Beautiful Disaster (Page 98)

"The days until our next session were endless. Alice constantly got on my nerves, then she wanted to know what was wrong with me and got pissed when I couldn’t tell her, and on top of that she ran into Bella, then threw a fit for days because you’d canceled your wedding. It got to the point where I actually told her to stop being so ridiculous, which got me banned from the bedroom for the rest of the week. I didn’t really give a shit because I wasn’t in the mood for sex anyway, and you know that being ignored is the worst for Alice. I think the day when I finally got to Sheila again I was half expecting Alice to call at any moment to tell me that she was done with me, and right then I didn’t even care, locked inside my head as I was.

"Sheila and I talked, for the first time really talked for hours, way past the usual end of my time with her. At first I was so weirded out that for this session she’d dropped her usual frank demeanor but somehow she dragged even more out of me than I’d written down. It was so exhausting but at the same kind liberating, although it left me kind of bleak and hollow."

I’m burning to ask him just what exactly has had him that much under the weather, but hold my tongue as he doesn’t even halt in his monologue.

"In the end she asked me what I wanted to do now, where I saw myself.

And the answer was so easy – all I really wanted was Alice. Because I love her, even if she drives me insane, and while I had to look so much about myself in the eye that I’d never wanted to see, it didn’t change anything about that. But it was obvious to me that things had to change, that it couldn’t always be just about her, and that whatever I did still wasn’t enough. Sheila encouraged me to tell Alice – not with blunt words but slow explanations, lots of stressing just what I felt for her and how much I loved her. So I did that."

This time his pause seems to invite a question from me, and after doing a quick calculation in my head I open my mouth.

"What did she say?"

"At first she was angry. Offended. I think mostly because she felt I had gone behind her back. Then she really started to think, and I guess felt a little guilty because what I oh so gently accused her of was true. She apologized. I apologized. I told her I loved her and that she meant the world to me. She told me she loved me, too. Then we made sweet, sweet love and everything was perfect."

I nearly laugh at the acerbic voice he uses for the last sentence, but his heavy sigh helps me not to appear like an even greater jerk than I think he is.

"Or so I thought. Be that as it may, Karma is a bitch, and I think I had it coming for a long, long time. Should have figured that the week of calm happiness couldn’t last. But the way things started to go down was absurd.

Or not, as you wanna view it. Actually it was Bella who incidentally threw that first pebble that turned into an avalanche."

"You’re really going to blame this on her?" I ask, immediately angry, but Jasper’s guileless answer is priceless.

"Not blame, on the contrary, I should thank her for it. Tried to but she only punched me for it. But that’s not the point. What she did was actually just being surprised. It was a few days later, early this month, when I got away early from one of my last meetings, and Alice called me that she was having drinks with Bella and that I should just come join them. When I arrived, Bella was about as angry at me as before, and I could tell that she and Alice had been arguing, so I tried to lighten the mood and congratulated her on not getting married. She actually laughed, and I think she was pleasantly surprised when she saw that I really meant it like that.

She hugged me when she left, which she hadn’t done for a while, but I only got until we were home to be happy about that.

"Because Alice wasn’t. At first she ranted about why Bella even felt the need to touch me, because that was clearly not normal. And when I defended her because, come on, Bella and I have always been the hugging sort, she got in my face and claimed I was only happy that you didn’t marry because that way I could again end up with both of you. Or either of you, I’m not entirely sure because at that part she started screaming and got borderline incoherent. It all came so out of the blue for me that at first I didn’t defend myself, which she just took for silent admission. In the end she was so far gone that she even said I was happy that she couldn’t design the wedding dress and organize the party, and I was stupid enough to tell her that maybe this was exactly the reason why Bella was so happy about not getting married, because she didn’t want it to be Alice’s wedding but her own.

"At that she was suddenly all calm, and it all started anew, only that now she accused me of always taking Bella’s side. And I told her that was not true, that I was always on her side, but she didn’t listen. I even went so far and tried to explain to her what I thought was going on with Bella’s hostility towards me, but it was like talking to a wall. The last thing that I really got to say was that if she wasn’t such a self-centered bitch she would have seen months ago that things would never be the same between Bella and me.

To what she screamed, ‘Because you f**ked her!’ at me, and I only got to say, ‘No, because I betrayed her!’ And after that Alice didn’t speak to me for a whole week."

I really don’t know what to make of that, but Jazz seems so far lost in the memories that he doesn’t even wait for me to add anything.

"I tried everything to win her back, so to say. Flowers, candy, candle light dinner, nothing worked. Then from one day to the next she was all normal again, but at the same time distant. As if she was just going through the usual routines without any feelings behind them anymore. I had two sessions with Sheila that week, and I think for the first time they were actually all about her field of expertise. I think she really wanted to tell me to just accept that things wouldn’t work out anymore, but I just couldn’t accept it. I was so ready to give up everything just for her.

"And then we had our last fight. I still don’t know what caused it, I mean we were in bed and I was just -"

"I don’t really think I need the details about that," I interject.

Jazz shrugs, but inclines his head.

"Sure. Either way, she suddenly shoves me away and runs out of the bedroom, screaming something like, ‘I knew that you were just like him!’ at me. No idea what she meant, and of course I followed her. Thought I’d find her either crying or screaming in the living room, but she just got herself a bottle of water from the fridge after tying her bathrobe around her, then turned to me and calmly told me that I should go because clearly this couldn’t work.

"It wasn’t really a surprise but I was still devastated. Cried, begged, but while I could see that she hurt, it didn’t move her. Then I asked her why, and she told me that she didn’t love me. That she’d always thought she loved me, but really, she had been deluding herself. That she loved the image of me that she had had in her heart for years, but that we both had to admit that I wasn’t that guy, probably never had been, and that for our sake we should end it before anyone got really hurt."

This time when he stops I simply don’t know what to say, and minutes pass in silence before he picks up again.

"I couldn’t accept it, just couldn’t, and begged her to give me another chance. That I would change, be the man she wanted me to be, but she just smiled sadly and asked me if I didn’t see that this was exactly our problem. That no relationship can work this way, and that she couldn’t be happy with someone who would so selflessly sacrifice everything. She also admitted that for months she’d tried to make me see that, tried to provoke me however she could, but I’d never just stood up for myself and told her to stop that shit right away. She couldn’t deal with me being such a pushover, and she couldn’t deal with the guy she knew I really was underneath it all, so there was no sense in continuing this.