I turn to look at him, knowing that my eyes are streaming with all the tears I’ve been holding.
“A cup of tea. And a piece of cake. The lemon one that cook made this morning.” Because for the first time in forever, I’m hungry. And for the first time, I feel like I’ve shed one of the weights on my shoulders.
Isaac
Blair has told me that she sees things in colours. People’s moods, their feelings, their thoughts even. If she saw me now, running through a forest that’s perpetual and fierce, she’d see red. Maybe gold. Any colour she associates with temper and anger and impatience, because I know where he is.
My feet thump against the earth and I don’t feel the scratch of the branches that catch me as I run, because the hurt they cause is irrelevant to everything else.
I hear an owl, a scuffle in the undergrowth and my own breath as I run. I hear my heartbeat. It pounds in my chest, not just from the exercise, but from fear and elation and anger and hurt.
I’ve waited all week to be able to be here. A whole seven nights of lying there, thinking of all the things I need to say to the man who I have given too much of myself that I can never take back. I don’t want to take it back.
But I also want to kill him with my bare hands.
I know there are reasons for this; a list a mile long as to why he left the way he did and I understand that. But it still hurt. It’s still hurting.
The log cabin is set so far into the forest it looks like a piece of nature. I don’t slow my pace; the door is there and I need to see what’s beyond it, well aware that Ben might not be alive, that everything has been a lie and we have to carry on without him.
I shoulder check the door and it flies open. I hear a voice, and it’s mine, calling his name and all I hear back is an echo.
Everything stops. The silence makes it stop.
Ben should be here. This was where he had been. This was where he was hiding, in this cabin that smells of cedar and wine and aged whisky and cigarette smoke.
My heart pounds and aches and I want to lie down on the floor and cry, because if he’s not here then I don’t know where we go. What I should be and what I want to be are two different things and he helps make the choice easy for me and for Blair.
I sink to my knees. Despair and anger are cloaks I don’t wear, but here I am, dressed in them. The noise in my head and the hole in my chest push down on me hard enough to want to pray to some deity I’m not sure exists. I’m not the man I was before.
I don’t know who I can be because everything’s been rearranged and I can’t be what I was and now I’m kneeling there, waiting for something that isn’t going to happen when I see him.
Cigarette smokes fills the room. He’s bigger. His hair is long, beard thicker and ungroomed and there are lines on his face that weren’t there before. He’s shirtless and seeing this makes me stand up.
Seeing his face makes me move towards him. Hearing his voice makes me move faster. The pain that surfaces like a shark makes me hit him, my fist flying into his chest and he’s grabbing hold, shaking me while my fists pound.
The first hit isn’t what I expect. It’s to my side and I shift off balance, reacting on instinct rather than strategy because all I want to do is let him know with my fists that we’re hurting.
The punches are an exchange of something. Pain. Heat. Loss. I can’t quantify everything that needs to come out and be eradicated but it’s there. We end up holding each other, boxers in an unmarked ring, shouting words that can’t be ignored but I’ll never remember them, I just feel them fly free from my heart.
His closeness makes me breathe.
I hear his voice, start to make sense of what he’s saying. Apologies, questions, Blair’s name, so many times, Blair’s name and then it’s too much and my mouth’s on his because I don’t need words any more.
The kiss is violent. My hands are round his throat and one of his is on the back of my neck, clasping me to him. I feel his warmth and then his heartbeat. We pull away at any clothing, a mess of limbs and skin and hardness sinking onto the floor and I lose track of where we are and who we should be because this is passion. Need.
There’s no lube. There’s no time for asking questions because the answer is here in the palms of our hands, in our mouths as we taste and lick and suck and then in the little death, an ending so we can be reborn as both of us find an ecstasy that’s an elixir and a reason for being.
We’re alive. He’s alive.
We’re a crumpled heap on a wooden floor and it’s perfect.
“I’m sorry.” They’re his words.
“I know. So am I.”
We both breath.
“Blair. How’s Blair?” Ben’s words are muffled into my shoulder.
