Part Two
Part Two
The good thing about public relationships was that I didn’t have to endure telling all of my friends about the break up - I could barely think about it, let alone stumble out a few sentences explaining how Rob had moved out and I hadn’t seen him in three weeks, because he was off location.
The tabloids had covered that for me. Nikki had called me in a frenzy a couple days after no one had heard from me or Rob, demanding to know why the paparazzi had to always attack our relationship. She was furious; the title had read Life Imitates Art and it detailed the break up between Rob and I, and the parallels between Edward and Bella’s break up. She said that she was sorry that people had to make up such vicious lies and not to believe a word of it, because Rob and I were perfect for each other, just perfect.
My silence had said more than my voice ever could.
The worst part about Rob moving out was that he was so damn disorganized that he left a lot of his things behind in places that killed me to find. He left half a stick of deodorant in the medicine cabinet - once, when I was feeling particularly masochistic, I rolled the gel stick onto my face and walked around the house all day with his familiar musky smell just under my nose. My tears didn’t dampen the smell, not at all, and it took me three good showers and a peel mask to get the smell off of me. I nearly clawed myself to death trying to remove the scent.
His ugly, worn out Chinese-looking slippers were still by the door. They were ratty and smelly and had holes in the toes, and I would bother him endlessly about getting rid of them. He had always been adamant, though - they were his and they weren’t going anywhere. When he had become overly annoyed with my complaints, I had woken up to them on my pillow. The smell had actually lured me awake, much like smelling salts, only much less pleasant.
It was memories that killed. I found myself thinking of the painting that Rob had hung in our living room - The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali, a Spanish painter that Rob had played beautifully in a movie. The painting had always haunted me, as it should any breathing person, but now I caught myself staring at it for hours on end, agreeing with the title more than any truth I could find in the brush strokes. The persistence of memory was what killed me, the things that I couldn’t escape: the dreams that I couldn’t control, the waking up that I couldn’t remedy, the looking over to the cold, empty side of the bed that I couldn’t fix.
I was really playing Bella up to my full potential. During Twilight, I really felt that Bella could be made into any girl in the world; the one that wanted to fall in love, the one that wanted to be brave, the one that couldn’t help but be naïve. But now, now I was in it. Now I felt the painful loss that I had rolled my eyes over, the way she had clutched at herself and couldn’t think of him and couldn’t stop thinking about him. It was me, it was my life, it was my existence. It was pushing forward when all I wanted to do was fall back. It was getting out of bed when all I wanted to do was shrivel away under the covers that had finally forsaken me of Rob’s smell.
I remembered Rob reading passages of New Moon to me as we discussed how to best play it, and the way he had skipped over the actual break up.
“I never want to say those words to you when I’m not Edward,” he had said seriously, brushing a kiss across the crown of my head as I rested myself against his chest. “There will never be a time when I’ll choose to leave you. As long as I know you love me, I’ll be here.”
And I had thought to myself, I’ll always love you - but I didn’t say it out loud to him, and it didn’t occur to me that he might have been waiting for my confirmation. So that’s why he had left - he had told me, months before, that as long as I showed him that I loved him, he would be there.
It was all my fault, and there was nothing I could do about it.
My phone buzzed next to my ear, and I picked my head up disinterestedly off the pillow. I sighed, not really having the energy to reach over and pick it up. I hadn’t eaten more than a couple of small salads in the past week, and I felt really weak. The constant stream of water that I put into my body was constantly expelled by the tears that leaked through my eyes involuntarily. My whole mind felt hazy, and I was just so detached from everything that had once caused me great joy. I hadn’t picked up my iPod since the day he left, knowing that every song would remind me of him. I couldn’t read or watch TV; I didn’t want to subject myself to a love story that would always be worked out in the end.
I sighed, closing my eyes against the glare of the mid-afternoon sunlight streaming through the blinds. Rob had loved keeping the windows open, and one of the first things I had done when he left was to close and bolt all of the windows. I constantly kept the blinds drawn; I hated even the slightest sliver of light being let into my world that revolved around my mind’s darkness. My phone buzzed again, reminding me that I had a text message that had yet to be read.
I reached my arm out to it, watching the way the sunlight hit off the bones of my wrist - they looked strangely skeletal and stretched against my pale skin.
Rob’s back.
That was all it read. I checked the sender - Nikki. Of course. She had been telling me all week that all I needed was to get dressed up and beautiful around him to remind him exactly what he was missing. That sounded great in theory, but I hadn’t actually discussed with her the details behind the breakup. But she was insistent; she said that as soon as Rob came back to Portland that she was going to fix me up real good. I had dully agreed, I remembered, mainly to just get her to stop talking. I couldn’t stand voices for the most part; they all faded into dull buzzing inside my head.
I didn’t answer her text, but I knew that she was on her way over. She was a good friend, and persistent if not anything else. If I could detach my soul and look at myself through someone else’s eyes, I’d probably be worried about me, too. But I wasn’t worried about me at all. I just hurt - every breath, every blink, every tick of the clock reminded me that it was just one more move onward in life without him.
I heard the door open an indefinable amount of time later, and then Nikki’s soft steps through my apartment. She pushed the door open to my room, and found me laying face down in the middle of the bed. I hadn’t showered in - oh, God only knows how long. Dirty clothes were strewn in piles around my floor, and I hadn’t taken out the trash in… I don’t know. I didn’t even know if I had a trash can. I should have been embarrassed, but I just looked up and met her gaze as levelly as I could.
“Baby girl,” she whispered sadly, moving swiftly over to the bed. I stiffened - I didn’t like it, her, on this bed. It felt like an intrusion. Like she was popping a bubble I was so adamantly trying to keep balanced on the tip of my finger. She smoothed the hair back from my forehead, taking in my appearance. I didn’t even know if she was supposed to be here; the scenes that featured the Cullens’ - besides Alice, Ashley, I meant - were few and far between.
“Hi,” I said croakily, not bothering to clear my throat.
“I saw him,” she said, cutting to the chase. “He looks…”
“Beautiful?” I offered, turning my face away from the thought. Of course he looked beautiful.
“Terrible,” she finished. “Even more terrible than you, because he’s trying to act like he’s okay. His sadness is palpable; it’s like when he’s in a room… it like, drains other people.”
I didn’t respond. As much as I hurt, thinking about Rob hurting made me want to crawl into a tide pool and drown myself.
Nikki displayed a lot of things that afternoon; it seemed like we were all becoming our characters. She showed Rosalie’s tenacity when I had refused to get in the shower and put on clean clothes. She picked me up - God, was I that light? - And all but threw me into the bathtub while the water beat down on my head. She roughly worked shampoo through my hair and forced me to rake a loofah with a vanilla scented something all over my body. She picked me back up out of the bathtub by my forearm, wrapped a towel around my body and brushed my hair for at least an hour. There were so many tangles and knots, but she was so gentle that it made me think of Rob brushing my hair for me - how he would glide the bristles slowly down the crown of my head, smelling the strands and remarking on its sheen. Two tears leaked out of my eyes, but all Nikki did was wipe them away with her soft fingers before throwing some jeans and a blouse in my direction. She also did my makeup for me; lightly, but she worked extra hard on the dark circles under my eyes.
I looked blankly into the mirror after she was finished, wondering at the dead girl in the reflection. She had no life in her expression, no joy behind her eyes. Sure, she looked pretty in a blue shirt that Nikki knew would bring out her blue irises, but the glow that had radiated from her every pore was missing. She looked like a matte finish instead of a luster. Nikki hugged that girl tightly, whispering you’ll always be beautiful to me before dragging her away from the mirror and into her car and to the set, where that girl had to film the birthday party scene.
*
I heard him before I saw him. It was like my ears were just automatically in tuned to his voice - like they pricked up like a dog’s when he heard his master’s whistle. He was talking loudly, very loudly; it was so different from his usual soft timbre that I looked up at Nikki in confusion. Hearing his voice for the first time after three and a half weeks was devastating to my nervous system; I felt tingly and disoriented and faint.
She steadied me with a hand on my upper arm and led me towards his voice.
Oh, there he was - there he was, that beautiful man that I missed so strongly, so intensely that I couldn’t look directly at him. I sobbed once, loudly, and his head turned in my direction. But then I noticed something strange - he had on two eye patches and was responding the sound of my voice, not to seeing me.
“Nikki?” I whispered frantically. “What… is he all right?”
She just sighed and pulled me closer. “Yes. Now shut up and pretend like you aren’t here.”
“Wh-“
“Shut up, Kristen,” she hissed, and steered me in the direction of him.
“Rob,” she called lightly, and he smiled in the direction of her voice. He missed her by a couple feet, so Nikki reached out her hand to touch his shoulder to let him know that she was there.
“Nikki,” he said quietly - oh God, his voice was music, the most perfect and beautiful and sad song that I wanted to hear in my ears forever and ever and ever. “How are you?”
She looked down at me, still telling me with her eyes to not speak.
“I’m good, sweetheart. How are you?” she touched his arm. “Is this really necessary?”
“Is what necessary?” he hissed, almost like he was bracing himself for a fight.
“The eye patches. No one understands why you’re doing this.” She rolled her eyes at me.
“It’s just… this, this idea I had. Losing Bella for Edward is like losing such a big part of him - I thought, maybe, if I could give up one of my senses each week of shooting, it would help me understand it even better. So, I’m giving up sight this week of shooting. Probably hearing next, I dunno. I just like getting the feel for it, you know? Like how I didn’t speak to anyone for weeks before playing Edward last time. Method acting, I guess?”
“You’re fucking insane,” she told him harshly. “You can’t just go around giving up your sight when you’re not shooting a scene. There are things you need to see.”
“I don’t want to see her,” he hissed, backing away from Nikki’s touch on his shoulder.
“No, I expect not,” Nikki argued harshly. “Especially because you don’t have to go through with giving up something vital like your senses to understand Edward’s pain, do you?”
He wrenched back like she had hit him. “She’s standing right here, isn’t she?”
No one said anything, but I sucked in a harsh breath, and I knew he would know that breath anywhere. His head shot wildly around, and then his blinded gaze landed directly where I was standing. His mouth tightened, and I opened my mouth to say something to him, to say anything, when -
“Rob, hey!” It was Ashley’s sweet voice, running towards us at the speed of light. She must have seen what was about to transpire, and she was trying to do anything to stop it. “I haven’t seen you yet. They told me you just got in. What’s with the eye patch, pirate?”
It worked. It distracted him away from me, and made him smile blindingly in her direction. He held out his hand to her, and she took his arm and guided him away. I heard him say, “Well, it was just this idea I had…” before Ashley turned a remorseful gaze in my direction and I shrugged both my thanks and my bitterness towards her.
*
If you want a recipe for going insane, I’ve got a good one for you.
1 Part gorgeous ex-boyfriend that you miss so desperately you can feel it in your toes
1 Part gorgeous ex-boyfriend keeping on eye patches so he doesn’t have to see the look on your face
3 Parts a scene in which you have to be pinned by his weight due to him protecting you from his kin
18 Million Parts a crazy director that keeps telling you that it just isn’t intense enough
Simmer on medium heat until the way he pins you with his weight reminds you of the way he made love to you, with his warm body pressed against yours in all the right ways - then boil immediately when you moan and cry all at once when he loses his balance and falls on top of you.
Don’t forget to garnish your dish with him pushing up off of you after fifteen heartbreaking seconds staring into each others eyes, like he was a lost dog trying to find his way home.
*
I slowly began to come out of the cocoon I had built for myself in the covers that no longer smelled of him. For some reason, being around him - even when he would have to be guided around set because he refused to take his eye patches off - made it just a bit easier. I found myself being able to wake up in the morning without having to remind myself how to breathe; I remembered, but breathing now was like pushing on a bruise… constantly reminding yourself of the pain that was inflicted because of it.
It was like one step forward and three huge steps back, because when I would do things like look for tampons in the bathroom cabinet, I’d run across the stupid notes he’d leave in every open box of Playtex tampons I owned - you better be glad you have to use these, and remember to say your prayers that no baby Rob will happen between now and next month. Things like that would knock me on my ass and I’d be forced to trace the lines of his bold handwriting with my finger over and over again until I could almost memorize the way his pencil had traced over the paper.
*
I was shaking the pack of cigarettes against my hand, bemoaning the Fates that I had grabbed the empty box instead of the full one in my haste to get out of the door that morning. I had been late - I had cried through the shower, trying to claw my eyeballs out of my head to get the dream I had been having out of my brain.
Rob and I had been dancing in the middle of a field. He was shirtless and in his black jeans, with those hideous Chinese slippers bearing two of his toes through the top. His face was unshaven and his hair was greasy and he had been so warm, so real, so tangible that I could still feel the way my hand had ghosted across the skin of his back.
But then he had been wrenched back by a force that neither of us could identify. He looked at me from across the field, his eyes wide and terrified. I reached out to him, but then his face relaxed like he understood everything.
“It’s my last test,” he had shouted to me, smiling sadly.
“What test?” I had shouted back, afraid of how rapidly he was moving.
“I’m giving up the sense of touch now,” he told me, drawing back farther and farther away.
“Rob!” I had called, trying to run after him. “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s me, you can touch me!”
He shook his head, still smiling. “I can’t. I can only touch what belongs to me.”
And then he had been gone, whipped backwards out of my sight and I screamed and woke up in a panic with tears streaming down my face.
Shakily, I took in a breath, trying to resist the urge to claw out my eyes again. I shook the pack once more against my hand, and then I was knocked into my trailer so harshly that I gasped out loud in pain.
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there. It’s these bloody things, I swear every one thinks I’m crazy for wearing them but they’re really helping me get in the feel. Like, I’m in the dark, you know? Sorry again. Who did I run into this time?” Rob was babbling, smiling - I couldn’t tell if it met his eyes, because the dark patches were over them, of course.
I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out except a small keening noise. “It’s me,” I said finally, backing away.
He dropped his arms immediately, backing up as well. His back met an abandoned speaker. “Oh. Kristen.”
I hadn’t heard my name from his lips in so long that I felt it rush up through me like someone had just given me water after being stranded in a desert for years. “I - I was just trying to get a cig, but I was in a rush and I left the wrong pack at home -“
“Typical of you,” he said jokingly, and then bit his lip like he regretted saying it. I regretted hearing it; I wasn’t ready for him to allude to our previous life together, and how well he knew my idiosyncrasies. “Um, here,” he said instead, taking his own pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and trying to undo the top of the box with shaking fingers.
He couldn’t get the top undone, and he grew more and more frustrated as his trembling digits gave him away. “Just, here! Here, take them bloody all.” He shoved the box in my direction, and I took it out of his hand, our fingers scraping each other in the movement.
He wrenched his hand away, turned around quickly and fell into the speaker - he stumbled slightly, and I went to reach out to catch him before he righted himself. He cleared his throat and looked around wildly; it was like he was sending out the bat signal because a PA was at his side immediately, guiding him to his own trailer.
I looked down at the bent box of cigarettes he had given me. I glanced both ways before pressing it to my nose, smelling the familiar scent of his Marlboros. I pocketed the box instead of smoking a cigarette, and I wondered idly to myself whether that ordeal should be put under a positive or negative light.