30. Run, Rabbit, Run

30

RUN, RABBIT, RUN

LILA

T he guest room is cold, empty, hollow. Not even the jaundiced light from the chandelier can sanctify the space in an ochre haze—can scare away the penumbra of night outside. Snow accumulates on the adjacent windowsill, melting into condensation on fogged glass, and hordes of weeping snowdrops are entombed beneath a blizzard of white. As warm and welcoming as the house feels, there’s a subterranean unease here now—one that’s been unearthed by my doing.

I shouldn’t be here. Bristol doesn’t want me here.

I hate fighting with him. I hate how my insecurities always seem to prevent me from being happy. He kept the ring a secret from me because he didn’t feel comfortable telling me. I forced him to shut me out. I should have been more understanding of his pain. And I picked a fucking argument during the hardest time of the year for him. I’m a terrible girlfriend.

God, will you listen to yourself, Lila? You’re so sure that he’ll leave when he’s given you his word that he won’t. It’s like there’s nothing he can say or do that will ever be enough, all because of a past he can’t change. You’ve always villainized him, even when he didn’t deserve it .

I tamp down the tears in my eyes, and my stomach roils with guilt. I try to focus on anything other than the crack in my heart—the miniature, decorated Christmas tree in the corner, a picture of baby Bristol in a heart-shaped photo ornament, the little bowl of peppermints on the spruce coffee table. This cabin is beautifully grand, and I…I don’t belong here. I should just leave tonight so I don’t ruin anything else. His parents were so generous to let me stay here. How can I face them after the things I said to their only son? I’m disgusted with myself. I was hoping this trip would bring me and Bristol closer together, but all it’s done is push us further apart.

I’m planning to slip out the door the minute I get the chance. I don’t think Bristol wants to see me, much less talk to me. He’ll be happier without all my extra baggage weighing him down. And who knows? Maybe we’ll meet up again when he returns to Riverside. Maybe we can stay friends. I hope we can stay friends.

I don’t bother with packing my suitcase. I don’t bother with lugging it down the stairs. I don’t even bother with leaving Bristol a text message. All I do is take a page out of his book, and I run without looking back.

Pitch-black night claws across the sky, half-obstructed by the coagulated mass of daunting pines that borders the vertiginous ledge beneath my feet. The only illumination I’m offered are my headlights, and I can’t see beyond the dense tangles of foliage or the ongoing deluge of snow clogging the lane. Nobody in their right mind would be out on the road right now. It’s too dark to see anything, and the possibility of crashing through these flimsy guardrails grows the further I distance myself from the cabin. But I don’t care. I guess…I guess a stupid part of me would rather be stranded on the side of a mountain than have to face the irreversible damage I’ve inflicted on Bristol’s and my relationship.

The rain has begun to beat menacingly on the hood, but even the persistent hiss in my ears isn’t loud enough to drown out a disembodied crack that comes from somewhere to my left. The crystallized dewdrops that once littered the trees have malformed into ugly, jagged icicles, and they heave back and forth with each rustle of the pines. Despite my high-powered fluorescents, all I see before me is a wasteland of desolation—a far cry from the glittering groves that once announced earth’s annual rebirth. I’ve never driven in snow like this. I’ve driven during some heavy downpours, sure, but I wasn’t simultaneously swerving through a rocky-ass obstacle course.

My heart tap-dances against my chest as I tighten my grip on the steering wheel, my knuckles the same off-white color as the snowy peaks cradling the small basin of Big Bear. The wind picks up outside, lashing against my windows, bringing with it an army of sleet that steadily covers my windshield.

Alright, Lila. Stay calm. It’s fine. Just some bad weather. The worst thing you could do is freak out.

My eyes roam to the fuel level gauge on my glowing dashboard, which borders on oh-shit territory and rests at 1/4 full. But that’s not where my problem lies. With how icy the road is, my tires are fighting for traction, and I’m afraid of spinning out (and off this goddamn cliff) if I apply too much pressure to the gas pedal.

Maybe I should turn back. There’s no telling what will happen to me the longer I’m out here. I don’t know Big Bear. I’m already about twenty minutes from the town. My head’s not clear enough to finish this drive. But if I turn back, I’ll have to deal with the life I left behind—the life that fucking ruined me. I don’t want to see Bristol’s face. I don’t want to speak to him. I just want to forget all about him. I just want to leave. I just want to…disappear.

I need to escape. I need to feel anything other than this hopelessness that slides a poison-tipped arrow through my third and fourth rib, misaligned just enough to scar the tissue around my heart instead of puncture it. Bristol broke everything we’ve built together. He had the ring this entire time, and he kept it a secret from me. Me! I opened up to him about my past, my insecurities. I let him hold the most delicate parts of me.

And then he just tore into me with his incisors like I was nothing but the too-soft pulp on an orange rind—weak, flimsy, created only to slake that greedy thirst of his. Thirst to have two women at once, to live his life with one foot in the present and one in the past, as if the consequences in doing so weren’t even a fleeting afterthought.

My Mazda judders forward a few inches, tires whirring against an impassable snowdrift. It clanks the entire foundation of my car, forcing me back toward a man I want nothing to do with, forcing me to submit to a supporting role in my own life. I make the idiotic mistake of peering out my window, and I’m slapped right in the face by the image of the mountainside sloping off into absolute nothingness—a demise I’m sure is awaiting me. But the worst part? I don’t even know if that scares me as much as forgiving Bristol does.

I’m bound to forgive him, right? Because that’s who I am. Because I just run back to the people who’ve hurt me in the hopes that they grow to love me.

The storm’s getting worse. There’s too much snow. My windshield wipers are in constant motion, and yet I can barely see ten feet in front of me. What if I run out of power? What if…fuck, what if I freeze to death out here? What if I starve to death? What if the weather is so bad that nobody can retrieve my body until it’s too late?

I should’ve never left. I should’ve stayed and tried to work things out with Bristol. And now I may never get the chance, all because I was a petty bitch who wanted to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. I didn’t even run because I was a coward. I ran because I thought that he might’ve cared enough to come after me.

I frantically scramble for my phone, hurrying to unlock it so I can call for…help? Bristol? Then I realize that those little Wi-Fi bars at the top are completely nonexistent.

I have no fucking cell service.

Shit. What do I do? I’ll die of hypothermia if I attempt to walk back to the cabin in this weather, but I can’t just stay here. I have no provisions to keep me alive for the next few days, or for however long this storm continues to rage on.

Acid—corrosive in every sense of the word—sloshes against the walls of my stomach, and fear rivets up my spine, turning my corporeal form into a boneless pile of mush. I’m going to die out here. I’m going to die out here, and Bristol will have to live with the belief that I still hate him.

The beginnings of a panic attack are coming on fast, and moisture coats my cheeks in a glossy sealant, tunneling my vision to a pinpoint. The sobs that rocket up my throat sear the lining completely. My head’s beginning to pulse because of how much water my body’s losing, and I can feel my heart punching against my chest as it threatens to charge for the nearest exit. My sniffles echo in the interior of my car in a twisted imitation of mocking laughter, the ball of nerves in my belly steadily expanding like that of a kingdom’s iron-fist-run sovereignty.

Breathe, Lila. Calm down.

I ruined everything. It’s all my fault. I was always worried I’d lose Bristol, and now I have.

You can fix this. Don’t lose hope. You two can come back from this.

He saw my true colors. Why would he want a girlfriend so insecure in herself that she punishes him for finding love before she came along?

It feels like my throat’s closing. I can’t breathe. I can’t think straight. The car begins to power down. I’ve run out of time .

My hands claw at the seatbelt restraining me, and sensibility flees from my grasp like an RV rolling down a rocky mountainside when I unclick the buckle. I scramble into the back seat and curl into a ball on the car floor. I’m no longer comforted by the rumble of the engine. Instead, there’s an eerie howl that sounds in the distance for far too long, and at too low of a pitch to be a product of just the wind. A wolf, perhaps. An emaciated creature looking for something to fill its empty stomach, to tide it over until the gunmetal clouds retreat.

Bone-chilling horror unmoors my false sense of security—the piers of a bridge suffering an integral collapse before the rest crumbles down with them—and I quickly unlock my phone to try and mitigate the panic. My fingers move at lightning speed to locate “Beautiful,” but instead, a man’s voice crackles through the small speaker.

I don’t know this song. There’s a melodious acoustic guitar that transcends me to another plane of heaven, and as I debate switching it, I glance down through the tears to catch the title of it on my phone—“Perfect” by Ed Sheeran.

I can feel the puttering pace of my heartbeat begin to slow, and I exert as much control as I can over my turbulent breathing. I lose myself in the lyrics, letting them distract me from my current predicament, too afraid of the inevitable silence that will follow. Bristol must have loaded this song on my phone without my knowledge.

I haven’t added new songs to my library in ages. I’d been so content with the past that I didn’t want to bring about change. Just like how I’ve lived my life—constantly revisiting my deadbeat father and how he abandoned me, constantly revisiting those self-esteem-crushing comments men made about me, all because it’s the only treatment I’ve ever known. Letting someone in, letting someone shift how I viewed myself, was scarier to me than the blows my self-conscious had already sustained .

And that’s what Bristol was— change . Change limned in a spotlight of pure gold.

Maybe it’s the delirium talking, but it sounds like this song’s message was made for me—a reflection of his heart, of how much he adores me.

Perfect.

Never something I thought I was, always something I strove to achieve. And now something I can maybe grow to accept.

Nobody’s perfect, but I’m perfect for someone.

With each harmonious run and tear-jerking lyric, I yearn to be in Bristol’s arms, to have him spin me around and hold me tightly to his chest. I want to go back to how things were. I miss him. I miss us .

The song finishes with an instrumental outro, and by that time, the damage has already been done. I’ve been distilled down to my barest parts. I rush to play it again, only to realize that Bristol’s left more than one song to communicate his true feelings for me. After some amateur sleuthing, I find that the Ed Sheeran song is a part of a playlist I didn’t create—a playlist titled “FOR WHEN MY ANGEL FORGETS HER HALO.”

I scroll through it in confusion before reaching the bottom, realizing he’s added over a hundred songs. I recognize a few titles off the bat, and I’m ninety-nine percent certain that they’re all love songs. Love songs to remind me how much Bristol cares about me, believes in me, supports me. He never once told me he made this for me.

I was meant to find it.

After he walked away, leaving me mired in my own mistakes, the only person I can blame is myself. I lashed out at him without allowing him the chance to explain. He couldn’t have…meant everything he said, right? I didn’t mean everything I said. Why am I still obsessed with a woman who’s no longer in Bristol’s life? Why do I have to let my jealousy and insecurities tear us apart? It’s not fair to him.

How can I truly think he doesn’t care for me? Bristol knows how much music means to me, and he took who knows how long to curate a playlist just for me, so I’ll never be without a preshoot ritual again.

Am I really going to punish him for keeping a ring that probably reassures him in the same way music calms me? I’m a hypocrite. And he said it himself—the ring was here, away from Riverside, for a reason. He was trying to move on without fully disregarding Summit’s memory. How could I insinuate that he’s still in love with her when he told me explicitly that he isn’t?

I’m the one who’s still comparing myself to Summit, not him. I’m the one who saw the ring as a betrayal, when in fact it couldn’t be further from it. He didn’t keep this secret from me to hurt me; he kept this secret from me because he didn’t want to hurt me. Asking him to erase Summit, or for him to choose between the two of us, is the cruelest thing I could do. If I truly trusted him, I wouldn’t feel so threatened by someone who’s no longer in his life. I owe him an apology. I need to make things right before we cross the point of no return.

And he’s right: he can’t just get rid of Summit. She’s a part of him. I should be thanking her for making him into the man he is today—the man I’ve fallen so truly and madly in love with.

I’m not ready to let him go. I’m not ready to let what we have go. Indelible history exists between us, and it’s as lasting as a searing brand on my conscience. I need to fight. I need to make it back to Bristol because…because he never once gave up on me. What if he’s out there, right now, looking for me? Our life together is still waiting for me, perfectly preserved like how I left it. For the first time in forever, I know what it’s like to be alive, to bleed, to feel . Bristol brought that out of me after years of decay. I thought that having a heart was a punishment worse than death, but that was before I remembered how bleak life was when I had nobody to love.

Bristol’s my whole world. He’s my home. And I ran away from the only place I’ve ever felt safe. He’s divine absolution heaven-sent, created to heal the blackened, scarred parts of me. I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for him. I would still be clinging to my self-hatred like the last disintegrating threads of a childhood blanket. I need him to know I’m sorry. I need him to know I love him.