Unpredictability of Love

The Time I Fell . . . . on The Floor

"What do you think you're doing here?" Ethan demanded softly, seemingly unable to speak over a whisper.

I turned around to see he had recovered a little from his shock. "If you checked your phone, you would know."

He shook his head as though he couldn't believe this was happening. "You-you're in my apartment. In my house. How did you even find it?"

"I drove you here once last time, remember?" I shrugged. "And I found this place by simply going to every apartment in the building until I came across yours."

"You did what!?" His grey eyes I'd missed for so long widened with surprise, the dark circles under his eyes making it more obvious. I suddenly noticed how tired he looked. He was almost bending over with exhaustion.

I stepped forward. "Are you okay?"

"Am I okay?" he nearly yelled, straightening up a bit. "Am I okay! What is wrong with you? You went knocking on every fucking door in this building? Are you crazy? Half of them are dangerous people with criminal records, and the other ones were lucky enough to escape prison!" He took a step towards me. "Were you trying to die? Or are you just plain stupid?"

"I don't know." I smiled. He was cute when he went all-adult on me, yelling about my safety and what-not. He cared. And that's all I needed to know. He cared so much that our fight didn't matter. He cared more about me than my lies.

"You're smiling now!" he snapped. "Do you think this is funny? This is not funny! Do you ever think before acting? Do you even have a functioning brain? You just - you just knocked on every freaking door here! What if someone opened the door holding a gun?"

"I would've called 9-1-1," I answered. "And you live here, anyway. So if nothing happened to you, I was sure I'd be fine."

"That's the stupidest thing I've heard today!" he was shouting now, eyes burning with anger, all signs of exhaustion evaporating under the pressure of his outrage. He slowly clenched and unclenched his fists, ground his teeth and set his jaw. "Stupid. Stupid. Stupid." He took a step closer. "Nothing happened to me because I never disturbed them. Nothing happened to me because I'm one of them. You're not. You're a teenaged girl who can't see 'not-safe' when it hits her in the face!"

I stared at him. There was the kind of fear in his face, concern for me in his eyes that I'd never seen before. And along with fear and concern, there were emotions, boiling under the surface, fighting, threatening to come out any moment, kept down by the very same fear. Scary, chaotic emotions that could destroy everything in their path, break hearts and make people go crazy. He was so close to me that I could feel everything he felt.

My heart twisted.

He didn't seem mind that I could read him. He wanted me to understand.

I wasn't ready to understand.

I wanted to speak - say anything, get out of this situation. My breath was erratic, matching his. I couldn't bear the intensity. I couldn't bear him looking at me that way. I wasn't made to bear this. I was made to joke around and have fun; to have someone look at me like that simultaneously set my heart beating faster and my instincts telling me to run away. Run as fast and far as you can! the sane part of my brain commanded.

But I wasn't sane. And I definitely didn't want to run, so I forced myself to finally say what I came here to say. "I'm sorry." I wasn't sure if it was for the lies or my"stupidity" as he called it.