Her gaze drops to the floor momentarily, then she raises it stubbornly back to mine. ‘I know I should be excited,’ she says stiffly. ‘And I know it makes me a terrible person that I am not. But you think you took two simple steps – I know that you just took your first two steps away from me again.’
‘This is the problem. This was always the problem,’ I snap at her. The hurt I feel is almost blinding – the sense of betrayal breathtaking. ‘You have never supported me, Molly. You want me to be like some bloody pet that you keep at home to play with. Is the wheelchair a bonus to you because it anchors me here?’ She raises her chin and stares at me, a fury rising that I know will soon answer mine, but when seconds pass and she does not speak, I try to hook a reaction out of her to hurry this argument to its inevitable conclusion. ‘You never wanted me to walk again, you wanted me to be stuck here.’
‘I told you,’ she says, ‘I knew you would walk again. I knew that you would never let this hold you back. And I also told you that we would end up right back here where we started – at the problem between us that has no solution. And if it makes me the worst fucking person on earth that I was hoping that your injury would mean you were stuck here safe with me so that we could be happy, then so be it.’
‘How can you even say that to me?’ I am all but snarling at her now, and I unclip the harness with furious, jerking movements, but I cannot get out of the portions that rest around my pelvis, so I leave them fixed as I wheel myself towards her. ‘My job is everything to me and the fact that you could only give lip service to it shows me how little you understand me.’
I manoeuvre myself all the way over to where she stands near the kitchen and I stop a metre or so back from her. We stare at each other, and the silence and our breathing is ragged.
‘Why are you so determined to kill yourself for that fucking job, Leo?’
She does not shout – the words are delivered with a deadly potency, she does not need to raise the volume of the sentence. I am incensed anyway by the selfishness of her anger, even as I feel my own frustration spiralling and building right along with it. My rage pulses red in my chest and my face feels hot. More than anything now I want to shout at her. I want to slam doors and storm out and go to the gym and punch a punching bag until my knuckles are bleeding.
But I can’t. I can’t do any of that, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. Instead, I stare at her so hard that my vision goes blurry. I can’t understand how she can miss such an obvious truth in all of these arguments about my work.
I have never understood her viewpoint on my job – but then again, I’ve never really understood why she wanted to be with me in the first place, or how she can fail to see what’s so blindingly obvious about what drives me.
‘I have to,’ I say. My voice breaks and I don’t know what that means – but I’m too angry to shut up long enough to figure it out. ‘Don’t you understand that?’
‘But why?’ she whispers, and at the desperation in her tone something inside me breaks free.
‘It’s for you! It’s for you and your fucking father and all of the people in our lives who know that I’m not good enough for you! You know as well as I do that if I don’t have this job, I am nothing.’
I seem to have stumbled upon a ‘stop’ button to our argument, because neither one of us knows what to say to all of that. I feel as though I have just accidentally left myself standing naked in front of an enemy at war.
‘Leo,’ Molly says. She’s completely calm, and that should calm me – but it doesn’t. My heart is racing faster and faster. I’m sweating – I need to get out of her apartment, away from this argument, before I lose whatever is left of my pride.
‘Just leave it, Molly,’ I groan, and I push the chair past her, into the hallway and towards the elevator.
‘No,’ I hear her say behind me, and then she takes the handles of my wheelchair and spins me round, and my anger resurges because I have told her not to do that and fuck, I hate this powerlessness. I might have shouted those things at her, but I can’t speak – I can barely breathe. My chest feels ever-tighter and I am working so hard on keeping my face neutral that I can’t really concentrate on much else. I certainly can’t look at her. I won’t see her pain in case it softens my anger, and I won’t see her pity unless it pushes me over the edge.
Molly drops to her knees in front of me and she takes my hands in hers and presses the backs of my fingers against tears that have appeared out of nowhere to cover her cheeks. I lean back in my chair away from her and I still don’t look at her – I can’t look at her.
‘I won’t stop you going,’ she says flatly. ‘I won’t ever stop you going. But before you do, you need to know something.’