“What the actual fuck! You know who you’re talking to, right?” I move right into her space. She doesn't blanch at my harsh tone nor the way I step into her. She takes it and I'm beginning to see that it takes a lot more than that to bruise this woman, even on her worst day. Believe me I have been trying. Her lips turn into a hard line as something flickers through her eyes. Her hand reaches for mine, squeezing slightly, her eyes looking down at our interlocked flesh and bone before rising upto meet my puzzled gaze.
“You know, I’ll never ask you who gave you those scars. But I’m starting to see the damage they have done.” She looks down then towards my heart covered in a white tee and a road worn leather cut covering the ruined skin. It burns with just her gaze. Every single time a pair of eyes fasten on my body, the pain intensifies and the charred scars and red harshness with tints of purple felt visible. There is always pain, I live with it. Just like I live with the ugly and ruined skin that the world gaped at when they got a look. I have laid with fire and survived, but all they see is burnt, scared flesh and a man wearing a cut. They don'tsee the me that I was before the world turned me black.
Her eyes meet mine one more time.
“I also know that there are other scars that you think only you can see. Feel. Touch. For I think the same when I look at myself,”
she says, her eyes flickering over my body. I see that she can see past the ugly and that she doesn't feel sorry for me, as she holds the same pain. She has scars of her own and she knows all too well just how deep they go.
“I know that shit is locked up tight for a reason. I know it because I’m using the same locksmith for my own shit. And, 81, I know that there is only one other person in this fucked up world with the key to unlock that fucking lock.”
Her eyes move toward the door behind me. I watch her eyes change from the colour of beauty to a dark painful stare that hurt me so much it burnt my irises as I watch pain and fear ripple through her. Twisting, I look over my shoulder and past Timberly to where her gaze was, and it was staring at a car the same car I seen outside her house the other night with a man smoking in the front seat.
“There will always be that one that will always create more scars even when you thought you had escaped their toxic hell. They always find a way to seep back in.”
She gave me one last glimpse of that sweetness I knew lay beneath before it clouded back over with pain.
Anger.
Hate.
Fear.
“Just remember that no one’s too ruined for the right person.” Timberly’s sweet voice broke the stare off with Jade and whoever the fuck that was outside.
“Or the wrong one,” she says giving my hand another squeeze.
I grip the knife hanging from my belt, more for comfort then anything else. Knowing it is there and can easily be stabbed into the flesh of whoever that wank stain is out there that has placed such an overwhelming sense of pain laced with fear inside Jades eyes.
“Go out and have a smoke. Talk shit. Do whatever it is you do. I’ll get the flowers ready,” she says to me, her tone bitter as the walls go back up, and all her sass gone.
“That’s what you get for being MIA for days now. It’s called a cold shoulder.” Timberly whispers into my ear. I hear the giggle hiding inside her tone. “I give it all the time to that dick-head brother of yours.” She nudges my shoulder.
“Not smoking,” I reply to Jade. Fuck Timberly and her smart-ass shit.
I watch Jade’s hand pause around a bunch of long-stem iris. I have to admit little bird did have the most beautiful irises, I have seen in a very long time and I’ve been buying these on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis for years.
“Come again?” Timberly says too loud inside the small flower shop.
“You’re not smoking?” Jade asks me, her back toward me, her hands moving from the deep vibrant purple to the tiny buds of fluffy white.
“What? You lose a bet with Bray or something?” Timberly asks me.
she says more to herself than us.
“Giving it up,” I say as Timberly gapes at me her beautiful face looks contorted in shock. She knows I smoke to help with the hunger for a drug I will fight against the taste of forever.
“You’re giving up smoking?” Jade asks her tone lighter. I know she hates it and doesn't like the smell.
“Um, and taking up what?” I heard the little lady behind me bark out. She's afraid of me failing, I can hear it in her voice. This day was going from bad to fucking worse and all I want is to get the damn flowers and get to the cemetery.
“I’m just quitting. Thought it was about time I like did something good for me,”I say. As Jade turns, a small smile on her blush lips that makes my body beg to touch, to kiss, to taste. As she hands me the flowers, I slip my hand into the back pocket of my jeans pulling a Fifty dollar note from it and slapping it down on the counter.
“See you later, little bird,” I say winking at her. Turning to walk past Timberly my eyes not meeting hers but staying on the wank stain that still sat in his car across the street.
“Tim, get Ghost to watch that fucker out there will ya?” I yell out as I straddle my bike and roar off toward the one place that allows me to shed all of who I am and seep out all the fucked-up emotions and feelings into the cold dirt burying my secrets and regrets.
The grass is soft under my boots, as I walk toward the dark and cold resting place of a women who stole so much of me, that I find it hard to escape and even breathe on a daily basis. She had the greatest gift ever growing inside her and not even that could have made her stay. A baby, a life, a little piece of her and I… the best parts of us. I never got to hold him, I never got to kiss him. All I got was a photo of him lying dead after being removed from her charred body.
