My body.
My words.
He doesn’t own me.
After Hanna and I finish the entire bottle of wine, we are both a little tipsy. Okay, we’re a lot tipsy, and we’re emotional. Not a great combination, honestly.
“I didn’t know you wrote songs,” she pouts. “I thought we told each other everything.”
I feel my head spin a little, god I hope she doesn’t want to hear them. I can’t sing for shit, and I’m too shy to sing my own songs. Which is why I always wrote things and snuck them into Ashton’s guitar case. He liked everything I put in there, making me feel like he wanted me, even when I knew he didn’t.
“I’m sorry. I was going through a lot when I wrote them. It was the only way I knew how to tell people how I was feeling without actually telling people how I was feeling.”
“I’m sorry,” She says tenderly.
“I’m sorry too,” I admit. “I don’t know what came over me the past few months.”
She sighs, “It was a surprise. A huge surprise.”
“I know,” I agree, “I wanted to tell you how I was feeling, but honestly, I’d never had those feelings before. I didn’t want to tell you unless I knew it was real.”
“Do you think you were headed in that direction? In the direction of telling me it was real?”
“I thought so, but the more I think about it. I can’t help but think I saved him from me. The blow up and the demise were for his own good.”
Her brows twist, but she doesn’t add anything else to the conversation, letting it go. Thankfully.
“Jameson and Ellie will be home in a bit. Maybe we should watch some tv, so I can sober up and drive home.”
I nod, following her to my bedroom, watching as she crawls into her usual spot on my bed. I laugh as she pats the empty side next to her and grabs the remote, “Boy Meets World?”
I smile, “You know you are the Cory to my Shawn.”
She chuckles and gets the show started, and within ten minutes, she’s asleep. She’s asleep, and I’m laying here wondering what Eric is doing because, at the end of the day, that is exactly where my mind goes. Straight to him.
No matter how many times I say that Eric and I can’t be together, it doesn’t get easier to say. It doesn’t get easier because the more I try to convince him and everyone around me that it’s the truth, the more I realize that I’m really just trying to convince myself.
CHAPTER 32
ERIC
The hospital board rang me a new one this morning over the incident with Ellie, but I got off with a slap on the wrist and a probation period. This is much less than I would’ve guessed, considering I walked into the 6 am meeting hungover.
Truthfully, I think I was subconsciously hoping for a more severe punishment. Maybe even a suspension, which I know… sounds horrible. Frowning, I turn into the nurses’ station and grab my stainless steel coffee mug. I’ve got a short break before my next surgery is scheduled, so I sit down and pull out my phone.
I don’t typically do the whole social media thing, but since Emma mentioned how famous Karly was on Instagram, my curiosity peaked, and I created an account.
No profile picture.
No bio.
Just an account with a fake ass name, just so I can get on and see what I need to see. Which is Karly.
I go to her profile and notice that nothing has been posted since last night around 9 pm. The video is captioned: Silence is deadly.
Intrigued, I click the video and watch as she appears on the screen. The first time I’d seen her appear on social media or a picture without makeup, but what got me, even more, were the tears in her eyes.
She talks for nearly ten minutes and completely comes clean about her journey to getting healthy, about her eating disorder, and about unhealthy relationships. She pretty much lays it all out in the open.