“I wanted to tell you the night you snuck out to see me too,” he continues, his words rough and guttural, cutting mine off, his fingers abusing the pages of the book. “But you ran away from me. So I thought, I’ll tell her tomorrow. I’ll go to her in the morning and pull her out of class. I was even making plans and thinking of scenarios where you’d refuse me and I’d make you listen. I’d beg you to listen.” He swallows. “But then Mom called me. And I never got the chance. But I was going to take my chance tomorrow. I was going to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“That you’re that girl for me.”
“What girl?”
He licks his lips before saying, “The girl who haunts me.”
“I-I haunt you?”
He nods. “Yeah. You’re the girl who keeps me awake at night. The girl who makes me look out the window and count the stars in the sky. I not only count them. I look for patterns. I look for shapes that match the freckles on your nose and under your eyes. You’re the girl I wait for at midnight because she wants to go for a ride and she has a thing for speed. But she’s always late and when she does show up, I complain about it because I’m an asshole. But the truth is that you’re the girl I’d wait hours for. You’re the girl I’d wait and wait for just to get a glimpse of you in my leather jacket. Just to see what color lipstick you’re wearingand just to hear you say the weird fucking name of it in your sweet voice.
“You’re the girl whose notes I waited for like a junkie back at St. Mary’s. And some days you’d write me two notes and I’d be over the moon. But I’d hide it. I’d hide it because again, I’m an asshole. I’m an asshole addicted to your words. To your letters. That’s why I stole them. I stole your letters just so I could read them over and over and write you back. Just so I could write to you every night.
“You’re the girl, Salem, who makes me want,” he bites out, the tendons on his neck standing taut. “Iwant. So many things, you understand? And I don’t know what it means. I don’t fucking know. I don’t understand and it terrifies me. It shakes me right down to my soul but still I want to find out. I want to know. I want to know why it hurts to see you cry. Why it hurts when you’re in pain, when someone upsets you. Why the thought of you in that godforsaken place with barred windows makes me want to break something. Break the world. Why it makes me sick to my goddamn stomach, whenever I think of you walking away from me like you did that night. I want to know what it all means. Because I’ve never felt this way. I’ve never felt this… need. This craving. Not until you. Not until you walked up to me that night at the bar like a vision of some sort. A vision that haunts me. That haunts my body, my soul. My heart. So yeah, you haunt me, Salem.”
His eyes are glassy and shiny by the time he finishes and I’m a mess too.
I think my eyes reflect the same glow. The same brightness.
I think my heart is beating just as fast as his when I blurt out on a thready whisper, “I know what it means. I know why.”
His nostrils flare, his eyes sharp. “Why?”
I let go of the desk then.
I unclench my fingers from around the wood and bring my hands up. I put them both on his chest, flat and splayed.
And he shudders.
Violently.
I think he even rips the pages he was tormenting. I hear the sound and it echoes in my stomach.
In all the places that were left hollow in my body ever since the night when the cold and brutal snow came to the earth.
“The fact that you write letters to me every night. The fact that you stole and that you hurt when I hurt. The reason that I haunt you is because you haunt me too. You’ve been haunting me for eight years. And it only means one thing.”
Finally, he brings his hands away from the desk too and puts them on my face. He cradles my cheeks and tilts my neck up. “Sayit.”
I blink.
I take a deep breath and fist his t-shirt, before I reply, “It means that you love me.”
Again, a shudder goes through him.
But this one is even more violent. It’s an earthquake.
His whole body shakes. His eyelids flutter. His grip flexes.
It’s like an explosion inside his body.
The fall of a mountain inside his chest. The fall of a bridge, a building inside his gut.
The fall of him.
But it’s okay because I’m here to catch him.
