AllFreeNovel
Share Us
42 SHE CALLS ME BACK
THEN
RIGGINS
The entire world feels bleak and empty, the longing for a drink creeping through my veins. And then I feel it, her small hand sliding into mine, the familiar smell of brown sugar and vanilla lifting on the breeze.
It’s a ghost haunting me, but then the hand squeezes, another hand resting on my bicep, and I give into the urge to look down.
And there she is. Still short as fuck, but her hair is a bit longer, with a bit of a wave to it as it brushes past her shoulders with pretty highlights woven through it. Her blue eyes are looking at me, wide and calming, the way I always felt when she was near, her full pink lips pressed together.
She looks older, but she doesn’t. She looks changed but wholly the same.
“Stell,” I whisper quietly, worried she might be a mirage, something my sick mind manufactured to further torture me, and worried if anyone in the area sees me talking to the air, it will be the breaking point. Everyone is already always on edge around me, walking on eggshells.
“Riggs,” she whispers, her hand tightening in mine, shifting until our fingers are twined the way we always used to hold hands.
I decide to say fuck it, to give into the delusion. It hurts too much not to, and there’s enough fucked up bullshit in my life right now not to take this moment of peace my mind is offering and succumb to it.
“You came.”
“I loved him, too,” she says simply.
And she did.
She loved my dad more than I did sometimes, much more understanding when his drinking overtook him after my mom died. When I would be angry he was the way he was, she’d always tell me to give him grace, to find understanding.
And when we were finally together, she’d always tell me,imagine if you lost me, Riggins. How would you deal?
The irony of that never ceases to amuse me in a sick and twisted way. The way I lost her and spiraled, became my father.
My father, who I’m burying today.
Nearly ten years after my mother left, after ten years of drinking to forget his soulmate was gone from this world, he drank himself to death.
I can only hope that now he’s at peace and by my mother’s side. I hope she forgives him for leaving me to fend for myself.
I forgive him.
I get it.
But now… now my person is here. She’s here after over two years of not talking to me, of sending back my letters and ignoring my calls and never coming back for me. Two years after she disappeared randomly in Vegas, not a trace or a note.
She’s here, holding my hand.
“Please stay with me,” I beg without thinking, without altering my response to sound better or less desperate or more casual. She must see something in my face, the pain there or the watering of my eyes as I once again fight tears, or maybe the way my hand tightens on hers because instantly she nods.
“Of course, Riggs. Of course.”
And she does.
She never lets go of my hand, not as I greet fellow mourners and accept condolences I don’t feel I deserve from people who wrote my father off years ago. Not as I toss a handful of dirt onto his coffin as it’s lowered.
She never does. Even when I loosen my grip, she’s there, holding firm.
And when everyone is gone, when it’s just us in a graveyard, watching an industrial machine scoop dirt onto the last remaining physical vestiges of my father, she turns to me, staring and waiting for me to say something. Anything, I think.
I break contact with the quickly disappearing coffin and look at her.
