Aurelie. [H.S]

CHAPTER 31

^play when mentioned!^

26 November 2017

Shanghai

Aurelie's POV

I collapsed the second that I shut the door. All of the emotion that I had hidden towards Camille reeled out of me in waves.

I cried my heart out, though I'll spare you the details. And once the sadness and devastation passed, I had another emotion to work through.

The numbness.

They don't really talk about it in the movies. They don't talk about the outer-body feeling which you experience, the inability that you have to move, or to even just feel.

You so desperately want to feel because deep down, you know that there's something wrong with you. You feel so alienated, so alone. You want to cry, to scream and prove that you're human, but you're too exhausted. You're just numb.

I lay on the floor into the early hours of the morning, making the decision to get up when I heard extremely drunk people pass by the room, returning from their night out.

It's hard to think that twenty four hours ago I was doing the same. I was laughing, smiling, loving. But now it feels as if it was a lifetime ago: another persons experience, not mine.

Maybe that's because I lost a special person, and with that, I have to loose a little bit of myself too.

My feet wandered the room, fingers trailing along the woodwork as I went. They stopped at my charger dangling from my bedside table.

Reluctantly, I plugged my phone in and watched it come back to life. I stared at the apple logo in disgust, memories of the last time I touched a phone coming to light.

The second that I could use it again, I went straight to my contacts and dialled the one person that I wanted to talk to, the one person that I knew I could count on.

I checked the time: 3am here, so 3pm for them in New York.

It only took a few torturous seconds of dialling before they picked up.

"Aurelie! How you doing?" he asked cheerfully with the sound of honking cars in the back.

And then it hits me. The house. I'm supposed to be moving in with Harry in a few days. I left whatever housing arrangements that I had in New York behind to move to Kensington with Harry.

"Ellie? You good?"

I really cut all ties with everything in New York for the boy that would just lie to me in the end, I screwed everything up for no reason.

"Are you free?" I ask a broad question, and I could almost hear his feet scratch the pavement, as if he'd stopped in the street.

"I can shuffle a few things around? Are you alright?" he sounds sincere. I feel like I've been such a burden on him recently, but he's offered me unconditional support the whole time I've known him and I can't envisage why it wouldn't be the same now.

"I just want to talk to you. It won't take long." I promise.

"Do you need me to come to Shanghai? I can get a flight and be there by nighttime for you." he doesn't hesitate to jump to help me.

I laugh a little, it being nasally and muffled due to the amount of crying that I've just done again. "No, I'll be fine."

"Are you sure?"