Hudson’s eyes search my face. I see longing and desperation in them. I want to make it all go away, but I can’t.
“You know what else, you were never going to tell me about this, were you, Alice?” he asks. “If I didn’t see this stupid postcard, you and Dylan were just never going to tell me. You were just going to go on and pretend like nothing had happened.”
“No…we weren’t,” I lie.
“Yes, you were!” he yells in my face. The hair on the back of my arms stands up.
“What about Juliet? Does she know?”
I don’t reply. I simply look away from him.
“Oh, shit! Juliet knows, doesn’t she? She knows?” Hudson says and goes back to pacing. “So, what do you all do? Do you all joke and laugh about this behind my back when I’m not here? Is that what you do?”
“No, no,” I say. Before I can get a hold of myself, I run up to him and throw my arms around his shoulders. “No, I’m so, so sorry, Hudson. You have to believe me.”
“Get the fuck off me!” He pushes me away. Hard. I lose my balance and fall to the floor. “I can’t believe you, Alice,” Hudson says, shaking his head. “I poured my heart out to you. I apologized for just flirting with Kathryn and you just went out there and married our roommate. My best friend. What the fuck, Alice? Who the hell are you?”
I don’t know. I don’t know who I am. All I know is that I’m not the person that I once was and I’m not sure if I’ll ever be her again.
“Are you okay, Alice? What are you doing on the floor?” Dylan walks into the living room.
“You!” Hudson yells. I don’t see him run past me, but suddenly he and Dylan are intertwined and withering around on the floor.
“Hudson, stop. Please,” I yell, but it’s to no avail. He punches Dylan in the face. He tries to punch him again, but Dylan blocks the second punch and instead, knees him in the groin.
“Hudson, Dylan, please stop!” I yell at the top of my lungs, but no one is listening to me. They’re back at it again. Pushing. Tussling. Fighting. At one moment, Dylan’s on top. At the next, Hudson is. Then Dylan again. Back to Hudson. Finally, I manage to grab someone’s shoulders. I pull as hard as I can, but he hardly budges.
BAM!
Everything turns to black. I can’t see anything. My whole face is tingling and throbbing. When I grab my nose to try to numb the pain, I feel something hot and sticky. I pull my hand away and see that I’m covered in blood. My nose is bleeding. I can’t see out of one eye.
“Hudson, what the fuck are you doing?” I hear someone say somewhere very far away. I recognize the voice. It belongs to Dylan, but he’s speaking in slow motion.
“Are…you….okay?” Dylan asks me. I see him above me. He’s still talking incredibly slowly. I try to say yes, but nothing comes out. My blood over my body is freaking me out. My heart starts to beat faster. My breaths get shallower. My hands and legs go numb. Everything turns blurry.
“Alice? Alice?” I hear someone’s voice somewhere above me. It’s a female voice. I try to open my eyes, but I only manage to get one open. The light from the lamp causes me great pain and I shut it quickly. The other one doesn’t open at all.
“Oh my God, Alice.” I hear the girl say again. “What the fuck is wrong with you two?”
“It was an accident. He didn’t mean to elbow her,” a guy says.
“I don’t care. You shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place,” she says. Juliet. It’s Juliet, I decide.
“He started it,” the guy says. Suddenly, everything starts to come back to me.
Hudson finding the postcard. Telling him about the accidental wedding. Dylan walking in. Hudson and Dylan fighting. Trying to stop them. Getting elbowed in the face. My nose bleeding. I don’t remember this, but that’s probably when I must’ve passed out.
I sit up and look around. I can barely see out of my left eye. The eyelid feels incredibly heavy and I don’t have enough strength to lift it. All I can make is a little slit.
“You need to put some ice on that,” Juliet says. She goes to the refrigerator and gets me a bag of frozen berries.
“Here. We don’t have any peas, but this should do.”
“Where’s Hudson?” I ask, taking the berries. I press the bag onto my eye. It relieves some of the pain from the swelling but brings about more of a different kind of pain from pressing something so cold onto such a sensitive surface.
“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug.
“He’s outside,” Dylan says.
“What the hell happened, Dylan?” I ask.
“I don’t know, what the hell happened to you? You weren’t supposed to tell him anything! Don’t you remember that little promise?”
“I wasn’t going to, but that stupid hotel sent us a postcard thanking us for getting married there, with some sort of discount for future stays. He saw it,” I say.
I point to the dining room table where the postcard, which has ruined my life, lies innocently.
“Shit,” Dylan says, picking it up. “Why would they do this?”
No one says anything for a few moments.
“It’s probably for the best,” I finally say. “He was going to find out anyway.”
“Not like this,” Dylan says.
Dylan goes to his room and then comes out with a concerned look on his face.
“Do you know where my phone is?” he asks. “I just had it.”
“I saw it earlier,” Juliet says. “It was on the floor when you two were fighting.”
Juliet helps Dylan look for his phone while I continue to sit motionlessly in a daze.
“It’s not here,” Dylan says. His voice is getting frantic. What’s the big deal? I wonder. Who the hell cares about a phone right now?
“It’s not here, Alice,” he says.
“So?”
“So? So? Don’t
