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“Remember the night you asked me if I heard a song in my head when I met my soul mate, and I said yes?”
I nodded against her cheek.
“It was with you. And this was the song. Years ago.”
The notes milled around us.
“Tell me the story,” I whispered.
“I had just turned sixteen. You didn’t come to my birthday because you’d been in Melbourne with some friends, and you gave me a nib pen. You said it was so I could keep making magic.”
“I remember that.” I kissed her on the temple.
“I started hearing this song in my head just then. And I felt…I felt the impulse to tell you something important, but I couldn’t. I had a knot in my throat.”
“Babe.” I hugged her tighter.
“All you heard was ‘We all live in a yellow submarine,’ but for me it will always be the first time I said I love you looking into your eyes, even if I used other words to say it.”
My heart skipped a beat. And I realized we were a puzzle that had been put together with the passage of years. The difference was that Leah had always had all the pieces, and I had taken years to find them.
85
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Leah
I had always loved him. But I used to love him from afar, looking at him up on a pedestal, unable to touch him. The things we can’t reach or can’t have always acquire a certain added value, like those paintings no one pays attention to until they find out they’re by a famous artist of the day and cost a fortune. For years, I had idealized Axel, I knew that. That he bewitched me. That I worshipped the ground he walked on. That his approval every time I picked up a brush meant everything to me.
Not anymore. Now I had him in front of me and, in a strange way, only now was he flesh and blood to me. Real. So real. With his defects, his shadows, all his magnitude, a thousand times better and a thousand times more interesting than the perfect Axel who had lived in my head.
And loving him added a new dimension.
More shades. More colors. More everything.
86
_________
Axel
Maybe if the feelings leah stirred in me had been lukewarm, I could have avoided them, stopping it before it happened, keeping up a barrier. But no, they were like a hurricane that sweeps through and upturns everything. Like something long dormant that suddenly awakens. Like the apple they say you shouldn’t taste, but it’s so shiny and tempting and perfect. Like the unexpected.
I could say it was chance. That Leah wound up in my house. That I struggled to strip her bare layer by layer. That I fell in love with her after finding what I found, when all that was left was her skin against my fingers…
I could say that…
But I’d be lying.
87
_________
Leah
I had gotten two bs and an A on my last three exams, and I was excited when I got home. Axel hugged me and said we had to celebrate. It was a warm spring Friday. I put on a loose dress and sandals. We went to Nimbin, a suburb to the west of Byron Bay, an artists’ and ecologists’ refuge, the most alternative town in Australia, where all the hippies gathered.
We walked down the streets and looked at the colorful facades covered in drawings. We’d been walking a few minutes when Axel’s fingers started rubbing mine, and soon we were holding hands. Seeing his expression, I understood. He had decided to take me to eat somewhere where we wouldn’t have to worry about anything. And I liked that feeling of being able to walk hand in hand with him like a regular couple, which was just what I wanted us to be. I opened my mouth to tell him, but he guessed it.
