by Ace Gray
“I told you I didn’t communicate well,” he murmurs.
“You didn’t communicate with me at all!” I throw my hands up.
“I started to look forward to your texts. I started to hope it was your name on the screen. And I knew that couldn’t be the feeling I had for someone who was engaged. Not even if you were becoming my best friend. How do you say that to someone? How do you say that to you, Mina?” His voice rises to match mine. “If you step back you know I’m fucking right on this.”
I blow out a breath that rustles the few stray strands of hair hanging in my face. I never thought that was why he said it. Not in a million years would he hide something. So I took it at face value. I was too much. Too over the top, too in his business to be his friend. Didn’t his friendship always seem too good to be true anyway? But if there was another reason…
“You shut me out after that,” I say softly.
“I tried not to.”
“There was the night at the taco stand—”
“That was work and I told you that. I apologized.”
He hadn’t. Not really. He’d said a lot but sorry wasn’t one of those things.
“You didn’t apologize, you gave me reasons that I had to sit and take it. You justified your actions to yourself, James, you didn’t once apologize to me. Not really. Nor even when I, more than anyone, knew what it meant to be disregarded by you for a phone.”
Silence blankets the room. Once or twice I think he’s going to start but I can’t bring myself to look at him so I’m not one hundred percent sure. Instead, I’m left to sit with my thoughts. There’s a small part of me that wants to pick apart those days, those nights, and find evidence for his claim. His claim that he felt too much for me. The vast majority of me wants to get up and walk away. Maybe even pat my own back for not slapping him this time.
But then the grind of metal against glass barely precedes the familiar pop and fizz of a bottle cap opening.
My eyes dart for his only to find them downcast as he reaches for the snifters I grabbed earlier and pours. His long eyelashes seem to brush against his cheekbones, his face still holds that complex look of understanding and bewilderment that only James Larrabee seems to have mastered. Not until he pours two glasses, sets the bottle down, and pushes one short stem toward me, does he look up, meeting my eyes unwavering.
“Will you share this beer with me?” he asks, simple and straightforward.
I roll my eyes but reach for the snifter and take a sip all the same. I hear the soft, breathy laugh that accompanies his crooked smile before I look up to find it. My favorite sound on earth has not changed, nor has the beaming smile that follows it.
When I don’t answer right away, he shifts in his seat and grabs something from his back pocket. The scratch of plastic against wood makes my heart flutter a moment before I look down to find his phone. Pushed across the table by one of his long fingers.
An apology the way only James knows how to give it, laid at my feet.
I sigh and sip again.
The beer is everything we were. Tart and citrus. A touch of honey, floral, and a bit of farmhouse funk. So good, but so complex. Something not everyone can understand. And some bottles turn. Now—even now sitting quietly across the table from each other—I can’t decide which flavor I taste first, which lingers. Or if the bottle has spoiled.
“What do you want from me, James?” I take another sip of beer then press the bulb of the glass to my temple.
“Another chance,” he answers as if it’s an obvious answer. An easy answer.
“A chance at what?” I arch my eyebrows.
“What do you mean, what? I kissed you.”
The memory is a backhand and my eyes dart to his lips betraying me. He wets them knowing full well what he’s doing. The effect isn’t lost on me either. I can’t speak, and it’s not because I have nothing to say, it’s because my throat is bone dry. With want, with hate, with years of unspoken words.
With the ash of letters.
I shoot up and shove my glass back across the table so hard that it wheels on its ring. It’s a self-preservation thing. Run! Get away! Don’t die all over again… A million things—answers, reasons no, reasons yes, things that could be better, things that will inevitably go worse—spin through my head. So fast, none of them truly form into complete…well, complete anything.
“I have to get back to work.”
“What?” He looks taken aback except for that small smirk picking up the side of his cheek.
“Work…bartending…short staffed.” I can’t even manage a work-related sentence when he has that damned smirk on his face. And when he knows it, his smile spreads.
I reach out for the wall to steady myself as I round the head of the table. He unfolds his long, lean body and puts it squarely in the doorframe.
“Finish your beer.”
He cocks his head, and I remember the first day I noticed his lips were the shape that they are. He looked at me just like he is now. His ice blue eyes dancing while they stared unabashedly at me just before he looked away and started talking with his long hands drumming on a pint glass. When I couldn’t study the facets of his eye color anymore, I drifted lower. I found myself studying the shapes his lips made with each of his words. How those words went crooked just like his smile, full on the left, thin on the right.
I watched every small, subtle change. I learned their language. I found a home there.
I’d burnt that home to the ground, hadn’t I?
He steps closer to me and his hand slides around my hip. He leans in, and for a singular wild flutter of my heartbeat, I swear he’s going to kiss me again. My breath catches in my throat, loud enough for him to hear, but he doesn’t lean in further.
“Finish your beer, Mina,” he says with a breathy smile.
Calling him a jackass and stomping on the instep of his foot is on the tip of my tongue and tingles my toes.
“Please.” His fingers, those long fingers I loved to watch drum on glassware, skate on the small of my back. I push against his chest but this time, it lacks the harshness of last night. “You can run if you want but I’m not going anywhere,” he says in all seriousness.
“I’m not going to run.” I sigh and flop back into the chair at the head of the table. One seat closer to him than I was before. “I’m going to finish my beer.”
“So, are you dating now?” Courtney asks me with a meticulously arched eyebrow over her third cup of tea.
“I had a civilized beer with him. Relationship that does not make.” I give her a look. “I don’t even know if you can call it a conversation.”
“You two didn’t talk? That’s awkward.”
“I still don’t know what to say.” I humph and let my head fall into my hands.
“You’ve never been lacking for words when it comes to him before.” I hear the undertone implying that she’s heard them all too. “Maybe you should write them down?”
Write them down. Court’s suggestion is such an obvious one. Words have always come far easier to me when I could trace them in my own script or plink away at them with my own keys. But write them down? I swore I wouldn’t waste another drop of ink or my bleeding heart on James Larrabee.
Then again, I didn’t think he’d move half-way across country to twist my insides into violent, exploding knots. I didn’t think I’d have to wade through this again. And wasn’t that why I started writing the letters in the first place? To face the emotion and get to the other side?
Tanner’s face fully forms in my mind. I find myself losing details of him in certain memories, but not from this one. Not from the day he read the letters, lips pressed into a thin line, a storm brewing in his eyes.
They were a wrecking ball to our relationship. No matter how I’d tried to build us back up, we just kept crumbling, dust breaking up in my hands, drifting away on the wind. I tried to tell him that James and I had already imploded. That he’d already broke my heart. That I was determined to pick
up the pieces and be the girl Tanner deserved, but those letters…
I can’t write him more.
Can I?
There’s no one to read them and see the real depth of my feelings anymore. There’s no one to read it as betrayal even when I swear on all the forces of the universe that it isn’t. That I didn’t want it. That I couldn’t stop it. Not any more than a hurricane or earthquake. James was the force that spun my life to Hell then irreparably fractured it whether I wanted it or not.
I tried to explain to Tanner that I definitely did not.
But those damned letters.
The ash is still sitting in my big marble bowl and I shove my fingers into it and sigh. When I burnt them I felt like a phoenix rising. Now…
My hand reaches for the pen discarded nearby before I really give it a thought. There’s no paper in sight but I start writing anyway. Through the ash dusting my skin.
You broke me. Forget about my heart because I’ve already said that out loud. The very core of me broke and I couldn’t put it back together. I don’t know if I want to have sex. I don’t know if I believe in love. Or meaningful connection. With anyone. Ever again. All I want is to feel like I did three years ago before I met you. I want to know my feelings, and I don’t want to know you.
The words scroll out so quickly, even if they are smushed and smudged across my skin, and I know I’m bleeding inside again for James Larrabee.
I’m bleeding and I can’t stop.
I shove my chair away from the table and crouch by my backpack, digging for the notebook I always have tucked in there. The world blurs around me and it’s just my pen, the paper, and my feelings coating the page.
Maybe that makes me a terrible person. Saying that I wish there was no trace of you in my life. Maybe it means I erase a lot of good that came from knowing you—I found strength, I know I can live through anything—but I would.
I would erase my soulmate.
Because I’m sure you’re him. I didn’t know they existed until you were gone. But to feel the hole I still feel from you, to know that I’ll always live with that, told me that all the myths are real. I say myths because the romance books aren’t. They can’t be. There isn’t always a happily ever after.
Even when you lay one at my feet.
And on that note, HOW DARE YOU? How dare you offer to love me. You don’t even know this version of me anymore. You don’t know what my heart looks like with a hole. You don’t know the new shape of my tears. The ones that happen to be the shape of you.
I see you and it hurts. Physically hurts that you exist in the same plane as me again. When I walk around a corner and there you are, pain becomes my dull companion. And frankly it’s been a more consistent one than you. One that I can count on even in my agony.
Not like you.
I can’t count on you. I can’t count on being enough for you. I can’t count on love getting us through.
I can only count on bleeding out. Again.
I try and blow out a deep breath but I can’t. Something has tightened in my chest, a vise on my heart and my ribs. I’m short of breath and getting shorter. Pain. I’d meant what I’d said about it. Constant.
A knock on my front door distracts me a little. Well, enough that the pain subsides to that distant, dim level again.
“Come in,” I manage to yell but the words are tight, forced.
I push up from the notebook, refusing to look fragile, and busy myself with making tea. That’s always Courtney’s answer, right? A warm beverage?
“What happened?” Of course it’s her.
I blow out a deep breath and abandon the tea kettle and any pretenses.
“I wrote him a letter just like you suggested.”
She walks over and picks up my arm. I’m not sure if she’s piecing together the words or if she’s just piecing together the mess I’ve made of myself today.
“They make paper for that.” She shoots me her signature eyebrows then takes the tea kettle and fills it.
“Wrote on that too.”
“Do you feel better?”
I take a moment and seriously consider her words. “I dunno.”
“Why don’t you know?” She turns and leans back against the counter, crosses her arms, and waits for my answer.
“Because everything gets all whipped up when I start thinking about my feelings when it comes to this. To him.” I take up a post opposite but as a mirror across the kitchen. “I have to wait for the dust to settle.”
“What does that mean?”
I take a deep breath. “It means I started thinking about Tanner. About him reading the letters. About his face when he learned I betrayed him. About how he wasn’t the one for me but that I hurt him in every possible way even though I didn’t mean to. I realized I can’t remember the details of his face unless it’s him in agony, but I can remember every timbre of James’ voice. That blasted ass voice climbs up my spine every single time.” All of my words steamroll together.
“Do you still feel guilty about Tanner?” Her brow creases.
“Of course. Even more so that I was going to marry him and can’t remember the details of his face except on that day.” It’s my turn to shoot her a look.
“He’s happy. Or at least seems like it on Facebook. You know that right? He’s engaged again and whatnot.” She reaches for her phone to show me like she does from time to time.
I wave her off.
“You were happy, too.”
I think back to a few days before the Solstice. Was I? Was I happy or had I just adjusted to a different level of existing? James popping back into my life makes me question it.
All of it.
“Remember that night? Remember singing Lizzo to me at the top of your lungs and telling me you felt worth it and worthy. That you had found yourself and were grateful that something so hard had taught you it was okay to be soft again?”
“What if I was always wrong?”
“Bullshit, Mina.” She throws up her hands in my signature move. “I came over here to check on you, I didn’t know I time travelled back three years. Because this is what you did at first, you justified their shit treatment. You made it all about him. You and Tanner were both left in his wake.”
“You’re the one who told me to write.” It’s a feeble defense and I know it.
“What did you write?”
“Starts here.” I point to the spot on my arm. “Finishes there.” My notebook lays open, ashen fingerprints covering the page.
She takes my forearm and reads with a stone face. She stretches my skin this way and that to make sense of the scribbled words. When she finishes, she wordlessly transitions to my notebook. At the end she whistles lowly and plops onto my former seat.
“Well?” I wait patiently for her words.
“At least your honest.” Her eyes don’t meet mine, instead they rove over the wild curves of my letters.
“Thank you?” I add the question to the end of my sentence.
“You always write so beautifully, it makes me feel it all over again, Mina.”
“What exactly do you feel?”
Her eyes rise to mine. “Pain,” she answers simply, and I start to nod. “And the want to make it stop. They alternate between the sentiment and the shadow. I feel the push and the pull.”
I blow out a deep breath and round the table to sit beside her. I reach for her hand and twine my fingers with hers under the table before I lean my head onto her shoulder.
“Me too, Court. Me too.”
I tried to wash the words off my skin after I transcribed them into weird spaces and shapes in the margins of my notebook, but such was my curse that they lingered. And in their faded state, they were slightly more legible.
“Great.” I roll my eyes as I go back to my closet and look for an appropriate long sleeve outfit that I won’t sweat to death in.
I grab a simple, albeit short and tight, long sleeve dress. It’ll just have to do. Just about anything else I own is for
winter, or da club. Emphasis on the D.
“It’ll just have to do.” My stupid emotions are covered and that’s all that really matters.
I grab my backpack and bolt for the door, snatching up my Danskos as I go and hopping on one foot down my front stairs to get them on. This would be the moment in a RomCom when James popped by to tell me my skirt was too short, and we’d flirt. I look around for him before I remember we aren’t in a RomCom. This seems to be something closer to a disaster film with big explosions; any moment Dwayne Johnson is going to show up. I roll my eyes a second before I roll my ankle.
“So this is how today is gonna go, huh?” I mean I’m only rushing because I had a bartender call out to begin with.
As soon as I push through the door at Holliday Tavern, I’m swept up in chaos. VIPs aren’t happy, we’re missing a case of limes, my bartender isn’t sick but nursing a hangover so wicked, he shared it with half the staff. I swear under my breath, dump my backpack, and dive in.
The rush of service is a familiar ebb and flow that doesn’t tax my weary mind, but rather occupies it. I take orders and the vaguely sexual comments that come with them. I buss tables, schmooze guests, and sweat my ass off doing it. But it feels good. I’m not thinking about James, or what I’d say to him, or why it hurts when he’s around. I’m just thinking about what’s next. I shove my sleeves up and keep moving.
When the pop is over and business has returned to a reasonable pace, I pick up a pint glass set out below a tap and pour.
“Thanks, Mina. That’s for bar ten,” Candice says and jerks her chin down the bar.
I turn and set the glass down with a simple, “Here you go,” before turning back toward the taps.
Except I can’t. A firm grip has me around my wrist. I look down first. Long fingers. Around the handwritten words I had for their owner.
“What is that?” James asks, his voice carrying an edge that the pad of his thumb circling on my skin softens.
