Attempted

I've seen four sunsets total. The fourth one just went down. I counted, and for the entire time, I've been cooped up inside the room I ran into. I haven't left the room once. Call me over-the-top, but I gave up everything and literally everything more if I needed, to avoid him.

He, the one with a name I didn't even want to say, but that was involuntarily up in my head anyway, was worth that kind of sacrifice. He was a poison to my mental health, and lethal to my heart, by only a glance. I'm not going to put myself in that danger. Not by my own will.

"Arizona, you can't stay cornered in there forever." I've heard Carmine twist the door knob of the room a few times since I've been in here, and I've seen his shadow darken the light from entering underneath his door just as often. He's called out to me this way, and each time I've chosen not to answer him, waiting around until he left.

"If I can or if I can't, I am." I answered for the first time after he's been trying to check up on me. I've never wished I can take words back into my mouth as much as I did now, but they were already out and he's already heard. I could tell by the movement of his feet. I know him that well, yet it was an entire waste. Why does he suddenly care? He didn't act that way four days ago. He wouldn't mind if I was dead then.

"Jeez, Riza, what would you have done if that room didn't have a bathroom?" He chuckled a little bit, but it wasn't enough to make his tone stray from being serious. I remained quiet as he's been wanting in the recent past, maybe to give him a taste of his own medicine, and maybe because I didn't know how to answer. "You have to eat. It's been nearly a whole work week, and all you could've possibly eaten was the stash of chocolate I have hidden in the drawer."

He's right. Been there. Done that. There's wrappers all over the floor to prove it, and he's right again; I'm starved, so much that I'd feel sick to a plate of food when I first smelled it, but I wasn't going to admit that straight out. "Be real, Carmine. You don't have to feed me if you don't even want me to be here. Continue pretending I don't exist like you have been."

He didn't respond, and for some good memorable seconds, I thought I won. Won for what the argument was, but not in any other sense. At the end of it, I was still lonely, heartbroken, and hungry, but I lost in the one way I thought I didn't. Carmine wasn't giving up this time, as he has been. He was going to break down the door if he had to, and though he didn't actually end up needing to do that, he did break off the door knob. Or screw it off with a tool that I wish didn't exist at the moment.

I could see him through the hole the knob was once taking up space, until he pushed the door in fully. "Eat." He said simply. The atmosphere was getting more stern. It already was because of his presence, but the closer he got to me the more it grew, like a weed. The thing you wanted to get rid of, that wouldn't go away. "Can you smell it from here? I made spaghetti."

Whether I inhaled or not, the aroma wasn't planning on leaving me alone. It'd take over my nostrils, my stomach will grumble, and my body might go numb for how much I wanted it. I tried to hide it, I really did, but Carmine saw right through me. We developed that naturally within both of us when it came to each other. He knew me. It sucks that I have to keep admitting that. "Arizona, be real. You want it. You don't have to fight with yourself."

I hid my hands behind me, between my back and the wall, so it'd be harder for him to get me to my feet, and easier for me to be able to decline, as much as I desired to give in, but even though it did make it that way, it didn't make anything impossible.

Eventually I was up to my feet, feeling too weak to change the direction he was bringing me to and he was determined to get me to the dining room. Each touch of my skin against his lit up a spark, but not the kind that it used to be. It's one that made me want to flee from him, as if some force was trying to cut us apart, but a force that he was stronger than.

Seeing the plate on the far end of the table was nearly love at first sight, which I've never experienced before, including when it came to him. The steam made it evident that it was only recently prepared, and it made its aroma even stronger that it began to make up my blood. It's all my body craved and longed for after what I've put myself through.

I took a seat, picking at the food at first to seem uninterested, even if it's true it took everything in me to resist. My sight had gone hazy because of every hour that's added up and passed on that made me this defeated, and my mouth drizzled of saliva.

He sat down on the other end, where a plate was still sitting there empty, and though I refused to glance at anything except the full plate in front of me, I could feel his gander right smack in the middle of my forehead. He was observing me, and he wasn't up for pretending that he wasn't.

By instinct, I knew he had on that signature glance; the one with his head the slightest bit tilted as his curiosity grew in how I was going to handle the situation. He did it with either furrowed eyebrows if he was irritated, or with calm ones if he was amused. It seemed too mixed for me to tell without confirming with my own eyes, and that was intolerable on my end, not knowing which, or if it really was both, what the stronger emotion was.

I quit with the picking at my food thing, and gobbled up the noodles as fast as I could so I can disappear from his sight once again. This made the amused trait more vivid and it came further to life, that I could tell based only on the words he would use as he watched me.

Saying things like, "try chewing before you swallow", under a giggle, or "I'm glad you're not hiding that you like my homemade sauce", with another laugh of it's own. Because of the mood I was in, it made me more agitated and extra desperate to get out of his sight, far from caring if I responded to however he joked or what he thought about me. If he was trying to fix the tight atmosphere of it was just what he felt like saying, it didn't matter. I didn't give a response. Not that he deserved my consideration or sympathy.

I finished the plate to the very last, and slammed the chair back underneath the table to sprint from before his eyes. As much as I hated the hidden basement, it was the closest thing to hide myself away from the one person I gave a chance, and the one person who messed everything up. I relied on it to keep me away from him. I've come to hate him more than I hated the place that revived my flashbacks, and never in my life did I think that was possible.

It was as cold as I last remembered it. Every step to the cement was torture, but it's not like I didn't deserve it. After all, if I've ended up to this point, it's probably the way it's meant to be. I'm supposed to be alone all the time. I'm supposed to rely only on myself and nobody else. I'm supposed to die alone and be forgotten, and here by myself in the cold, that was to weigh down on me even more.

I guess there's hypocrisy in all of our hearts in one of its corners. Somewhere, but never could I expect that there'd be someone as bad as Carmine. It's the betrayers that hurt you the most. Not the ones that you expected to not once be on your side.

Backstabbers hurt worse than an enemy.

I hid myself deep into the covers, my entire body underneath the warmth it was meant to give, but I didn't feel any of it. With a cold, locked, and guarded heart that didn't know how to trust, the rest of a person couldn't so easily warm up, but no matter how frozen and bolted it gets, its uneasiness still makes it fly right out of your body when the source that made it the way it is is after you again.

Carmine made his way down the stairs. By the way he stepped, I knew he didn't come down here often, because he hit every creek in the staircase that I've learned not to step on. He couldn't sneak up on me if he tried, unless I was long passed out, and I honestly wished I was. The only strategy I had was to pretend.

But that strategy was shallow. With the aura he's been holding in the recent days, and insisting on sitting on his knees right on the bedside, I couldn't act closed-eyed for long, and he's not going to leave if I told him to. That's a fact that I couldn't change. "Arizona, can we talk?"

I turned the opposite direction so my face couldn't see his, and so the one tear that escaped down the side of my face from laying on my hip he couldn't notice either. "What do you want?" I growled through clenched teeth, to wash the possibility that he noticed what I turned away for, but even to myself it wasn't believable. "There's nothing to talk about."

I couldn't help but realize how familiar the words sounded. During hardship, we both curled up in our privacy and did the exact same thing, but our situations were different then and now. I felt I had more right than he did to act the way I was, compared to his times of distance. I had that entitlement.

If he couldn't understand my right to feel the way that I do and to put space between us after he put this ache in my chest, then he didn't deserve to have me listen to him. There wasn't anything to explain. Not when he already lost his chance. I opened up a door for that already, and now that it was shut he couldn't come inching back. My heart isn't something opened on his time. It's opened on mine.

I should've found a way to stay in that room.

"Arizona, I'm sorry." He muttered, fidgeting with his hands, probably, and at that second I hated how the humans body works. However much you guard your heart, however much you lock it up, however much it's coldness escalates, it doesn't matter - it doesn't matter one bit. The pang will come at you with just as much impact, or maybe more miserable than you could've originally thought. There's no cure or shield for that kind of arrow; that kind of illness.

I hummed quietly to respond, since it's all I could muster up, and once again, I wished I didn't. It was the permission he needed to go on; what he needed to hear to say what he wanted to say - to make me listen to what I didn't want to listen to. "You remember I only had 93 days in the states, yeah? When midnight comes, it's officially my 90th. I can't spend any more of it mad at you for doing nothing wrong, and I don't want to spend any more of it with you despising the sight of me. I regret it. So just let me talk. Please."

Maybe if I would've known that later in the night, we wouldn't be the only ones in the house I would've let him speak.

Maybe if I would've known that people were planning at this second to have us dead before morning came, I would've let him speak.

Maybe if I would've known that neither of us aren't meant to see tomorrow, I would've let him speak.

Maybe if I would've put in my mind just how fragile his life can be too, no matter the fame, the glory, the riches, and the elegance, on top of all that already happened, I would've let him speak.

But instead, I shut him up. I said a simple, "no," and it was enough to stop him from going on. He felt too guilty to talk, and I thought that was exactly where I wanted him. So I shut my eyes, and fell asleep as peacefully as it could be made possible for what the evening was becoming.

He was suffering at my side, his upper body against the other side of the bed, and his lower pained by the hard floor underneath him.

I let his conscience and his physical body shiver without a single second to care, and I made a mistake.

I made a big mistake.