SEBASTIAN
“It’s time.” I say to her, as we lay there, clothes and bed sheets twisted between our legs and sweaty, sex-ravaged bodies. Her head is on my chest and my fingers in her hair, my heart on my sleeve and hers in my trust.
“For what?” She mumbles, her lips moving against the dip in my sternum.
“For you to tell me what happened.”
“What happened when?”
“What happened that you, even you, have trouble trusting. You, who have faith in music and air and smiles and friendship. But not me, not men.”
She sighs and I run a finger down the length of her arm. Wanting the contact to give her strength. Strength to tell me, to trust me, to relive it.
“I came… really, really close to not wanting to live any more. Seriously close,” she says.
I freeze. I can’t imagine those words coming from her. From my Cadence.
“What did you say?” I eventually have to ask her to repeat herself, to clarify.
“I said,” she repeats, in a steady voice, “I almost killed myself.”
“When? Why?” I sit up, and she follows, pulling the sheet up around her and pushing the hair from her face.
“Why do people tend to commit suicide? They just don’t want to live any more. And there was a time… I just didn’t.”
“My god, what happened?”
“Long or short story?” She asks, as if there’s really a choice.
“I don’t think the short story exists.”
“No, and I guess it deserves a long story.” She shuffles around on the bed, leaning back on the headboard and I wait. I have no right to rush this.
“I’ll start by stating this. I’m fine now. I’ve been fine for a long time. But for a while there, I wasn’t. I was the furthest thing from fine. So, we were living in Melbourne at the time and I had just turned fourteen and my Dad had just passed away. My mum and I had moved to a different school because we couldn’t afford the house we were living in anymore. On the first day of school, in music class, of course, music class, I got paired up with this guy, his name was Brent. He was a drummer.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I give her a soft squeeze on the arm, and she smiles softly.
“You shouldn’t be. No one was. Let’s just say, I was a little less… well, pink cardigan-y, back then. Anyway, we dated for three years, all through high school, and we applied to the Sydney Music Conservatory together. We were destined, or so we thought. Turns out music talent wasn’t all they were looking for, some dedication to actual schoolwork was needed, something Brent didn’t have. Anyway, cliche of all cliches, I got in and he didn’t. ”
“Ah, his ego must’ve liked that.” I cocked my head. I can only imagine how her boyfriend would’ve taken that, being of an ego-driven nature myself.
“Nothing about him liked that. But there wasn’t going to be anything that stopped me from going. As much as I loved him… I had my dad’s memory to keep alive.”
She takes a breath, to remember her father, I feel, and I can’t take my eyes off her. What had happened to this amazing woman? And yet here she still was, with a heart the size of that giant sunburnt rock out there.
She shifts and I know she’s ready to continue.
“So the closer the day came to me going to Sydney, the colder and more distant he became. He started drinking, something he’d never done before and I’m sure that drugs started coming into the picture as well. I just thought it was… I don’t know, I thought that once he realized it wasn’t going to be so bad, he still had his music, he was in an up and coming band, Uni wasn’t ever really his thing anyway, and we could visit every month, he’d calm down. Every day he still kept begging me to stay, saying he couldn’t live without me, and me, in my youth, thought that it was almost sweet, romantic even.”
“But he didn’t calm down?” God, what did this fuckhead do to her? I already want to bash him for trying to hold her back.
“No. No, he did not. Two days before I was supposed to go, my mother threw me a going away party, all my friends and family, pretty much everyone I’d ever met in my life. In hindsight, he was weird that night, more than he had been in the week leading up to it. Like, he was strangely calm and sweet even. I thought he’d finally come around. Then just as my mom brought out the cake, he asked to say a few words. I was so touched, he wasn’t really a man of words…”
She stops and I can see her eyes glaze over for a moment, as if she’s physically trying to brace herself for what’s to come. I want to reach out to touch her, but something stops me, like, she wants to get this over and done with, and to put it in the past.
“We’d had pictures projecting on the walls all night, and then, just as he goes up, the pictures stop. And the images change. But I hear it even before it focuses. I can hear the sounds. I can hear myself moaning and breathing. It’s dark and blurry, but there’s no mistaking it. It’s a video of him and me having sex. On the wall, for everyone to see.”
“Oh, Cadence.” Oh god.
“And everyone is just frozen. I was looking at him, and he had the biggest smirk on his face. And then someone, I don’t know who, covers the projector, but you can still hear the sounds. And then he just says into the microphone, ‘It’s OK. For those who want to know how it ends, it’s now on every popular porn site. And your email.’ Then he drops the mic and comes up to me and says, ‘no one leaves me. I leave them. And I’m leaving you. I can’t be tangled up with a two-bit porn slut.'”