After the End

by Alex Kidwell

  When I went to apologize, she held up her hand, stopping me. “Not me, you idiot. Brady. Ranting, getting mad, that’s what you do when you’re trying to move on. But you don’t get to sleep with someone and bail without so much as a phone call. That’s not grief, Quinn. That’s just being a giant dick.”

  She was right. I just wished she wasn’t.

  “I don’t know what to say to him,” I mumbled, staring at the ground like a scolded two-year-old. “It was really nice, Trace.” Tears pricked at my eyes again and I wrapped my arms around me, the weight of Aaron’s cardigan not nearly as comforting as it once had been. “The stupid thing is, he was great. And I want to call him, which just makes me feel like shit, because I shouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” she asked, going to me, hands rubbing comfortingly up and down my arms.

  “Because,” I answered, and I didn’t know how else to explain it. Because Brady was slim and golden and wonderful and nothing like what I’d had before. Because being with him had made parts of me, places in me, wake up to a world where everything I’d counted on was gone.

  Because for that little while, I hadn’t hurt. Hadn’t grieved, hadn’t missed him with that tight, pervasive ache.

  “Because,” I started again, voice breaking, “he’s not Aaron.”

  TRACY did leave, eventually. She hugged me, and we sat on my couch. I wrapped myself in Brady’s scarf and Aaron’s sweater. I sat and she sat and we watched mind-numbing television and I said, very softly, through snot and tears, “I’m sorry.”

  And she said, “I know,” and kissed my cheek. Because Tracy was my family, was half of the two I had left. My parents had died a long time ago. I knew grief. I knew loss. Except losing Aaron was less like losing a piece of me and more like waking up to find there was nothing of me left at all. My mom and dad had taken parts of my heart. Aaron, though, had simply blown me all to hell. But there was Tracy, still, and her wife, now my other sister. So she hugged me and forgave me and didn’t say a damn word when I pulled that borrowed cashmere around my neck and huddled in, chilled.

  Hours later, before she left, she pressed her lips to the top of my head, hand squeezing my own. “Call him,” she urged me, but I couldn’t.

  What would I say?

  I did, however, take the coward’s path and send a text. One text, after which I hid my phone away because if I didn’t see the accusing blinking light, I could pretend like it didn’t exist at all.

  I’m okay. Can’t deal.

  Two things that were so diametrically opposed I was half-surprised putting them in the same text hadn’t ripped apart some kind of space-time continuum. The thing was, they were also true. What we’d done had been okay in the best sense of the word. It’d been awakening and achingly gorgeous. When I closed my eyes, I could see tousled dark gold strands; I could taste sweet skin.

  Which led to the second half. I couldn’t deal. I could not fucking deal with a world where Brady existed next to me, where I dreamed of his lips. Where his voice made me shiver. Where his touch brought me to life. I could not deal because all of that okay meant Aaron was not. That he was gone, really gone. That my heart, instead of staying broken and bent, had somehow begun to beat again.

  “That was the deal,” I told Winston somberly. The cat had given up grumbling after Tracy, who was gone with not even a can of tuna left to console him. He’d curled up on my lap, head resting on my knee. One plump ear twitched back toward me at the sound of my voice, the first time I’d spoken since the door had shut behind her. “I was supposed to mourn him forever. Because I loved him, I was supposed to stay that way. Like the fairy tales, you know? I was supposed to wait.”

  Apparently Winston wasn’t very interested in what I had to say. He jumped lightly from the couch, stretched, and rumbled a yawn before he sashayed his way out of the room.

  “That was the deal,” I repeated, more softly. Brady’s scarf was lying against the sleeve of Aaron’s sweater, two blues, deep and dark against pristine sky.

  Because if I didn’t wait, if I didn’t love him, then what kind of person was I? What did my whole life mean if I wasn’t Aaron’s anymore? If he wasn’t mine?

  The days passed slowly. One by one, petals falling off a withering plant, until it was Thursday, until the week had left me without so much as a by-your-leave. I hadn’t called him. Tracy had, Annabeth told me, no recrimination in her gentle voice. Tracy had told him my head was up my ass. Brady apparently hadn’t disagreed. Nor could I, really.

  I sat and watched the sun make an arc across the wall, and I made promises to myself. When the light hit that crack, I would move. When it hit the doorway, when it slanted across the clock, when the fingers of golden-tinged pink, now, came to rest on the table, I would get up. I would re-engage the world.

  But the heaviness never left my limbs. I watched and each marker the sun passed would find me sitting, still. Only when the world had gone dark would I move, aching and slow, and stumble into my bed. The next day started all over again. So the week slipped past me, and I never realized until I woke up on Thursday to a steady drumming at my door.

  Somewhere along the line I’d showered, somewhere I’d eaten, but I couldn’t quite remember when those things had happened. If it’d been yesterday or three days ago or in fits and starts somewhere in between, I couldn’t have said. What I did know was that Brady’s scarf was still around me, and I clung to it as I wobbled to the door, looking beat up and as exhausted as if I’d fought a battle I couldn’t seem to win.

  Brady stood there, looking perfect, hair in place, jacket tight around himself. He stood and he looked at me; I blinked owlishly at him, confused. My brain was still in bed, still watching the sun wander across my walls, and it took me a long time to form words.

  “Why are you here?” My voice rasped, sandpaper against silk, and I scratched at the stubble on my chin.

  “You’re kind of an asshole” was his pronouncement, and he swept into the apartment past me, past any protests I had, none of which found voice.

  I frowned at the now empty hallway, then down at Winston, who was sitting next to me all solemn and fluffy. “He’s not wrong,” I told my cat. Winston meowed up at me.

  After getting myself together enough to shut the door, I followed after Brady to find the man in my kitchen, unloading a sack of groceries. A hanging bag was over the back of a nearby chair, and all at once I remembered tuxes and talk of a ball and rainstorms and soup. “Christ,” I mumbled, rubbing a hand across my face. “Your charity thing. Did I miss it?”

  Brady’s face was completely inscrutable as he sniffed the milk in my fridge. He pulled a disgusted face and proceeded to dump it out and replace it with a container from his groceries. “It’s tomorrow,” he said briskly.

  The coffee pot was put on, Brady moving around my kitchen like he owned it. Like he fit there, like he belonged, all his long limbs and graceful motions filling the place up. “Go put some clothes on,” he told me. “Shower, shave, whatever.”

  Again, a frown creased my forehead, and I glanced around at his whirlwind of movement, stupefied. “Why?” I managed. It was the only question I could think of to ask.

  Brady’s hands stilled on the box of rice before he determinedly put it away. “Why shower? Because you stink like you’ve been in bed for days, which, judging from how you look and the fact that you’ve completely stopped answering your phone or going to work, I assume is true.” He turned on me, in those perfectly polished boots, eyes holding mine.

  It was then I realized he wasn’t impassive. He wasn’t remote. He was hurting, he was angry, he was a thousand things all at once, all reflected in the wide brown depths of his eyes. There was gold in them too, I remembered. Beautiful gold flecks that lit up when I touched him, that caught the sun and made him shine.

  “Or are you asking why I bothered to show up when you so obviously don’t give a shit?” His voice was steady and low, but he’d balled up the cloth bag from the groceries in his hand, gripping it tig
htly. “Because honestly, Quinn, I don’t know if I can answer that. Maybe this is it. I’m just purging you out of my system.”

  A painful ache flared in my chest, and I found myself taking a step forward, searching his face. “Brady….” But I trailed off, because I still had the same problem as I’d had a week ago. What the hell did I say to him? “It’s just Aaron—”

  He cut me off. “I know,” he barked, arms folding tight across his chest, eyes dropped. “God, I know. You’re grieving. You’re confused. I get that, Quinn. I’m okay with that.”

  I shook my head. “Then why are you so angry?”

  “Because this isn’t grieving, you dick.” Brady’s lips were thinned out, color high on his cheeks. And even though it was confusing, even though I felt like I was fighting through a fog to understand what was happening, all I could really think was how stunning he was like this. How alive. How he made me feel alive. “Having sex and then disappearing, acting like I’m nothing? That’s not grief. That’s just a shitty thing to do.”

  “I didn’t know what to say.” It sounded so flat. Sighing, I rubbed a hand through my hair and went to find a coffee mug, desperate for something to jolt me awake.

  “You could have said that.” His voice was soft, that harsh, angry edge fading. “Jesus, Quinn, you could have told me you were upset. That you thought it was too much. I could understand any of that. What I don’t get is how you could just write me off, like I didn’t even matter. I really thought—”

  I knew what he didn’t say, what was in the heavy sigh the words trailed off to. He’d thought we had something. Something tentative and new. Something born in borrowed scarves and peach pie. Something that meant hands and kisses and his mouth around me, my touch sliding along his skin. He’d thought we were more.

  So had I. We were. That was the problem.

  “I’m sorry.” It didn’t seem like enough, but I said it, fingers wrapping gratefully around the mug of coffee. “Jesus, I’m just so fucked up.” Swallowing hard, I forced myself to meet his eyes, to see the pain there, the hope, the confused anger. I’d done that. I’d been selfish and I’d caused that. The least I could do was look at it.

  “You told me once I kept jumping to the end.” I took a sip of the coffee, needing that hit of caffeine. “I do that. I get all wrapped up in my own head and I don’t look at where you are, where I am, what’s actually happening. It was just… I really liked what we did, Brady. And that scared me. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t want to be around you or crave touching you. I shouldn’t feel the way you make me.”

  “Why?” he asked, frustrated, reaching out to cup my cheek, to push back my hair. His fingertips touched the scarf I was wearing. “Why do you keep freezing yourself off?”

  “Because I loved him.” My jaw tightened and I shook my head, wanting both to be closer to him and to shove him away. “I’m supposed to wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Brady gripped both of my shoulders, holding me there like he could somehow make himself see what I did. “He’s gone, Quinn. He’s never going to exist outside of the two of you, together, but you have to. You lived. And I know that sucks sometimes. I know you feel guilty you did, but the fact is, you can’t wait for him. You can’t stay there where he is. Every breath you take, every moment, it’s going to push you further down the road from where he is. He lived his whole life with you. He was yours until the day he died. But that’s his story. Not yours.”

  I’d started crying somewhere in there. Angry tears, horrible, wrenching sobs I kept behind tightly pressed lips, behind a throat that wouldn’t give them voice. Shaking, I jerked myself away from him. “I’m not just going to move on and forget him.”

  “No one is asking you to!” Brady threw his hands up, pacing away and then back to me. “God, Quinn. It’s like you died, too. It’s like you wrapped yourself in his grave and you hunkered down and that’s it. And fine, okay, you’re grieving. I’m not going to stop you, I’m not going to push you. But there’s a difference between going through grief and wallowing in it. Letting yourself become less of a person. You treated me like crap and you couldn’t even see that.”

  “I lost everything.” I was yelling, now. I couldn’t remember ever yelling about this, ever screaming it out. My sorrow had been quiet and contained, had existed inside my head, inside the walls of my own mind. Now Brady was yanking at the scabs, making me bleed, and I lashed out. “You have no fucking idea. You just walked in with your perfect hair and your smile and some stupid peach pie and, what, I’m supposed to forget? I’m just magically supposed to stop hurting? Brady Banner’s perfect dick going to cure me of my grief, is that it?”

  “No, you idiot.”

  He moved forward, those beautiful brown eyes snapping, mouth tight and tense against more words. He was holding back. I didn’t have that restraint. It was like something in me had been torn open, some dark, aching wound had been forced to the light. God, it hurt. I was raw, a nerve exposed, because he wasn’t backing away. That much pain, that much grief, people tended to turn from me, to hide from the sight of it. Like I was a reminder of what would happen to us all, of the fragile, horrible possibilities. But Brady was looking at me, seeing me, all the hurting parts of me.

  “I hate you,” I whispered, but he didn’t flinch away. “I hate you so much.”

  “No, you don’t.” There was hurt in his gaze, in the lines of his face, but he held firm. His fingertips went out, touching the soft fabric of the scarf around my neck. “I don’t believe that.”

  “I do hate you.” Moving a step closer, I was shuddering, almost sobbing. “Before I met you, I didn’t care. I was numb, do you understand that? I was locked up and it was fine. But you came in and I wanted.”

  “Why is that so bad?” Agony, then, in his voice, rounded out and barely breaking through. “God, Quinn, why won’t you just listen to me?”

  “Because he’s gone!” Why was this so hard? It should be the easiest equation in the world. It was me and Aaron. If you subtracted Aaron from that, it was only me. It should only be me.

  Brady growled in frustration. “And you’re still here! Goddamn it, Quinn, no one—” He grasped my arms, ducking to meet my eyes. Forcing me to see, like he did, to look, to connect. “No one is telling you to forget him. But if you stop living, then what the fuck is the point of breathing in and out?”

  “I don’t know!”

  And with that he kissed me, hard, angry, our lips bruising together with a force I didn’t even know I was capable of. I grabbed him and hauled him in when he dared to pull back; his hands wound up in my hair, and my back hit the wall with a thud. The fury, though, faded. Our lips softened, his tongue sought mine, and instead of grabbing hold I just melted into him.

  “I don’t know,” I repeated, tears salting the taste of him.

  Sighing softly, Brady hooked me into his arms, chin resting against my shoulder. “Then you’ve got to figure that out, sweetheart.” He kissed my neck, my jaw, nudging his forehead against my temple. “Because I can’t make you live. I can’t push you into accepting your life. Neither can Tracy or Anna or, shit, anyone but you. All I can do is tell you there’s something more for you than pushing everyone away to sit here with ghosts.”

  I didn’t want to acknowledge that. For two years I’d stayed in my own head. I’d lived with the memories of what we’d had. What I’d once been. To accept even the smallest possibility of something more, of something after, was a betrayal. It had to be.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I finally said, letting out a slow breath, hitching myself further into his arms. “And I really don’t hate you. I don’t.”

  “I know,” he murmured. Just like Tracy. Accepting my apology, embracing me again, because sometimes I fucked up. Because family let you do that.

  “I miss him, all the time,” I choked. Pulling back slightly, I gave him a rueful twist of my lips, an almost smile that was too shaky to be full. “But I missed you too. And that’s scary.”

  “It
is for me too,” he admitted, rubbing a thumb along my cheek. “It’s scary that I need you so much, and I know I can’t have all of you. That you’re still working through shit.” Brady kissed away the tears on my cheeks before wrapping me in a hug. “Just don’t shut me out again. Even if it’s terrifying, even if you’re so upset you can’t move, please, just let me in.”

  After a moment I nodded, relief hitting me. I clung to him as tightly as he was holding me, pressing my face into his neck to kiss him there, to whisper a “Thank you” into his skin.

  “What for?” he asked lowly.

  I kissed him again instead of answering, gentle and sweet, bumping our noses together when we broke apart. “You never told me why you came.”

  A little smile touched his lips. “Because you needed someone to.”

  Huffing a laugh, I reached out, pushing some of his wayward curls off his forehead. “Thank you for not giving up,” I clarified.

  He wrinkled his nose. “Don’t thank me for that. I… well, I don’t know what we are, but I care about you, Quinn. I think you care about me, too.”

  “I do.” There was a lurch in my stomach as I said it, a guilty twist, but it was true. And I had spent the last several days hiding from it without much success. There was relief in Brady’s eyes when I finally let the words exist, when I gave them form and substance. Like he’d hoped but wasn’t sure.

  “So, we don’t give up.” He shrugged, taking my hand in his. “Even when I want to shout. Even when it’s hard.”

  “No giving up.” Gently I kissed his cheek. “I can do that.”

  After a few moments, he pulled away. “I have to get back to work. I’m swamped with last-minute stuff and I have to spend the night cooking and—” He waved his hand, filling in the rest with an eye roll. “A thousand things.”

  “Can I still come?” I asked, eyes going to the bag lying across my chair, the tux inside.