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thirty-nine
‘Good book?’
It’s six years ago again in my head. I’m instantly back there, in those woods with Eden. The minute the song starts, I’m hurtled back in time, six years ago.
I always think of that time.
It’s like I’ve never moved on from the days after I first met her.
In my head, we’re eternally sitting under those orange-red trees, in the quiet, filtered autumn sunshine. She is reading her book, I’m fiddling with my guitar or my violin, trying to pretend I’m writing a song, when in truth all I’m doing is looking at Eden and trying to control my teenage body and my swelling soul.
This time, I have a specific memory.
It was only a few weeks after we met, but it felt like I’d known her all my life.
We’d gotten into a routine: I would skip class and run to meet her in the woods. She was usually waiting for me. She wore baggy clothes and was skin and bones underneath, her black hair always getting in her face. But her eyes, those haunted honey eyes… They would light up the minute she saw me. Every single time. I would stumble and go weak in the knees.
Then we would sit and read and melt.
‘Is your book good?’ I asked her, because I had been watching her, and there had been a lot of staring at a specific page and sighing for the past five minutes.
‘Horrible,’ she had replied in that curt, sharp way of hers.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d love for it to be true,’ she had said, looking wistfully up at the sky through the lattice of tree branches. ‘A boy to worship me, to be my slave.’
“I do,” I had replied at once. ‘I am.’
She laughed as if I had said the most hilarious, weird thing in the world.
It was one hundred percent true, but I was too embarrassed to tell her. Also, that laugh. I couldn’t get enough of it. I closed my eyes and drank in the rare sound of pure happiness coming from her. I would make a fool of myself every single day just so she would laugh like that more often.
‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she told me once she was done laughing. ‘I don’t even know why I told you. These books I’m reading… I know it’s wrong. But I can’t stop.’
I raised an eyebrow at that.
‘Are you no longer reading classing English lit?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she replied, her cheeks turning scarlet. ‘I mean I am, but I’ve kind of finished it.’
‘You what?’
‘I read a lot of it, or all of it, and now I’ve moved on to more… contemporary authors, let’s say.’
She was hiding behind her hair again, and it was only because of that that I finally noticed the cover of the paperback she was reading. It had a couple on it, but the couple was… Let’s just say they were hugging a little bit too much and wearing a little bit too little.
On a bed.
