And now it’s happening again… maybe it’s me. I might be the one pushing people away.
I slide my cell phone away and pull the script out once more. I don’t know why I want to read it again, I have already poured over it with every inch of my being, I know it inside and out, but I need something to distract me from the rolling news. I guess there isn’t anything else going on in the world at the moment because there seems to be a lot of focus on this. Which is good and bad news for me. I get what I want but I can’t escape.
“Right, focus,” I tell myself. “Make a decision about Iceland. I need to make a choice today.”
I wasn’t exactly given a deadline, just told to make a choice fast, but I can feel the pressure weighing down on my shoulders. I need to know what my future holds so I can get settled. I want to know where I’m going next.
But my eyes won’t focus on the page. Instead they keep drifting over to the television. It takes a while for anything of real note to grab my focus, but when it does it totally rocks my world.
“Rae?” I practically scream as my friend’s face bursts on the screen. “What the fuck?”
I grab the remote and turn the volume up even louder than before just to make sure I hear every inch of my friend being interviewed on the television. She’s dressed up to the nines, she looks absolutely stunning, she knew that this was coming today. My heart hammers violently in my chest as I sidle closer to the screen to really see her. It pounds so harshly I can hardly hear her for the first few moments, all I can hear is me.
“…yes, I knew it was him the moment I saw his face online,” she giggles, more girlishly than I have ever heard her do before. “And now he’s admitted it, so it turns out I was right. If my friend hadn’t dated him…”
“Your friend?” The interviewer jumps on this making my heart stop dead. This is me. I mean, Shane and I didn’t exactly ‘date’ but it was close enough. Of course I’m who she means. If she mentions me now…
“Yes, my friend, Tia Cooke.” Shit, she betrayed me. “That’s where I got the picture from. Her phone. She took it early on in their dating game and as things went sour she wanted to delete it. I took the initiative and sent it to myself just in case. I thought it might be because she’d want it again, I didn’t think it would be for this.” She waves her hands around and giggles again, clearly loving all of this, especially the part where she’s destroying me. “That just turned out to be a good coincidence because I forced him to admit the truth.”
Forced him? What the hell is she talking about? She ripped a family secret from him in the worst way possible, using a woman’s kidnapping to her own advantage. And she is the one who made me delete the picture too. A lot of what she’s said has been a lie. I shift uncomfortably, trying to process this. I have always known that Rae has a bit of a jealous streak, she’s always been a bit… off when it comes to my success, but I didn’t think that she would do this to me. I’m shocked, rattled in the nastiest way. She has absolutely wrecked me.
My judge of character is terrible. I cannot trust myself at all. I will second guess myself forever.
“Oh God.” I fall backwards, nearly hitting the ground. “What if Shane is watching this?”
He doesn’t know that I snapped a picture of him on that very first night, or he didn’t. But he does now. He probably saw that picture online, maybe he didn’t guess that it was me at first, but he knows now.
He’s going to assume that I was in on all of this. He’s going to hate me forever more.
“Fuck.” I grab my phone and try to call him, but his phone is still off. It doesn’t even run through to voice mail anymore, so I can’t even let him know that I didn’t have anything to do with it. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Anxiety transforms in to a deep panic like nothing I have ever felt before. I grab on to my stomach and heave. Yep, I’m going to puke! I race to the bathroom and let the vomit spill free, hopefully ridding my body of all the spiteful negative emotions tearing me apart. I don’t know if I have ever felt so lost before. I’m a mess.
I have lost Shane; I tell myself sadly as I collapse on to the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. And I don’t have Rae anymore either. I will never be able to be friends with her again. I’ve lost everyone.