let me. The typical tactic was to distract me, wearing me out so I couldn't brood over my problems, when peace was what I really needed. How else would my body catch up?

I had heartburn to rival a nuclear holocaust when I got home that night. Racked with dry heaves and draped over porcelain, Esme held my hair and traced shapes on my back while I panted through the spasms that tore through my stomach. 

We had sat that way too many times before
— naked and mutually post-orgasmically exhausted. What good had ever come from living my life that way until Blaze came, a man who took me out of that pattern whilst simultaneously satisfying all the criterion I set for a 'normal' night? Why was I so scared to go home alone just once rather than add notches to my bed post, leaving me feeling dirty and devalued?