The Beginning of the End

Karisshma Kaur
Nov 3 · 9 min read

It was pouring outside. Max was drenched, frustrated and exhausted. He felt under the weather, under his job, under his life. He felt under. The air was cool and somber, the world whizzed past him. He felt like a thin and worthless cog in a massive wheel that was leading to a greater cause. Like if he fell off, the wheel would keep turning as if he wasn’t there in the first place. Maybe that was how the world worked. No one truly gave a shit. Some pretended to, and that’s how they ended up becoming politicians and actors that owned mansions with an unnecessary amount of water features. But those that didn’t? Well, they ended up working a thirty-five-hours-a-week-job and owned cramped apartments in the butt-fucked end of New York. Nobody ever gave a damn about all the Maxes in the world, even if they cared, they were pretentious about it. Max was done with it. He stopped giving a shit — he stopped caring altogether about what society thought, and that was when things started to look up for him. To an extent, at the very least. He raced up the staircase to his floor, not even bothering to wait for the elevator. The best part of his shitty day so far, had finally arrived.

The keys jangled and Ray looked up from her novel. Max, she thought, grimacing. Her heart sank as she set the book down on the coffee table. She didn’t know how to break the news to him. Max — her precious, sweet, and caring Max. She had pondered it for days. To tell or not to tell. Max stumbled over the mat and set the keys on the credenza. The poor guy was drenched from head to toe. Upon seeing Ray, he grinned and claimed to have ‘forgotten his parka’. Ray laughed, her heart plummeting even further. Max threw his coat into the dryer and headed into their shared bedroom.

She truly was a ray of sunshine, thought Max with a chuckle. He recalled the day he met Ray. She was in the comic section of the bookstore and he was scouring the records section. She was flipping through old issues of the X-Men comics and he was on the hunt for Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell album. Max saw her from across the aisle, and for him at least, it was love at first sight. If such a thing even existed. He didn’t know how to make the first move, but thankfully, Ray did. She began chatting to him about how she thought Pink Floyd was musical genius because of how much they referenced the Doctor Strange comics in their songs. Max was captivated, not just superficially, but by the way she spoke. The confidence she projected, the fire in her voice, bewitched plain, old Max Hartley. That, he proudly recalled, was six years ago.

Max came out of their bedroom, freshly showered, smelling of lavender shampoo and dressed in a Batman Begins t-shirt and blue sweatpants. He crashed onto the couch and planted a kiss on her cheek. Ray smiled and she couldn’t help but blush. She was trying very hard to push what she needed to do to the back of her mind. Just one more day of this, and I’ll tell him, she thought, just let me have one more day of this. She bit her lip and grabbed the remote. Max grabbed them some leftover pizza from the fridge and two beers. Ray put on their favorite film, Scarface. She had to tell him, she knew it. But how could she? The news would shatter Max. Hell, it would shatter her too. The guilt continued to bubble up inside of her, and it lay on her skin, itching like poison. Ray had to say something to him, before she suffocated. Could someone suffocate from guilt?

“Max, we need to talk,” she said, her voice faltering. Max raised an eyebrow, but his expression softened the moment he laid eyes on her. It was as if he knew something was wrong, or was Ray imagining it? She hated the speculation and the absurd sense of longing she was feeling. Her insides were rotting, was how she would describe it. Maybe Max knew something was wrong because she practically spoon-fed the stupid words to him. We need to talk, the four words that could break any relationship. Four little words that could sever ties and ruin lives. Ray sighed, better to rip the band-aid off and get things over with. She could assess the damage after.

Ray’s phone pinged. Curious, Max looked over at the notification. His face paled.

Is he home? Or shall I come over? Call me when you get this text sweetheart. Liam.

Ray saw the notification. She knew that Max saw it too. The room became silent. One could hear a pin drop, and it would be amplified. Ray looked down at her patterned socks. Her breath shallowed and she felt the suffocating feeling sink in. Max opened his mouth to say something, but it came out as a barely comprehensible stutter.

Ray — his Ray. She couldn’t have done this. Distancing herself was one thing, but cheating? She wasn’t capable of doing something so vile. It wasn’t like the Ray he knew. Who the hell was Liam? Max was silent, too anxious to speak. If he spoke, the glass bridge would shatter. If the glass bridge broke, the pieces would fall into the river below and him and Ray would be two ends of two canyons without any connection left. He wanted her heart, he wanted her. He wanted Ray.

This must be it, she thought to herself. The lull before the storm. Max was silent. Why won’t he say anything? She was puzzled, frustrated, ashamed and bereaved all at once.

“Say something,” she said, breaking the awful silence. Max sighed and shook his head in disbelief.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” he croaked. Ray’s breath hitched. She was too choked up to utter anything, so she nodded instead. When, he asked. Tonight, she replied. He threw a cushion on the floor. She got up to wash her face. Silence encompassed the apartment once more, save for Al Pacino’s voice echoing through the living room.

Max wanted to retch into the kitchen sink. Apparently she was going to tell him tonight. He toyed with the ring in his pocket. Was the bridge still intact? His heart was non-existent. His mind was a mess. His hands were trembling, for God’s sake. He rummaged through the cabinets, searching for his pills. He felt like breaking the damned casserole dish that lay on the counter. He felt like flinging an ax through the credenza. And what of the ring? Max felt like flushing that down the toilet. Every atom in his being was screaming in unison. Ray was in the bedroom. It had been half an hour, she hadn’t emerged. Max wanted to run in and check on her. He wanted so badly to ask her if she was alright. He scoffed, shouldn’t she be the one trying to console him? She made the mistake. Not him.

Ray sat on the bed. The same one she’d befouled the night Max left for his business trip. But was the situation as black-and-white as it seemed? Max had been distant for a while now. It seemed as if every other conversation they had ticked her off and led to an argument. Liam just seemed like the perfect stand-in. No baggage attached. It felt like Liam was what she had been craving for a while. Liam was easy. Everything seemed light and breezy with him, whereas things with Max were heavy and daunting. She felt so dumb. She felt cheap. Things with Max were real. She had a real, tangible, and fairly stable relationship and she threw it out the window over a petty infatuation. Nothing was left to salvage. Ray knew, and she knew that Max knew — infidelity was a deal breaker. She held her head in her hands. Fuck. She wanted to run into Max’s embrace and cry, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t face him anymore. She wanted to run and hide, which was exactly what she was doing. She heard music coming from the living room. Mansard Roof, she recalled. Their song. Slowly, she stepped out of the comfort that was their bedroom.

Max sobbed, like he hadn’t before in his life. His body violently rocked back and forth. Mansard Roof was their song. It was the song they had danced to at the party where he had first realized he was completely, head-over-heels in love with Ray Axel Vergara. I love you, he said. A horrible decision really, she replied with her characteristic too-loud but pleasant laugh. Max panicked, until mere seconds later, she had reciprocated. And I love you too, Maxwell Hartley. The party which had started out boring and futile — as most reunion parties were — had ended in the most spectacular way possible.

Ray rushed over to Max. He was sobbing with more violence than any gale. To say that her heart broke would have been a massive understatement. The music was on full blast and she was pretty sure that it was there to drown out his sobs. She wrapped her arms around Max and whispered reassurances into his ear. Ray knew that Max didn’t care any more. She saw the bottle of sleeping pills next to her book on the coffee table. It was tightly shut, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She was glad that Max hadn’t consumed any of them. The sobs finally came to an end. Max turned to face her, his green eyes were bleak; no longer as piercing.

“Why?” he asked, his voice raw with grief. Ray’s honey eyes were downcast. She had to tell him the truth. She was already knee-deep in lies to begin with. Liam was easier to reach than you were, was how she concluded her explanation. That’s fucking genius, he snapped. Tears streamed uncontrollably down her face. Max grabbed a fistful of his curly hair in exasperation. Jesus Christ Max, it won’t happen again, she said. It shouldn’t have happened in the first place, Ray, he yelled. She yelled back. He threw a framed picture of them at Disney World against the wall and she pushed him. They played the blaming game for what seemed like an eternity. It’s your fault, one quipped. Is it? It’s not my fault you were acting like the entire world revolved around yourself, justified the other.

Max glanced up at the clock as Ray desperately tried to compensate her actions. He wanted to forgive her. He had to forgive her, right? Where was a damned couples therapist when you needed one, he thought. Ray fell silent after a couple of minutes. Max’s throat was sore from the back and forth yelling and sobbing. His body ached all over and he felt strangely cold. He was tired. It’s late, he said.

“I think I’m going to go over to Marlene’s,” she said, in resignation. Max shook his head.

“No, you should stay. We’ll talk in the morning. I’m going to Daryl’s, I can’t stay here any longer, ” he said. Max could see the tears form in Ray’s red-ringed eyes. With a disappointed sigh, he grabbed his keys and slammed the door behind him.

Ray winced as she heard the door slam. Her throat dry and head pounding. She collapsed onto the couch, her brain littered with memories of her and Max’s brighter days. She wanted to sow her eyes shut and place her brain into a jar — everywhere she looked there were memories. There were tomorrows. The tears had finally consumed her, and she wept like she had lost everything. Maybe because she had — Maxwell Hartley was her everything. She saw a tiny ring, that lay on the coffee table, behind the bottle of pills. Her body quavered as her cries grew. Mansard Roof continued to play softly in the background. Ray came out from the bedroom clad in one of Max’s old Led Zeppelin sweatshirts. She curled up in fetal position on the couch and toyed with the ring. The beginning of the end, she thought with a bitter smile.

How terribly wrong the night had gone.

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