Desire | Shawn Mendes

TWENTY EIGHT

Song of the Chapter: Slow It Down - The Lumineers

"I feel her filth in my bones / Wash off my hands til it's gone..."
- s -

For the briefest moment, it's just the magazine and I in the room. The pages burn in my hand and my fingers feel like they're on fire as I grasp what is in my grip. Jack comes back into the room and hands a beer to me and takes the other for himself as he takes a seat and begins to sketch away at whatever he was sketching.

"You can't read it alone." Jack tells me. "I mean, you can, but I know you don't want to be alone."

"Thanks." I reply.

She was young and she was scared.

There's an authors entry and the usual is stated, names have been changed to protect the identity of those, but the moment I read it, I know it's her. I read the excerpt they have for her and I feel Jack's eyes on me. I glance up and see he is in fact looking at me. Does he want a reaction?

"I wanna see your reaction to that first sentence." Jack says.

I glance back down: Alison* found out she was pregnant on her twentieth birthday.

No fucking way...

"How did she...?" I begin.

"Keep reading, bro." He tells me.

The moment I begin to continue reading is also the moment that I know I'm not gonna be able to stop reading, either. In my hands is the story that I refused to read or listen to. Now I start to wonder if I can close the magazine. My hesitation goes noticed by Jack.

"You can't close it, if that's what you're thinking." He reads my mind.

"What if that's not what I'm thinking?" I reply.

"Alright. What are you thinking?"

"What if I don't change my view? I read this and I still hate her. I don't know why but the thought of continuing to hate her terrifies me."

"The fact that you feel like you'll still hate her terrifies me. Shawn, why do you hate her so much? Do you even really hate her? Because for someone who claims to hate someone so much, you seem slightly obsessed with her."

"I don't know. I don't know." I shake my head.

"I was scared to read it and I was there holding her hand when she got it done. It's a scary thing to read a woman's truth."

"That!" I snap my fingers. "That's what I'm scared of."

"The truth?" Jack asks.

"Jasmine's truth. I'm gonna read her truth and I'm scared."

"Shawn, what are you so afraid of?"

"Her. I'm terrified to read about the pain I caused her."

"You're never gonna get that closure unless you read her truth. It's painful, that's what I can tell you."

I take one gulp of the beer before continuing to begin the trek of Jasmine's long, scary, and painful truth.

"I remember the fear in my stomach when I was looking at the box of the tests." Alison says. "It's something you can't explain. You can try and do your best to describe it, but until you're a woman and you're all alone and you find out you're pregnant and it was unplanned, no fear will ever top that."

Cosmopolitan: How old were you when you found out?
Alison: I had just turned twenty - it was my birthday.

C: Where were you? Were you with anyone or by yourself?