maybe that's what it means to be in love, to willingly be at the mercy of another person.
- tayari jones, an american marriage It starts in the summer, when cicadas sing at a fever pitch and the air sticks, thick as mosquito netting, against sweat-salted skin. It is in that haze they find themselves, alone when they shouldn’t be, out of place and awkward. But their manners fill the polite silence, a dance in a hospital waiting room: her, a chipped tooth and a bruised lip from an unfortunate dive in the family pool, him: a broken arm from “something stupid”.
They pass a note etched in shy smiles like a shared ice pack: I won’t tell if you won’t. And they don’t. That first summer unfurls like a peony, petal by petal they peel each other apart. It is a delicate undoing: to know someone down to their marrow. They don’t have to ask: are you lonely too? They smother it in kisses. For Bellamy: it is so close to the magic that pulls at the edges of her being, a reprieve from the burning in her bloodstream. The Marrows were rotten at their root and still they flowered. It soothes her, this fever that burns between them: sweet like spiked lemonade snuck at Founders Day that makes their head spin. They are drawn to the dramatics like moths, the word forbidden as binding as a spell: nobody can ever know that I love you. But “love” folds into the past tense. If it cannot be, it shouldn’t have tried in the first place. It becomes: Nobody can know that I tried to love you. When they look back: it is so achingly sweet. The saccharine hides the sour, the fissures of their own anxieties that in their childishness they exploit. When they get older, these habits grow teeth. It is hard to remember that they were still children when they met, that there was still that itch to pick a scab to see if it had scarred over. In the end, they remember things differently: She heard: “This will never work.” He remembers: “We want different things.” And still, they come back to one another — like birds that follow the same migratory patterns, like gravity, like soap bubbles circling the drain.
tldr: A surprisingly long-lasting, mutually destructive and bizarrely equally tender on again/off again/on again/off….“”romance”” for Bellamy Marrow (I don’t like to give my characters nice things). Are they technically exes? Sort of?? I honestly have no idea at this point. Said relationship probably looks better when viewing it through rose colored goggles which these two dummies have absolutely fused to their craniums. Leaving the rationale as to why they weren’t “suitable” for one another up in the air because I prefer to be collaborative, be it a divide of family values, good ol’ socioeconomic differences, deep-seated parental distrust, or whatever! Totally open for bellamy to have not been the one to do the dumping (tbqh it might be fun for someone to have told her that she’s not good enough). Faces are flexible but should be 30+ (as I’m still…..pretty flexible as to where Bellamy will land but probably around 30-32), and also gender is flexible as well, I just used ‘he’ as I had already made the graphics and was too lazy to redo!
