AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he murmured.
“There are people you would die for,” I said softly, repeating the words I’d thought before on the night that Jamie and I fell away together while the Killer Klowns played on in the background. “Oh, you would die for that person. But you would also live for them, too.”
“What?” His words were barely a whisper, his eyes gazing down at me as if somewhere inside of him, if only deep down on a soul level, he understood and could feel everything I was feeling.
You know me, Jamie.
“Don’t you remember what we shared?” I asked, hovering my lips over his without actually touching. “The night I tried to kill myself. No, not at Stony Point. The night with the pills and you showed up as an apparition and we fell away together.”
My hands snaked behind his back, and his hands lightly touched my sides.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “This is… this is…”
His words trailed off, as his hands pressed a little more firmly against my hips. We swayed together in a tiny circumference, barely moving at all.
“That night… though I didn’t even consciously understand it… we fell away together after you asked me to stay,” I said. “And I stayed for you. And you stayed for me. And we stayed together, navigating through the hardest pieces of our lives.”
“You became a writer. I can hear it in the way you speak these days,” he said, completely disregarding the message behind what I’d just said. “Also, I’ve seen your books. In the Powell’s off Hawthorne.”
“You’ve seen all of them. I know. You know I’m a young adult author, too. The way I know you work for Safeway and do home restoration on the side.”
“Huh. If this wasn’t you here in my apartment, Jems, I’d be pretty scared right now that someone knew those things about me.” We swayed a little more rhythmically now, as if dancing to an invisible song that never played. In my mind, “Ocean Breathes Salty” serenaded us, cocooning us in nostalgia from the past and the no longer existent present.
Jamie added, “Let me guess, someone in my family filled in your mom who told you?”
I shook my head. “Not exactly, no.”
“Then what, exactly?” Jamie’s arms moved up my sides, toward my chest, on the outside of my clothes. Then he stopped, an audible breath escaping his lips. “Jesus. I haven’t seen you in forever, and I’m practically goddamn groping you. What’s wrong with me, anyway?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. It hasn’t been forever. Not really.”
“Yeah, okay, whatever you say.”
We continued dancing, my head resting against his upper chest and neck, his arms finding a place around the small of my back. His face rested against the crowd of my head, leaning into each other now as if we’d never been apart for a single moment.
“God…” He let out a long sigh. “Your hair smells good.”
My lips curled. “My hair smells good? Well, thanks, I guess.”
“What? A guy can’t notice how his ex-girlfriend’s hair smells?”
“I’m not complaining. Except… well, speaking of that whole ex thing. We never officially broke up. We simply stopped talking.”
He laughed. “Yeah. True. Sorry, dear… if I can call a sort of ex-girlfriend a pet name since we never officially broke up… but breaking up and breaking apart seem to be the same thing, don’t they?”
“Do you ever wonder what our lives could be like in a different place? The version where I tried to kill myself and survived and you called me… or I called you…”
“And we always would have stayed in each other’s lives?”
“In the version where I could have been your eternal flame.”
“There was never a version where you weren’t,” he said.
We stopped swaying, and I looked up to meet his eyes. He gazed at me longingly, then added, “Sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me… I just—”
I pressed my lips to his. However, despite his admission, it seemed as though I kissed a man who was an empty shell. His lips simply there, nothing but a round, warm mouth which belonged to a man who had no intention of ever kissing me back.
Undeterred, I kissed him a second time, gently. Lingering against his lips. Then a third. He remained as he was, lifeless on the receiving end of that kiss. A flash of energy danced around us, massaging my face. A carry over from spirit energy, I imagined. Making me even more confident that everything we’d gone through had, in fact, been real.
