Losing Ruby

chapter twelve

Losing Ruby

Copyright © 2020 Kelsa Dixon

All rights reserved

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[Brody]

I felt like a bull in a china shop. Everything I saw reflected the rage like a rippling red flag. I couldn't stand still.

I paced the length of my office; from one end to the other. At the door I whipped it shut as the searing strength forming in my arms needed to be released. At the glass paned window on the far side, I slammed my palms flat against the glass wishing I could feel the sting of the shattered pieces tear across my knuckles just like I'd once felt in the midst of a fight. At least it would take my mind off his words.

"Had you been there—had you ever been there...." The accusations caged me in, chained me back to a past I could never seem to escape. This room felt like a sealed box.

"Maybe....we wouldn't be so...disgusted with each other...." I was only ever disgusted with myself.

The collar of my shirt started to feel like a noose and I ripped it open. Buttons flew in different directions, dropping to the floor like the high pitch chime of a trip gong. Suddenly, I found myself bouncing on my toes, needing to swing. But the only thing I could see in front of me was Luca's face.

He was fifteen, and it was my nineteenth birthday, just days after a graduation I hadn't shown up to. Only months after the accident. He was standing in my doorway as I zipped my bag. It was a small duffle; I didn't need much. Really I hadn't wanted anything from that life at all, and when he asked what I was doing, as the panic started to leak into his voice, I brushed past him without a glance. He'd tried to stop me, and when his hands landed on my shoulders, his words a desperate plea for me to stay, I shoved him aside—I shoved him hard, back into the wall and let him see the cold shell of an exterior I'd become.

I'd told him to fuck off—that I didn't need all the pathetic attempts he'd made to save me. That was a choice made in a blurry haze of benzo's and cheap liquor. Even now I could remember how the words came out slurred and hard and borderline manic.

My arm swung wide and I cleared the end of my desk in one swipe. File folders erupted and paper fluttered toward the ground. Pens crashed to the floor and rolled until they hit the wall or a file cabinet; the leg of my desk. It wasn't the release I needed. It didn't clear the memories.

I'd walked that night. I didn't have anywhere to go, but I couldn't stay there. Not where the memories talked and the walls whispered. Even in a doped up sleep I couldn't find peace, and neither could anyone else. Not when they looked at me, knowing what I'd done.

The converted drafting table in the middle of my office seemed to call to me. My fingers ached to curl under its lip; so I flipped it on its side. I used the chairs for my clenched fists. Only once they were all on their sides, did I feel the crippling tension in my shoulders start to ease. The weight of Luca's accurate accusations started to sag into pity.

"If you had answered...."

He'd called two dozen times that night before I turned my phone off. I hadn't wanted to answer, and by the time I realized what I'd done months later it'd been too late. The calls had stopped coming and finding the words to say to him after he'd finally given up seemed impossible.

The night I left I'd stumbled into the bad side of town where dive bars hosted rounds of gunshots on a typical night. Apartments cost less than a used car payment and reeked of mold and mildew, especially when half of them didn't have a working AC unit in the middle of summer. There were bars on store windows; convenient stores stayed open all night with the cashiers tucked behind bullet proof glass.

There were no two story homes. No white picket fences and two car garages. On that side of town the people were more privy to the same kind of tragedy I'd experienced. It's where I belonged—I fit in; I'd held the life of someone else in my hands. 

I sat on a bench under a street light at a bus stop until the early morning. Until the sun had risen and I had to figure out what to do next. When the first bus pulled up, I got on and rode it all day.

"What the hell are you doing, Brody?" I froze as a bookshelf that housed design trends and history, ancient symbolism and art theory, and memoirs from artists I now sought inspiration from toppled sideways. Only then, as both adrenaline and relief surged up my arms, did it register that I was standing in the middle of my office without a shirt, my chest heaving in heavy grunts. My fingers were curled at my sides.

My hand throbbed and I stared at it, flexing it open and closed. My right knuckles—though the swelling had faded—were still scratched from the day of the funeral, and were now red and raw again. Only Chloe had noticed. Or the only one who had made note of it the next day as I helped carry boxes from her room to the car. She'd made sure to quietly question the bruising when no one else was around. When I brushed it off as having run into a door frame she easily let it go.

This time she wouldn't notice; they would be wrapped by the time she came home. It was the distraction I needed.

I spread my fingers long and envisioned the letters that would span my right hand. Lena—our mother's name—fit as painfully well as Ruby.

"Your ten o'clock is here. Do you need me to cover it?" Josh's tone was curt, but I didn't think it had anything to do with the fact that he'd been picking up my slack for the last two weeks.

I straightened the chair lying on its side at my feet. "No. I can handle it." 

"He'll be waiting in studio 3."

"Keep Drake's schedule clear; four to five."

He didn't respond. He was waiting for me to turn and face him. I wouldn't, because that would give away too much to a friend that already knew more about me than I cared to know—or understand—about myself.

"I'll put you on his schedule. But it won't fix whatever set...this off."

I clenched my jaw, and waited until I heard his footsteps fade. It wasn't like Josh to let something of this magnitude go so easily. Today work came first and I'd prefer it that way over the typical critical analysis of my past and how it was currently presenting itself, any day. Especially considering the state of my room.

Quickly, I stood the table and the rest of the chairs upright, and grabbed an extra Slave to the Needle t-shirt before I finally sat behind my computer and pulled up the design for this appointment.

I stared at the detail and the lines and the meaning that it held for this particular individual; the story that went with it. I don't know why I pulled my phone from my pocket to check the messages, and I couldn't explain the pang of disappointment when there wasn't anything from Luca. Why would he call? To say, 'sorry, that was harsh, I didn't mean to take my frustration out on you'?

For once I felt just a small, minuscule fraction of what he must've felt then; when I'd left and never bothered to call. To not send a single, one syllable word. Nothing that would spark a single bit of hope that maybe I did—even from a universe away—still care. Now I didn't know if he still did either.

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• losing ruby •

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