Present
When Blu and I were good, we were really fucking good. But when we weren’t…
Drag me to Hell.
That’s what the last four months of our life had been, how it’d felt like.
On and off, on and off –
Up and down, up and down.
I was turning twenty-four in a little over a month and I had no intention of continuing this vicious cycle, one I knew I should’ve cut off the night we first slept together again, but I was thinking with my dick.
Just like I’d done the first time around.
I blamed it on my inability to change, but that just wasn’t true.
The games were fun. Winning each other back was euphoric. Our relationship fed on my jealousy, my ego and sadly, my pride.
In a way, I loved Blu.
The thought of her being with someone else, the thought of losing her sliced a cord somewhere deep in my heart.
One night, she really was prepared to cut things off. I saw it in her eyes. The exhaustion, the hurt. I caused some of it, I knew that. I wanted to repair the damage.
“Kade wouldn’t do this,” she shook and cried, “He wouldn’t keep placing doubts in my head, not like you.”
We were out at the bowling alley and I bumped into a girl who Blu felt clearly threatened by. I don’t think I intentionally made her jealous, but the fact Kade’s presence loomed over our relationship was enough to warrant a flirt.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she snapped, picking up her phone. Her finger hovered over Kade’s contact name.
My walls fell apart right in front of her. My mind spiralled.
“Don’t,” I released, pleaded.
“Don’t what?”
I thought of losing my brothers to age, to maturity and differences that were out of my control; losing my father to something I clearly could not provide – a bond that was broken [or never really there].
A tear fell down my cheek. Crying was easier when you didn’t think about the act of it. The weakness it represented.
“Don’t fall in love with him, Blu,” I wrapped her in my arms, feeling the weight of past burdens building up in my chest. “Please don’t fall for anyone but me, please.”
“Jace,” she pulled back to look at me, her brown eyes gleaming with empathy.
My soft girl.
My Blu.
I pressed my lips featherlight against hers, allowing the cool tear to stamp her cheek as well as mine. “I’m selfishly in love with you.”
After my admission [and plea], she cut things off with the editor guy Kade. I thought we had a real shot, I did, thought she was serious.
But she wasn’t.
And maybe I wasn’t either.
Time after time, she just kept getting mad at me over little things and I was sick of feeling like I wasn’t good enough to please her.
Some days I went to bed wondering what I did wrong, and other days I was just too exasperated to deal with it.
Maybe I wasn’t the best lover, but I’d done what I could. She needed to work things out on her own, so I ended it.
I fucking ended it.
Actually…
I’d done that a few times.
But I always kept running back; always felt like something was missing without her.
I think she felt the same way, that’s why she let me in even if I didn’t deserve it.
We were almost worse than we were before. She quite literally said, “I hate you” when we were fucking.
She told me she hated me.
While I was inside of her.
Next level shit, man. Next level shit.
I convinced her to revisit her psychologist, since she’d ghosted her for months when we got together again. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why. Doctors were supposed to help. It’s like she didn’t want that while she was with me, as if she deemed our connection unsalvageable from the start.
Eventually Blu filled out that questionnaire assigned to her months back and sent it to Stacy. She wasn’t ready to face her yet, so she just emailed the results.
“I have no idea what this is even for,” she’d told me. I just glanced at her and shrugged, letting her twirl her fingers anxiously in my bed.
A few days later Stacy had emailed her back and told her to make an appointment. Apparently it was serious.
But we’d gotten into a fight just two days before her appointment. That was last week.
I hadn’t spoken to her since.
“Should I text her?” I asked Mel.
We were walking through Prix since Mel had another art showing, admiring the new portraits on display. Well, she was anyway. I was typing out a message to Blu.
Mel snagged my phone and shoved it in her tits. “Enough.”
“If I were a worse man, I’d grab it back,” I scolded, accepting my defeat.
“Even the best of men would kill for an opportunity to grab my boobs,” she teased, but there was only bite to her tone.
“I shouldn’t text her then.”
“No, leave her alone.” She waved at a couple who entered the gallery, hand in hand, and offered two flutes of champagne. “Hi, nice to see you Earl. Tina.”
They left and I laughed. “You aren’t a fucking server, why do you keep pawning off champagne?”
“It’s hospitable.”
“This gallery isn’t your home,” I contended.
“It will be,” she said, dragging me away from the crowd. “Carson’s retiring.”
“What?” I couldn’t conceal my surprise, my eyes growing by the second. “Since when? He’s only, what, fifty-four?”
She squared her shoulders. “He makes enough money with his artists’ commission pieces. He said he wants to pass the gallery torch to me since I make him the most money.”
“Oh yeah?” I smirked, knowing she said that to boost her self-esteem. “Not because you’re family friends or anything?”
“Of course not, why would it be that?” But her lips lifted in amusement. “This is big, Jace. I could be a business owner. I need people to like me.”
I placed a gentle hand against her arm. “Everyone likes you, Mel.”
“Well, aren’t you just the sweetest –” Her attention immediately switched to someone behind me as she swatted my touch away. “Get your paws off me, I have to mingle – Hi! Bella, hi, how are…”
Her voice faded into the background noise of everyone else’s chatter. I snagged a champagne glass from the marble table and did another round of the gallery, halting my pace in front of the “Controlling Chaos” painting I’d seen so long ago with Blu. Surprised it’s still here, I thought. Simpler times.
I squinted at the intersecting circles, the lines that represented the turbulence of life and the untouched soul in the middle of it all, protected by a hue.
The more I looked at the tiny dot in the middle of chaos, the more I resonated with it.
Art was never really my thing, but I could understand why people thought deeply when looking at paintings.
They signified stories, memories, chapters in people’s lives that made no sense to anyone else but the muse.
So maybe if I identified with this muse, I’d become it.
All the lines furthest away from the middle dot, the black ones, that represented my high school friends – Morris, Danny, the lot of them. I tried to become them, tried to fit in. Maybe those lines were my insecurities.
The charcoal lines which represented the grey area of happiness, the mundane life that provided something of relevance was my family.
Don’t get me wrong, things weren’t awful. Dad was starting to come around more, Mom seemed happier. Baxter surprisingly took my advice and started branching out to different concepts, and Will, well… we golfed on occasion.
Scott was the one who really stepped up. He proposed to Sab last year with a ring hidden in her birthday cupcake. She almost choked on it. Hilarious way to go, honestly.
But their wedding was coming up in just a couple weeks, and I was supposed to bring Blu.
Supposed to, being the keyword.
That’s it, I had to call her.
But just as I reached for my phone, it vibrated with a text.
9:42pm – BLUberry: I’m sorry. I need you. Can I see you?
She read my mind. She always did.
And so I went over.
She was already two glasses of Chardonnay down when I walked through the door, weeping quietly in the corner of her couch.
“What happened, darling?” I rushed over to her spot, caressing her back.
Mascara had streamed down her face, dripping onto her lips. “I have BPD.”
“What?”
She moved away from me, swatting a form in my direction.
“The questionnaire that Stacy made me fill out, yeah,” she rubbed her nose raw, “It was to test for borderline personality disorder.”
Borderline personality disorder.
“Borderline personality disorder,” I repeated aloud.
I’d heard about it before, but never did I know anyone to have it around me, let alone someone I was involved with.
“Don’t look at me like that.” She buried her face in her knees, wrapping her arms around herself in protection.
I didn’t even realize I was staring. I felt like I was seeing her through a different lens.
“Come here,” I whispered, pulling her warmth into my arms. “What does BPD entail?”
“Everything that I am,” she let out an exhausted laugh, sniffing in between speech. “Inability to have stable relationships, sabotaging every good thing in my fucking life, self-harming, God, everything – fucking everything I’ve done.”
“Blu –”
“So I am broken,” she continued, inconsolable. “I now have doctor documentation to prove it.”
“Darling you aren’t –”
“Jace,” she shook her head, eyeing me with caution. “This explains so much. It explains why my behaviour is so erratic and why I feel the way I do.”
“Is it certain that you have it?”
“No.” Her arms were covered in goosebumps as she shook. “I mean, I think there’s a lot that goes into diagnosing someone, not just a fucking questionnaire.” She laughed out loud.
Then, she cried.
I leaned back, watching the reality of her situation sink in. She was in utter hysterics, her eyes red and puffy.
I didn’t know what to say.
Maybe if I went to a psychologist, they’d diagnosis me with something. Surely I was a broken mess too. But if they didn’t, and I was just a deeply insecure person plagued by loneliness, then I was just fucked up.
That would be my label.
Simply, fucked up.
I cleared my throat. “Do you need to take medication?”
“I don’t… I don’t know.” Her fingers wobbled against the form, her brown eyes darting around the page like a crossword. “Maybe? God, all my life I thought therapy was so stupid. I don’t want to take pills, I don’t – I don’t like the idea of having a tiny capsule control my thoughts and…”
She trailed off, her words dying in her throat.
“If it’ll help,” was all I managed to say.
“If it’ll help,” she softly repeated back to me.
I watched her because that’s all I could really do. I mean, I wasn’t qualified to do anything but listen. If that’s what she needed, then that’s what I’d provide.
For how long, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about anything now.
But after an hour of her crying on and off, she fell asleep in my arms.
I held her. I held her and traced the lines of her scars, hidden beneath tattoos.
I held her, memorizing the curve of her lips and outline of her hips.
I held her because I could. Because in this moment, she needed me and I was able to right some wrongs.
So, I held her, because a gnawing feeling told me this might be one of the last times I would.
