Page 12 of All That We Never Were

I got up, feeling like an asshole, and hugged her. Her body shook against mine and I closed my eyes, holding on, holding on even though it hurt, because I wasn’t about to say sorry for what I’d said, because I knew this was how it had to be.

Leah pulled away and wiped off her cheeks.

I stayed there beside her, my arms on the wooden railing around the porch, the damp night breeze blowing around me. I grabbed my notes.

“Next up.” I had her right where I wanted her: open right down the middle, shaking. Stripped of the armor she wore at all hours. “Why aren’t you painting?”

If I hadn’t seen so many different things in her eyes, I could have sifted through the parts I was dissecting to try and understand her––but I wasn’t there yet. “I can’t stand colors.”

“Why?” I whispered.

“Because they remind me of before, and of him.”

Douglas Jones. Always covered in paint, colors, life. I had a lot of questions left on the page. Why can’t you accept what happened? Why are you doing this to yourself? How long do you think you’ll be like this? I balled it up in my hand and slipped it into my pants pocket.

“Are you done?” she asked, uncertain.

“Yeah.” I lit another cigarette.

“I thought you quit.”

“I did. I don’t smoke. Not the way smokers do.”

She smiled. It was a timid, fleeting smile, but for a millisecond, it was there, illuminating her face, tensing her lips, just for me.

12

_________

Leah

I don’t remember when i fell in love with Axel. I don’t know if it was one day in particular or if the feeling was always there, asleep, until I grew up and became aware that it was love, wanting someone, yearning for a glance from him more than anything else in the world. Or at least, that’s what I thought when I was thirteen, when he was living in Brisbane with my brother. If he came to visit, I would spend the night before sleepless with butterflies in my stomach. I used to write his name in my day planner, talk to my friends about him, memorize his every gesture, as though they hid some important message. Later, when Axel came back and settled in Byron Bay, I started to love him down to my bones. All I needed was to have him close and let that feeling grow even as I kept silent, as though it were in a locked box where I protected it and nurtured it with my daydreams.

The first time he set eyes on one of my pictures, it was as if the world stopped, every blade of grass, every flap of a bird’s wings. I was breathless, looking out the window while he turned his head, keeping his eyes on the canvas. I had left it there after spending the morning painting that stretch of woods that grew behind our house, trying to follow my father’s instructions.

When my legs would obey me, I went outside.

“Did you do this?” he asked me.

“Yeah.” I looked at him warily. “It sucks.”

“It’s perfect. It’s…so different.”

I could feel myself blushing as I crossed my arms. “You’re kissing up to me.”

“I’m not either, damn it. Why would you think that?”

I hesitated, not taking my eyes off him.

“Because my father asked me to paint them,” I said, pointing at the trees, “and I did this, and they don’t look anything like them. It started out right, but then…then…”

“Then you did your own thing.”

“You think?”

He nodded before smiling at me. “Keep doing that.”

Axel praised that canvas full of lines that even I had struggled to understand, though, in some way I couldn’t explain, they fit, molded to each other, worked. His dirty blond hair shook in the breeze, and I felt the need to come up with the perfect mixture that would give me that tone: a base of ochre with a little brown, shadows at the roots, the sunlight sprinkled on the lightest tips as they curled softly. Later I would focus on his skin, its tan concealing the few freckles on his nose, his eyes almost closed, his smile mischievous, astute, but at the same time unworried, there in his disorder, in himself…

Source: www.allfreenovel.com