Of Course, It's You

Chapter 17

CARMEN

Sitting in her office, she still felt both heavy and weightless at the same time. She had never witnessed a person having a panic attack, and to be entirely truthful, it was terrifying. Of all the things to maybe, hopefully, mend what she was pretty sure she shattered with Hannah, she would never have guessed it would be helping Hannah through an event like that.

A feeling adjacent to hope took over her senses, and she wasn't entirely sure why she would even be feeling hopeful. Why she was so concerned about the work relationship she had with this woman, made absolutely no sense. She was a simple hook up, a one-off thing. She shouldn't care. But, if she didn't care, she wouldn't have crouched on that bathroom floor clutching the woman's hand.

Carmen flexed her fingers and noticed there was an emptiness after having let go of Hannah's hand. It was probably more comforting than it should have been, to have had the opportunity to help her.

She never was the person that helped. She rarely went out of her way for anybody, albeit Dani, but Dani was practically family. And, to put it into even more perspective, she didn't even help her own family anymore. The extent of physically dropping anything and everything for someone had been reserved only for Viktor.

She knew this was one of the many reasons people weren't all that fond of her. Nobody really wanted to be around her for an extended amount of time. She wasn't deemed "cold" for nothing.

The words, thank you, and you helped, were on repeat in her head. Had she really helped though? Carmen felt as if it had been a lie to make her feel better. And she hated it when people did that to save face.

She looked at the torn and dry skin around her thumb nails. It hadn't been this bad in years, but her stress was at an all-time high. Carmen opened her desk drawer and grabbed the hand lotion she had shoved in there. The lotion was simultaneously painful and soothing. An irony to how her life was going lately; painfully moving forward. She was leaving a lot in her past, but heading in a direction in her career that she once thought she would never aspire to.

Carmen stood up, still rubbing in the lotion on her hands, and walked to the window overlooking the street below. She hugged herself tightly. Maybe it was watching someone else go through turmoil, that she began to think about the chaos within herself.

Carmen wasn't sure when it happened, but recently the dark clouds of worry that hovered around her, hadn't been as bad. The worry wasn't there, but she felt like she was standing in waist deep water knowing that the tide was about to change. And when that tide did change, the water level would rise too high, and she would be swept away.

Dani had been right, once again, not that she really wanted to admit that outright. Carmen should have just talked to Hannah earlier, been honest and upfront, but no, she waited until the poor woman had a panic attack before she apologized. She felt mostly responsible for her attack too. She had instilled fear into her and hadn't thought of the repercussions or whether she was going through her own personal dilemmas.

Maybe Dani understood more than she led on. Carmen thought of their conversation the other night. All the other women Carmen had been with never had emotions of their own, it was all forged for cameras and the surrounding public. Sure, they were gorgeous and knew how to work a red-carpet event but, they were too self-indulgent, and dare she say, sought someone with money and power.

The more she thought about it, she concluded that she didn't want Dani to be entirely right. She had repeated her friend's words to Hannah, a wonderful mistake, but a mistake, nonetheless.

She wasn't sure why, but she didn't want it to feel like it had been a mistake. She realized it when she followed Hannah into the restroom and when she placed her hand on her heaving chest.