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hoLLy
Chapter 7: Part 1
[Maria]
I wish it was just a nightmare, but it wasn’t. It was more than that. It was a breaking point. This morning might have been the end to Max and Liz, but no one brought it up to either one in fear that it might really be the end. No one wanted to remind the two of this morning. I didn’t even want to be reminded off this morning, but it’s all I could think about.
“Just get the hell out of my face,” he demanded.
Liz left the room in tears, running off to the master bedroom to sleep or not on her own. Max got some air out on the veranda and was joined by Michael not long after. Isabel and Jesse went back to their own home in each other’s arms, hoping they wouldn’t turn out like Max and Liz, which is something I never expected to say or compare. As for me, I went after Liz, but her bedroom door wouldn’t budge and she didn’t reply to my pleas to let me in. So I had gone back downstairs instead of going to my own room to get some sleep, because I couldn’t go to sleep after a morning like this one, and if I wasn’t going to rest then I might as well clean up the mess downstairs, i.e. the broken glass from the veranda door.
When I had reached the breakfast nook, Michael and Max were still standing out on the deck. I noticed them conversing but couldn’t hear much and didn’t care to listen, anyway. So I swept the debris of glass into a dustpan and poured the crystals into the trash can. Passing back through the breakfast nook, I noticed that Michael and Max were no longer on the deck, but off to the side of the backyard, taking down the hammock for some reason. It was barely used anyway.
I slept the day through, waking up near noon. Liz was gone, Michael was at the club, and Max was just exiting his den downstairs with bed head and half open eyes, I guess today he was taking the day off. Even though I glared at him disgustedly and spoke no words to him, I made the both of us lunch, though we at in different areas of the house. He hadn’t said thank you, but I think by the look of my face, I told him that I didn’t care to hear him say it.
I was angry at him, that’s stating the obvious, but I was angry at Liz too. I understand her fear, I have the same one, but the way she deals with it is not the road I want to take, and it was time for me to tell her that, to tell her that the road she was taking was the wrong one, that she had gone down that road long enough and it was time to turn around.
I had an idea of where Liz was at this time, but I could never be too sure. She doesn’t exactly tell me everything anymore either.
It was near three o’clock and Liz would most definitely be at the library, but Harvard had nearly a million libraries and Liz never told me which one she went to. I had been to Harvard before, nearly two years ago when Liz just had to give me a tour of the large campus. I knew where all the libraries were and where all the labs were, but I still had to check each and every single on. So lucky me, I got to drive to every single one of Harvard’s libraries, searching for Liz. Each one spacious and enormous and each one farther from the next and so on. Of course the last library I checked would be the one where I’d find Liz. I walked into each one, scanning aisles of book cases in awe of all the books each library owned. There were more books in one Harvard library than there was in all of Roswell.
At Kummel Library I strolled right in, scouring the building, looking for a certain petite brunette. I peered into each aisle like in the libraries before this one, shoving my head in between people and their books, searching for my best friend, disrupting study groups and tutoring sessions. In the far corner of the library, I finally found Liz, working away in her books with her research group sitting around her.
Just like with the other study groups, I bothered Liz’s too, walking right up to her and pulling her out of her seat.
“What the…?!” she started to say.
But I kept moving, dragging Liz behind me.
“Maria!” she exclaimed loud enough for everyone around us to turn their heads. “What are you doing?”
I looked back to smile at her study group. “Excuse us,” I requested, and then continued pulling Liz to a secluded aisle, stopping when we reached the end.
“Maria, what’s going on?”
I scanned around to assure myself that we were somewhat in privacy. “You and I are in desperate need of a talk,” I told Liz.
“About what?”
“Oh, don’t play dumb,” I warned her. “This morning. We need to talk about this morning.”
Liz sighed heavily, rolling her eyes. “Maria, there’s nothing to talk about,” she claimed, “and if there was, I can’t talk about it now.”
“Too bad,” I said. “There is something to talk about and we are going to talk about it now. You need to stop ignoring it. I need to stop ignoring it and you need to realize what’s going on.”
Liz let all her weight rest on one leg so that her hip jutted slightly to the side. “What’s going on?” she asked mockingly.
I took a moment to look into the eyes of my best friend. I studied them and looked inside of her, realizing that she really wanted an answer because she didn’t know the answer herself.
“I can’t believe it,” I scoffed in disbelief. “I can’t believe you don’t see your marriage crumbling before you.”
“Maria,” Liz scoffed in the same way. “It’s not.” She was absolutely convinced.
“Oh, my God,” I said aloud to myself. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re…you’re…” My frustration was getting the best of me. “…you are so stupid!”
Liz looked at me with a raised brow. “I can’t believe you just called me stupid,” she laughed. “Thanks.”
She had played dumb for so long, learned how to ignore the problem and all its reprisals, that she really didn’t know what was going on anymore. Liz had changed, I realize that now. She had allowed this fear to overcome and consume her, change her.
“You’re marriage is in trouble, Liz. Get it through your head.”
Liz nervously shifted her weight and tilted her head back to look up at the high ceiling of the New England style building. “It was a fight, Maria. That’s all.”
I grabbed my best friend by the shoulders. “Listen to me,” I said. “Your husband is a different man, and I don’t mean that in a good way. He’s hurting, Liz, he told me himself.”
Liz’s eyes welled up slightly. “He pushed away first, Maria.”
“I know,” I nodded. “I know, but that’s why you need to talk to him. Find out why he pushed first and let him know why you pushed away.”
“I can’t do this now,” Liz shook her head. She took a step to leave, but I snatched her arm quickly.
“Liz, I’m begging you, talk to him.”
She took away the gathered tears in her eyes. “I’m going to talk to him, but I’m scared, Maria.”
“You have to talk to him now,” I said, pointing into my palm.
Liz shook her head, feeling afresh after having wiped away her tears. “Maria, what’s the big deal?”
“What’s the big deal?” I mocked. She had gone off edge, and I couldn’t believe it. “Your marriage is falling apart, Liz! It’s become non-existent. You and Max always used to run away from your problems, but you’ve run the farthest, Liz. Max may have stormed out, but you’ve run the farthest,” I repeated. “You’re avoiding your husband. It’s stupid and childish.”
“I don’t need this,” Liz sneered. She turned around and started walking out of the aisle.
{Liz}
“You can’t just keep running away!” she shouted after me as I walked back to my research group. “If you don’t talk to him, I will!”
I pretended to not know the person behind the loud voice as the library patrons started to look my way. I lowered my head slightly, pretending to scratch my forehead.
“You ok, Parker?”
I looked up and found myself back at the table where my research group were all waiting for my return. “Yeah,” I nodded. “I’m fine.”
Justin, the guy who asked if I was ok, glanced at his watch and pointed to the entrance of the library. “It’s almost four, Liz, shouldn’t you get going? Josh’s probably waiting for you.”
“Thanks. You’re right,” I smiled, snatching my books off the table and shoving them in my bag. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow?”
Several of my peers shook their heads.
“No can do,” one of them replied.
“I’ve got a lab tomorrow for chem.”
And another one said, “You work too damn hard, Parker, and too damn much for that matter.”
I stuck my tongue out at Walker, the trouble maker of the group. “Someone has to,” I smiled. “Fine, I guess I’ll just see you guys in class.”
Walking through the library, I threw my leather jacket on to protect me from Boston’s middle of winter, but the cold wasn’t on my mind and I wasn’t hoping that the snow fall wasn’t heavy, covering the windshield of my car with a thick sheet of snow. I looked out the large windows to find that snow had already fallen and that Maria was making her way through the doors. I froze.
She pushed her way through, not caring that someone was heading towards the doors with a tower of books in his arms. She left quickly and swiftly, the tail of her coat flying up in the air when she reached outside. She was disappointed in me, I was disappointed in myself.
I shoved my hand into the pocket of my jacket, quickly searching for my keys, but it wasn’t my keys I was looking for. I pulled out the carabiner keychain and studied the two white gold rings in between my car key and house key around the piece of mountain climbing hardware. One of the rings held three diamonds and the other was a simple band. I glanced at my bare left ring finger and sighed heavily. Maria was right, I had been running and hiding long enough. I was hiding the fact that I was married for Chrissakes! And the marriage I was hiding was in shambles, near non-existent.
I loved Max, I do love him, but for three months, I let my love for him shy away and hide along with my marriage. I stowed it away. I truly missed him, even though he slept next to me. I missed him even though I kissed his chest every night before I fell asleep, that was until this morning.
This morning I had slept alone for the first time since I was married. We had had fights before, but none to the extent where Max favored sleeping in his den than in the bed with me, but that was going to change because I’ve realized that I’ve missed my husband. I want to love him again, the way he needed to be loved, but I wasn’t ready yet. So I shoved my keys with my engagement ring and wedding band back into my pocket, hiding my marriage for the last time, and continued to head out of the library.
“Liz!”
I was near the door when someone called. Turning around, I found Doug, running my way waving his hands for me to stop.
“You know, I’m in a rush,” I told him.
The tall senior bobbed his head up and down while trying to catch his breath. “It is a long run from the back of the library,” he panted. He swallowed the lump in his throat and smiled. His grin wide and his cheeks glowing red. “I leave to use the bathroom and I come back to the table and you’re not there. The others said you had to go and I was just wondering why you were leaving early.”
Dr. Holt had just added Doug to the research group. He didn’t know my situation, and the others didn’t either, but the others knew that I had somewhere else to be, Doug didn’t.
“I just have to go,” I answered.
Doug took a deep breath. “Ok,” he nodded. “The group said you were looking to get together again. I just…Tomorrow. Do you want to get together tomorrow? For the research group, that is. Well, it’ll be more like research pair since everyone else is busy. I was just wondering if you—”
I gave a little smirk but shook my head. “I’m sorry, Doug. I can’t.”
“But you were looking to get together tomorrow,” he said softly. He was a charming guy with the looks of an Abercrombie&Fitch model and the brains of Einstein.
I nodded in agreement while continuing to glance at my hand in my pocket, still holding my keys. “I know I wanted to work on this tomorrow,” I told him, “but I just…I can’t.”
“Ok,” he nodded, cheerily. “Well, maybe I can stop by your dorm and give you the notes and stuff you’re about to miss.”
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
Doug sighed heavily and then shook his head. “What are you hiding, Parker?”
“Too much,” I sadly admitted. “I’ll see you in class, Doug.”
He bobbed his head and turned around, defeated. I watched him walk off with his hands shoved in his pockets and his shoulders slightly hiked up. He was a really great guy, but not my Max, my husband.
I spent the drive to the coffee house thinking about my husband and how I had wronged him. Before today and before Maria’s intervention, I would have spent the drive thinking about how to spend tomorrow since the research group wasn’t going to get together. Even if I was meeting with the group tomorrow, I wouldn’t have gone because I was going to talk to my husband when I got home today and spend tomorrow with him, but first I had to say goodbye to a friend.
The little bell attached to the back of the door rang as I pushed on through into the quaint coffee house on the corner of Jefferson and Waldon in downtown Cambridge. Down by the counter a man in his late twenties turned around with the hugest smile on his face. “Lizzie!” he laughed. The tall brunette jogged across the room, pulled me into his arms and lifted me off the floor.
“Hi, Josh,” I smiled. “How you doin’?”
He put me back on the ground and kissed my cheek. “Better, now that you’re here.”
I knew my cheeks were turning a rosy red, but I remembered what I had come here to do. I lowered my head slightly, watching my fingers fiddle around with each other. “Look, Josh, I need to speak with you, privately.”
But the handsome Bostonian looked around the coffee house and I did the same, noticing each chair filled, a line filing at the counter, and more people entering than exiting. “You know, I’d love to talk, Lizzie, but we’ll have to do it later,” he sighed. “I’ll take a break in five.”
I gave a little nod. “Yeah, that’s fine. Look, I’ll get ready and come right out to help you.”
“Great,” Josh smiled. He grabbed his order pad and kissed my forehead. “You’re the best.”
“I know,” I said jokingly.
Josh rolled his unique green eyes while I made my way to the back. “Liz, wait,” he called. “There was some girl looking for you.”
Dense wrinkles formed in my forehead. “Who?” I wondered.
Josh shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, some blonde.”
“She’s not one of yours?” I grinned.
“Aw, come on, Lizzie,” Josh said, tilting his head to the side. “Why you gotta be like that? You know you’re the only girl for me,” he grinned. “She said she was a friend of yours. I told her you’d be in soon, so I let her hang out in the break room.”
I nodded and started heading to the back, wondering who it could be waiting for me. I surely wasn’t expecting anyone. I had just seen Maria, so it couldn’t be her. Isabel didn’t know where I was at this time, so it wasn’t her either.
I stepped into the back room and found confirmation that it wasn’t Maria or Isabel, but someone I had never seen before. Her blonde hair was tied back tight into a pony tail and her blue eyes sparkled even in the dim room. She had fair toned skin and a little dimple in her chin. When she saw me walk in, the stranger stood up of the couch and smiled.
“Liz Parker?” she asked.
I had no idea who this person was. Fear took over, restricting me to speak.
“Are you Liz?” the girl wondered. “Liz Parker?”
Back in the coffee house a cup or plate dropped, breaking on the floor. The shattering made me jump. My breathing quickened as I finally came to my senses.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I’m Liz Parker. Who are you?”
The girl stretched out her hand and smiled. “My name’s Serena. Serena Hudson.”
TBC
I'm glad you guys see it that way because I see it that way too. 
Thank you as always.