“Mmm. You too.” I hang up the phone, and for the millionth time I hear Ben’s voice saying, ‘Did it again, Cora. You didn’t tell me you love me. What’s up with that?’
I’ve told him a grand total of three times that I love him, and each time was a lie.
I’ve never gotten over Callan. Not even close. At dinner, when he said I would never get married, he was right. I might trick myself into thinking it’s what I need to move forward in my life, but I’d know. I’d know it was the wrong thing to do, because try as I might, I’ve never been able to stop loving Callan. There’s been no room in my heart for anyone else, because that bastard has owned me since day one. Without even trying, and with an entire country separating us, Callan has exerted a powerful and terrifying hold over me that I haven’t been able to shake. Worse still, I haven’t even tried to shake it. I’ve let it rule and ruin me for so long. It’s been self indulgent of me to believe that there’s nothing I could do about it, when in actual fact there’s plenty I could have done.
I could have gone to see him. Gotten some closure. I could have talked about my relationship with him in therapy, instead of refusing point blank every time the subject of him came up. I could have tried to love someone else. Or tried harder at least.
There are other reasons I haven’t been able to let him go, of course. Dark, awful, agonizing reasons that even he doesn’t know about. I kept them from even him, and while he’s sat on the east coast for all these years, stewing on that stupid photograph, I’ve sat on the west coast, stewing on something far worse. I couldn’t tell him back then, though, and there’s sure as hell no way I’ll ever tell him now. What would that accomplish? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.
I plan on drinking the second bottle of wine and going to sleep. Halfway through the second bottle of wine, I plan on putting the rest in the mini fridge and calling Callan so I can scream at him. Despite how badly I wanted to burn it, I did keep that fancy business card he put under the windshield wiper of the Porsche, so I have his number. I could do it. I have so many things I could yell at him for. The rest of the wine never makes it into the fridge. I polish off the bottle, blearily wondering if I have still have a drinking problem. Back home in LA, I may have a few glasses with dinner, but that’s hardly every night. Maybe once or twice a week, if that. No, I don’t think have a problem with alcohol. I have a problem with Port Royal, and I have a problem with Callan, and with my dead father, and with the ghosts and the memories and the pain waiting for me at every single turn. The alcohol is a temporary coping mechanism, just like making myself throw up on the way to the airport.
Even as I wash the smudged mascara from my face, I know I can’t rely on alcohol or a resurgence in my eating disorder to handle this situation, though. It has to stop. It would be all too easy to lean on those crutches a little too hard, and then where will I be? In rehab? Ben staging an intervention for me, because I can’t eat a single solid meal without forcing myself to throw it back up again? He would hate that. So would I. No. Fuck that. I’ve wrestled through years of therapy. I’ve been in crisis twice already. I don’t ever want to revisit that dark place again. I’m past all of it. I just have to be.
If only Callan had stayed in New York. Dealing with Dad’s arrangements would have been hard, but I think I could have managed it. I probably would have been able to get through the farce of a funeral and the service without breaking down and destroying everything in sight. Maybe. But with him here, it just makes everything ten times harder. I find myself growing angrier and angrier by the second as I realize that him showing up here really was the most selfish, underhanded, cruel thing he could ever have done to me.
I’m clearly not in my right mind as I pick up the phone and call down to the front desk for a cab. Calling Callan and giving him hell isn’t enough. I need to see him face to face so he can see the look in my eye when I call him every name under the sun. I need to be able to look straight at him when I plead with him to go back home to New York.