+ + + + +
"You should cook naked." Grace jumped onto the off-white countertop and watched as I started to cut the steak. "I mean, we have the whole night to ourselves. Mom and Dad are out for the night, so it's just me and you till morning."
"Not happening." I peeked up to catch her smiling. "I swear, you're such a pervert."
"That perfect ass, that perfect body, and even those perfect blue eyes. . .They make it hard not to be one." she laughed softly. "You know you love every last bit of it."
With the slightest roll of my eyes, an embarrassed smile began to spread across my face. It was hard to explain how Grace looking at me felt, honestly. The more she looked at me that way, the more I grew to enjoy it. When she gawked at me or told me how I looked, this feeling, this sensation would just kind of come over me. Those words and actions made me feel, I don't know, special?
Grace made me feel like I was one of a kind, that I meant something different to her than the other people in her life. She made me feel like I wasn't just another body, another burden to drag her down with. When I was with her, I felt like I was center of her attention. Even when she was busy, I was given the time of day. She looked me in the eyes and answered me. Every time.
As I continued to dice another part of the meat, her hands began to crawl around my stomach and interlace with each other as they united in the front. Her warmth began to spread through my back as she pulled herself closer and closer. She was so close that I could hear her soft breaths in my ear, breaths that were just as warm as her touch. This woman was infinite, there was nothing she couldn't do to me - or the world.
"So, I have to be perfect for you to love me?" I teased as her lips fell onto my shoulder.
"Nada." her hair continuously brushed against my shoulder while she shook her head. "You could be the devil herself and I would still love you. You could be pink and from mars, but I would still love you. I didn't fall in love with your ass or your body. I fell in love with Lynn Owens."
Slowly, Grace leaned to the left and began to pull me with her, then to the right. It hadn't been long until we were teetering from side to side like a pair of drunk idiots as her lips refused to leave my skin. Even as the both of us bounced from left to right, it was like we fell right into the eye of the hurricane. A still calmness, as though no movement existed at all, was the only thing in my mind. Just us in our own small world.
"I love you." she refused to let go.
"Are you okay?" I turned my head only to have her lips hit my cheek. "You seem really lovey tonight."
"I'm fine, babe. I'm actually in a really good mood right now." her lips traced the back of my neck until she met my other shoulder. "I just feel like if I don't tell you often enough, you're going to disappear one day. . .So, you better get used to it."
Grace was never super touchy-feely with me, even if she did show her affection a lot. More times than not, she tended to fall back onto her wider vocabulary to make me feel some way and when she needed to, she got more aggressive with her hands. I knew she loved me and that was all I cared about. She didn't have to be all over me at every moment of every day for me to understand that. That was something that went both ways, I think.
I set the knife down and turned within her grip until I was facing her. Just like always, she had my attention. I was always listening, always watching because I didn't want to miss a thing. There was some part of me that knew if I looked away, she could have very well been in another world - a world I wasn't allowed into.
"I'm not going anywhere, not until you want me gone." my hands shimmied themselves free and brought themselves around her neck with the length of my arms.
"So, you better get used to it."
+ + + + +
Blinking, I was splashed back into reality as the waves crashed roughly into the dock, hitting my legs and some of my arm. Why was I thinking about that right now? It was just like any other night we could've spent alone. Her parents let me come over and cook, we ate and did various things throughout the night, then we got a little intimate. It was a typical night between us, just a little louder than usual, so why had it come to mind?
Even I was able to see that I was obsessed with her, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that much. It also didn't take one to figure out that my every decision had her in mind, that everything seemed to make me think of her or something she did. Then, were all of those drugs for her, too? Did I do all of those drugs for her, or did I do them to run away and protect myself from reality, from pain and feeling?
"Would you still love this?" I shook my head before feeling a deprecating smirk fall across my face.
Even in her coma, had she thought about me? If she was in some little dream world, living her life, was she still thinking about me? Was I still in her life? There wasn't a night I didn't stare up at the roof and think about her, thinking about something we did or something she said. I would think and think, reminisce and reminisce ceaselessly until my eyes closed and I fell asleep. Then the nightmares followed.
Nightmares of Devin. Nightmares of Courtney. Nightmares of every last thing I could have done differently. The lines of heaven and hell, happiness and sadness had all been blurred. The thoughts of Grace made me happy, but unfailingly led to sadness. Thinking of her made me feel like I was in heaven, but soon led me to hell. If I tried to think of nothing at all, then I thought of was him or Courtney.
It was simple eventuality. Something sweet will always turn sour and that sour will eventually turn into something downright disgusting. The problem with eventuality is that it's never good. It can go from good to bad, but never bad to good. A cynic would probably say that the slow regression of humanity and society is the act of eventuality itself, that humanity has hit its limit and was now slowly declining.
". . .And now I think it's okay to talk to myself." I brushed my fingers through my hair. "I wish I could just go back. I'd make so many different choices. Starting with you."
"Doesn't everyone?" another spine suddenly rested against my own, his deep voice reverberating through it. "I wish I could go back and stop my mom from OD'ing. I wish I could go back and see my dad before he took off with everything. I wish I could go back and apologize to her. Shit, sometimes I wish I could go back and stop myself from being born."
"Didn't anyone ever teach you not to eavesdrop?" I gazed into the muddy water as I found my ears slightly perking up.
"Yeah, but she never said anything about listening to pretty girls talk to themselves." the back of his head lightly pressed against the crown of my own. "Boom. I win."
Just like a feather, the length of his hair tickled the nape of my neck as it draped into the back of my shirt. Quiet, I could feel every breath he took as his knuckle clacked against the wooden dock. Stationary, I could feel the warmth pour off of his back and onto mine. His silence and the words he spoke shared a lot of what I was feeling or had felt before, regret and self-hatred. Especially the last one. There were nights I went without sleep, thinking about just that. How much better everything would have been if I'd never existed at all.
I couldn't have cared less about the eavesdropping, it wasn't like I was trying to keep a secret to myself or talk to someone privately. What actually caught my ears was what he said about apologizing to her. My curiosity had been piqued, as the only known relationship that Jay ever had was when he was accused of kidnapping a fourteen-year-old girl. Turned out, she was a runaway who lied about her age, according to the media. She just happened to get lucky with the chosen guy.
"Who is 'her'?" I teased, turning my head slightly.
"Ana Reyes. Five-foot, a huge rack, and a bangin' body. . ." Jay answered after a small pause. "This tiny little Latina partied me under a table half the time, and still managed to carry me home after putting me on blast for being a lightweight. She had an attitude on her and loved throwing that mean fuckin' right of hers while yelling all kinds of shit in Spanish. She was crazy, and I fuckin' loved every bit of it.
What I really miss, though, is the way she put up with my crazy stunts and bullshit antics. Before I found music, she was the one who was there with and for me through all those dark nights. Not my parents, but her. I fucked it all up, though. I hurt her and there's nothing I can do to fix it now. Just like I can't fix my past or myself. . .and I just said way too much, didn't I?"
He really hadn't said too much at all. In fact, if I was in his position, I could have and I would have gone on for a day and a half listing everything I loved about Grace. The way Jay had been so open was endearing, at worst. Even if the way he described her made her sound like a beautiful, violent criminal who was notorious for having a few too many, the way he felt about her was thrown into the air for all eyes to see. Unafraid of the judgement he may have faced.
Maybe I was in the minority, but I found the way he could just explain his feelings like he did cute, sweet even. I had no idea what exactly happened between them or how much he hurt her, but if Jay repeated those words to her, she would have felt something. It wasn't even so much the words themselves as it was the tone and truth behind them. They were his honest feelings, feelings that would make her listen.
"Screw being a firecracker. She sounds like a cannon." I could feel the faint beginnings of a smile. "You can keep talking if you want. I'm so fucking tired of being in my own head right now that hearing this is kind of refreshing."
"That she was." he snickered.
A moment passed before I heard the sound of crackling plastic being ripped open, a sound that was different, but somehow faintly reminiscent. After the sounds of plastic had disappeared, his fist reached around and held out what looked like a handful of Oreos. A small laugh escaped as I raised my hands and watched as they fell into my palms. It wasn't so much the act of him dropping the junk food into my hands as it was the sheer randomness of it. When was the last time I even had junk food?
"Let's see. . .I grew up in this little part of Texas called Jefferson, I don't think there was more than twenty-five hundred people living there, either. It was pretty much school, homework, and then party. That was it, and that was how I met Ana. I got my ass handed to me in a fight and when I woke up, she was sitting there next to me." Jay was now clearly speaking through a smile. "I swear, I thought I was dreaming when I sat up and saw that she was still smaller than me. I started laughing and the next thing I knew, I was on my back with her standing over me. Maybe she was drunker than I thought, but I still got a faceful of her underwear that night. Nice and pink.
I think it was like a week later that we were 'official' or whatever you wanna to call it. What she and nobody else knew was that I'd been sleeping in our English teacher's barn. My mom had just OD'd a few months before, and I kept dodging the CPS officer. It was probably, like, two months later that I found Ana waiting in the barn. She said that she followed me back there the night before and wanted to tell her parents about it, to see if they could do something. Obviously I said no. I wasn't a fuckin' beggar, never would be and never will be."
He began to chew on the cookie as I took to internalizing everything he said. "Did she end up telling them?"
"Nah. I ended up fucking her." he snickered. "Right in that barn, that night. She told her parents the day after, though. As pissed as I was, they somehow managed to suck me into their fancy little world. I ended up living with them for a few years, and shit between me and Ana just got more and more serious. I played the nice little boy for a while, and Ana seemed happy enough being with some hopeless loser like me. Then she asked me why I never showed my feelings for her, why I never told her that I loved her.
I really did love her, a lot, and I tried my best to show it in the best way I knew how. But at the end of the day, I still couldn't. Hindsight says that I didn't let her close to me, because I was scared she would just up and leave me, too. Just like my mom and the new 'dad' I had every other week. I really wanted to, but I just couldn't let her all the way in. I was way too fucked up, probably still am."
He had it worse than me in some ways. I thought I had a mom that was too busy for me and a dad that went from being someone I went to for everything to disappearing all day, but at least they were around. My parents were around and not getting high when I needed them, unlike his, where his mother was getting high daily and brought men home to do it. He didn't even have a roof to live under because of her cruelty, because of her demons.
Yet I still talked about my parents the way I did, even when they put these clothes on my back? Even when they put food in my mouth? Even when they made sure I was healthy? I mean, didn't I have a right to be angry at my dad? Sure, but my mom was a different story, though. She was there, and even if it took her time, she grew to understand what I wanted and who I loved. Then, why was I, essentially, angry at her for someone else's actions? Why had I expected her to know something when I never said a word or even showed her my face?
"You should call her or something, you idiot." I nudged an elbow into him. "If it was that serious, then just tell her what you told me and I'm sure she'll understand."
". . .Either way, she's gonna have to wait for a little while." Jay stood up and turned, sitting back down next to me, just a few inches to my left.
"It's your turn. Tell me something about this girlfriend of yours."
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