Friends with Benefits - Nicole Blanchard Page 0,1

read it back later and regret it, but if the only weapon I had was words, I wanted to aim for his heart and make it hurt.

ME: Then I guess all the promises you made about wanting to be with me forever, all the times you said you loved me meant nothing. All those were just lies? I’m not a perfect person, but I deserve better than this. I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am, but I actually believed the bullshit you spun to me about it being us against the world. Lose my number. I don’t ever want to hear from you again.

As tears flooded my vision, I blocked his number and navigated through the aisles to the front door. I don’t know how I made it back to the apartment complex without wrapping my car around a pole, but I did. Sheer will, I suppose. All those late nights driving an ambulance, high on adrenaline, must have paid off.

An indeterminable amount of time later, I found myself in the shower, the hot spray beating down on my naked body and hot tears streaming down my cheeks. I didn’t know a person could hurt so much. It felt like I was dying, except there was nothing I knew in my repertoire of life-saving skills that could resuscitate me.

I don’t know how long I sat there, wallowing in self-pity. It could have been minutes, but it felt like years. The water began to run cold, although I could barely feel it. My brain seemed to have disconnected from my body. It was probably a good thing. The flashes of pain that radiated down to the marrow of my bones were almost too much to handle.

I’d never believed in broken hearts. Get over it, I’d think to myself when friends of mine would go through a breakup. Even when Liam and Charlie or Layla and Dash had split, granted it was only for a short time, I didn’t think it was so bad. They’d gotten back together, after all. I’d been with Chris so long it had never occurred to me what would happen when we broke up. Not even when things started to get so rocky a couple of months ago.

What a fool I was.

My laugh echoed off the dingy subway tiles, and I peeled myself off of the tub floor to turn off the water. My hair was matted to my head, but I couldn’t find the energy to care. Any concern aside from surviving had leaked out of me in the torrent of tears and had seeped down the drain.

The twins still had another couple of hours at school. Mom was probably off with whatever bum she’d hooked up with over the weekend, and my father, who didn’t seem to care who she slept with, was no doubt glued to a barstool down the road at his favorite haunt.

I was alone.

I doubled over as the implication stabbed through me.

I was alone.

I had my family, but they were more of a responsibility than a comfort. I’d get through this for them. I had my friends, but they had their own lives, and I didn’t want to burden them–not yet. It wasn’t in my nature to lean on others. I provided for my family, working myself to the bone without any help from my deadbeat parents. I would survive this, even if it didn’t feel like it at the moment.

For now, it felt like the pain encapsulated everything, blotting out my surroundings until it contracted to a dull ache in my chest. I staggered to my bedroom with a towel wrapped loosely around my body and water dripping from my saturated hair onto the worn wood floors. I didn’t care. I couldn’t scrounge up the energy to do more than throw myself onto the bed and pull the mussed covers around me.

My phone was hauntingly silent, which only made the tears fall harder. There were no social media notifications. No emails. I knew, somewhere deep down in my soul, that he wouldn’t try reaching out that way.

He’d found someone else.

I’d supported him through his father’s death the year before. When he didn’t think he could pass his finals after the funeral, I stayed up after two double shifts and helping the twins through a stomach virus to quiz him. For his birthday, I’d driven down and taken him to his favorite restaurant, even though I was barely making enough money to pay rent and support my sisters.

I would have