The One You’re Holding Onto
Stay here in my arms tonight
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
I just wanna be the one you’re holding onto
I didn’t have to work the next day, so I spent the majority of it just sitting on my couch, facing the door. It was stupid, but I couldn’t force myself to move. What if he came back? What if he had just run out to get food or go to some appearance he hadn’t mentioned? What if?
But I knew. Deep down, I knew. He was gone and he wasn’t coming back.
It didn’t matter what Zac said. He wasn’t going to stay. He could flatter me all he wanted, make me feel more alive than I ever had… and then make me feel more dead. Because he wouldn’t stay. He couldn’t stay. And it was foolish for either of us to act like he could or like one night really meant anything. One night didn’t change a damn thing, and I knew it.
I let myself mope for one day. Just one day. Once he’d been gone for twenty four hours and I hadn’t heard a single word from him, I accepted that it was over. Even if he came back eventually, groveling, begging to see his baby, I would know that he wasn’t mine and never would be. I would know that I couldn’t trust a word he said. For twenty four hours, I mourned the loss of whatever I had delusionally convinced myself we might have someday had, and then I moved on with my life.
There were too many things to do to sit around weeping for a boy who I jad never truly had. As my due date drew closer and closer, I was simply too damn busy to think about anything but the baby. She occupied my every thought, not Zac. If he occasionally crept in, I only needed to remember how he had left me and he was easy enough to chase away.
I leaned on Tobias more and more in those days, because it wasn’t like I had very many other friends. I’d been too focused on my classes to make friends in college and my high school friends had all drifted away from me after my parents died and they didn’t know how to relate to me anymore. Avery still hadn’t spoken to me, and so that left me with no one nearby but Tobias. Aunt Sus came to visit often, but that was different. I needed an actual friend.
Asher hadn’t returned, of course, except in my nightmares, which grew more and more insane every night. He and Zac battled to the death in my subconscious more than once, and no matter how much I screamed at them, they didn’t stop. The scariest dreams were the ones where they turned on me, choosing to vent their frustrations on my body, too, ignoring my screams that they would hurt the baby. Sometimes they joined forces to help me deliver her, but what they delivered was only a corpse… or worse, a monster. I didn’t sleep a lot those days.
Just stay here in my arms
Just stay here in my arms tonight
It was starting to take a toll at work, but I was determined to work for as long as I could. It didn’t matter how bad I felt; if I could pull myself out of bed and get my big fat ass to the store, I was going to work. The more money I had saved up for the days when I simply couldn’t work, which I knew would be a lot of them once the baby was born since I didn’t have a babysitter, the better.
“Colby? Colby? You in there?”
I shook my head to clear it, slowly realizing that Tobias and Joey were both standing right over me, looking concerned. I’d developed a tendency to space out at work, especially if I’d had nightmares the previous night. That particular night, I’d watched Zac blame Asher for the dead, mangled corpse I’d given birth to. I didn’t really even remember waking up and going to work, but evidently I had.
“Maybe you should just take the rest of the day off,” Joey suggested.
I shook my head again. “No, I’m fine. I just got lost in thought for a second.”
“Are you sure?” He asked. “You can go in the back if you need to like, pass out or whatever.”
“I’m not going to pass out,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “I’m fine, I just… I just drift off. Pregnancy brain.”
“Do you need to take a nap?” Tobias offered.
“No!” I snapped. “Not with these fucking nightmares I’ve been having. I just need a second and I’ll be fine. Seriously.”
Joey crossed his arms. “I hate to ask this, but what are you going to do once you have this kid? It’s bad enough now, but maybe you just need to go on and take some time off. I’m glad to have you here, but I don’t want to put more of a strain on you than necessary.”
“I’ll be fine,” I replied, standing up. “It’s not like I can keep working much longer anyway, but I’m going to work as much as I can. Eventually my money will run out, you know.”
I stared them both down, willing them to disagree with me. Neither one did. Aside from the radio playing in the background, since we couldn’t agree on a playlist that day, the store was completely quiet.
I got a feeling that I cannot contain
I can’t believe this moment
You’ve got your eyes locked on me
In my head I think it must be a mistake
But my heart says take your chances
It could be this first dance is the unexpected beautiful
I can barely admit I’ve been longing for
“Of all the fucking times,” I mumbled.
I let my head fall against the counter and groaned. Even though he couldn’t know what was bothering me, Tobias rubbed my back gently. Joey mumbled something about how I needed to go in the back, and then shuffled away. That was about as close to sympathetic as I expected him to be, maybe even moreso.
Of all the times for Hanson to have something of a comeback, it had to be now, when I was trying to rid my life of them. It had to be now when I was doing everything I could to remove Zac from my memory. It had to be now when I didn’t need to hear him promising to stay. It had to be now when I knew his promises meant nothing.
From within my pocket, I felt my phone buzzing. I wiggled around to pull it out and see who could possibly be texting me.
Even though I had deleted his number, I didn’t have to guess who Z was. How many other people could I possibly know whose name started with the last letter of the alphabet, especially ones who owed me an apology? Of course it was Zac Fucking Hanson. After banging my head against the counter for a moment, I typed a reply.
Tobias was still rubbing my back but thankfully not looking over my shoulder when I received Zac’s reply. I was sure he could guess who was texting me, anyway, and I was glad he wasn’t nosy enough to feel the need to read the texts, too.
I gaped at my phone’s screen, not believing the words I was reading. Once again, he could only make things all about him. He said he wanted to make things up to me, as if it were possible, but he didn’t. I knew he didn’t. He wanted to save his own ass. That was why he ran. Because no matter what he wanted, he knew who he was accountable to, and it wasn’t me.
With a heavy sigh, I tucked my phone back into my pocket. I didn’t need to read or hear whatever else Zac had to say. He couldn’t fix this. He just couldn’t. It was what it was and I was done pretending that there was any way that it could ever change.
“Take a break,” Tobias said softly. “Joey doesn’t mind. You can just go in the back and rest.”
I nodded. I didn’t feel like arguing that any nap I tried to take wouldn’t leave me feeling any more rested. I was tired of fighting with everyone, so I did what Tobias said and went into the back room. I had left a blanket there some time ago, and while the back room wasn’t exactly the most comfortable place to take a nap, it was better than going all the way home.
Just as I settled myself into the floor and wrapped myself up in my blanket, my phone began to ring. I didn’t have to guess who it was. I wiggled around until I could pull it out of my pocket again, and sure enough, there was the same number Zac had texted me from. I hated myself for answering it.
“Hello?”
“Colby, please…”
“Please what?” I asked. “I can’t do anything for you, Zac. I can’t make you stay. I can’t go back in time and undo… any of this. So what, exactly, do you want me to do?”
“I don’t know,” he replied weakly.
“I don’t either. You keep asking me to take all these leaps of faith and trust you, but I can’t. Every time you prove that I can’t.”
Stay here in my arms tonight
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
I just wanna be the one you’re holding onto
And if you wanna run tonight
I’d take you anywhere you want me to
I’m giving you my heart ‘cause I
I’m lost without you
‘Cause I’m lost without you
I could hear what sounded like ice clinking in a glass before he spoke again. “I know we can’t go back, but believe me, I would do so many things differently if we could. I just… I wanna stop talking about what went wrong, and talk about what can be different. What we can do now.”
“And I want to stop talking about it and actually do it,” I replied. “You can talk all you want, but you don’t do a damn thing you talk about doing.”
“There has to be something I can do,” he said, his voice breaking.
“Nothing I’ll ask of you,” I said. “You know that. I won’t ask you to leave her, because I don’t believe you ever will, anyway. And I know you can’t be here all the time, but you’re not even trying to be here when you can.”
“You don’t fucking know that!” He growled.
I cowered, even though he wasn’t there to see it. After taking a moment to collect myself, I replied, “This is the first time you’ve contacted me in two weeks. And how long was it before that? And before that?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But Colby… she reads my texts, checks my calls… And why shouldn’t she? I’ve proven that I’m an asshole she can’t trust.”
“Exactly,” I shot back. “So why should I trust you?”
“Because I said so!” He replied, the words slurred ever so slightly. “I don’t fucking know, I just want a chance to… a chance to do things right for once.”
“I can’t give you that. Everything I’ve given you has gone to shit.”
“Well, fuck it then,” he mumbled. I heard the ice tinkling in the background again and I wondered if he was drunk. I didn’t want to ask.
“I’m going to go,” I said softly. “This conversation isn’t getting us anywhere, because there’s nowhere for us to go.”
“Fine.”
I sighed. “Don’t be like that, Zac. You know I’m right.”
“Just go,” he said. “Just fucking go. Whatever.”
Before he could get any angrier with me, I ended the call and turned my phone off. I was done. Done with him and done with giving him chances. Just… done. I settled back down into my blanket and hoped that, if I could fall asleep at all, I had no more horrible nightmares.
I see it all aligned in front of my face
But like a shooting star fades
It could be gone just as fast as it came