Bohdan never talked much before, but he certainly doesn’t talk much now.
I sit, propped up in our bed, the new seafoam-green sheets pooling around my legs—the navy ones are buried in the closet—a text on herbal remedies open against my knees instead of anything else I should be reading.
I have a perfect view from here of Bohdan stepping out of the shower in the en suite. He dries his hair, wincing only a little when the towel touches his head, and he moves through the prescription bottles on the counter in the order they sit.
The first antidepressant.
The extra-strength ibuprofen prescribed to him.
He skips over the triptans—a good sign his head might not be bothering him too much—but he does take a sleeping pill.
His eyes used to find me first in any room, but he sort of looks right through me—probably through everything, actually—and he drops to his side of the bed.
“Do you like them?” I ask, tugging on the sheets.
Bohdan blinks, scrubbing his face and wincing slightly when his fingertips graze the cut along his forehead, still raised and pink against usually golden skin. “Like what?”
“The sheets.” I tug the sheet up again, trying to smile.
His eyes skip over those, too, and he shrugs, dropping his head against the pillow. “Didn’t even notice them.”
“They sort of match the new plant in the windowsill.” I point half-heartedly towards the pothos draped across the ledge, leaves curled outwards, waiting for the morning sun.
He presses his eyes shut, fingers finding the bridge of his nose. “What plant?”
He’s not being rude, and even though he falls asleep right beside me, even though I watch his breathing, the way his eyes flick under his closed eyelids, tracking something that I hope might be a good dream, he’s just ... not really there anymore.
Bohdan
It’s like college in the best ways. Like any timebefore, really.
There’s no way we’re floating on the ocean somewhere between Livorno and Rome.
We’re somewhere else.
At least, I am.
Maybe I’m dreaming. It has to be a dream—because I’m in this stupid disco with my best friends, Sloan looking up at me, face soft underneath flashing lights that on any other day would send me to my knees, but I hardly see them tonight.
The only bright thing here is her. And despite everything I’ve done to her—everything I’m still capable of doing because I’ve got the truth she wants so desperately in my hands—there’s nothing about her that hurts me.
She’s the flash of blinding light, the smattering of colour across the walls and the floor and the entire world. The vibration of a too-loud bass in my chest, making my heart beat and keeping me alive.
That has to be psychosomatic—the power of whatever’s left of my brain coming in handy for once, so I can stare at her, see those freckles thrown into contrast and painted with vibrant, white light, and nothing about it can hurt me.
She holds up another pair of grey rubber loops that match the ones nestled in her ears. She smiles—it stretches wider across her face than anything I’ve seen in years when she reaches up to place them in mine, fingers whispering over my skin.
They trace my jawline, her thumb running over my bottom lip, pulling down slightly before she places her hand on my chest, right above my heart.
A blanket settles over everything. All that noise I couldn’t really hear anyway.
She rests her hand there, fingers tapping in time with the beat of my heart—one, two, one, two, one, two—before she slides it down, interlacing her fingers with mine. Back where they belong. The same hands that still hold my heart the way I used to hold hers, and I know I should let go, that I never should have gone along with it. But I don’t think my head’s ever felt clearer, and I follow the woman I’ve loved since she was an eighteen-year-old girl, and I let her drag me towards our best friends at the bar.
We do too many shots. We dance. We laugh too much and too loudly and for too long. I push her up against the wall in a random hallway just off the bar and kiss her with too many wandering hands and too much tongue and too many teeth coming down on her bottom lip.
And when they kick us out, our friends booing loudly and Talon proclaiming we ruined disco night with a smile bigger than any goal or championship ever produced—we go back to the suite, and I trace letters on her skin with my mouth that she’ll never be able to read to tell her how sorry I am and how much I still love her and always will.
The sun rises at some point, rays stretching across the gentle, rolling waves of the ocean, and the milky sky tries to tell me I stayed up too long and drank too much and I should know better, because I’m only going to cause myself pain.
