Indigo

I DON’T THINK I’VE suffered a bigger wave of embarrassment than when I walk out of Jeremiah Valentine’s apartment. I’m halfway down the steps to his apartment, huffing and still not one hundred percent sober, when I sense someone behind me. I turn, but it’s not the buzzcut and inked arms that I’m met with, but dark hair. It’s his roommate.

“Hey,” he says, still in a Superman pyjama shirt and plaid pants. “Wait up.”

Sighing, I slow my steps so he could catch up with me. “I’m sorry about that.”

I shake my head. “It’s alright.”

“I’ll walk you home,” he says.

I lift my gaze to meet his. He isn’t as tall as Jem, but he still has a few inches on me. I want to gently turn down his offer, because I don’t have very far to walk, and honestly, I’d prefer to wallow in my mortification alone.

“You really don’t have to,” I say, “I’m only three blocks away.”

“Exactly,” he says, “All the more reason to walk you home. Plus…” He stops for a beat. “Mae will have my ass if I don’t.”

I narrow my eyes, a bit confused. Eli catches on, a little dent forming between his brows. “Mae didn’t tell you about me?”

Still confused, I slowly shake my head. “Um…no.”

He sighs. “We went to the same high school. I ­used to have the biggest cr—” Then he pauses, as if catching himself. “I haven’t seen her in a while, but we’re friends. She made me promise to watch over you. Or else.”

My mind replays the exact moment Eli had barged in the door, the moment Jem had pinned my body under his, his mouth was so close to mine all I could breathe was him. The sweet taste of the marshmallow he’d popped between my lips is still fresh on the tip of my tongue. I would’ve gone through it. I would’ve gone through more. Controlling my breathing, I shoot Eli a glare. “So you did it on purpose?”

“Cockblocked? Oh yeah.” He grins. “Definitely on purpose.”

“I really don’t know whether I’m supposed to like you or hate you right now,” I murmur under my breath, not thinking he’d catch it.

But the light in his eyes tells me he does. “Love me, duh.”

I scoff, making a mental note to rip Mae a new one. We walk in silence for a while before Eli starts talking again. “J never brings girls home.”

There’s a pause in my step as I offer him a slow, sidelong glance. “Am I supposed to feel special?”

He lifts his shoulders. “Do you?”

“No,” I admit, honestly, “I practically jumped him and left him with no choice but to take me to his place.”

“I don’t think so,” Eli says. “I know my guy. He’s weird about who he lets in.”

I lift a questioning brow. “What do you mean?”

“It means,” Eli says, as we round the corner of my block, “You don’t enter his space unless he wants you there.”

I half nod, my throat dry. When I thank him for walking me, he says I shouldn’t mention it before striding back in the direction we’d come from. I’m outside my door, fiddling around for my keys, when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out, expecting to chew Mae out for leaving me alone (even if she’d left me in the care of her high school friend), but the notification on my screens shines bright with someone else’s name altogether.

Kade.

My heart drops out of my chest as the night’s events come crashing down on me. I danced on Jem in the middle of that frat, fully aware that Kade had been watching. And he’d walked up to us, his gaze filled with unrestrained anger. I’d gotten what I wanted, hadn’t I? So why do I feel like I can’t breathe?

Swallowing, I force myself to keep walking as I enter my password and open the text.

Can we talk?

THE NEXT MORNING, I’m at the gym, lungs burning as I battle the remaining scraps of my hangover. I’d ignored the text. As I lift the weights, I try to sort through my thoughts. It’s been a month since Kade broke up with me. And I’d been off-kilter, unbalanced, unfocused the entire time.

I don’t regret anything. I’d wanted this. I wanted him to hurt as much as I did when he broke up with me and got with girls right after. Like I was nothing. Like all those years we’d spent together was nothing. I wanted closure. I wanted…

Nothing to do with him.

Asshole.

So he could block and unblock me at his convenience? Only on his terms? I should’ve blocked him right back, but a small part of me had been holding on to the hope that he would text one day. Pathetic, right?

The urge to punch something becomes nauseatingly strong.

Right now, I have a raging headache, and I’m fully aware sweating it out was a very, very stupid way to deal with a hangover. Alcohol dehydrates your body until you’re nothing but a dry cork, and being here at the gym, losing even more water to sweat isn’t exactly helping my situation. But what else can I do? I’m losing my mind.

Gritting my teeth, I push through the drill until I can’t breathe. Then, when I’m at the verge of bursting, muscles burning, I drop the weights, gather my stuff, and leave. No warm-down exercise, because I’m a blooming idiot.  

When I reach my apartment, I shower and sleep through the dull muscle ache the rest of the day. By the time I open my eyes, it’s dark, and I realize that the only reason my body hauled me out of my sleep was because it felt like it was literally going to die.

White hot, searing pain shoots through my arms, my neck, down my spine. I try breathing, but even moving my lungs hurt, and tears prick my eyes. I need to move. Right now. I need to get off my bed and get to my meds.

But I can’t. Everything hurts.

Managing to move into a foetal position on my bed, my pillowcase soaks up the tears on my cheeks. When a muffled whimper leaves my mouth. It hurts. So much. The pain is sharp, sudden, debilitating.

Then, a figure appears at my door. Scarlett. Even though she went to the same party as Mae and I, she doesn’t look the slightest bit hungover in her matching Nike sweatshirt and pants, dark hair held black by a claw clip. When her gaze settles on me, her eyes go wide. She pauses only for a second before rushing in. “Indigo? What do I do? What do I do?”

Chronic pain. Osteochondroma patients suffer varying degrees of pain, and I’m one of the lucky ones. I have my good and bad days, but right now, the pain scale is a nine. I’ve only hit this level five times in my entire twenty years on the planet. Twice with my mother, once with Mae, and twice with Kade. All times, I’d pushed myself too hard physically.

“Mae,” I rasp. “Call Mae.”

Scarlett’s eyes go wide. “What? No. You need to go to a hospital.”

I shake my head. I don’t need the hospital. By the time they go through their examination, I’ll have suffered through everything already. “Mae.”

My roommate curses, pulling out her phone and frantically tapping her screen. Just as she does, there’s a knock at the door. Her eyes wide again, and she gives me a passing look, then looks in the direction of the door. Clenching down on her jaw, she brings the phone to her face as the dial tone sounds. Then, the person at the door knocks again.

“Fuck,” she swears, running out of my room to the door.

I make out a surprised “you’re here?” and then there’s quick muffled conversation before footsteps near me. Mae reached so quickly? Honestly, I don’t care about the specifics. It’s a blessing. I just need this to be over. But when Scarlett walks in, and my eyes catch the person standing behind her, the pain doubles over.

Kade. He’s wearing a varsity jacket, his jaw is tight as he stares down at me, and suddenly, I’ve never detested my condition more. Because it makes me weak when I can’t afford to. Not here. Not in front of him. And suddenly, I want nothing more than to choke out a sardonic laugh, because the only people around to help me are the two people who hated me most.

And when I register the panic-stricken look on Scarlett’s face before she rushes away from my room, I get all the closure I hadn’t gotten from Kade. I don’t need to look far to figure out why he’d left. It’s me. It’s always me. I’m too high maintenance.

Why sweat it out with me when there are far more convenient options? Girls who actually have free time because they don’t go to med school and have a side job. Girls who don’t have debilitating medical conditions.

He doesn’t say anything except for, “Where?”

I can’t manage more than moving my eyes in the general direction of where the meds are. It’s enough for him. And I hate it. I hate him. He pulls out the plastic case from my shelf, and Scarlett walks back in with a glass of water.

When he sits next to me on the edge of my bed, I realise he got the dosage right. One white pill, two small yellow ones. I lift my head only a little off the pillow as he places one pill into my slightly open mouth, then brings the glass to my lips gingerly. I take a small sip. It’s the same thing two times over.

“Finish the rest of the water,” Scarlett quips, and when Kade glances back at her, she purses her lips primly. “Dehydration.”

If I could, I’d smile, because she is a good med student. A demon, but a good med student nonetheless. After a few minutes of taking the water down, I manage to sit up a little. Breathe a little.

Scarlett vanishes, and I’m forced to look at him. Actually, I want to nothing more than flash him the middle finger on both my hands, or maybe even with a Glock in each hand like that Daniel Radcliffe meme, but I reign it in. Besides, it’s not like I can, you know, move more than an inch yet.

Kade’s eyes land on me. “You didn’t reply to my text.”

“You blocked me.” I know that to send me the message he must have unblocked me, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that he had done it initially.

“I know,” he says, “I made a mistake.”

“Go away.”

“No.”

I’m too tired to argue. And when I look back him, his stupid brown hair and his stupid green eyes, and his stupid nice hands tucked into his varsity jacket, there’s an ache in my chest, and my eyes tear up again. But I don’t allow myself to cry in front of him. That much I can try and control.

“I was an idiot,” he continues, “I was failing a class and I took it out on you.”

He was admitting it? He never opened up to me about his grades. I was always under the impression that he was sailing through his course. Sure, he’d admitted anatomy was giving him a hard time, but that was it. He hadn’t told me he was failing. He was at freaking Columbia for crying out loud.

Then, he shrugs, and everything makes sense again. “I managed to pull up my grades.”

“Congrats.”

“Indigo,” he says, his voice strained. “I want you back.”

Wanting nothing more than to bury my face in my pillow and for his stupid face to disappear, I clamp down on my jaw. “You kissed other girls.”

I don’t want to ask if he did more than just kiss other girls. I’m too afraid of the answer.

He shifts uncomfortably. “Look, whatever you think you saw that night at the party, you didn’t see it, alright?”

“Kade,” I say. “What the hell does that even mean?”

“I…” he starts, “They didn’t mean anything. I swear. I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so much, Indigo.”

I’m not convinced. What am I? Just something he can dump out at the slightest inconvenience in his life? Sighing, I try to clear my mind, try to think past the dark red haze of anger at the forefront of my mind. He thought he was failing a course, and it’s okay to self-destruct every now and then in college.

“Besides,” he continues, gaze wary, “It’s not like you didn’t find a distraction of your own.”

My jaw tightens when he so obviously refers to my buzzcut stranger as a distraction. But is he wrong? I’d openly used Jem to make Kade jealous, and it’d worked. Clearly. Both Kade and I had made bad decisions. In the end, I’d gotten what I wanted. I wanted him to beg me to go back to him, like he is right now. So why do I feel so empty?

“You’re right,” I say, after a while.

 “I always am.” He grins. “On a side note, you egged my window?”

I make a disgruntled noise at the back of my throat. “You deserved it.”

Half expecting him to argue, I’m surprised when he just shrugs with a small smile. “I did.” Then, his green eyes veer to me, concerned. “So, we good?”

I clench my jaw as I look at him. Despite everything, despite me being so high maintenance, so unlovable, he’s here. He’d helped me. He knows me. I feel the heavy pain meds sinking into my bloodstream, and the pain slowly starts to numb.

My mind drifts to the tall, grey-eyed stranger, and my chest squeezes. Because that’s all he is—a stranger. What’s one drunken night with a stranger compared to five years of time? Of effort? Of trying?

You don’t even know me. I replay his answer like a one-track album. I want to, though.

Silencing my mind, I force my eyes to meet Kade’s.

“Yeah,” I say, “We’re good.”

a/n:

(yes, they are back together now. on loose terms.)

surprise :)

yʼall reading this, probably:

anywho, stay gold,
yuen