A New
Beginning
Chapter
5: Honestly, I Lied to You
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Once more I woke up on that damn couch. Charlie was sitting on the table next to the couch with his feet resting on my back. “Don’t move,” he ordered me. “I’m comfy.”
“I’ll remove your feet from your body if you don’t move them,” I threatened. “What are you doing up? It’s not lunch yet for another couple of hours.”
“What are you sleeping here for? Connie and Guy aren’t even home,” Charlie said and put his feet down on the floor. “You’re not drunk are you?”
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Huh?”
“Good morning,” Fred said somewhere close to my ear. I backed away and fell to the floor with a thud.
Charlie laughed. “Well, at least she’s up. I just told her that Guy and Connie were out last night. She seems to like the couch, why else would she sleep there if it wasn’t necessary?”
Fred helped me up from the floor. “Sorry about that. Too early, huh?”
“I guess,” I mumbled. That’s my new phrase; ‘I guess’. It used to be ‘fine’.
Adam opened the door to his room. “Please tell me that there’s breakfast,” he pleaded. “I can’t stand to walk down to the cafeteria again. Hi, Cee, what are you doing here?”
I was about to answer when Connie came bursting in through the door. “I have great news!” she exclaimed. “Guess what?”
“You bought your roommate a better couch to sleep on?” I guessed. “You bought your own apartment? Guy got struck by lightning and is currently hospitalized? Or is it bad news?”
“No!” Connie objected.
“You told me to guess,” I said.
Connie turned towards Charlie instead. “Guess what?”
“Can’t you just tell us?” he asked tiredly. “We played this game in elementary school. I always lost.”
“I’ve got a job!” Connie cheered.
“That’s the big news?” I asked. “I thought it was something that I could be happy about too.”
Connie went over to me and grabbed my arm. “It is, because you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s close to school, so I can work whenever you want to have some peace and quiet.”
“Oh, joy,” I muttered. “Can you work between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m.?”
Connie shrugged. “I still have school,” she pointed out.
“And I was being sarcastic,” I said. “It’s great, Con. You have a job. Lucky you. I had a job too, but my boss fired me. I’m too tired to celebrate you right now, can’t I just give you twenty bucks instead?”
Connie rolled her eyes. “Why did you sleep on the couch? I wasn’t with Guy last night.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard,” I sighed. “It’s okay, I’ll live. I’m beginning to feel like a homeless, but I’ll get over it.”
Connie began to bounce up and down. “I have a great idea!”
“I’m not supposed to guess again, am I?” I asked worriedly.
Connie took my hand and dragged me over to the window. “You can take Guy’s room if you want. Right, Adam?”
“Huh?” Adam said. “Cee in my room? No way.”
“Oh, come on!” Connie shouted. “You’re friends, you know each other. Guy’s fine living in my room.”
“Yes, we know,” Fred muttered. “Look, Connie, maybe it’s not such a great idea...”
I changed my mind at that very moment. Fred was NOT the one entitled to decide where I should live. “Adam, don’t be stupid. It’ll only be for a while,” I hurried to interrupt Fred. “I’ll move in at once.”
I pushed the door open to ‘my’ new room, and I heard Adam mutter to Fred. “Thank you so much Fred. Thanks for butting in.”
I didn’t get what Fred answered, but I guess it wasn’t too nice.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
I love my new room. Guy was fine living with Connie (who would’ve known...) and I told him to move his stuff out as fast as possible. Adam was a bit mopy, because he wanted to keep his room to himself. He’ll get over it.
Adam’s room is bigger then Connie’s. And I got the bed by the window. I’m beginning to like Guy again.
I finally have my own room, with my own desk and my own closet. I even have my own TV. Okay, it belongs to Adam, but still...
“Look, Cee,” Adam said. “Now when you’ve intruded on my room with all your stuff, I have to put up some rules.”
“Who made you the landlord?” I pouted. “It’s my room too now.”
“Until your name is listed at this room number, it’ll be my room,” he said. “Rule number one...”
“I always break all the rules,” I reminded him. “Remember everything I wasn’t supposed to do back at Lincoln? I did it all.”
“I know. Shut up now,” he muttered. “Rule number one: Keep out of my side of the room.”
“Baby,” I mumbled.
“Rule number two: All my stuff are off limit.”
I gave him an indulgent gaze. “That’s the same thing as rule number one,” I pointed out. “Can’t I just try to behave without a lot of rules? I promise to stay out of your way when you’re with your girlfriend.”
“Rule number three,” Adam went on. “Stop referring to Melissa as my ‘girlfriend’. That’s an important rule you must follow, in case you don’t want me to strangle you. Rule number four: if you don’t clean your room at least once a month, I’ll throw you out. Rule number five: use all the hot water in the morning and I’ll kick you out...”
“Don’t worry,” I sighed. “I shower before I go to sleep. As cute as your obsessive routine is, I have to tell you to shut up, or I’m bound to cut off your tongue. Now my rules: keep away from my side of the room, don’t use my tooth brush, don’t mix your laundry with mine and don’t borrow my stuff without asking.”
“Okay.”
“And also: no touching my homework, no complaining about the music, be quiet when I’m sleeping and don’t you ever tell my parents what I’m doing if you happen to answer when they call. Got it?”
Adam nodded and walked over to me. “Maybe we’ll get along fine if we follow those rules,” he said.
We shook hands on it and continued dividing our stuff.
“You’ll know that’ll never happen, right?” I asked him.
“Yeah, I know.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Fred sat down on my bed and looked around. “Nice room,” he said slowly. “I guess you’re still pissed?”
“Why do you think that?” I said sarcastically from under the cover.
“For starters, you’re refusing to look at me. And you moved in with Adam just to make me look like an idiot,” Fred concluded. “You always do things like that to annoy me, Cecilia.”
It’s annoying to hear him call me ‘Cecilia’. He used to call me ‘Cee’ like everyone else, but somewhere along the way he just stopped calling me that. Now I’m ‘Cecilia’. I haven’t heard him call me anything else but that since we left for New York.
“No, I moved in with Adam because I grew tired of sleeping on the couch. That you got bugged was just a nice effect to it all.”
Fred shoved me. “Do you want to talk?”
“No, I got tired of talking last year.”
“Do you need to talk?” Fred changed the question.
Yes.
“No, I’m fine, Fred,” I muttered. “Why can’t you just move on? I won’t forgive you anytime soon anyway. You needed time, and now I need time. Why were your break more important then mine is now?”
Fred lay down on the bed and grabbed my pillow. “I don’t know. I guess I’m selfish.”
I stuck my head out from beneath the cover. “I guess you are. Guess what? So am I.”
“You were right, you know,” Fred said after a long silence.
“About what?” I whispered.
“I kind of broke my own heart when I left. Do you know how much it hurt to leave you like that? I couldn’t function without you. The worst thing was, I knew you felt the same, and the fact that I caused you so much pain back then makes me unable to sleep at night.”
“You broke my heart,” I mumbled. “And I know how much it hurt. You just left me, without an explanation. You disappeared, and left me all alone. I cried every day for two weeks. I never cry.”
Fred gave up a laugh. “You did cry. The whole last year was so different from before. You actually talked to me, without me having to force you. You got weak in some way, like you surrendered to that cold side of yours. Instead of shutting down, you let out your feelings. That scared me to death, because you’d never done that before.”
I closed my eyes and tried to hold back tears.
“You cried when you were sad, and laughed when you were happy. I made you feel like that, and it scared me. You showed me your true feelings, and I felt that I couldn’t really control them. I couldn’t help you overcome your fears, and I couldn’t take care of you like I wanted to. We were all alone against the world.”
“I loved you,” I said quietly. “I still believe that last year was the best year I’ve ever experienced. You know why? Because you made me happy. I’ve never been happy before. Not like that. We were happy, and we survived without anyone’s support.”
“But then that thing happened.”
“And everything changed.”
“I left.”
“And broke my heart.”
“When do you want to talk about that?”
“I wanted to talk back then. I needed you. But you just left anyway,” I sniffed.
Fred pulled the cover off me and took my hand. “It was a stupid thing to do.”
I sat up and looked at him. “Yeah.”
Fred put his arms around me. I guess he was crying too.
“It would’ve been next week,” I whispered. “It would’ve been then.”
“What would?”
I pushed him away. “If everything hadn’t been, it would’ve happened next week.”
Fred closed his eyes. Neither of us said anything more. I was glad, because I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
“When do you think we’ll be fine?” he asked me. “How long will it take?”
“Forever,” I said, holding back my tears. “I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.”
“About me?”
“If I was sure that you would stay with me this time, I’d talk to you, you know that. But I can’t trust you like that anytime soon. I think you know why.”
Fred nodded. “You need to talk to someone about it.”
“So do you.”
I guess I didn’t tell the whole story behind why Fred left. We had our issues. His parents were suing each other’s asses off, and he had to help them out.
Last year around Christmas, when everything was fine between us, I discovered that I was pregnant. I lost the baby in February.
Fred left in March.
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