Mud Vein

Senna, did you think you were going to die?

Then the garage closes, muting their cacophony.

Boom!

Goes my heart…

Nick opens the door for me and we walk into my house. Dust fills my nose and mouth as I breathe in fourteen months of packed-up air. I touch the edge of his hand with my fingertip. He opens his fingers and entwines them with mine. He walks with me from room to room, and I feel like a ghost. He’s never been in my house. Making money off of heartbreak is a good business to be in. When we reach the white room I jerk to a stop in the doorway. I can’t go in. Isaac looks down at me. Nick. Nick looks down at me.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

Everything.

“This,” I say, staring at all the white. Then, “Why did you come, Nick?”

We are on the edge of the white room. Technically a room that he created, inside of me and out.

He looks stricken. “Did you read my book?”

“Did you mean the book?” I spin back.

“Can we talk about this somewhere else?” He starts to step into my white room like he wants to take a look around. I grab his arm.

“We talk about this right here.”

I want him on the brink of what he drove me to. I want to know what this is before I cross any more thresholds.

He leans against one side of the doorframe. I lean against the other.

“I was wrong. I was young and idealistic. I didn’t realize…” He grimaces. “I didn’t realize your value until it was too late.”

“My value?”

“Your worth to me, Brenna. You spark things in me. You always have. I love you. I never stopped. I was just…”

“Young and idealistic,” I repeat.

He nods. “And stupid.”

I study him. Look at the white. Look at him.

“You have writer’s block,” I say. “You wrote the last book, and everyone freaked out. And now you have nothing else.”

He looks startled.

“Tell me it’s not true.” I flick at the grey falling into my eyes. Then I think better of it, and let it drop back to cover them.

“It’s not like that,” he says. “You know we are good together. We inspire each other. Greatness comes when we are together.”

I think about this. He is right, of course. We were great together. Some days I woke up playful. I wanted to laugh and flirt and be a love story. The very next day I couldn’t stand being looked at or spoken to. Nick let me be. He spoke to me on the days I wanted to be spoken to. He left me alone when I shot eye daggers at him. We coexisted fluently and effortlessly. With him I can have companionship and love, and never have who I am questioned. We were great together. Until Isaac taught me something new.

I didn’t want to be left alone. I wanted to be questioned. I needed it.

I didn’t know I needed someone to dig into my heart and figure out why on some days I wanted to play, and why on others I craved solitude. I didn’t even like it when he did it. It’s a painful thing to look inside yourself and see the whys and the hows of your clockwork. You are a lot uglier than you think, plenty more selfish than you are ever likely to admit. So, you ignore what’s inside of you. Thinking if you don’t acknowledge it, it’s not really there. Until someone unlikely comes along and cracks you. They see every dark corner, and they get it. And they tell you it’s okay to have dark corners, instead of making you feel ashamed of them. Isaac wasn’t afraid of my ugly. He rolled through the highs and lows with me. There was no judgment in his love. And all of a sudden there were fewer lows and more highs.

Nick loved me enough to leave me alone. Isaac knew me better than I knew me. I said I wanted to be left alone, he knew better. I said I wanted white, he knew better. He brightened me. He enlightened me. Because Isaac was my soulmate. Not Nick. Nick was just some great love. Isaac knew how to heal my soul.

“We were good together,” I say to Nick. “But I’m not her anymore.”

“I don’t understand,” he says. “You’re not who?”

“Exactly.”

“Brenna, you’re not making sense.”

“Do I ever?”

He pauses.

I shake my head. “I don’t make sense to you. That’s why you left me.”

“I’ll try harder.”

“I have cancer. You can try as hard as you want, but I have cancer and I’m not going to be here in a year.”

His face is a cocktail of woebegone and shock. “But … I thought … I thought you had the surgery.”

I never told Nick about the surgery I had to remove my br**sts, but my agent and publicist knew. Things get around in the writing world.

I was staining Nick’s perfect, white idealism. Cancer happened, sure. But in Nick’s world you beat it. Then you lived happily ever after.

“I have it again. It came back. Stage four.”

He starts fumbling with sentences that he never finishes. I hear the words “treatment” and “chemotherapy” and “fight” and my heart grows tired.

“Shut up,” I say.

Nick’s glow is an ephemeral phenomenon. He’s already looking like the same dumb f**k who thought I was too dark for his white room.

“It’s too late for that. The cancer metastasized. While I was there. It came back. It’s in my bones.”

“There has to be something…”

He looks so terribly forlorn.

“You’re trying to save me. But I’m not staying alive to be your muse.”

“Why are you being so cruel?”

I laugh. A good belly laugh, too.

“Charm is clothed in narcissism, you know that? Get out of my house.”

“Brenna…”

“Out!” I send my fists into his chest. “That’s not my name anymore!”

“You’re acting crazy,” he insists. “You can’t do this alone. Let me help you.”

I scream. He created a monster, now he’s going to meet her. Every little crevice.

“I am crazy! Because of you! I can do it alone. I’ve always done it alone. How dare you think I haven’t.”

He grabs my wrists, and tries to subdue me. I’m not having it. I rip away from him and walk to the center of my white room, rage rolling in waves. I can ride them, but someone’s going to get hurt.