DREAMS of 18

by A. Kent, Saffron

  I’m asking about his dad. About Graham. I’m asking if he’s here, if he has finally come back for me.

  “You wanna come sit by the pool with me?” he responds instead, and my heart deflates.

  He’s not here.

  Not yet.

  I nod, giving him a brave smile. “Yeah.”

  We go around the house to the pool and sit on the edge, dangling our legs in the water. It feels like old times. The sun shining on us and the neighborhood all calm and quiet with the occasional whoosh of a car driving by.

  “He told me to come see you,” he says, and I whip my eyes over to him.

  Brian’s squinting at something in the water.

  “He did?”

  He nods slowly. “He said you needed me.” He swallows and glances at me. “He said you needed a friend right now.”

  My doomsday brain starts ticking. My anxious thoughts start to consume all my faith and my trust and everything in between.

  You know, when you suffer from anxiety, everything is a disaster. Everything is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

  You drown in them, in your bad thoughts. You try to swim across sometimes. You try to get to the shore, get to safety where you can distinguish between rational and irrational thoughts. What your gut feeling is and what is fake – a telling from your ill brain.

  But sometimes, it’s really hard. To swim, I mean. It’s exhausting. You wanna give up. It’s easy to give up.

  And for a second, I want to.

  I want to give up again and assume the worst. I want to lie down and let the anxiety take over and assume that Graham sent his son because he isn’t going to come himself.

  So I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I curl my fingers around the edge of the swimming pool and plant my butt on the cement.

  I’m not budging. I’m not giving up and taking the easy road. I’ve done that enough.

  I’m brave.

  “Yeah, I needed a friend,” I whisper to Brian when I open my eyes. “I was kinda… hurting.”

  “What happened?” he asks, all concerned.

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  Shoving a hand through his hair, he replies, “No. He called me from Denver. He said he had to do something. But he told me that you were gone and that he needed me to go see you. That’s all. I came as soon as I could.”

  Denver?

  “What’s he doing in Denver?” I think out loud.

  Brian shrugs. “I’ve got no clue. I’ve literally got no clue about anything right now.”

  Despite myself, his exasperation makes me chuckle. “It doesn’t matter what happened. I’m here and he’s not.”

  Not yet.

  He goes silent for a few moments.

  We watch the water together and I try not to cry, I try not to tear up at the pain in my chest when he says, “I should’ve asked you out.”

  “What?”

  He faces me, his features open and raw, kind of a younger version of Graham’s. Although Graham is a master of the blank expression. It’s very rare for him to show anything. Well, except the day he sent me away.

  That day he looked like he had nothing to live for.

  He looked like a man without hope.

  Now, Brian sighs next to me and I see his turbulent hazel eyes that remind me of his dad.

  “I should’ve asked you out long before that night. I should’ve made my move,” he says.

  I search his features. “Yeah, but it’s irrelevant now, right? Even if you did, you would’ve realized that you didn’t like me so it’s kinda moot. Isn’t it?”

  I was about to chuckle, but then he looks away and it hits me.

  Oh God.

  It fucking hits me, and momentarily, all the heartbreak, all the pain I’ve been feeling for the past week, gets buried down under this… thing that I’ve discovered.

  “You still… You still like me,” I breathe out, horrified.

  He clenches his jaw and that is such a perfect mimic of how Graham does it that I feel dazed. Both by what I’ve discovered and the fact that I love his dad.

  I see his dad in every move he makes and it’s gotten worse now, after living with Graham for weeks.

  Brian’s still looking away from me when I ask, “Why did you… Why did you say that you didn’t? That it was over.”

  Finally, he gives me his eyes, pain-riddled. “Because I hurt you. I hurt you in the worst way possible and I wanted to make up for it. I wanted you to be with him. I wanted you to be with someone you loved and I wanted you to do it without the guilt. And I wanted him to be with you. I hurt him a lot, too. I wanted to take care of him for once, like he took care of me.”

  “Brian, I-I don’t… know what to say.”

  He smiles sadly. “You don’t have to say anything. You love my dad and that’s okay. And at the end of the day, you’re right. Even if I did ask you out, you would’ve said no because you’ve always been in love with him. I just…”

  Brian completely faces me and says urgently, “Vi, I don’t know what happened. Between you and my dad. Why you’re here and he’s in Denver but Vi… he’s not cut out for this. He’s not a relationship kind of a guy and I don’t want you to –”

  I reach out and take his hand to make him stop. “He is cut out for this.”

  After that, there’s no talk of Graham.

  Except when Brian tells me not to say anything to him. Brian says it will hurt his dad and he’s done hurting the man who raised him over something that was never his to begin with.

  I don’t know how everything became so tangled and tragic. I don’t know how me loving one man turned into the pain of another guy but I promise Brian. I promise to never tell Graham about it.

  So at night when I go up to the roof, I write a wish, a dream I have for Brian. I wish he finds someone, someone who will take away his pain.

  I don’t want my best friend to hurt. Especially not from a lovesick heart.

  I know how that feels.

  I know how it aches and makes you cry while you sit on the roof of your house and watch the moon at midnight and wish for the man you love to come back.

  You wish for it so much that when it happens, you don’t believe it.

  And I don’t.

  When I hear a violent screeching of tires on the road and see someone jump out of a black truck, someone who doesn’t even wait to close the door behind him, I don’t believe what I’m seeing.

  I don’t believe that there’s a man out on the street. He’s tall and broad and his legs are planted wide.

  And as soon as he jumped out of his vehicle and took a few steps toward the driveway, he lifted his face and his eyes found me up here.

  Like he knew where to look already. He knew where to find me at this time of night.

  It would horrify me that a stranger is staring at me like that. It’s exactly what happened the night I lost control of my car.

  But it’s not a stranger.

  It’s him and it’s real.

  Because as soon as he found me, he didn’t wait for even a second. He started to stride toward me.

  He came back.

  Oh my God, he came back.

  I don’t even stop to think.

  I shove away the journal and flashlight from my lap and climb down from the roof so fast – faster than I’ve ever done before – that I can’t catch my breath.

  Only when my feet touch the ground do I take a deep breath, a deep, hiccupping breath because I can see him clearly.

  I can see his face under the tiny lights of the driveway.

  He’s breathing hard like me. That’s the first thing.

  Like, really hard.

  The kind of breaths you take when you break the surface after being underwater for a long time. The very first, sweet breaths of life.

  And then, there are his eyes.

  Gosh, his dark, dark eyes.

  They look haggard and tired and in s
ome major need of sleep, they’re bright. Brighter than these man-made, artificial lights in the driveway.

  Brighter than the moon I’ve been watching.

  “You could’ve fallen,” he says and I decide I was wrong.

  His voice is the most extraordinary thing about him right now.

  It’s barely there. It’s so low and thick and whatever is there, whatever sound is left inside his throat, is pure gravel.

  It makes my bare toes curl on the heated cement. “I’m used to it.”

  “You are, aren’t you?” He flicks his eyes over my shoulder to the tree for a second before focusing back on me. “That’s how I saw you, that first time. It was my first night here and I saw you grabbing hold of that branch and scaling it up to the roof. I’d never seen someone climb a tree so fast. I thought you were an intruder or something but then you sat down and took out your journal and started writing. I realized that you were the girl next door.”

  Girl next door.

  Yeah, that’s what I was and he saw me the same day I saw him: on my sixteenth birthday. It’s weird that I never asked him this. I never asked him exactly when he saw me.

  But now I know.

  I know that we saw each other the same day, maybe hours apart but we’ve had this obsession for exactly the same amount of time.

  Exactly the same, that’s what we are.

  Before I can form a word, he continues, “I’d look forward to that, you climbing up to the roof every night. In fact, that used to be the highlight of my day. Watching you in moonlight.”

  That pushes his chest to the extreme. That makes him punch his shirt – is it even buttoned correctly? – with a gusty breath as he shakes his head once. “I’ve beaten myself up a lot for that. Watching you, I mean.”

  I swallow, letting his gaze wash over me, letting him look at me as I look at him. As I still try to soak in the fact that he’s here.

  I know I’ve been saying this to people all along and I trusted that he’d come but God, it’s happening.

  And it feels so real and sharp and breathtaking.

  Maybe because he’s saying things, telling me things.

  He never says anything; I’m the one who does the talking, which is a surprise in itself, really. Because I don’t talk much with others.

  Only with him.

  I’m a different me only with him.

  “You’re here,” I whisper when he goes quiet.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  He swallows. “I came for you.”

  He came for me.

  His answer is more potent than anything else about him right now. More drastic and weightier.

  I have to close my eyes for a second and just let it sink in.

  Again, I knew that but still.

  He’s here for me.

  Not only that, but he’s saying the exact words to me that I said to him the first night I found him at the bar.

  I came for you.

  That’s what I said, and now he’s saying it back.

  When I open my eyes again, I notice that he’s come closer. He’s taken a few steps toward me and his focus is on my feet.

  I wiggle my toes, confused, and look at them myself. They seem perfectly okay to me, bare and small.

  “You left behind your nail polish,” he says.

  And I realize the reason for his focus. My colorless toenails.

  “I left behind a lot of things.”

  “You did,” he confirms.

  It’s true. I did. I did leave behind my journals, the dresses he bought me.

  My home.

  I left behind my home when he sent me away and I have to hear it from him. I have to hear it from his mouth. All the reasons why he sent me away and all the reasons why he’s back now.

  “Why?” I ask him again, my hands fisted in the hem of my red pajama bottoms. “Why are you here for me?”

  His chest shifts again and so does his jaw. He clenches it for a second before saying, “Because I fucked up.”

  I raise my chin. “Fucked up what?”

  He notices my defiance. He notices how tight I’m holding myself, and I am.

  I am holding myself tight.

  I am standing my ground. I am gluing my feet to my spot because damn it, I’m mad at him. I’m fucking furious at him.

  Yeah, I’ve been waiting for him. Yeah, I knew he’d come but he hurt me. He hurt me in the worst possible way and I’m not budging until he tells me everything in his own words.

  I’m not going to him. Not this time.

  He has to come to me.

  As if to say that he heard me, he takes another step toward me. He closes a little bit of the distance between us and my heart starts pounding.

  “My promise to you,” he rumbles.

  “What promise?” I try to inject some sternness in my tone.

  Another breath but this one is short. “That I’d keep you safe. I’d protect you. But I sent you away. I sent you back to the people, to the town who’ve always hurt you. And I hurt you myself in the process.”

  My eyes sting with tears.

  Bingo.

  He hurt me.

  He got that right. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him off the hook that easily.

  No. Not after what he did.

  I clench all my muscles, all of them, as I ask, “Why? Why did you send me away? And why did you send me away like that?”

  “Because I wanted you to hate me. I needed you to hate me. So I did the worst thing that I could think of,” he confesses with a penetrating stare.

  “You wanted me to hate you.”

  “Yes. I wanted you to stop loving me and hate me, instead.”

  “Why?” I ask again, probably for the third time.

  “Because I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was doing you a favor. I thought I was…”

  “You were what?”

  My words – as inconsequential as they might be – seem to have hit him somewhere. His gut, maybe. His chest, his heart, I don’t know. But they have hit his body and he flinches with the strike.

  He ducks his head down and scrubs his face with his palm. He looks even more tired now. More tired than when he arrived here a few minutes ago and my heart squeezes for him. God knows how many sleepless nights he’s seen.

  I haven’t slept either ever since we came back from Colorado.

  The strange thing is that I’ve never been a good sleeper until I slept in his bed, right next to him. And when he wasn’t there this past week, I became an insomniac again.

  I became a child of the moon again. Lonely and invisible.

  And I’m so mad at him, for giving me all the wonderful things and then, taking them away just like that.

  So fucking mad that I almost shout, “Tell me, Mr. Edwards. I wanna know why you want me to hate you. Why can’t I love you? What’s so awful about loving you?”

  At last, he lifts his face, all exhausted and sharply angled. “Because we come from different worlds, Violet.”

  “What?”

  He scoffs and looks at the sky for a second before saying in a hoarse tone, “Different worlds. We’re from different worlds, you and me.” He shakes his head. “My world is lonely. And I’ve always lived there. In a lonely world. I’ve always lived in a world where people leave. Where people break promises. Where people are selfish. Where no matter what you do, you always feel like you haven’t done enough, that you can’t do enough. That you’re not worthy. At least, not worthy enough for them to stay. That’s the world I live in. My mom left when I was five. I don’t even remember her. And as tragic as that was, it would’ve been okay if it was only my mother. But with her, my father left too. Of course, he was there. Physically. But he was never really there. He’d drink. He’d talk about my mother. He’d promise me that he’d stop but he’d pick up the bottle again the next day.

  “So I got used to that, you understand?
I got used to living in a lonely world. I got used to living in a world where people don’t mean what they say. I got used to cleaning up after my father. I got used to distracting myself with the first thing that came along: football. You asked me that, remember? If I wanted to be this big football player? The truth is that I never really liked football. I never really liked playing it. I was good at it. It was easy and it took me away from home. It gave me an escape and that was it. I never really cared beyond that because again, I got used to it. I got used to living in a world where I didn’t want anything other than that. Other than distractions and going through the motions and just making it to the next day until I could escape the town I was living in.

  “And then, my father died; cirrhosis, and that time finally came. I should’ve been ecstatic. I should’ve been happy. I mean, yeah it was devastating that my father died but by then, he was so checked out from the world that he was as good as dead for a long time anyway. But instead of being happy and relieved and ecstatic, I was something else. Do you want to know what I was?”

  My tears are blurring my vision now. I didn’t think I’d start crying so easily, that I’d give up so quickly and my heart would force me to go to him.

  But it’s happened.

  He sounds so lost and sad that I almost want him to stop talking. That I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him that everything will be okay, but I don’t.

  Because I think he needs this.

  He needs to say all these things. So I stand here, glued to my spot as before, not because I want to be away from him but because I want him to get this out.

  “What were you?” I whisper.

  He swallows again and replies, “Terrified. I was terrified.”

  Frowning, he pauses to gather all his thoughts. “I was scared that I was going to do the very thing that I wanted to do for the longest time: escape. I even had a scholarship for a college. And I wanted that scholarship. I worked hard for it. I wanted something that would take me away from the cabin, from my dad and when the time came for me to go, I was fucking shaking with fear.

  “But then, Brian happened. I was terrified about that too, about taking care of a baby. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t know if I could do it. But I did. In fact, I threw myself into it, into taking care of my kid. I became everything he wanted me to be. Everything he needed and I did it happily like every other parent, I imagine. It was all about him, his homework, his practice, his friends, his school, his needs, his wants. Everything was about him. I became his father and nothing else. Until you. Until I saw you and something happened to me.”