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Like right now. She’s here, but she’s not here.
We’re not riding anymore. She’s sitting next to me on the picnic table overlooking the lit-up town of Pleasantville, her long legs on the bench in front of her, her silky soft blonde hair glowing a pale gold in the moonlight, and her scent—peaches, freshly mowed grass and lemon zest—mixing perfectly with the scent of the redwoods all around us.
The town’s lights are reflected perfectly in her eyes like a blanket of fire, but I’ll never be able to figure out what she’d thinking no matter how hard I stare.
“You’re very quiet for a guy who wanted to talk,” she says in that melodic voice of hers. Only her lips moved, but it was still the most mesmerizing thing I’ve ever seen.
“Why’d you come on this ride with me?”
I have no idea why I asked that, and she’s startled enough by it to actually turn her head towards me. Her eyes aren’t just reflective glass anymore.
She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me. I could just look into her eyes in silence forever and be perfectly happy. What a stupid thing to think.
“I don’t know,” she finally says, and I once again realize just how much I actually appreciate her honesty.
I look at her sideways and grin. “Must mean something.”
“Who knows?” she says and looks at the town again.
Her voice is so gentle and quiet, so fragile. I’m afraid she’ll just float away if I press too hard. Or try to hold on too hard. But that’s not a new fear.
“You know how I helped your parents?” I say, but get interrupted by her turning sharply to glare at me.
“You saved their lives,” she says. “They’d be dead if you hadn’t been there to keep pressure on their wounds and wait for the paramedics to arrive. That’s probably the reason why I said yes to the ride tonight, I guess.”
There’s nothing fragile in her voice now. But she still doesn’t seem solid. Still feels like she could disappear at any moment.
“I think my life was saved that night too,” I say, not even completely sure where I’m going with this.
The glare is replaced by confusion as she looks at me.
“I never told you, but my parents were shot and killed when I was sixteen. I tried to save them too, but I couldn’t.”
My voice is flat and emotionless, but inside my chest there’s a hurricane of emotions. Or more like boiling lava ready to blow. I never talk about this. Not even to my best friend Edge whose parents died alongside mine that night.
“Your parents were shot too?” she asks using that fragile voice again.
I nod. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about though. I only had revenge to live for after that. And once that was done, I had nothing. So, I lived on the edge. Dangerously. Without caring about anything or anyone. Until I helped save your parents and saw your happiness.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if they died because of me,” she says.
The men who shot them were there to abduct Ariel and her sister. We saved them too, but something tells me she doesn’t consider that our greatest feat. That was keeping her parents alive.
“Anyway, I fought hard to come back again. To be a man with something to live for.”
She’s looking at me with a mixture of annoyance and fear now.
“Please don’t say that reason is me,” she whispers.
I chuckle even though she’s most definitely not joking. And her words weren’t the ones I wanted to hear.
“Maybe. And maybe you coming on this ride with me means you wouldn’t mind that at all.”
“Ruin, I… “
I stop her talking by laying a hand on her arm. She tenses but doesn’t recoil. Progress, I’d call that.
“That’s not what I wanted to talk about either,” I say.
