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He looked at me sadly and rubbed his hand over his cheek. "Of course I do, Skylar. You played that song for us. That's our song, baby."
His memory made me cry. The stress that continued to build, the worry I always felt, came in a flood, and I broke down against his shoulder.
"Sssshhhh," Brandon's voice crooned as he wrapped an arm around me.
I hadn’t realized just how intensely frustrated I was until I'd started to play, allowing the emotion in the music to fill the void I'd created in order to manage the chaos of my life.
"I didn't––I don't––I don't know how––"
I couldn't get a full sentence out as sob after sob wracked through my chest.
Before I could try again, Brandon slipped one arm under my knees and another behind my back, lifting me easily off the piano bench and carrying me over to the couch. He sat down with me cradled on his lap, pressing me close enough so he could bury his face in my neck while his hand threaded into my hair.
"Hush," he said through a cracked voice. "I got you, baby."
The sound of the familiar nickname only made me cry harder, enough that it took me a few moments to realize that Brandon's shoulders were shaking. He was crying too.
"What if––" I hiccupped over my words––"what if we don't––don't know––how to do anything but hurt each other. Hurt ourselves?"
There it was: my greatest fear, spoken aloud. I didn't want to believe it, but as complications continued to mount, a part of me wondered if we'd ever be able to get back to the simplicity that marked our best times together. We both came from dysfunctional families, both children of addicts, of people who didn't know how to love properly. It was like Kieran said: we did this to ourselves. What if we couldn't break that cycle?
Brandon kept stroking my back, refusing to let me move while he kept his face buried in my neck. He was starting to shake slightly in my arms––clearly my fears were not unfounded. As if of their own accord, my hands wove themselves into his hair and started to stroke him back, hoping to calm him.
"That's not us," he murmured finally into my hair.
He hugged me even closer, refusing to let me go. The movement made my sore ribs hurt, but I didn't care. Nothing had ever felt as good as this––having him close again––and I clutched him just as tightly. We were buoys to each other in a storm of our own making.
"I had a dream," he whispered in my hair. "Another nightmare. But I heard the music and it calmed me down."
Slowly, we rocked each other through the darkness that threatened to consume us.
"That's not us," Brandon said again. "That's not us."
Eventually, we fell asleep again, entangled like that on the couch, and didn't wake up until the morning rays of sun blasted through the wide picture windows. I regained some faith that everything would work itself out if we just tried hard enough. But it wasn't until the next day, when I was back in my office, at my own job, that I realized I'd forgotten to tell him that I'd passed the bar exam. Not for the first time, another part of my life was being eclipsed by his.
~
