Free The Fray Theory: Resonance by Nelou Keramati Page A

manages to get out, “and you just
left… You left ,” she heaves, “ he left,” her anguish bending her
at the waist, “everybody leaves…”
    Dylan reaches out, but Neve swats
his hand away. He goes to pull her into an embrace, but she pushes him away.
And then her efforts are too feeble, and he is wrapped around her, warm and
strong.
    “I’m so mad at you,” she sobs into
his chest. Her arms are folded, and her fists are too weak to pound onto him.
“I am so mad at you,” she cries, her throat tight and throbbing.
    “I’m sorry,” Dylan buries his face
in her neck. “I’m sorry, Neve. I’m sorry,” he repeats over and over, his voice
tainted with guilt and regret. And even when Neve’s knees give out from under
her, his hold keeps her from falling to the floor. So she surrenders to the
compulsion, and cries over what feels like a lifetime of heartbreak, longing,
and loneliness.
    “Come on,” Dylan whispers while
gently stroking her hair. “Let’s go inside,” he starts to shift, and like a
crutch she needs to keep her from crumbling, Neve lets him lead the way into
his apartment.
    Once within the confines of his
home, Neve pries herself away, adamant to hold her ground.
    “Can I get you something?” he
asks.
    “Don’t do that,” Neve looks at
him, fury encasing her pain. “Don’t go acting like everything is okay. It’s not okay. You don’t get to walk back into my life
and act like nothing’s happened.”
    Dylan’s shoulders slacken, the
sorrow in his eyes draining Neve of her intensity. And once again, she’s feeling
vulnerable and defeated. The same goddamn feeling she’s been struggling to
suppress all day.
    “They all just stared at me like,
‘who’s this bitch’? ‘Why is she here’?” Neve shakes her head and
diverts her gaze. “Just because they didn’t know me, it was like I didn’t have
the right to be upset over their loss. Like what I was feeling wasn’t
qualified.”
    “People grieve in different ways,”
Dylan says.
    “They were judging me,
Dylan. It was almost like they were blaming me.”
    “For what?” concern twists his
brows.
    “I don’t know. Not being a good
enough friend? Or maybe they thought I was his psychotic ex-girlfriend. That I drove him to it.”
    Dylan squints, visibly perplexed
by what she just said. And in that moment, Neve realizes she never explained in
her text to Dylan how Elliot died... only that he did.
    “He killed himself,” she
practically whispers.
     
    And silence swallows the room.
     
    Dylan breaks eye-contact and slips
his hands into his pockets—what he does when he feels defeated.
    “God—I’m sorry,” he shakes his
head. “I thought it was an accident, or something.”
    “Oh, it was anything but,” Neve
walks over to the window and leans against it, gazing out at the urban
congestion—at the view she never thought she’d see again, at least not outside
of her memories.
    “I don’t know… Maybe they’re right,”
she mutters as Dylan approaches her from behind. “Maybe it was my
fault.”
    “Don’t say that,” Dylan rests his
hand on her back. “I know blaming yourself may seem comforting, but it’s just a
way for you to feel like you’re in control.”
    “I knew…” she says, oblivious to
Dylan’s attempts at consoling her. “I knew … I must have.”
    “Knew what?” Dylan sits down on the
windowsill, looking up at her.
    “I had a dream about it. About his
death.”
    “Neve. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.
You look back and feel like the answers were right there in front of you, and
start blaming yourself for not doing things differently. But you can’t think
like that. You need to make peace with things that are out of your control.”
    “What if it was?” Neve whispers as
though telling him an ugly secret. “What if it was in my control?”
    “How do you mean?”
    “It wasn’t just some random dream.
When the cop explained—” Neve’s heart skips a beat, “Jesus, it was like he