Into The Dark

Strong arms wrapped around her waist and tugged her out of sleep. Lips on her jaw, down her neck. His breathing was heavy as he pulled her closer, her back pressed against his chest.

"I love you," he spoke frantically between every caress, every press of his lips, "I love you so much."

Her sleep-addled brain didn't think much of his urgency. Instead, she tucked herself further into his embrace, sighing and allowing her eyes to fall closed again. She was nearly asleep when he buried his face in her neck. It was damp.

"Hey," she jolted awake, twisting in his arms. "Hey, what's wrong?" She gently grabbed his face, pulling his teary gaze up to meet hers. "Noah, what's wrong?"

"I love you," his lips pressed against hers, desperate at first and then softening into slow, gentle kisses. But his tears still fell.

She pulled away, enough to ask him again. He stared at her, the picture of devastation. She wracked her brain for what could have happened in the few hours since she had last seen him. He had gone out with their friends, she had been too tired. She seemed to be too tired to do much lately. Normally, he stayed in with her, but it had been months since he had gone out. She had practically begged him to go, saying it would be good for him, and besides, she wanted a night to herself. That wasn't true; she had too many nights to herself locked in her head. But she wasn't sure she remembered how to be around others anymore.

"Lilly, I love you so much," he tugged her close, his hand on the back of her head, tucking her into him, holding her tight as if to tuck her between his ribs. As if trying to keep her.

She pulled away.

"What did you do?" She whispered.

She felt it before he said it. She felt it in her gut, intuition screaming at her to run. But she didn't run. She stayed there wrapped in his arms because she wasn't sure how much longer she had left in them. Once the words were out, it would all be over.

He didn't answer right away, just kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her nose, and she could not help but soften into them.

"I didn't mean to, I didn't. She pulled me into her room and we were just talking, and then she started kissing me. And we had been out all night drinking, all of us and we had gone back to the apartment after, and we stepped away into her room and she kissed me and I was drunk and I - One thing led to another, and we, I -" his voice cut off in a sob.

"You cheated on me?" Her voice did not sound like her own. She did not even feel like herself. She was floating above the horrendous scene that was unfolding, watching it play out, because surely this could not be her life. Surely, her fiance, the man she had been with the past four years, her sweet, kind, doting, loving Noah was not telling her he had cheated on her, that in four hours he had broken everything.

"It was stupid, Lilly. It was so stupid. I love you. I love you so much. I was drunk and caught off guard and -"

She couldn't hear anymore of this. It made her sick hearing him talk about himself with another woman. Images flashed behind her eyes and she needed to get out, get away.

Pushing away from him, she scrambled off the bed, kicking off the sheets and comforters. Her phone. She needed her phone, and she would call Marla and stay with her. Her best friend, she needed her best friend.

Before she could stumble over to the nightstand, his arms were around her again, face pressed into her hair. Why did it still feel right, being in his arms? That wasn't fair that she still found comfort in them. But then she thought of them wrapped around someone else, in bed with someone else, and the comfort turned into a melancholy ache.

"Please, we can work this out. I love you, I messed up. You are all I want. I can't lose you," he spoke through his tears.

"We can't fix this. It's done, we're done," her voice was cold, removed. She stood rigid in his embrace.

"Don't say that, Lilly, don't say that. I love you. Do you know how much I love you?" He pressed her face into her hair, pressing his lips to the juncture where her neck met her shoulder.

The thing was, she did. She knew how much he loved her, more than anyone else loved her, better than anyone else loved her. His love encircled her and held her and made the world feel warmer on the coldest days. But love couldn't fix this.

"I know you love me, but you broke my trust. I'll never be able to feel okay in this again. I can't," she shook her head, the back of it rubbing against his chest.

"It meant nothing. I didn't feel anything with her."

Somehow, he meant this as a comfort, but it was a knife to the ribs. Was that what she was worth? Their years together lost to a night, minutes of nothing? He gave it all up for someone he did not feel anything for. She was worth nothing, her love worth nothing?

Her knees buckled as her body devolved into shuddering sobs. Slowly, he lowered her to the floor, cradling her. She couldn't even push away, her body lost to the tears that spasmed through her. He was gone. She had lost him.

They would have to cancel the wedding. She would have to find a new apartment. Should she leave the city? Could she ever be happy again in a place they had come to together, that they had dreamed about living in together? Her family was across the country. Oh God, she was going to have to call people, tell them what had happened. That perfect Noah had cheated on her. And how many people would blame her? That she wasn't good enough and that was why he had to crawl into the arms of another?

"Please breathe," his frantic voice snapped her out of her spiral.

Her breath staggered and hitched, barely getting air down. Her vision blurred and spotted. Her head light and foggy. Her skin crawled, and she wanted to tear it off. Her body trembled.

"Lilly, breathe," he begged, running a hand through her hair as he had every time she had fallen into spurts of panic.

This time, it only made it worse.

She was choking now, on her tears, on the air that no longer seemed to fit in her throat.

And then she was moving, bouncing in his arms, suddenly in the bathroom. The cool press of countertop against her bare thighs, the slamming of drawers, the running of water. Still, her tears fell, her breaths grew faster, she dug her nails into her palms to fight the urge of peeling off her flesh that was growing tighter by the second.

"Can you drink?" His arm was around her again, cradling her back, eyes wide and pained. He held a cup in the other hand.

"I - I don't -"

"Try, just try," he set down the cup and brought the little white pill pinched in his fingers to her lips. She opened her mouth, allowing it to drop onto her tongue, willing herself not to breathe it down. He grabbed the cup of water, which she took from him, drinking enough that the pill was gone.

But it would take tens of minutes for it to work.

She brought a hand to her pounding heart. Squirming in his grip, she needed - she didn't know what she needed. Her thoughts were flying as rapid and fleeting as the air in her lungs.

"Fuck," he ran a hand down the side of her face, before more drawers were slamming, the water running again, and then cold dark cloth covered her vision. The extra water from the wash cloth dripped into her hair, down her neck as she took a deep shuddering breath.

The cold shock to her system always seemed to stop the spirals when nothing else would. Noah knew this. Would anyone else be willing to learn it?

Her breath slowed along with her heartbeat, her body grew tired and heavy. Her trembling panic fell into a bone-tiring exhaustion accompanied by the haze that hydroxyzine always brought.

Before she could fall asleep, she was lifted off the counter, a soft surface beneath her back. She allowed her head to fall to the side, cheek pressed against the pillow, blinking until her bleary gaze revealed the shadows of him.

"I hate you," she whispered.

"Not more than I hate myself," he murmured. She knew that was probably true.

She bolted up right and shoved off the bed, going for her phone on the bedside table.

"I need to get out of here, I can't be here," she grabbed it.

"Where are you going to go?" He flicked on the light, covering the room in a glow to soft to fit their place anymore.

"I'll call Marla and stay with her," she began typing in her best friend's name when the silence in the room shifted.

The devastation on his face morphed into something deeper, more profound. The look of a man who had driven the knife into her heart and knew there was no way to staunch the bleeding.

It clicked. Though her mind was foggy from the ebbed panic, everything came into focus.

"You guys were all planning to go back to Marla's after getting drinks," she wrapped her hands around her phone to hide the way they trembled. "My best friend? You cheated on me with my best friend?" She meant for the words to be scathing, but they wobbled and warped with the tears that somehow could still fall.

A shriek burst from her mouth as she hurled her phone at his head. He ducked out of the way, and it hit the wall with a hard thud. Wrapping her arms around her stomach, a hideous sob escaped her as she curled in on herself. Everything hurt.

"Don't touch me," she snapped, feeling him reach for her. "Don't touch me ever again."

Straightening, she saw the hurt as it spread across his face, as the realization struck. And it hit her, too. Her life would change if she really left him. Her world as she knew it would crack and splinter until it was unrecognizable, until she was unrecognizable.

For four years, she had built her life with him. They were intertwined in every way. She could no longer parse out which friends were hers and which were his. At times, he felt as much a part of her family as she was. His sisters had become her sisters, the ones she had always wished for growing up with only boys. He cooked, and she cleaned. He watched TV while she read.

And he had seen her through the worst. The past year, she had fallen into a bout of depression so deep she wondered if she would ever crawl out of it. There were days she could not even get herself out of bed. On those he would bring her food and tea and sit with her when he could talking, never expecting her to say anything back. On the days she could not get herself to shower, he carried her to the bath and scrubbed her body, shampooed and conditioned her hair, the feeling of his fingers on her scalp always a comfort. And the days when her inabilities caught up with her devolving into fits of anxiety and panic so bad she could not breathe, could not sit still from the way her skin crawled, he held her tight until her body fell into the exhaustion it always did after those episodes. Then he would run her hands through her hair and press gentle kisses along her face until she fell asleep.

Could she give that all up over one night, one mistake he had made? But it wasn't one mistake, not really. He had betrayed her. He had crossed a line. He had chosen someone else over her. That was not one mistake. That was everything.

Yes, this past year had been hard, surely it had been draining on him as well. But had she not weathered storms beside him? Had she not sat by his side in the hospital when his mother was sick, doing everything she could to ease the burden of caring for a sick parent? Had she not taken over the funeral planning on the days he could do nothing except get through? When he had broken his hand and could hardly type without assistance, had she not taken over all his little tasks around the house so he could focus on his work that now took double the time? And in all of that, she never thought about someone else. She would never have run to someone else. Picking up the person you loved when they could not hold themself up was part of loving someone.

It would be so easy to stay, to not tell anyone what had happened and pretend it was all fine. He wouldn't do it again, and the wedding could go on. She could distance herself from Marla and ask her not to mention anything to avoid embarrassment. Wouldn't that be better than throwing herself out into the cold, leaving her life behind?

But then the image of Marla's lips on his, of her best friend and fiance in bed together, flashed through her mind. She nearly fell back to her knees.

No, she could never look at him the same again. Something integral had broken in her, even if she still loved him. It could never be repaired.

She darted past him towards the closet, his frantic questions lost to the buzzing in her ears as she pulled down a suitcase from the top wrack and began throwing whatever she could get her hands on into it. She then moved to the dresser, grabbing undergarments and pajamas before hurrying into the bathroom and filling a toiletry bag with whatever her hazy mind could think of.

"Please, talk to me," he begged, following her frantic packing. "Lilly, go back to bed, and we will figure it out in the morning."

"I can't lie in a bed with you," her voice was back to the detached hollowness as she brushed past him out of the bathroom and threw the small bag into the suitcase before zipping it up.

"I'll sleep on the couch." He grabbed her hand, and she jolted away from his touch. She could see his heartbreak at that moment, but she couldn't summon anymore sympathy.

Grabbing the suitcase, she stormed out of their bedroom towards the front door.

"Stay here. I'll go if you really can't be in the same place as me. I'll sleep somewhere else-"

"Where? At Marla's?" She whirled on him just before she reached the front door

"No, God, no. I'll go to Matt's. It was a mistake. I love you, I only want you. I will do whatever you need-"

"What I need is to leave. I can't stay here," she tried to keep the cold detachment, but it was slowly slipping into despair the longer she looked at him. Would she have done anything differently, said anything different if she knew a few hours ago she was looking at the man she loved for the last time? Because surely the one who came home to her tonight was someone different. He could not be the Noah she knew, her best friend, her great love, her future husband. And yet he looked like him, smelled like him, spoke like him. And her heart cracked like it was him.

She loved him, she knew she still did. But she couldn't stay. She knew she could not stay.

"Where are you going to go?" He scanned her as if looking for a crack in the icy armour she had shielded herself with.

"A hotel," she bent down to put on her shoes.

"It's two in the morning - "

"And it's a big city, they'll be something," she shrugged on her coat.

"Let me walk you there then, or get you a cab. I need to know you're safe or -"

"No," she jutted a finger at him, hot rage cracking through the ice, "No, you don't get the comfort of knowing I'm safe. You don't get that privilege anymore."

Turning, she picked up the suitcase and took a shaky breath, steeling herself to step into the world beyond.

"I love you, I love you so much, I'll do anything," he whispered through his tears.

"Goodbye, Noah," she spoke to the door, turning the handle. She shut his words of love and pleading behind her and walked down the quiet hallway.

The walk to the elevator and out of the lobby was a blur. Had the doorman been talking to her?

Suddenly, she was alone on the dark sidewalks in the cool night, accompanied only by the soft noise that came with living in the city where there was never real quiet, no true solitary. She breathed in the stark cold, allowing it to burn through her system, cleansing her from the old that had begun to rot and decay inside her. Her first breath in this existence. What a mundane setting for such an important marker to take place.

"Okay," she whispered to the night, "Okay."

And with that, she took her first step into the dark toward a new life.