Page 69 of Was I Ever Here

Chapter 38

Sunny

MymindbroodsasI sit quietly beside Byzantine in his parked car, the sunrise still a few minutes away. He’s been making the detour to the flower fields at least once a week since that first time. Something about the sunrise and the quietness of dawn seems to calm him. Calm me.

Well, usually.

I’m distracted. And it’s not even because of the obvious issue of Byzantine killing my attacker last week. Shamefully, I haven’t really dwelled much on it since. Something else is taking up all the space in my mind.

The countdown to my sister’s death has officially started. Like a dark mark. An ink stain seeping onto the calendar page anytime I catch a glimpse. Even saying the date out loud is like a small death itself. Five years. I should be over it by now. Right? Or halfway healed at least.

But grief is tattooed deep into my skin.

It’s not only her absence I’m grieving. I’m also mourning my own death. I was ripped in half when she left me here. Half of me, simply gone.

Not to mention the guilt I still carry with me. Sometimes it becomes unbearable to even cope. So I try to forget. Gin tastes better going down than the shame of not protecting her. The guilt of leaving her to die alone.

Cold and wet.

The twisted irony isn’t lost on me. The cruel joke weaved into the very fabric of that day. I was the twin who romanticized death. I was the one who felt too much. Who wrote morose poems about my funeral. But she’s the twin who died, like a sick cosmic joke. As if finding her dead would somehow make me want to embrace life. To survive for River in her memory. Instead, it only heightened the feeling. The urge to end it all. She was the lucky one.

And I’m still here. Barely living. Barely holding on.

“I can hear you think from all the way over here,” Byzantine remarks.

My head rests on the car seat behind me and I let it fall to the side as I give him a droll look. “I can’t help it.”

“What’s on your mind?” he asks.

“Everything,” I answer.

“Right.”

His hand falls palm up on my thigh but he says nothing else. He just gives his fingers a small wiggle as if to saywell?So I lace my fingers into his. He brings my hand up to his mouth and presses his lips to my skin and my heart tugs a thousand million ways.

Jesus, I must be starved for affection.

Or maybe it’s him. Don’t I already know the answer? It’s always him. He places our clasped hands on his thigh, his thumbs tracing a slow pattern on the top of my hand as he looks off into the distance, the first rays finally stretching over the field facing us.

“Come away with me,” Byzantine says in a quick hush as if he was nervous to let the words out.

I let out a small laugh. “What do you mean, like on a trip?”

“Yeah. Next week,” he replies.

A thrill zips through me but it evaporates quickly. “A whole week?”

“Why not?” He hasn’t looked me in the eyes since he asked.

“I mean, I would love to Byzantine, but I can’t afford to take time off work like that…” Or what it would mean to spend a whole week with Byzantine, just him and I.

“You don’t need to think about that.”

I try to take my hand back but he holds on to it.

“What does that even mean?” I ask, my laugh full of nerves and I kick myself for how it sounds.

Finally, he looks at me, his eyes a heady force gluing me to the seat.

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