Hearing that the woman you thought you were destined for was going to die before you had turned twenty-five basically fucked up my thoughts and proved to me that life is random and chaotic. Nothing happened for a reason. People you loved got sick, they died, and none of it ever made any goddamn sense. That was the conclusion I had come to after she died.
But, now my thoughts were jumbled again and I wasn’t sure what I believed. Why had Robin died so quickly? Why was April the one they got to fill in for the time Robin was out? Why had her husband been traded to Tampa Bay in the first place, when no one else seemed to want anything to do with him? Why was April making me rethink everything about fate, about life, and about love?
I wanted to protect her. I knew that more than I knew I wanted to tell her we couldn’t hang out with each other, couldn’t see each other anymore. I wanted to take her away from Marco and never look back. I hadn’t met her children, but deep down I knew I didn’t want them growing up in a home with a father like Marco. Being around her, I felt like I had known her forever, as cliché as that sounded, even though I barely knew her at all. God, what a mess.
Before I knew it, I was home. Sometimes it would scare me when I would reach a destination I had been driving to and I couldn’t even remember driving there. That had happened a lot since the invention of texting. But, this drive had been distracted by my thoughts and not my phone.
I got home at around ten o’clock and sat on my couch with a toothpick in my mouth, watching the Marco story continue to unfold on SportsCenter. I wanted to text April again, but I had no idea whether or not Marco was home yet, and I sure wasn’t going to be texting her when I knew he could be home. Psychos were not to be trifled with. And here I was thinking about the psycho’s wife.
I felt myself growing tired. It had been a long week. Holly would be coming over in four hours, and I wanted to take a nap. Sex with her wasn’t something I really wanted to do anymore, at least not now, but I couldn’t explain that to her. So, I turned the volume on my phone up, set my alarm, and laid down on the couch to try to squeeze in a couple hours of rest before she got there. Maybe with a little rest I could fake it.
I awoke to a loud ringing and rolled over toward my phone, which was lying on the floor. At first, I didn’t have a clue where I was; it was one of those moments where you wake up and think you overslept when you needed to be somewhere important. I went to turn off the alarm, when I realized it wasn’t the alarm at all. It was a phone call from April.
I shot straight up on the couch. It was almost midnight.
“Hello,” I said, hoping to sound much more awake and coherent than I felt.
I could hear April crying. The sound was slightly muffled, but it woke me up immediately. She wasn’t saying anything, only sobbing.
“April, what’s wrong?” I said, standing up. I began pacing around as she continued to cry. I asked her once more what was wrong, and I could tell she was trying to get words out.
“He...hit...me,” she said, and then repeated herself, seeming bewildered.
Oh god. That bastard.
“April, where are you? Are you okay?”
I could tell she was driving, and the sound seemed muffled because she was probably talking to me through her car’s speakers.
“Yeah. I’m...okay,” she said.
“Where are you, April?” I asked, walking circles around my living room.
“I’m just driving,” she replied. “I’m not even sure where I am.”
I immediately thought of getting in my car and going to find her. But then what did I plan on doing? Just hang out with her next to each other’s cars? No.
“April, come over to my house,” I finally said. I didn’t give myself time to question what I was saying, or rethink it. I just said it.
“What?” she said, still in a daze.
“Drive to me. You can just stay with me until you’re okay.”
“Are you...I mean, are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m insisting. Come over now. You don’t need to be driving around like this.”
I didn’t know where she was, so I asked her if she could make it to the school from where she was. She said yes, she probably could, so I gave her the simple directions from the school to my house.
“Okay, I think I can do that,” she said.
I heard a loud beeping sound on her end.
“Marco is calling,” she said, and her voice went up and filled with tears again.
“Don’t answer it,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t answer him. Drive over here. You aren’t going to talk to him like this. You can use a little time to cool off, breathe, think. Then, if you want to call him or answer his calls, you can.”