Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe Book 1)

It was late on a Saturday night, about three years ago. He’d been at a party. I was sick, I think. That’s why we weren’t together. He and Jo had already planned it, he said he’d skip it, but I didn’t really mind. I was so tired and I didn’t want him to catch it.

He walked into my bedroom, closed the door, pacing back and forth. We’d been together more than five years by then, I’d never seen him this way. He looked high almost, but not in a fun way. Manic. “Parks,” he started. His breathing was funny. I could hear it. “Parks.” He was walking around in circles.

“What are you doing?” I frowned.

He shook his head. “I’ve done something.”

“What do you mean?” I got up and walked over to him. “Are you alright?”

“That’s not what I mean—” He shoved his hand through his hair. “I did something wrong.”

“Okay?” I said. My voice was small, so much smaller than I knew it could ever be and there was a pit that began to grow in my stomach, like a sink hole opening up in the centre of me.

I could feel it coming before he said.

“I slept with someone.”

I think my blood turned cold. My eyes didn’t meet his. His hand was over his mouth. He looked like he was going to be sick.

“What?” I asked, blinking lots. He said nothing. “What do you mean?” I pressed. He looked at me, silent still, his eyes begging me not to make him say it again. “When?” I asked quietly.

“Just now.” He reached for me.

“Just now!?” I swatted his hands away as I stumbled backwards away from him.

“It was an accident.” His breathing was shallow as he reached for me.

“How was it an accident?” I yelled as I searched his face, looking for something familiar to grasp onto.

“It just happened—”

I shoved him away.

“How?” I shrieked; my hands flew to cover my mouth. I didn’t recognise the sounds coming from my throat. They felt foreign. “Who were you with?”

“We were just at home, there was a party and then I was drinking and—”

“Shut up.” I shook my head, urgent.

“We never meant to—”

“Stop it!” I hurled a Lalique vase at him filled with hydrangeas he’d brought over for me yesterday. He dodged it.

It smashed on the floor.

“Parks—just let me explain.” He reached for me again, his eyes were wet.

I jerked away from him. “Don’t touch me. You’re disgusting.”

His heart broke on his face and I ran into my bathroom, closing the door and locking it behind me. I stayed in there crying for four hours, and he sat outside my door, crying the whole time. He cried so much he worked himself into a sort of panic attack. His breathing went gaspy, like it was stuck in his throat and couldn’t get to his chest. Like he was suffocating. I opened the door, rushing to him, sat in his lap, took his face in my hands and breathed with him silently. In and out, in and out. I did what he did to me all those times I had panic attacks that I don’t like to think about. And his breathing eventually fell in pace with mine, his eyes didn’t look away from mine. So blue from the redness of crying.

What a mind fuck it is to comfort the person who just blew your whole heart open with a rifle. Carnage everywhere, men down, blood spilled.

But the truth is, when you love someone how we were in love, it didn’t matter what he’d do to me—he could have hit me with a bus, kind of he did—I innately still would have done everything I could to make him not feel what he was feeling.

For so many years, his pain was my pain. But that pain, the one he was crying about then, was mine. He was crying my tears, feeling what he had done to me, broken by his own actions. He cried into my neck and said sorry so many times, the word lost meaning… the word stopped sounding like a word.

He held me tight, tighter than I think he ever has, he told me it was a mistake and that it’d never happen again and it was just one time and then he tried to kiss me. I pulled back and looked at him, my face, very serious.

“We are—” I grabbed his face so he was looking me in the eye. “Listen to me—listen. We’re done.” I ran straight to Marsaili’s room, and she locked the door behind me. She held me as I cried until I fell into a sleep that would last thirty-six hours.

You know the rest…

My devastation over what had happened and what he did was eclipsed by how much I missed him and wanted to be around him because he’s the kind of person you be around at all costs and believe you me—it was all cost. I learnt to look him in the eye again, I learnt not to cry every time I left him again, I learnt how to breathe through him flirting with other people, I realised we could still talk to each other without using words, and somehow, in the bloodshed of it all, I found my friend.

It’s because I’m weak, I think. It was easier to be his friend than not to be. Too much of my life, maybe even too much of who I am entirely can be traced back to him or us.

Everything wonderful, everything magical, everything painful, everything beautiful and spectacular and wretched and defining that has happened to me happened with him.

And I hate him for that.