chapter seven: the ache

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Previously: Tally and Nil wander around the forest like they used to, and Tally feels more torn than ever between the two lives she could live.

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    The girl keeps calling his phone. 

    “Her name is Piper,” Nil corrects Tally. 

    But who cares, really? With his hands zipping down her fleece when they penetrate the shrouded cabin, his fingertips cupping the back of her head to bring their parted, famished mouths together, before turning his phone face down on the nightstand – he can’t well pretend.

    Afterwards it is night and they drive to the next town. He rolls the windows down and she weaves her left hand through the one resting on his lap. They breathe in the icy air, their bodies warm and slick as ripe fruits against the wind’s blade as it storms through the car. Is he more quiet now or is it in her mind? 

    The radio plays a Taylor Swift song, Down Bad. Unbothered by its message Tally sings along with her trained voice and Nil listens pensively, strokes the back of her hand at red lights. They are vibrant and lustful; a sad song is just what they need to polish the moment so it rings in their minds, crystal-like.

    The big 24-hour store is empty, but not as empty as one would expect. The people they cross paths with in the neon-sanitized aisles carry a mix of alcohol and second-thought stocking stuffers in their carts. 

    “Did you know there are more suicides and accidents around Christmas than at any other point in the year?” Tally whispers to Nil as they pass another. 

    He says he knows. 

    “I learned that in Grey's Anatomy.”

    He knows this as well: she made him watch all nine seasons with her until Lexie’s death, which upset her so much she vowed never to watch a single minute of the show again. 

    They grab snacks, peach wine. They didn’t have to come on this errand but it feels better than the unbearable pressure that laid over them when they faced each other in Nil’s bed, their naked bodies pale in the moonlight after they came together, the girl’s silver dress sparkling dimly on the nearby chair.
He is definitely quieter since getting the call, Tally thinks as she tucks one large Lindt Santa under each arm.

    “They’re gonna melt,” he observes. 

    She sticks her tongue out, then, looking around and seeing no one, licks his bottom lip with the tip of her tongue, like a cat. 

    He wipes his mouth with his sleeve, smiling, but from a distance now, his demeanour suddenly reserved. “Ew?”

    She laughs. Her mouth is still sore from how hard they kissed in the cabin. She wants it to hurt even more. 

    On their way to check out they cross the hair product aisle and he stops to point at a bottle of lavender-colored dye. “Look.” 

    “I still have a bottle at home somewhere,” she says. “Do you have gloves?” 

    Nil smirks. “Garden gloves, yeah.”

    “These come with them anyway,” she shrugs, and in a desperate attempt to get back the sliver of normalcy they had just found again, to warm his cold, to keep the ghost of her LA life at bay, she takes the bottle from the shelf. “Let’s go.”

    “It's not gonna be a problem for your job?”

    Grinning with more mischief than she feels over her shoulder, she says: “What job?” 


  

    But back at the cabin, they’re silent again. She sits on a pillow by the coffee table and wraps the towel he hands her around her shoulders to protect her top from the dye. 

    “The usual?” He whispers.

    She nods. 

    He mixes the dye in a bowl and dips his brush with confidence in it, muscle memory taking over in the rotations of his wrist. The dye is cool and tingles as he rubs it into the roots of her blond hair with the crinkling plastic gloves. His body stings hers at all points of contact. She wants to know what is on his mind but is too afraid of the answer. She keeps her pale gaze on the window opposite her, where the black outlines of the trees shiver against the high moon and snow falls fast and oblique against the glass. All around, the wind roars and makes the wooden cabin creak.

    The forest is a different kind of loud. No endless stream of cars. No click of heels, no drunken shouts. No beeps, no construction drills, no blaring news, no gossip, no phone calls. Just this cabin. Just this moon. 

    Just Nil. 

    “Are you tired?” He asks.

    “No. Are you?”

    He ignores her question. “You seem sad.”

    “You seem sad,” she retorts, though she is not certain ‘sad’ is the right word. 

    He doesn’t answer. Trying to keep her head still, she hugs her knees tight against her chest, feeling suddenly cold and overly spacious. 

    “Do you have any friends there?” He asks after a while, his hands moving confidently over her scalp as he applies the dye. 

    “Of course.”

    “I mean real friends.”

    Defensiveness rising inside her, she says: “Can we not?”

    He pauses, then continues: 

    “It doesn’t seem like you do.” 

    She stifles a sigh. “Well, I do.”

    “How do you know them?” 

    “Similar circles, I guess. Some writers. Some actors. Some performance artists.”

    “I don’t even know what that means.”

    Moving her head slightly to look at him from the corner of her eye without disturbing his fingers, she asks: “Are you sure you’re okay? You seem pissed off.” 

    His phone buzzes on the coffee table again and lights up with the girl’s name. His thumbs pause behind her ears, then continue with their mission. 

    Frustrated by his silence, she says: 

    “You should pick up, you know.” 

    “Why?”

    “It’s disrespectful," she says, only because it's the first thing that comes to mind. 

    He scoffs. “And you know all about respect.”

    When her entire hair is tangled with dye and the air is burnished by its chemical smell, he removes his hands and doesn’t say “there you go, madame,” like he used to, so she knows she is right: he is angry. She uncrosses her legs, rises from the pillow, then leads herself to the bathroom, the foretaste of a fight on her tongue, sharp as blood. 

    “You want me to leave,” she says bluntly when she comes back, her clean hair inside a towel on top of her head. 

    It’s not a question.

    Nil has started tidying the room, picking up their clothes from the floor, making the bed. “No, Tally,” he says, not turning. “I don’t.”

    Not pushing him for an answer would be best, she knows. They have done this many times. Bickering in clipped consonants, restraining from saying the mean and true things that come to mind – his passivity, her selfishness – but that their bodies say anyway, ignoring each other until the energy to fight has left them. 

    It would be easy. She pushes anyway: 

    “You seem like you do.”

    He stares at her, confused. “What are you doing? You made your terms clear last night, and I agreed to them. Why are you trying to pick a fight?”

    Maybe because it will be easier to leave if she can make him hate her. Maybe because she is a shark out for her own wretched blood. Maybe because she wants everything or nothing at all.

    Instead, she says: “I just want to know why you’re acting weird.”

    As if weighing the pros and cons of answering her, Nil does not answer straight away. 

    “I went to the airport, you know?” He finally says. “That Christmas. Before I went to LA. No one told me you wouldn’t be on the plane.” His jaw sets. “You never told me you weren’t coming back.”

    A drop of cold water snakes out of the towel along the nape of her neck. 

    “Why didn’t you?”

    “I don’t know.”

    But she does. 

    He turns to face her. “And why did you come back this time?” 

    “I don’t know,” she repeats. 

    Another lie. She couldn’t begin to explain what she’d felt when her agent called to tell her she’d landed a final audition for Marvel, how it had seemed like a vortex opened under the desk chair she was sitting on, ready to suck her into its black mouth. How could she explain this to Nil, when she forsook a life with him in the hope she might one day get that exact phone call?

    “You don’t seem happy about your life there.”

    “I am.”

    “But you’re here aren’t you? For the first time in, what, four years? And you don’t know why, though clearly, clearly, whatever you have over there, all that glitter and gold, it’s not doing it for you anymore, if it ever did.”

    Stranded in the middle of the room, she finds herself unable to formulate a convincing rebuke. He scoffs and continues to tidy. For the first time ever, she wishes Nil was Benjamin, who can never tell when she lies, can never hold his own in a fight.  
	
    “Okay and why are you here?” She asks, defiant. “If your life is so much better than mine, if you’re so content with your nice hometown, your nice girlfriend, driving around the same forest you’ve been wandering in your whole life?”
	
    He casts her a dangerous look over his shoulder. “You don’t know anything about my life.”
	
    “I know who you’re with right now. Why is that? Happy people don’t go fooling around with their ex. Maybe Roses isn’t right for you either.”
	
    He cocks his head. “And where else would I go, huh?”
	
    “Wherever you want. Olympic National Park? That was your dream, wasn’t it?”

    “It was.”

    “So?”

    The look he gives her is loaded with meaning. “I don’t let myself dream too big anymore.”

    His words drop like stones inside her chest and scrape against her ribcage. 

    “Not everything is my fault.”

    “No. I guess not. But I made my choices. I’m not sure you’ve made yours.” 

    An endless silence stretches between them. She turns away from him, looks at the window where her reflection, thin and watery in the glass blacked-out by the surrounding night, watches her back. Waiting to see what she will do next. 

    This was a mistake. 

    She should never have messaged him again, never entered this cabin, never let her hands find their way back to his skin. She had wanted to forget about LA, to be held by the only soul who made her feel more than the sum of her parts – not just pretty, not just talented, not just another piece of merch to be sold on the world’s stage – to feel real, maybe for the last time.  

    But her plan has not changed. It can’t. She has come too far. She must go back to LA. 

    She must get the life she sacrificed everything for. 

    His steps make the wooden floors vibrate as he crosses the room until he stands right behind her: “What is it you want Tally?” 

    The plan has not changed, she repeats to herself over and over, a helpless rage rising in her chest, catching fire in her throat. All seeing him has done is make it even harder for her to go through with it. All it has done is ensure that for months his cold ghost will haunt her mind, shackling it back to this goddamn place just as she needs to be freed from it the most. 

    “To be rid of you!” She whips around to face him – Nil, the one holding her back, the jailer to her old dreary life. “To be rid of you.” 

    She stares at him, breathless. They are so near each other that in an alternate reality they could have kissed, and she hates him for the way the deepest parts of her twist with desire at the thought. 

    The way he looks at her down the length of his nose, eyes heavy with longing but also wary, like she is an addiction he must not fall back into: she knows he feels the same. 

    But his gaze hardens with resolve: “Same.” 

    On the table, his phone lights up again. 

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Thank you for reading <3

How do you feel about Tally picking a fight with Nil? Do you empathise with her predicament or do you just want to slap her around 😂?

Let me know in the comments!

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