2 : Russell

Carmen's POV

"Shit," Russell cursed the moment he saw me standing in the doorway. He scrambled out of the bed, grabbing his pants from the floor and pulling them on in a hurry, one leg at a time, like the speed of it was going to help anything. He crossed to where I was standing, took my arm without asking, and pulled me out of the room and into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind us before I could open my mouth.

I gripped the wall for support. My legs were barely holding me."What the fuck is going on?" I managed to get out.

He stood in front of me with his shirt still off, running a hand through his hair, looking at everything in the hallway except my face. He started talking. About how things had gotten complicated. About how I needed to understand. About his career and where he was now and what that required of him. I stood there and let him talk, because I didn't yet have the words for what I was feeling and listening was easier than finding them.

"You have to understand that this is best for my career," he said. "I can't be dating an average architecture student at this point in my life. The type of woman I date needs to be class-elevating."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means you can't give me the aura I need right now, Carmen." He exhaled like this was a conversation he had been dreading and was relieved to finally be having. "Tanya is a thriving model. She ticks every box for what a WAG should be. She elevates the image. And you..." he trailed off, looking at the floor.

"I am just what?" I asked. I already knew whatever came after that sentence wasn't going to be gentle, but I asked anyway. A part of me needed to hear it out loud, needed him to actually say it so I couldn't spend the next year convincing myself I had imagined the meaning behind his silences.

"You are just plain, and flat. You don't have what it takes to drive a man crazy." He said it quietly, which somehow made it worse. "I hate to admit it, but sometimes I feel like I'm dating a man. It would be hard to put you by my side at this level, Carmen. It really would."

I felt the tears before I made the decision to cry. They just came, hot and immediate, running down my face before I could do anything about them.

"How could you say that to me?" My voice cracked on the last word. "How could you stand here and say that to my face?"

He opened his mouth. I don't know what he was going to say and I never found out, because I turned and walked before he could get the first word out. Down the hallway, down the stairs, through the lobby, out the front door and onto a Liverpool street I had never been on before, and I cried the kind of tears that don't care who is watching. The ugly, uncontrollable kind that comes from somewhere so deep they scare you. I stood on that pavement for a while because my body needed a moment to remember how to function before I asked it to carry me anywhere.

I booked a flight home that evening.

A few days later Tanya posted a photograph of the two of them at a club. His arm around her waist, her face tilted up toward his, their mouths pressed together. She captioned it with a single red heart emoji, which was all it took. By the afternoon every football gossip account had reposted it and by the evening the internet had decided what had happened: Russell James had dumped his university girlfriend for a model. The timeline split cleanly in two. Half of them were brutal. 

She was never on his level. Did she really think a girl like that could hold a man like Russell James? Footballers upgrade, that's just what happens. 

The other half were sympathetic, which was somehow worse.

Poor girl, she must be devastated. I genuinely feel for her, imagine watching that play out publicly. Sending love to whoever she is, nobody deserves that.

I hated both sides equally. The cruel ones wanted me to know I wasn't enough and the kind ones wanted me to know they had noticed, and I didn't want either. I didn't want to be torn apart and I didn't want anyone's sympathy. I wanted to not exist online at all. I read every comment anyway. All of them. I sat in my apartment with my phone in my hands and scrolled until the screen blurred and kept scrolling after that.

I went back to my lectures the following Monday,  sat in the same seats and talked to the same people. Handed in my assignments on time. I learned to live inside the noise until it moved on to someone else, because I understood that the internet had no loyalty and no memory, only a constant appetite for the next thing. But his words stayed. They didn't move on the way everything else did.

Three weeks after Liverpool I started going to the gym every day. His voice was in my head first thing every morning and physical exhaustion was the only thing that quieted it long enough for me to get through the rest of the day. I changed what I ate. I started sleeping properly. I went back to the gym the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, and I told myself every single morning that I was doing this for me, because the alternative was letting what he said become the thing I believed about myself, and I refused to give Russell James that. Or maybe that was just the positive side of me, because deep within me, I knew I was doing all that because I wanted to achieve the body type Russell said I didn't have. I wanted the figure that would drive a man crazy and not be boring and I let Russell's words get into my head and haunt my confidence.

There was a full-length mirror on the back of my wardrobe door that I had never paid much attention to before any of this. About a month after Liverpool I was getting ready for bed one night and caught my own reflection and actually stopped. I stood there in just my underwear and I looked at myself the way his words had taught me to look, trying to find what he had found. The flatness he had spoken about. The lack of curves. The things that apparently made a man feel like he was dating someone who wasn't a woman. I turned sideways, turned backwards. I looked for a long time, longer than was healthy.

I didn't find evidence that he was right. But I didn't find evidence that he was wrong either. I just found myself standing in my bedroom at eleven at night staring at my own body like it owed me an explanation it wasn't giving, and it was one of the loneliest things I had ever done. I closed the wardrobe door and went to bed and didn't think about the mirror again, or at least I tried not to. That was a year ago. I am nineteen now, almost done with my degree. I had done the work on myself, built something back up from what Russell left behind, and most days I was fine. 

I came back to the present and found Mirabel still standing in my apartment, still watching me with an expression that showed she knew she had already won and was waiting for me to catch up.

"This is crazy," I said. "I'm not doing that."

Her expression shifted. The warmth dropped out of it completely. "Think about your brother's hockey dreams," she said. "I have connections at that academy. One phone call and Mateo never plays at that level again."

God! I hated that voice! "You will do no such thing, Mirabel."

"Watch me do it, then." She said it without a flicker of hesitation. "I'm not making empty threats, Carmen. You know me better than that."

"Think this over carefully," she continued. "You do the job, your tuition is fully handled. Your mother's medical bills are cleared. Everything gets sorted and nobody has to know anything. It’s a win-win situation." She picked up her bag from the back of my chair, unhurried, like she had already made her exit in her head and this was just the physical version of it. "You refuse, and you risk not graduating six months from the end of your degree. Your mother stays in that hospital bed with no one covering her treatment. Mateo loses everything he has worked for, as a consequence of a choice you made." She looked at me one more time at the door. "It's a simple trade, Carmen. Don't make it complicated."

"Get out of my apartment!"

She smiled and pulled the door open, stepped out and closed it. I let out a sigh of relief the moment she was no longer in sight 

I sat in silence and thought about Mateo, about the look on his face after a good training session, about how hard he had worked for the placement he had. I thought about my mother's face when she was trying not to let me see how tired she was. I thought about graduating and what it would mean if I didn’t pay the outstanding tuition balance. 

That night, I didn't sleep at all. Thoughts about realizing my insecurity in front of the mirror stayed with me longer than I wanted. The image of myself standing there with his words in my head just wouldn't go. It took months before I could wake up without running through some version of what he said before I'd even opened my eyes. But the gym helped, and slowly, I built something back up from what that hallway in Liverpool had knocked down. And now my half sister is asking me to seduce some man so she can hurt the girl Russell cheated on me with. It's both annoying and hilarious.