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“Luke.”
She came again, this time pulling me over the edge with her.
For a moment, I felt weightless, free falling as I collapsed on top of Cindy. I don’t know how long it took before I came back to the moment, but when I finally did, my face was buried in her neck, and I inhaled the scent of clean sweat, sex, and cherry shampoo.
Eventually, we shifted so that I was on my back with one arm propped under my head and Cindy was nearly asleep on my shoulder.
I racked my brain for something to say. Something to encapsulate this moment, how profound and perfect it was. How everything had changed, yet our relationship was stronger than ever. But my mind was blank.
Cindy spoke first.
“I hope you like this mattress,” she whispered. “’Cause you’re never going to be able to return it. It’s going to smell like sex forever.”
I chuckled a little, not caring about that at all. I kissed her forehead. I held her close and closed my eyes, feeling her warm breath on my oversensitive skin, until we got cold and decided to pry ourselves out of bed and search for our clothes. We found my stuff pretty quickly, but Cindy’s clothes were scattered all over the place.
We’d found everything but her jacket, which was tossed over one of the cardboard boxes. As she put it back on, something fell out of the pocket. It didn’t look like much, maybe a receipt or something, but Cindy chased after it like it was something precious.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Don’t bullshit me. It’s clearly not nothing.”
She sighed. “It’s something else we can probably burn right next to your index cards.”
“That serious, huh?”
“Yeah. It’s just as serious. But it’s also fucking embarrassing.”
“Well, now you have to tell me what it is,” I said with a nervous laugh.
She shook her head and looked down at the paper. I could see that it was old, worn, and had clearly been unfolded and refolded several times. There were some doodles in the corners. It reminded me of a note a high schooler might shove in a friend’s locker.
“It’s my Death Note.”
“What the fuck is a Death Note? Cindy, is everything okay?” I asked, panicked.
“Everything’s fine. I’m not dying,” she explained. “It was something I wrote before I left for the military. Some guidance counselor recommended it. It’s a letter that was only supposed to be read if I died. Hence, Death Note.”
“That’s morbid.”
Though that was Cindy’s fucked-up sense of humor. I wasn’t really surprised.
“You, um, you come up quite a bit in this note,” she admitted. “I was actually going to give it to you for safekeeping while I was away, but I never got the chance.”
“Because you left without saying goodbye.”
“You know I couldn’t face you, Luke. So I gave the note to Stephanie instead and, of course, she opened it and read it fifteen thousand times.”
“Can I read it?” I wondered. “I mean, someday. It doesn’t have to be right now.”
She slowly met my eyes and, surprisingly, she nodded.
“Someday.”
I took the note from her and led her back into the bedroom where, in one of my moving boxes, was a locked box full of important documents. I opened the box and added Cindy’s note to the pile before locking it again.
“You’re really not going to look at it until I give you the okay?” she asked.
