I will tear you out of myself piece by piece, if I must. If bare hands are my sole defense, then I will rip you from my soul in fistfuls of flesh—skin and muscle, bone and blood. If I cannot unshackle myself from your aching presence, nor you from mine, then I will claw, and scrape, and rip, and tear, and chew, and scratch, and pull, and mangle my way through you until there is nothing left to feel; and I will free us both.
Perhaps, in such a violent emancipation as this, I will feel your agony as if it is my own; perhaps, genuinely and inextricably, it shall in fact be my own. Perhaps it is flesh of my own flesh that I will be rending, bone of my bone and blood of my blood. Or perhaps it is destiny at which I tear, with this clawing and desperate and stubborn abandon. Perhaps the curse is that you have been stitched into my fabric since before I had a name by which to be called, and that I have thus been stitched into yours.
It almost seems that your fingers were designed to fit so perfectly into these dark fissures, where I’ve tucked away all these secrets and all this pain. It almost seems that you were meant to crack me open with such effortless obliviousness, to overpower my inherent strength and spread bare before the world the raw, tender underbelly I’d worked so tirelessly to conceal beneath stone callus.
Do I even possess such power against you, such power as to tear you apart from the inside out, and to rip you up from your very foundation? Have my fingers been designed to slip so perfectly into those dark fissures, where you hide away all of your secrets and all of your pain? Shall I ever know? I likely never shall. What is the point at all, if you are not so powerless against me as I feel against you, struggling to contend with the pull of your gravity?
I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for you. If it were at all possible, I would hate you with the depths of every ounce of love I’ve ever thought myself capable of giving.
So I will tear you out of myself in fistfuls of flesh, then—bone of my bone, blood of my blood. If it is indeed the truth that Destiny herself has stitched you into my soul, then I will cut the sinews of our heartstrings on my teeth.
I take him by the chin—jaw set against my fingertips with stubborn determination, a will of iron—and I bore straight into the depths of his beautiful brown eyes.
From a distance, they’re “just brown,” I suppose, dark like anyone else’s. But from here, where I stand, they’re a dull sort of amber color—somewhere between green and unpolished bronze, singed darker around the edges. The middle is stained with a wash of russet brown that leaks further into his right eye than his left, tarnishing it in a way that nearly mimics heterochromia.
And they’re deep.
It feels like minutes that I fall—piercing through the layers controlled and calculated, at first, then losing my footing and tumbling end over end through a tempest of wind and wildfire. In his eyes, I see a little bit of everything, changing like the chaos of shifting sand. It’s hot and sharp, closest to the surface, and I see hatred there—rage, rage, vehement and vast and wild, but deeply unsteady. Beyond it, beyond the fury of the fire, there is a terror indescribable, snaked around his windpipe; there is a profound and languishing grief, a leaden gray pall that spreads wide and cracks deep; there is an unremitting exhaustion, bound to it, that draws even on what’s left within me.
There is a great and gaping wound, weeping and swollen, that cuts to the very heart of his being and then a little further still. It’s an old wound, but still raw, forever raw, even around the edges. Much of it, now, has begun to blacken with rot, a sort of poison that spreads unchecked until it has consumed all that remains within.
In his eyes, I see the depths of an untold pain, only half-concealed, that eclipses all that he is.
But at the center of it all—past the fire, and the cold, and the violent winds of the maelstrom that tosses him to and fro—I see a warm glow that remains. It’s a dim and beleaguered tongue of fire, faded and flickering—and still, it fights.
I see bitterness and hatred and searing rage in his eyes, and so do I see an aching vulnerability, a tenderness critically wounded. I see in his eyes a dullness akin to death that shrouds his entire being, and so do I see a spark of life, startling and unexpected and brighter than it has any right to be. I see hope, and despair, and hardness, and softness, and openness, and fear, and weakness, and untapped strength, and death, and life.
He hurts so terribly, so deeply, that it saps his power even to remain steady-handed, sure-footed. I know, then, that the depths of his capacity for love are the same—all but entirely unrealized, and yet equally profound.
But he isn’t a good person, not now. He hurts, but the pain makes him dangerous—erratic, unempathetic, abusive, hateful. And yet, the flame of a curious and persistent hope for him burns within me nevertheless—inexplicable, unquenchable (though God knows I’ve tried) in spite of my myriad prior successes in snuffing it towards others.
His sanity is fraying thread, but his will is unsteady iron—set in his ways, set in his rot. Only fire can heal him now, a fire far hotter, far more purifying, than anything I could ever hope to give him on my own.
(In his eyes, I see myself—my own eyes, in the mirror, staring gray and miserable back at me. The others tell me that he has my father’s eyes, before he withered from my life, before he’d rotted away completely. I think that I should hate him for having my father’s eyes. I think that I should hate myself for having my father’s eyes. I wish that I could hate him for having my father’s eyes.)
“The day that I forget your existence entirely,” I tell him, in a language I don’t think he can even understand, “is going to be one of the best days of my life.”
The wind that soughs through the pine boughs above is quiet and icy with winter’s death, carrying with it portentous gray clouds that herald a fierce blizzard from the north. But even so, the air, as she draws closer to the marred remnants of the forest left in the skirmish’s wake, reeks of the heat of war.
The battle had been a violent one—that she had determined even before she arrives at its location, even before she comes upon the first splinters of shattered wood and corpses limp with the Reaper’s kiss still fresh on their tongues. It had broken out earlier in the afternoon, well within earshot of her campsite, and raged on for the better part of an hour before collapsing back into silence.
She had realized then, concealing herself in a tremulous crouch under the protection of a nearby thicket as she listened to the fight, that the soldiers and their war effort had drawn far too near to the wilderness that she now calls home. She has no desire to interact with the soldiers of her home country, much less those of the enemy, and she has done everything in her power to avoid them both since the invasion’s first bloodied dawn. Their proximity now will drive her where they dare not stray—further up the slopes of her neighbors the towering mountains, where the snow is deep and the wood is dense, and winter’s cruel grip with altitude combined freezes the unprepared down to the bone.
Once, perhaps at the start of the war, she might have been terrified at the prospect; a season ago, perhaps, her entire being would have been alight with the flame of a primal fury. Now, she finds the effort of emotion far too exhausting to feel much of anything at all. This is the way that she has chosen to live these years of her life; it will do her no good to mourn what could have been.
The snow that lay beneath what was once (she discerns to be) the thick of the skirmish has been stripped to its thinnest lower layers, uneven and melted in patches where it had been blasted into vapor by hand grenades. What snow does remain is sullied with black soot and dark earth, and sprays of pinks and rich reds where the combatants’ lives had been spilled. There are trees, too, that had fallen victim to the gunfire and the explosions—a few felled, some with wounds that will not heal, and many more with grazing scars.
And then, of course, there are the bodies themselves.
The first that she encounters is that of a young man, surely not many years her senior, struck down in his steps by a bullet to the neck. His jugular had been severed immediately, if the mangled pulp that remains is anything to go by, and the uneven spurts of dark cherry staining the snow around his slack-jawed face. He lies softly near the base of a fir, the onset of rigor mortis delayed by temperatures that struggle to crest the freezing point; his expression is pale and gentle beneath the greyed cloak of eternal slumber, as if merely napping for a little while on the forest floor.
He had been a fortunate one, even in death; his blood had drained swiftly, and his suffering had not been prolonged.
From him she takes his pack and most of its contents, his rifle and pistol, the canteen at his hip, and his knife. Even minus the weight of the night vision gear and his extra clothes, it’s an incredibly heavy load to bear, and she knows that the trek back to her campsite, then onward into the mountains beyond, will be long and arduous.
She doesn’t bother to check the name engraved into his dog tags—his is not the first human corpse she has encountered, but she still finds it easier for him to remain nameless, a pawn of the war rather than a human being who had once been loved, who had harbored secrets and scars and dreams, and had once lived a life not so unlike her own.
Many of the others, on both sides of the battle, have sustained similar injuries, strewn carelessly about the area in their varying final positions—one of the enemy, dead of a starburst hole that had shattered upward through the bone of his cheek and pulverized his brain in its skull; another of her home country, felled by a round that had all but minced his knee and sent homeward by another that left ground meat and splintered bone where his nose had once been; another of the enemy, one of the few women that had been present, bled out from an injury that had severed her brachial artery. Some attempt had been made to save her, judging from the hastily-tied tourniquet above the wound, but it’s evident now that it had been in vain. She sits slumped against a tree, head cocked, coal-black eyes glazed, and coal-black hair dull against once-warm skin now paled in the pallor of death.
There are those, too, who had fallen victim to the grenades, but she does not linger long over the bloodied scraps that are left of them, their strewn limbs and broken teeth, their tattered organs and mutilated expressions. There is not much of use to be salvaged from their remains, anyway, that had survived the explosions any less scathed than they themselves had.
The casualties suffered by both sides look to be roughly equal in number, and it’s impossible, picking through the mostly-intact corpses that remain to pilfer their ammunition and warmers and freeze-dried rations, to tell what the outcome of the battle had been. Neither of the units, for whatever reasons, has yet returned to collect their dead or its bounty; perhaps, she muses, they will wait until the blizzard has passed, and the memory of battle has been forgiven by the purity of a fresh layer of snow. They will certainly notice the missing ammunition and food packs—the disappearance of the one’s rucksack and weaponry even more so—but she will have long since departed for the mountains, and with the blizzard’s blind fury to cover her tracks in the coming hours, she doubts they will bother with the effort of pursuit.
The clouds have grown heavy above, dark with ice and malice through the gaps in the forest’s canopy, by the time she is prepared for the journey back, donned in the spare thermal garments of the woman with the tourniquet, and rucksack stuffed with rations and ammunition and warming packs in the space left by the first soldier’s discarded extra clothes and personal belongings. Far too much time has passed, and far too much blood has been shed, for guilt to prick at her numbed spirit in any meaningful capacity. The best that she can offer the soldiers and their fruitless sacrifices now is to hesitate at the edge of the skirmish’s fresh scar, to allow her gaze to linger on the butchered corpse of a man fallen prey to the indiscriminate spray of a hand grenade, and pray that death had not tarried too long in collecting his soul.
It is then, as she turns her back to this memory and sets her face towards the great mountains ahead, that the wind stills in the treetops, just for the briefest of moments, and the unmistakable sound of a man’s cough reaches her ears across the silent snow.
It’s a feeble, burbling thing, and it has her spinning on her heel in a skipped heartbeat, scanning the surrounding trees, all senses on blade’s edge, for approaching men—soldiers, doubtless, who would give chase if she fled and fire without question should they catch sight of her weapon. But there are no men to be seen, no dark figures to blend with the shadows of the forest in petrifying ripples of dim color. She remains alone in the wood as she had been before, her only companions the trees and the whispered secrets they share with the breeze in the canopy...and the mysterious cough, from the gully that runs along one edge of the battlefield.
The weakness conveyed in the cough, the startling wetness at its core, is the sole factor that sends her pressing forward to the gully’s brim in cool curiosity, nearly stumbling beneath the incredible weight of the pack across her shoulders. She doesn’t notice anything out of the ordinary at all, at first, gaze skimming along the length of the icy rocks that lie where the stream flows during the warmer seasons. Perhaps solitude has driven her mad at last, she thinks dully, and the “cough” was simply the first of many auditory hallucinations to come.
But then a splash of inky crimson snags in the corner of her vision, unnatural amidst the greys and whites and browns of winter. It smears down the slope several paces from her position on the gully’s rim, strikingly vibrant against the trail of disturbed rocks and snow it follows, and ends in dark patches beneath a figure that lies supine at the edge of the frozen creek bed—a man, one of her home country’s soldiers.
He is gravely injured, it’s apparent, even before she scrambles gracelessly down the slope and makes her way to his stilling form. His breaths have been reduced to shallow gasps, despairing bids for oxygen around the pointed wood chip, roughly the size of a small Bowie knife, buried deep and with extraordinary force into the side of his neck. One leg rests at an unnatural angle against the rocks, bent at the shin, where something sharp protrudes against the cloth of his pant leg with a deep and sopping scarlet stain. Half of his face lies in bloody tatters below his helmet, peppered with fragments of wood that trail havoc past the shard in his neck to tarnish his uniform with reddened blotches along his arm and side.
He doesn’t shift to look at her as she abandons her rucksack to kneel at his less scathed side, only watches her movements with a single green eye, the one not bloodied and swollen shut amidst ribbons of pink flesh. His brow creases above it—in fear, or surprise, or perhaps a silent plea; she cannot determine which—as she removes her thick gloves, setting them aside to gingerly unclip the strap below his chin and remove his helmet. His jaw reacts to hinge wider once she has finished, choking in ragged gasps of frigid air that ultimately send dark blood bubbling upwards to splash his teeth with a fresh coat of somber scarlet.
The others’ faces had been quick to blur in her mind’s eye even before she had looked away, sinking backwards to fade into abstract smears of color and distant emotion on the tapestry of her memories. But this soldier’s, this man’s, features burn starkly into her brain nearly as soon as she has settled into them—pale, pale skin, nearly as pale as the snow around him, warmed just faintly by the shadows of a golden undertone; high but gentle cheekbones balanced against a strong jawline, swollen and discolored even on the more recognizable half of his face with bruising and the barest whispers of frostbite; a bloodied but distinctly European nose, mangled by a messy gash through the cartilage that allows burbling air to whistle through; blued lips, neither exceptionally plush nor bare, parted in dying desperation and stained with wine-black streaks that trail to the earth below; vague traces of a caramel-colored beard still patchy with youth; a soft honey-brown crew cut not yet darkened with time.
Long, full lashes framing the one eye, dark but shallow, verdant with the murky greens of a watering hole beneath the forest’s summer canopy.
Her stomach marbles with a sudden and peculiar dread when his gaze latches onto hers—aching, desperate—and holds it there, unwavering except in his silent death throes as he searches her eyes’ darkest depths for...something, something that stubbornly eludes her grasp.
She knows this man’s face, she realizes all at once, and her gut drops away into a cold, faintly horrified void as the nebulous sense of dread solidifies into resigned familiarity. Her fingers tremble now in a terrible mockery of anticipation, stiff and flushed in the frozen air, as she moves to reach carefully into the warm space between his uniform and his chest. A shudder ripples through his muscles when her fingertips brush across his skin, skipping across his hollow breath as her hand closes around warm metal engraved with words that will confirm or deny what she already knows, deep down, to be true.
But the truth, in spite of expectation, burns no less than the lukewarm dog tags in her palm, and the letters of the name that is inscribed into them: Caeden Rack—formerly, and perhaps still more popularly, known to the masses as the internet superstar Kingwrap.
It’s a name that draws her back, on a rush of air and memory, to a different time—a better time, a time before the war, when she had been trapped in the depths of a black and torpid mire. Caeden had been a distraction for her, back then, a voice on a screen that had deadened her senses with a charisma and nonchalant charm that had seduced millions before her, and many more after. He had made it easy, with the affable candor projected by his persona, for her imagination to craft a sort of relationship with him, a man whose features were for months an attractive invention his anonymity forced her mind to create. But even after he had made the decision to bare his face to the world, even after she saw it not to the standards of her mind’s particular whims, the bud of a dull, parasocial love for him had remained in the pit of her gut. Not one of his videos, prior to the start of the war, had been left unwatched.
He had vanished with hardly a trace from the face of the internet, she remembers, not long after war had been declared, and the draft had been announced. The prevailing theory at the time was that he had disappeared to dodge the draft, though she and others like her (correctly, she can now see) suspected that he had left to join the war effort. Some even surmised that he had perhaps met a similar fate as a fellow creator across the pond, a man the internet knew primarily as Oliver Tryst, who had buckled beneath the enormous stresses of his country’s draft and hung himself from a bridge in London.
His disappearance had pitched her downward into an embarrassingly deep depression, thickened further in the beginning months by the media’s unabating coverage of the war, but she had learned to harden herself and come to accept, eventually, that if he returned at all, he would never again be the man he once was. Kingwrap, and Caeden Rack as the world knew him, she told herself and any other person obstinately naïve enough to argue otherwise, was gone.
But she realizes now, watching the life of a man she once thought she might have loved ebb in labored throbs from his veins, that she has not accepted much of anything at all.
“Oh, God,” she whispers above him.
Something in her chest fractures then, with a snap that reverberates in perfect silence through her consciousness, and her breast splits open, pouring forth with everything, every emotion, that she has ever dared to freeze out—blistering rage against the coal-haired army from the west, crippling fear of the war’s outcome, the inexorable heartache of solitude, and grief, so much grief, over losses she has never suffered herself to mourn.
Her vision blurs in the deluge’s wake, swimming with the burn of liquid salt that swirls Caeden into the snow and rock around him, smudges of browns and grays and shocks of red. A sob swells to fill her windpipe, and she nearly chokes on the effort of suppressing it until it slips from her lips with a stilted jerk of her shoulders, liberating those behind it to flow unimpeded.
For a long moment, he simply watches her weep over him with a profound sorrow that, she imagines from his perspective, seems far wetter than it has any right to be from a perfect stranger such as herself. It is only the unexpected touch on her wrist, mild but urgent, that pulls her from the troughs of her own despair, guiding her gaze back to his with words unsaid and the mere brush of his presence as she blinks away the fog of tears.
His proverbial hold is firmer now, an aching vice grip of a desperate tenacity belied by the singleness of his eye, boring muddy moss green into hers with what had never been a search at all, but a request—a message that had been distorted, before, through a façade of chilled apathy and the boiling knot of putrified emotions it had concealed. But now it rings loud even in its intangibility, clearer than spoken words:
Kill me, he implores with all that is left in him, and it echoes around her, in the wind that moans through the trees, the crease in his brow and the tremble stuttering through his gasps, the sheen that spreads across his faltering gaze. Please.
Shock rushes out the tide of all coherent thought, leaving her mind light and empty, air stagnant in her lungs, as she stares down at him in stupefied silence. The first thing to follow feels small and hollow, dwarfed by the impossible magnitude of what he is asking of her—and then the tide is sweeping back in again, tainted black with bitter guilt at the realization that she cannot find within herself the fortitude to end his suffering.
Her conscience bristles, a painful prickling sensation deep below her sternum, as she breaks away from his silent pleas, eyes stinging with the threat of fresh tears as she scans the forest bleakly. It would take little effort to grant him his rest, especially considering the severity of his injuries—a targeted slash across the throat, or a round fired square through the center of his forehead, would emancipate him in seconds from the shackles of his torment and soothe her smarting conscience. But grief, or one of its more panicked cousins, coils itself tight around her spine, and she remains petrified on the spot.
Fury and frustration mixed blaze across her nerves, then, justice crowing in indignation at the root of her hesitance to kill him—it isn’t borne of a coward’s grief, after all; she has hunted for food before, birds and rabbits and deer that had certainly deserved death no more than any human male. Her grief is a selfish grief—only in part for Caeden himself, and mostly for the loss his imminent death represents to her personally. Grief for an innocence lost forevermore, a version of herself that will remain tethered to him in his grave even if the war is won. Grief for the knowledge that a world shattered cannot be rebuilt the same as it once was. Grief for a time long past, when though her life had been directionless and depressed, the world had been safe and comfortable, and so had she.
Everything seems to have happened so quickly, all of a sudden. She just wants a bit more time to release it all, to bid it a proper farewell before it is swallowed whole by the sands of time.
Compassion and selfishness war in equal halves within, meeting with all the ruinous and uncompromising power of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Their gravity pulls at her mind with unyielding strength matched perfectly, swaying her neither right nor left, and she realizes then that she cannot choose the purely right course of action, but neither can she choose the wrong.
So she chooses neither at all, and takes the road that lies through the absolute middle, reaching across his body to grasp the wood embedded into his windpipe. It’s only then, in the moment that she hesitates, that she truly comprehends that he had suffered for hours prior to her arrival, since the skirmish’s final traded shots—alone, forgotten in the snow and the bitter air, drowning in the agony of injuries even she cannot see (dulled somewhat, she can only hope, by the onset of shock) and his own blood, trickling steadily down his trachea to fill his lungs. He doesn’t have long now; removing the wood chip won’t be nearly as humane as a bullet to the head or slash to the throat, but it will hasten the process of his death, and simultaneously lend her a bit more time to accept it.
I’m sorry, she whispers to him through silence borne solely of her own cowardice. Hot tears swell once more, spilling from her eyelids when his hand moves to find hers, sitting in her lap, and curls cold around it, squeezing as earnestly as he can muster. He avoids her gaze now, staring upward into the canopy above, relentless struggles for breath quickening as a single, crystalline drop slips from the corner of his eye to trail past his ear.
When, she wonders, securing her hold on the fragment, had she become such a terrible person?
And then suddenly, with a flex of the muscles in her arm, the wood chip has been torn from his neck, surface slightly soggy with a vivid coat of red, and decorated at the more jagged edges with shreds of flesh. His body jerks violently, a movement to arch his back that is abruptly aborted with a pained puff of air. He doesn’t cry out, not like she had expected he might, but she can still feel his scream reverberate in her bones, vibrating in her marrow through the bite of chilled cloth as his gloved hand clenches into the skin of hers, and the softly-keening whistle of oxygen lost to the wound in his windpipe. Palpable fear is swift to rush into the vacuum left in the wake of the initial jolt of pain, glossing his eye with a stricken gleam that fills nearly as quickly as it drains, and though his hold loosens marginally, he clings to her hand as if it is the fabric of his own life.
Aching empathy crackles like electricity across her diaphragm as she brings their joined hands up, pressing his knuckles flush against her lips, and reaches forward with the other to card her fingers through his honey-brown hair, cold but startlingly soft against her calluses. The sour taste of regret rises to rest on her tongue at the thought that this is the best she can offer him in his final moments—futile gestures of comfort that, no matter how tender, do not change the fact that a stranger’s face will be the last he sees, and that (oh, God) he is going to die.
But his lashes flutter at her touch, as if in the most tragic shade of gratitude, muscles slackening at the sensation of her fingertips skimming his scalp, then down across the least mangled contours of his face. An expression of such soft yearning comes over his features at the contact that emotion wells to fill her vision hardly before she can register the pinch of fresh grief in her gut, and though she wills herself to be strong for him, tears are leaking down her cheeks to soak into his glove before she even can begin to suppress them.
He is going to die. He is going to die.
Fate must have found it incredibly amusing to dictate that her first meeting with Caeden Rack was also to be her last, and though her vocal cords remain paralyzed beneath the weight of her emotions in their totality, she finds words rushing through her mind like the babbling of a brook—words that she has always wanted to say to him, conversations that had been carried out entirely within her fantasies. She had always liked to imagine bumping into him in the urban wilds, back then, the two of them serendipitously hitting it off with greetings exchanged and quips traded on a bright day in an imaginary future.
The words sift past closed lips now like his silken hair through her fingers, falling away into oblivion with the glistening splinters of her dreams, forever to remain unspoken.
It is only now, it occurs to her with a metallic twist of irony through the gut, that she truly recognizes Caeden as a human being—not a character in her fantasies, a myth, a legend, a disembodied personality trapped within a microphone thousands of miles away, but a human. A human, with a family and friends and loves come and gone, memories and mysteries and complexities all of his own. A human, who walks and talks, laughs even if he doesn’t mean it and cries in secret. A human, ephemeral as the morning vapor, with skin and bones and organs that bleed the same black cherry as her own.
A human who lies dying at her knees, mutilated by energies no man’s constitution could possibly endure, and clasps her hand with the unabashed fear of what is to come.
It’s a strangely surreal feeling, watching a person who had once seemed so close for all the distance between them fade, an ache that throbs colder than frostbite in tandem with every faltering gasp that passes his parted lips. But she cannot yield to it now, or grant it even the liberty to weigh on her features, not while Caeden bathes in blood and fear as he anxiously awaits his hour’s arrival, clutching her hand with all the strength that is left within him. He needs an anchor now, something to ground him as he departs—someone to be the strength that has long bled away, a terrible onus that compassion and the gnaw of guilt compel her to carry for him.
But the numb wall of jaded apathy is not strong now, not when Caeden had driven the point of his suffering straight through the permafrost to pierce the tender core of her heart. Her chest burns with the pressure of smothered empathy and all its companions as she sits with him in somber silence, watching his valiant endeavors for oxygen wither until all that is left to prop up his consciousness is the despairing fervor of his own spirit—regrets, perhaps, words he has always wanted to say, things he has always wanted to do, sights he has always wanted to see. And still, even on elastic minutes of borrowed time, even as he skims the surface of slumber’s midnight waters, still he struggles.
She brings his hand, trembling around hers, to rest against her forehead, closing her eyes as her breath quakes with the effort of staying strong, of being his rock—not as a fan, or a friend, or anything more, but simply a fellow human being. “Let go,” she whispers, against the raw howl of selfish grief that tears through her senses, and they are nearly the most painful words she has ever brought herself to speak—not only directed to him, but to herself, and to the part of her that clings to the past with the same stricken persistence that he clings to her hand. “Let go.”
His fingers shift, adjusting in her hold to grip her hand more securely, but she knows he understands what she meant.
It is quiet when he slips away—a bleeding exhale that does not rebound, the unnatural easing of the muscles in his hand—but it is the sudden and absolute absence of his presence that resonates the most within her, a solemn stillness so profound that the wind itself seems to die in the trees. His eye is glazed when she lowers his lifeless hand, fixed for eternity to some point amongst the pine boughs, pupil blown wide in a perfect blackness void of everything he had ever been.
Winter has never felt so bleak, and the teeming wood so wretchedly barren, as it does when the realization fully settles upon her that where two flames had once warmed each other, one remains alone, and the other shall never be relit for all the unburnt wax that remains.
She stays by his side for some time after he has passed, as if in wait for something that does not exist—some sign, perhaps, that he isn’t truly dead, something to ease the unexpectedly crushing weight of solitude. The forest has begun to dim when she gets to her feet at last, darkening steadily in the shade of the blizzard and the reign of night. Grief is quick to reclaim its throne in her throat when she takes Caeden by the feet to drag him up to the hill to lie amongst his fallen comrades, where his unit will be more likely to find him, and where his death will not forever be lost to the war. His family, at the least, deserves the same closure that she has been granted, of mourning his broken body.
The tears fall softly first, then in roiling torrents, soaking her cheeks and constricting her diaphragm with racking sobs the moment she hears his fractured shinbone push back through his skin, slipping into place with the traction her pull on his legs creates. His face remains perfectly frozen, forever set into that final expression, and though she knows that he can no longer feel the agony that had drowned him, though she knows he is dead, his utter lack of a reaction cuts into her with all the cruel abandon of the wood chip in his neck.
She cannot bring herself to linger for too long, once she has laid him to rest away from the gully’s brim at the top of the incline, and though she takes none of his equipment or supplies, her conscience aches at the thought of leaving him, as if he is still capable of taking comfort in her presence. But her mangled heart cannot bear the sight of his blued lips, his expression iced over, his vacant green eye, the life she had once lived, any longer than is absolutely necessary.
He is dead, after all. He’s gone.
The baleful sighs of wind have rather appropriately swelled into a tempestuous howl by the time she departs—a feeble imitation, for all the blizzard’s ire, of the maelstrom that rages in the confines of her ribcage as she stumbles off into the looming woods. Tears stream steadily down her cheeks well after she has left him behind, burning with the heat of his blood on her cheeks against the bite of the gale. Each memory of him that she has ever tucked away throbs in bruising pulses against her mind’s eye as she stumbles away into the endless wilderness—fond memories, of his crooked and curiously charming smile, the cocky ring to his voice, his unattractive and terribly contagious laugh, his cluster of small idiosyncrasies.
Things that she, and everyone else, should have cherished, because they had been what made him human. Little things that are forever lost to history, crystallized beneath ice far colder and deeper than anything on this Earth could fathom.
Guilt spins end over end in its tussle with sorrow, twisting and stretching to intertwine with fury and fear and everything that has been disturbed by the hurricane that rages through the cavity in her chest. The chaos of emotions she cannot even begin to identify crashes against bone and muscle, and she staggers beneath the combined onus of their gravity and the weight of the pack across her shoulders, energy sapping from her knees unexpectedly to trail down her calves and blacken the snow with the memory of Caeden’s blood.
In the snow and the gale, amidst the first flakes that have begun to sting the Earth in the settling darkness, her final image of him burns on her cortex, as bright and hot as he once had: his corpse, empty and light for how heavy he had been, lying utterly lifeless in the battlefield’s center, pale and cold and glazed beneath a thick but invisible cloak, face smothered in a strange, resigned peace. She shuts her eyes against it, but it remains undimmed, and for all her efforts, the phantom of a repressed cry shudders through even the most sheltered depths of her spirit.
Her greatest wish, in that moment, is that Death and his frozen scythe had at least had the courtesy to take her with him. ◾
“Here is something that I need you to understand—and listen carefully, now, because it’s an important lesson to remember.” Their words hang thick in the air, heavy with a serious gravity that weighs bruises into my shoulders.
Their gaze is the gaze of a billion eyes, a billion thoughts and opinions and ruthless judgements that pick me apart from the inside out with the agonizing persistence of a bacterial infection. I cannot move even if I had wanted to, pinned beneath those eyes with nine-inch spikes directly through my feet.
“Unless people like you—many people, especially. You know the saying, the more the merrier,” they continue, voice dragging slow and dark to ensure it burns in the way it is intended to burn (and what a terrible voice it is, a voice of a billion voices), “your existence means nothing. You. Don’t. Matter.”
Tortured, probably. Insatiable; insufferable. Frightful, fearful, dreadful. Loud and clingy; distant and cold. Haughty; humble. Genuine; one of many masks. Fire; winter. A raging gale; a mellow ripple. Jealous beyond all reasoning, a vice grip. A wailing onus, a ball and chain. A good listener but a bad friend. The worst of the best, and the best of the worst. Ultraviolet and ultrasound. Lost but found. An impenetrable fortress. A crumbling bastion. Entirely alone in an ocean of faces.
Weak; just strong enough. An effort. Your problem. Not good enough, no, never good enough.
She realizes, then, that she doesn't like him anymore, not really. She doesn't like his glasses, or the way he does his hair, or the way he smiles down at everyone that he meets. (And it's a terribly lovely smile—a waste of one, at this point, more than anything.)
They're all things that she used to like, which is perhaps the worst thing to realize of all. Because it's not any one of those things in particular that she doesn't like; it's who he is now. It's the man he has made the decision to become.
She misses him terribly—the man that he used to be, sensitive and emotional in all the right places, willing to lean into the pain because he knew, instinctively, that it was the only way he could grow. She misses the days when his smile didn't cut, when he would look at people like her instead of down upon them.
And she misses, nearly worst of all, that bygone time when his chords made her feel things to which she could put no words—the time when he would use song to express emotion, to release the pressure of that unrelenting sadness he's always had to carry.
That time is an ashen memory now, and his music is empty and apathetic, lukewarm like old bathwater.
I don't think I like you anymore, she begins, fingers faltering over the keyboard, mind stuttering across a truth she wishes were a lie. I...I like who you were. Who you used to be. And I guess, who you still have the potential to be. The man, the version of you, that you've thrown away because that's what society told you to do.
His voice isn’t clear and smooth when he sings, like the voices on the radio, the meticulously-fashioned purity of a bell tone. It wavers, at times, uncertain and insecure against guitar strings that buzz occasionally under misplaced fingers. There are notes overreached, others gone flat, and others still that fall but a hair’s breadth shy of their intended frequencies.
Imperfections, all of them, only expected of an amateur musician.
But despite the negative connotations of the word, she finds that imperfect gives his voice, his music, a character lacking in its bell-tone counterparts. Imperfect colors his voice earthy when he sings, textured, like gravel and a sprinkle of his soul crunching beneath her bare feet.
Where the stars stretch for their home in the heavens, whetted to nigh-perfection, he’s right down here, in the sand and the gravel, on the ground. Here, with her.
-
He as a whole, similarly, falls short of that looming pinnacle called masculine perfection. His forehead is large (very large), his eyes set ever so slightly wide in their sockets, only just barely; his eyebrows, bushy and unkempt, angle somewhat downward, almost as if in perpetual disappointment or vague fright. And he’s rather thin, too—all lanky arms and legs and gangling height—with a soft jawline and soft features. He’s no Chris Evans, to be certain, or Henry Cavill, or any of those sculpted men marketed as immaculate deities.
But ah, he’s so very lovely.
His features are gentler, yes, than the standards expected (how ludicrous, anyway) of his sex—but elegantly so. Eyes shaped like rounded almonds, coated in dark chocolate; a strong nose peaked to a graceful pointe; a plush, supple lower lip, crowned with a Cupid’s bow crafted by God Himself.
(How soft, she wonders—how warm—would his mouth be, pressed feverishly to her own.)
There is an awkward grace, too, to the rest of him—to his somewhat slight frame, his willowy limbs, his towering height. Something about his Adam’s apple, the way it casts a soft, rounded shadow against the column of his throat, makes her gut twinge and her heart flutter. Something about the way his hair flops against his forehead—earthy, free, textured like his voice. Something about the way his long, elegant fingers twist the cap off of the vodka bottle.
(Long, slender, graceful. Perfect to entangle with her own fingers. Perfect to warm her hands against the cold mist of a cruel and heartless world, blissfully numb to her pain.)
When those lovely lips part into a winsome smile, chiseling dimples deep into his cheeks, she realizes in full that she has fallen in love.
-
The prickly pear that’s been sitting obstinately in the hollow of her chest rises to stick to the base of her tongue as she takes a single, fateful step forward.
“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). He doesn’t look up immediately, features concealed by a fringe of artfully-disheveled, earth-toned hair as he fiddles with a button on his shirt. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.
“Hi,” she replies, not allowing herself even the liberty of a steadying breath before she speaks. Her tone is stable, at least—disinterested, almost. It’s a façade, one that grates against the truth, the way her heart pounds ruthlessly against her breast.
In the short pause that follows, an eon’s worth of imagination tracks across her brain as she envisions how the next several seconds will transpire. What will his reaction be when he looks up, she thinks. Revulsion? Disinterest? Or, nothing at all—an aching emptiness that stings more than hatred itself?
He looks up, barely before her mind can begin running another scenario. Deep ganache meets muddy green, and the world ceases to spin around her. Around them.
She’s paralyzed, drowning in his gaze. Her breath drops from beneath her as she watches his lips part, his long lashes flutter in a half-blink. His eyes, she’s convinced, burn straight through her very soul.
Fuck, she thinks, hardly for the first time (and certainly not the last). The thought echoes hollow in a mind that’s gone suddenly blank. He’s gorgeous.
Whatever spell has bewitched them both passes in an instant, just as abruptly as it had been cast. He blinks, and all at once, sensation comes rushing back to her consciousness as he breaks away from her gaze. “Sorry,” he says crisply, dropping his eyes to the pen he’s resumed twirling between elegant fingers.
Her eyes latch onto his Adam’s apple as it bobs in a nervous swallow. “What?” she says, dumbly. Very dumbly. What an intelligent response.
When he looks back up, his cheeks are flushed a soft rose. The first shadows of his dimples appear as a shy smile dawns on his lips.
She enjoys watching him, much in the same respect that she enjoys his voice. Dashing, magnetic good looks aside, he’s simply a delightful person to observe—charismatic and quirky, at times, cool and polished at others.
She watches him, from afar, as he frolics about with his friends, has a laugh with his good mates, all kept close at arm’s length. Watches him smooth unruly locks to one side, revealing one eye, glinting with subdued mirth, and shadowing the other. Watches him toss a tired, carefree smile in the others’ direction, as they vie in a reasonably elegant cacophony for his affections.
Because, of course, her heart is hardly the only one to be captured by his alluring persona (and he’s so lovely, how could it possibly be the only one?). He’s constantly flocked by people, waiting on his right hand and on his left, flanking him back and front. Hoping, each and every one, that perhaps they will be the one he truly allows to attach—the one, the only one, he truly allows to burrow into his soul.
For all his soft words and soft eyes and gentle smiles, it’s an extraordinarily high wall to scale. None of them make the cut; sometimes, she wonders if any ever will. But still, they stay, wined and dined by the flirtatious mirage he offers of a genuine connection. That’s the only reason they stay, in fact. Otherwise, he would have found himself abandoned long ago.
(Perhaps, she thinks, she can be the one to crack his code.)
-
Given where she stands in his social circle—forever stranded at the periphery, behind an invisible but hopelessly insurmountable barrier—she finds, strangely, that she knows him better than most. Better than any of the others at her level, naturally. But better, too, than those who reside further inward, towards the core of his sprawling social system.
There are the obvious things to know, of course, the scraps of history and personality he freely tosses to the winds—his favorite movie, for example (A Silent Voice), or his hometown (Sheffield), or his age and birthdate (23, 5 September 1997). Those who pine for him most ardently lap them up as if dying of thirst, those few and precious details, fitting them together as they would puzzle pieces and hoping—praying—that they will one day form the key to his looming walls.
They are blissfully blind to the futility of their efforts, to the reality that those meticulously-curated details merely skim the surface of deeper, and perhaps darker, waters. Waters whose depths seem visible in full only to her, shadowed in plain sight from the prying eyes of the world.
But perhaps that is simply in her essence—to see, as the others do, and to understand as they do not. Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice how his battery dies in public, after a point, when he’s wearied of the shallow company his fellow humans offer. His smile always stretches drawn and plastic when it does, and his voice clips to an unforgiving point, words cutting where they should not.
Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice the distinct pain of a broken family bleeding from his voice, dripping from his eyes—one that’s been spliced and spliced again, but even so remains tattered and frayed. (It’s not so much the sort of pain to be promptly identified as it is the type to be dug up by the root. The type she likens most to a decaying tuber, wedged securely in a rotting wound.)
Perhaps it is simply in her nature to notice, wandering slightly too far into those guarded doe eyes, the jagged splinters of a shattered man, forever denied by his gender the opportunity to take stock of what he’s lost. To acknowledge the damage. To heal.
(Perhaps it is simply in her nature to feel what the others cannot, and what he is not allowed to. To rage in his rage, to laugh in his joy. To cry his tears. To feel his pain.)
-
They’ve never stood quite so close before—so close that the fabric of their trench coats brushes with shallow breaths, so close that she can make out the rough silhouette of a healing razor burn in the shadows on his neck. Close enough that she can smell the edge of his scent against the thick aroma of water in the air.
Even under the shroud of darkness, he’s ethereal, almost—the lights of London life dancing across his features with the shadows of night, figure framed by evening raindrops that flash coppery under the streetlight. He’s so indescribably lovely, without trying at all, that she wonders—even as her heart stutters pathetically in her chest, watching those luscious lips part and those dark lashes flutter in a not-quite-blink—if he’s even real at all.
He bends down, just slightly, face angled in a way it hadn’t been before. An intoxicating cocktail of nerves and hot anticipation rushes to her head like steam, clouding her senses and muffling the world around them. The thin layer of confusion lingering along the top falls away suddenly, and though he doesn’t speak, she understands.
She rises to her tiptoes to meet him halfway, fingers curling into soft, dark locks beneath his beanie, and molds her mouth to his.
A firecracker of sensation erupts across her face at the contact, sparking and popping with every fraction of a movement their lips make against each other. His are everything that she imagined them to be, soft and warm and distantly sweet. He tastes like bourbon and Britain and something else for which she has no words, something she can only describe as uniquely him.
Unexpected tears spring to her eyes then, riding a sudden swell of overwhelming emotion, as he gently works her top lip between his, slow and careful and sweet as if it is his most treasured possession—as if she is his most treasured possession. She feels suddenly drunk on his touch, on the heat that shudders through her as he slides his free hand, the one not suspending the umbrella above them, around to her back, rolling her deeper into him.
In the moment that he sighs into her, gripping her tight and true as she feathers and pulls at that lovely lower lip, she wishes for nothing more than to collapse into him entirely, saturating her senses with him until that’s all there is left to feel of this miserable world.
-
Of those fortunate enough to be members of his elite, his close-cropped inner circle, only a mere few are women. None of them are particularly remarkable to her—except for Karin.
She doesn’t know much about Karin at all (not that there’s much to know, with how generally dull and saltless she is), just that she’s a year or so his junior and that her name isn’t actually Karin. It’s something Dutch, and far too complicated to bother expending the energy to remember. Karin is easier, in part because the one Dutch person she’s met before had been named Karin, and in part because it seems to better suit her.
Karin is madly in love with him, it’s clear—hopelessly infatuated with his voice and his face and his eyes, wholly enamored with even the worst of his flaws. It’s agonizingly obvious, impossible to miss, in everything that she does when they’re together—in the crop top and tight jeans, the layers of makeup, her immaculately faux-blonde beach waves. The lingering gaze and soft smiles, the gentle (and often unnecessary) touches, the quiet giggles that bubble from her lips when any fraction of his attention brushes across her.
In the truest, most visceral sense of the word, it’s pathetic to watch. She’s pathetic to watch.
Perhaps she should feel some semblance of a detached pity, at least, for Karin, her heart lodged firmly in the grip of an indifferent hand. For all his cavalier disinterest in her efforts, he seems to derive an impish pleasure from toying with her heartstrings, weaving and stretching them between his fingers with a practiced dexterity that leaves her a trembling mess in his palm.
It’s an indisputably skilled act, one so artfully convincing that there are times when she wonders if perhaps he is in love with Karin after all. But though he teases the charade to its very brink, he always pulls away before the finish—and though his fingers remain entangled in her yarn, he never pulls her with him, never closer. Only to the edge of an arm’s length, and never further.
Perhaps she should be angry with him, disgusted that he seems to delight in a pastime some might describe as plain cruel. And she should sympathize with Karin, too, sharing with her the pain of an unrequited love and a man who can’t bring himself to care in the slightest. Is that not the human experience, after all? Is that not the life of a woman?
She cannot bring herself to feel bad for Karin (at the expense of an aching conscience), and she cannot bring herself to fault him for how he treats her. She cannot help but to think that in a way, perhaps Karin deserves it. It’s the least karma can trade, after all, for the innate privilege that is irrevocably tied to her flawless Aryan features, and the effortless success that comes with it. And besides, maybe if she weren’t so miserably and blatantly desperate for his affections…
(Perhaps needless to say, she is not incredibly fond of Karin.)
-
It’s a perfect twilight, cloudless and cool after another long and torturous day spent baking beneath the desert sun. Stars are beginning to dot a flawless canvas of ombré blues, interrupted only by the platinum sliver of a waxing crescent that’s sinking steadily to meet the edge of an arid and rocky mountain behind him, the one that the restaurant’s been built into.
He’s quite lovely in the candlelight, face cast from below in a warm glow that flickers in the same evening breeze that tousles his windswept locks (which he’s recently had cropped into a more conservative cut). Though he’s sitting right across from her, his mind is elsewhere, gaze lost to the side, down the barren, sun-scorched slope and out in the distant lights sprawled across the valley below. It’s a good look on him, she thinks—the gentle, faraway expression of unarticulated musings.
The tranquility of his trance is broken only by the waitress’ (no, waiter’s) wordless arrival, whisking away the empty bread basket and replacing it with a fresh one before moving to the next table. He draws his eyes from the city then, lifting his glass to take an effortlessly graceful sip of pinot noir, and turns to link his gaze with hers.
Her heart skips a beat, catches in her windpipe at the contact with shadowed ganache, twinkling with reflections of the candle’s flame. The way she mentally traces the familiar path she’s carved across his features is reflexive, habitual—warm and comforting, in a peculiarly bittersweet sense, like a distant home.
There is something in the moment that her eyes connect with his again—something in the shared ease of the silence between them, the hushed chatter of the other patrons on the patio, and the din of the other diners inside. Something about the quiet strains of one of Saltwater’s newest releases, floating away from mounted speakers into the cool breath of the descending night. Just...something.
The weight of an old and weary tension she’s never realized she’s been carrying bleeds from her shoulders as she slips her hand across the table and into his. Dark eyes crinkle, cheeks dimpling with a smile so impossibly warm and soft that a pang of sudden and overwhelming emotion begins to prick at the corners of her eyes.
She thinks, for the first time in her recoverable memory, that maybe she’ll be okay after all.
-
He’s looking directly at her now, gaze boring dark and unyielding through the glass and the layers and the sadness—straight into her eyes and then further still, deep into the shadowed crannies of her soul.
It isn’t a prying sort of gaze, by any means, the sort that chips relentlessly at her walls, seeking structural imperfections and tender scars to exploit, to leverage. But there is something unmistakably wild to his eyes, an unhinged and clawing abandon that escapes occasionally to stretch his irresistible smile wide and sharp, to infect his mannerisms, the stories he tells, with the uncanny essence of a madman.
The others seem to quite enjoy it, that briny twist of mild insanity—it is only an act, after all, a bit he plays purely for the sake of their entertainment. (Or, so the story goes, at least.) But it is a part played far too well, far too convincingly, to persuade her that there is no truth to be found in that persona.
She thinks she understands. He has been blessed, too, with the curse that afflicts her: the terrible ability, the beautiful power, to feel what the world feels—the agony and the rage, the laughter and the tears, and everything in between. She likens it to incessantly experiencing the sensation of drowning, gasping for oxygen in a deluge of such magnitude that there are times when she cannot differentiate her own suffering from anyone else’s.
Perhaps he does not recognize, yet, the horrible blessing that he has been bestowed. Perhaps that is why the fabric of his sanity frays a bit at the edges, worn in threadbare patches. Perhaps that is why there are days when he truly seems mere steps from the edge of insane.
She lifts her chin, ignoring the chill that rolls down her spine, pinned beneath his eyes (those eyes that see, and understand), and meets his gaze head on.
(If only she could get close enough, perhaps she could find a way to help him.)
-
The interstate dips gently into the valley before them, a dull gleam beneath the sun that stretches straight before curling away into distant mountains. Their destination lies a mere hour from here, sprawled eighty miles ahead along the coastline. If they make good time, perhaps they will reach the hotel before sunset.
He’s awake now; he had been dozing before, head lolling against the window in spotty sleep. (Not that she can fault him—this part of the desert, barren and lonely and largely featureless, does not provide much in the way of visual stimulation.) She peels her eyes from the road to risk a glance at him upon hearing his yawn, tracing his profile with her gaze. Committing it to memory, as if there’s any chance she could ever forget.
He looks over to her, sunlight glancing across his iris and melting chocolate into warm gingerbread-caramel. Dimples pit his cheeks as his lips curve upwards into a placid smile, and she stops, mind stalling stubbornly on the image, crystallizing it in time and tucking it away to be seared into her memory, an indelible and beautiful scar.
Her heart stumbles over a beat when he reaches up, taking her by the chin and turning her head to face the highway. “Eyes on the road,” he says, eyes light, tone jovial. “I didn’t come all this way to die in a car accident because you can’t focus on the road.”
His touch lingers, callused at the tips in the way only a string player’s can be, and she feels herself smile.
-
He’s all warm colors, she realizes, watching him in the orange-golds of the sinking sun—all golden skin and frizzed honey-brown highlights, warm dark eyes and warm dark hair. Warm lips, warm hands, a warm smile.
He’s beautiful.
His fingers twitch, entwined in her grasp, as another wave rolls in with the tide, buffeting their ankles with salt water and seaweed. He’s lost at sea, looking into the distant sunset with that expression that settles to shroud his features when he is completely and utterly at ease, when he makes no effort to be or do or act anything other than himself. It’s a deeply sad sort of look, like old wounds that ache in the winter, contemplative of secret things and secret scars.
She looks out, chasing his gaze across the vast waters and into the sun, which hangs old and dim over the horizon. Something in her chest pulls away with its gravity, with the receding wave, and a strange longing descends upon her to walk into the sea with him and forever disappear into that great blue mystery—lost to the depths, never to be seen or heard from again.
(It would feel closer to home, at least, than she ever has here.)
He squeezes her hand then, reeling her back to shore from the hiraeth and the ocean. He’s studying her when she turns to take him in again—loose, fluffy curls, the barest shadow of facial hair, the slightest upward curve of a gentle smile on his lips that grows when she angles herself towards him, rising to her tiptoes and tilting her face upwards in a silent plea.
He makes no sound as he obliges, excepting an amused huff, and releases her hand to cup her jaw, scooping her upward to capture her lips with his. It’s a chaste kiss, warm and dizzyingly tender, smooth and soft like the sand further up the beach, away from the water. Gentle like his touch, like the way he brings his other hand up, buries it in her hair.
She pushes further into him, deep for the briefest of moments, before breaking away to stare into his eyes, burning hotter shades in the sun’s dying reds, weeping blue with that eternal sadness. Her bones ache in her chest, with love, and with that bane of a gift she has been bestowed—with the ability to perceive that pain, and to feel it as her own.
His hair tickles her face when she leans in again, and his laugh, as she peppers fluttery butterfly kisses along his cheekbone, tickles her soul.
-
He lies still with her for the rest of the hour, arm and leg draped across her, and drifts to and fro from a half-sleep as she strokes her fingers through his wild locks. For a short while the room remains quiet and tranquil, save the intermittent hums and clicks of the air conditioner and his soft snores, and the muted, rolling roar of the ocean outside. It’s nearly enough to lull her, too, into a gentle sleep, but her mind races with thoughts of breakfast in the lobby downstairs and the day’s plans to follow, splintering away on unpredictable sidequests in between.
The daylight leaking around the curtains’ edges, tinged pale blue by the western sky, is strong and bright when he stirs at last, roused by the muffled commotion next door of their neighbors’ preparations for the day. His arm flexes to curl around her in some hybrid of a hug and a stretch, and when she shifts her gaze to rest on his features, she finds that he’s watching her sleepily with those almond doe eyes, dark like the earth, soft and sad.
Time stretches rubbery in the moment that they simply remain like that—looking, but allowing the silence to hang, trading a hundred thousand thoughts and feelings, unspoken words that refuse to coalesce into sentences. He blinks, slow and gentle, when she brings her hand forward from earthy waves at the nape of his neck, drawing it in a soft stroke along the coarse stubble on his jawline. The corners of his mouth pull upward, a faint smile that just barely meets his eyes.
Something rises from the pit of her spirit to settle in her windpipe, thick and heavy, that spurs her forward, pressing a kiss to his forehead that is light only in delivery, laden with emotion too obscure, too fathomless, to be expressed in any other way she can conceive.
He draws in a breath through his nose, holding her close to rest the tips of their noses together even after she’s pulled away. Against the edge of her shoulder blade, she can feel his fingers brush her skin, tracing an aimless pattern back and forth, back and forth. “Morning,” he mumbles, voice still draped in sleep. It’s reminiscent of old leather and warm musk, deep and cracked at the edges. Deep in her gut, she feels a nerve thrum upon registering the sound.
She leans in to plant a messy kiss on his top lip, suppressing the giggle that wells up when he smiles into it. “Morning,” she whispers back.
-
“Are you taking requests?”
“Sorry?” His brow is creased in evident confusion when he looks over to her from his elegant fingers, messing about on the fretboard. The sky behind him, a faded turquoise on the horizon through the inky silhouettes of towering conifers, looks cool and distant in contrast to the warm glow of flames on his face.
She smiles cheekily, edging closer to the campfire against a suddenly chilled breeze that rolls from looming granite cliffs. “Are you taking requests?” she repeats, blinking at him coyly. She gestures to his guitar, a well-loved Simon & Patrick Luthier that, he has emphasized on multiple separate occasions, he cherishes over his own life. “Song requests, I mean.”
“Ah.” The grin that he tosses to her in return is roguishly lopsided, pulling further into his right cheek than his left. His eyes sparkle in the dim firelight with a twinkle so mischievously boyish that it’s a genuine effort to resist collapsing pathetically into a giggly heap at his feet. Damn him.
“No,” he says, after a moment’s faux consideration. “No, I don’t think I will.”
She purses her lips in a melodramatically exaggerated pout.
His smile softens, evening into something gentler, and he moves to begin experimenting with the frequency of the D string’s tuning, toying with it by practiced ear. “What do you want me to play?” he asks, tone warm and affectionate, comforting like his guitar’s voice. Something sweet and light blooms in her chest, like a daisy on a sunny spring afternoon.
“Hm,” she hums softly, considering. In the moment, she doesn’t have a particular preference, she supposes—she simply fancies the thought of indulging herself in those mellow, imperfect tones, sitting by the campfire and losing herself to him again and again and again. It would be nice to hear one of his original songs again, perhaps. Or, maybe…
“‘Underground,’” she decides aloud, drawing her eyes back to him from where they had wandered to the neighboring campfire, surrounded by a rowdy throng of college students.
“‘Underground’?” he echoes, staring absently into the night’s shadow and brushing his fingers lightly across a chord—testing a key, she presumes. There is a knowing smile in his eyes when he looks back to her, an airy laugh on his lips when he asks, “‘Underground’ by Cody Fry?”
“Yes,” she affirms, a giggle she cannot successfully quell bubbling into her voice. This is not the first time she has requested this song of him, and they both know it will certainly not be the last. “Please.”
For a short moment he remains silent, plucking at his strings in light thought, and then he shifts, settling the guitar more comfortably against himself. “I gotchu bae,” he says, in a comically terrible mockery of an American accent, and then he begins, voice shifting to texture effortlessly into those flawed earth-tones, that grounding song. A pleasant chill catches in her ribcage as the sound swells to fill her ears, mingling with the crackle of flames, and the mysterious rustle of the forest, and the lazy chirping of crickets.
“I woke up underground
Not a light, not a sound
Threw my voice into the dark
But the dark had no remark
Just repeated what I said…”
-
She buries her face into his chest, inhaling the scents that have soaked into his light sweater—a bit of sweat, a sheer spot of cologne, a wave of him. It’s a vaguely intoxicating combination, one she knows she will never tire of, and peculiarly bittersweet, as if the sadness in his eyes has spread over the years to saturate his very pores.
Or, perhaps it only seems that way now that it’s being torn from her grasp.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she mumbles into his sweater, fingers curling into the fabric around his back. It’s a golden sort of color, like the sun warming them through the windows, hanging low over the western horizon.
He hums, nose buried in her hair, a rumbling vibration in his chest that she can’t hear over the roar of jet engines and airport traffic. He squeezes her tight, just for a moment, and then he’s pulling away, bringing up one hand to rest on her cheek.
In the golden hour’s utopian glow, he suddenly looks more breathtaking, impossibly, than he ever has before—ethereal, as if he never completely belonged to the Earth to begin with. Those brown eyes, that warm skin; that perfect nose, those perfect lips; that carefree, frizzy fringe of browns and caramels and honey-golds.
Her heart, lodged obstinately in the hollow of her throat, wrings pitifully.
“Well, no need to be so dramatic about it,” he quips, caressing his thumb over her cheek in sweeping strokes. He laughs lightly, a deceptively high-pitched giggle so contagious that she finds it impossible to resist the pull of a smile on her lips.
“I’m not being dramatic,” she argues, without heat. On impulse, she reaches up to grip his hand, tilting her face to place a gentle kiss against his palm. His demeanor softens visibly at the gesture. “I just...I don’t want you to leave. I’m gonna miss you so bad—”
He pulls his hand away suddenly, and hers with it, pressing his lips against her wrist as she instinctively reacts to cup his jaw, faintly bristled with day-old stubble. “I’m gonna miss you too,” he says softly, against her skin. Her heart, caged in her windpipe, leaps at the sensation. “But this isn’t the end, right? We’ll see each other again.”
-
She writes to him, fingers slaving over keys until the tendons in her wrists ache, eyes poring over the spidery black of virtual ink against the cottony white of virtual paper until they burn worn and weary in their sockets.
She writes to him about little nothings, the odds and ends that make her days unique in their mundanity. She tells him about her next-door neighbor’s new husband, how he reminds her a bit of him, or the weather as of late, or the Netflix series she had binge-watched the night prior at the expense of assignments due the following morning. Simple things, requiring little investment, that fill the gaps in life, for all their lack of any appreciable impact.
She writes to him, too, about the deeper things, the things that fall closer to the center. Roughly 5000 words, one golden, hazy morning, on the futility of cliques, how deleterious they are for all their vanity; another 500, a couple of afternoons later, on her most recent preceding crush, how he hadn’t been aware of her existence for half a year, and shunned her when he had. An entire essay, quite possibly the longest she’s ever written, on divorce, and men, and that tragically magical thing they call love.
And sometimes, when her walls wear thin and patchy under the fatigue of her own emotion, she writes about him. She writes about his earth-tones, how they draw her in, reflecting in dark hair and golden skin and sad, sad almond doe eyes. Writes about his elegant fingers, his elegant features, the whimsical sophistication to his charmingly boyish smile. Writes about his voice, warm and textured like a country road washed gold in the light of an aging afternoon, and how she loses herself to it—how she loses herself, as a whole, to him.
(She writes because there is not much else that can be done, after all, when months have passed and she loves him no less than she did at the very start.)
-
“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). He doesn’t look up immediately, features concealed by a fringe of artfully-disheveled, earth-toned hair as he fiddles with a button on his shirt. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.
“Hi,” she replies, not allowing herself even the liberty of a steadying breath before she speaks. Her tone is stable, at least—disinterested, almost. It’s a façade, one that grates against the truth, the way her heart pounds ruthlessly against her breast.
In the short pause that follows, an eon’s worth of imagination tracks across her brain as she envisions how the next several seconds will transpire. What will his reaction be when he looks up, she thinks. Revulsion? Disinterest? Or, nothing at all—an aching emptiness that stings more than hatred itself?
He looks up, barely before her mind can—
…
A light sparks in his eyes, dull and heavy with palpable fatigue, when she steps forward, putting forth a valiant effort to avoid his gaze but ultimately finding herself unable to contend with his gravity. It’s hardly more than a flicker, so faint and subdued that for a brief moment she deludes herself into believing it had merely been a trick of the eye.
But the way he sits taller, more attentively, is no illusion, nor is the unmistakable brightness to his smile.
“Hello,” he greets her politely, and though his accent rests thick and weary on his tongue with evident exhaustion, his tone harbors a distinct interest it had lacked with the others.
Nerves flutter into her throat, strung taut like rubber bands. “Hello,” she returns, voice deceptively stable, expertly concealing the way her heart slams against her ribcage.
“How are you?” he asks, and she cannot help but to notice the way his Adam’s apple bobs in a fleeting gulp before he speaks, or the way his gaze has hardly strayed from her features since her turn had come—
…
“Hello,” he greets her, clipped and polite, as she steps forward. His voice is tight, accent thick and weary on his tongue with evident exhaustion, but his tone harbors a keen interest that it had lacked in his interactions with the others.
“Hi,” she returns, shyly, though her voice is deceptively stable, expertly concealing the bunch of nerves that flutters into her throat, strung taut like rubber bands.
“How are you?” he asks, and when she finally harvests the courage to lock eyes with him, she sees that his cheeks are flushed a warm rose, smile soft and shy like an autumn dawn. There is a spark in his eyes that had not been present before—faint, but simultaneously and uncharacteristically ardent. Heat pools in her core as she allows him to search her gaze, prying with a curious sort of yearning.
“Nervous,” she replies honestly, once she’s swallowed her surprise—too honestly, perhaps. The laugh that bubbles past her lips is a bit too shrill, a bit too loud, and far too annoying to be considered anything along the vein of attractive. She regrets opening her mouth before it has even died away into the surrounding hubbub.
She’s astonished when he giggles, too, high and deceptively shrill for his voice’s speaking register—
…
“Hello,” he says pleasantly (mechanically—he’s done this a thousand times before, it’s clear). His tone is clipped, polite in the most meticulously-crafted sense, but his voice is tight, accent resting thick and weary on his tongue. He’s exhausted, she can tell.
“Hi,” she replies. The word escapes her mouth too quickly, too loudly (too desperately), and it does nothing to mask the sledgehammer beat her heart pounds into her bones, hard and ruthless and fast. Her body quite nearly betrays her, then, with a visible cringe, but he’s already pressing onward with a conversation so repetitive that it has long been bled of any genuine warmth.
“How are you?” he asks. Something about his inflections sounds incredibly forced, strained far beyond the extent it was designed to ever be.
“Uh—” Nervous, she nearly blurts, but thinks better of it at the last possible instant and manages in a faltering stammer, “I—I’m...I’m pretty good, how, uh, how are you?”
“I’m doing well,” he says, simply. He’s donning that lovely smile, naturally, when she at last brings herself to look him directly in the face, but it is drawn and plastic—cold, in a sense, though it’s clear he tries his best to conceal it with a cheap veneer of warmth. The softness that remains in his eyes is genuine, at least, but it is buried deep, clouded by layers of plastic and apathy and pain, and something hot and sharp that feels much like resentment, sizzling in unyielding opposition against the watery blue of that unending sadness.
She sees then that she does not make the cut.
A violent shudder tears through her as she places the origami heart she had brought onto the table in front of him, fingers twitching as his hand brushes hers in the briefest of strokes when he picks it up, marker poised. Nausea settles into her stomach, cold and dense like stone and horror; the dam restraining an apocalyptic deluge of tears springs a catastrophic leak as callous reality collides with her psyche and she realizes that she will never be anything more than a stranger to him.
Terror, panic, and grief strike in pitiless tandem, and she flees before he can even finish writing, wading through a blur of tears and voices and smells and sounds and perplexed stares until she finds herself in the end stall of a public restroom, pouring wracking sobs into the flimsy embrace of single-ply toilet paper rougher than truth itself.
He does not see her; he does not care. His soul is closed to her, just as it is closed to the others, and just as it always shall be.
Why is she crying? Why is she disappointed? Why does her heart ache, bitter and acrid and sharp against her bones?
(What else could she possibly have been expecting?)
Humiliation burns on the back of her tongue like bile. She hasn’t left any sort of impression on him at all, she thinks dully, pitifully suppressing a hiccup (with only marginal success) when she hears the bathroom door creak open—or if she has, it isn’t a positive one. Hers will be a face that he remembers, perhaps, months down his timeline. But certainly not for any of the reasons she might ever have hoped.
He thinks she is phenomenally pathetic. You are phenomenally pathetic.
She is phenomenally pathetic—to such an absurd degree, in fact, that she cannot even manage to deafen herself entirely to the ludicrous whisper of distorted hope on the edge of her cortex, to the voice that whispers maybe.
My room is dimly lit, washed in a soft, warm glow by the lamp at my bedside. Over the low hum of the air conditioner, I can hear the irregular tapping of insects fruitlessly throwing themselves against my window, in desperate pursuit of a light they will never reach. The background rumble of the highway that runs past the neighborhood has died away, falling into silence alongside the crickets. Somewhere in the distance, an owl’s haunting call ripples across the chilled night air.
He or she is my only companion, aside from the insects. I’m the last person up, sitting in bed with my laptop, on a YouTube train to nowhere. Mom was in bed by nine, and knocked out hardly five minutes after. Kev had fallen asleep around midnight, I’m surmising—he’s not particularly loud or obnoxious for a younger brother, but somehow, I can always tell when he’s gone to bed. He just...feels different. He feels calmer, softer.
When I refresh YouTube and click on the “Trending” tab, Kingwrap’s newest video still dominates the category—8 million views, now, in a little over 12 hours. He truly is at the top of his game right now, I muse idly (not that it’s an epiphanic revelation), the top of his fame. He’s my age—six months older than me to the day, to be precise—and he’s already a self-made celebrity, raking in millions of dollars and at least as many (if not more) blindly-adoring fans. It’s hard to go anywhere, at least in the corners of the internet I frequent most, without somehow hearing about him.
And then there’s me—his generation, his age, and trapped in a completely different echelon. No job, no passion, no ambitions, no place or money of my own. Just depression and anxiety and cripplingly low self-esteem, and what I’m told is a grossly distorted self-image. I’ll never come close to his level of success, I realize, even if I had the energy to try. I don’t even have the innate privilege that comes with his gender on my side.
But for whatever reason, staring sightlessly at the video’s thumbnail, I don’t feel that aching but familiar sense of debilitating failure, the gnawing disgust with myself ignited by Kingwrap’s meteoric success. I don’t hear the whispers of a tsunami of negative self-dialogue, because in that moment, it truly strikes me that I am on my own journey. Kingwrap hasn’t lived my life, lived my trauma.
And even if he had, I’m not Kingwrap. I’m me. And I will blossom when I’m ready.
Maybe it’s the fact that it’s one in the morning that I have that realization—the fact that at one in the morning, everyone and their expectations of me are asleep, trapped to ricochet around their own dreams. Or (and perhaps this is more likely), maybe I’m just tired. Too tired to care. Too tired to hate myself for things that aren’t my fault. Tired because it’s one in the morning and I can’t sleep past sunrise.
I feel a sudden and unanticipated pang of empathy for Kingwrap—enslaved by his own fame, imprisoned by his own, obvious desire to just be enough. For all that I envy him, I feel his pain.
The air conditioner clicks off with a soft rumble. A particularly vehement tap against the window draws me from the recesses of my mind, and I settle further back into my pillows. The owl hoots softly in the distance.
