AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The only thing I could put together was this: the motel room was a dank, dark place where terrible things happened. Whatever those things were, Avery was responsible. Why else would she apologize? Thinking her name triggered another and then the pieces of what I was seeing started falling together. Not all of them, but enough to start hating her.
His name came into my mouth. "Jake?" I fell on him, pulling at his hands-the hands that had spent hundreds of hours holding me-and pressed them to my lips, feeling how cold they were.
All the strength was drained from my body. I let go of the room, willingly this time. I had to disappear and made myself shrink, keeping my grip firmly on him. If he was no more, I wouldn't be, either. I would take him with me into my tight, tiny ball, where neither of us would exist. Together.
+++
I'm shrugging, trying to disconnect myself from the picture in my head. "I had no practical experience. I mean, I'd left dozens of people, but I had never said goodbye to any of them. I never said hello, either."
My voice quavers. "I said hello to Jake every time I saw him and there was so much after those hellos. So many moments that changed me."
Can they understand? Do they know now that I would never hurt him?
Tight Bun Tara's eyebrows are drawn together as she studies my every word.
"Before Jake, I didn't know what love was beyond the songs and lyrics I had heard. It was this phantasmal thing: intangible and unreachable, a poetic dream of something higher that died with Romeo and Juliet."
I didn't know.
"Then, I met him and heard his music. I was afraid I would forget what it felt like, that I would never find it again.
"How was I supposed to know the 'hello's' were over? That it was time for goodbye?"
The blue interview room seems to flicker red while I ponder the limp word. Goodbye. It's insufficient. One word formed from two meant to imply that leaving someone is a good thing.
"Before I knew losing him was possible, he was gone. And I was . . . crushed."
+++
When I found myself again, I was holding his head in my lap. Tears were falling down my face, landing on his and he wasn't flinching or complaining, or trying to wipe them away and comfort me, the way he always did. He was just laying there with his eyes closed and the sight was so painful, I couldn't get past it to even think his name. Recognition was enough.
I caressed the stubble on his cheeks. My memory flooded with images of us; giggling at something stupid I did-the way he would cover his mouth when he tried not to laugh at me. The way he'd sometimes dance with me in the crowd while the other bands played. His pouty lips; the way they always twisted when he was really concentrating. The way they molded around my name.
He was just laying there in my lap. So still.
Too still.
He was supposed to be waking up in a few hours and packing his bags, heading for his future; a record deal, a recording studio. We were supposed to move to California and work and make our dreams come true. Jake had often told me that I had an eye for talent, so I planned to use that instinct to help him. I was gonna go to business school and learn how to be the bands' manager.
But none of that would happen now.
He was stuck. Still and cold in my lap. His eyelids weren't twitching as he dreamed.
His dreams were dead.
"I'll die. I'll die, too." I rocked him in my arms, feeling warmth run through me at the thought. I had to be wherever he was.
"If we start a fire, there'll be sprinklers and alarms." Her voice broke through my concentration.
The image of those words threw horrible pictures into my head. "What?"
Avery walked over and knelt down. She was in shorts and a t-shirt. No shoes. She set a hand over mine, both of us touching his chest. "I was only thinking out loud. We need to leave, though. We can't stay here."
"What?"
Acid burbled in my stomach. The idea of moving, talking, breathing, or having to do anything was absurd. It was over. Nothing came next. There was nothing left. There was no reason, just plain nothing.
Utterly lost, watching Avery's long hair as she wrapped it into a neat bun, I noted that her moves were kind of jerky, halting in a strange rhythm that matched the beat pumping from the radio on the nightstand. Was she dancing?
