by S. K Munt
But the love in her eyes, the absolute concern for Ryan’s state of mind was so intense that Hunter felt ugly for having penned words without quite understanding their true meaning for Ryan. Did Ryan truly love her so much, that he actually could not sing a word about her? That was intense. In fact, it was the opposite of Hunter’s inclination. Callie made him want to sing until the world stopped turning. And that need had him in its grip and he was afraid that if he tugged himself free he would never be able to sing a note again. His music needed his heart, needed his all. So he forced the support breath to flow where it ought to, latched on to his feelings, worked them for their worth and expelled his love for her on a broken breath: ‘... your shelter from the storm, all you need.’
The crowd was receptive, and the way they swayed along with him reminded him of when he’d gone to his first Pearl Jam concert and Hunter wondered if that level of adoration could be his to keep and if it was, would it get him through Callie and Ryan’s love affair? Callie’s death? Maybe. Until he knew for sure, he’d just keep singing.
‘A guitar without strings, is an angel without wings… and without you I will always be…..!’ He ripped up the scales on the final chorus, and heard the crowd scream in appreciation. They didn’t know that tears were choking him- that he meant every word. He softened his voice, drawing out the last line. ‘A sad and broken love song... With no Melody….’
*
The most angelic voice in the world wrapped around Ryan and chased off the monsters lurking in the shadows. Chased off the absolute desolation. Warm arms slipped around his shoulders, and the gentlest lips were against his ear whispering soothing things to him.
‘Ryan, baby…’ hands were cupping his jaw. He blinked his eyes open when he caught the scent of cherry lip gloss, and there she was, his Callie. Her eyes swirled like harlequin sunsets and sparkled in an almost other-worldly way that made him fall even more deeply, threatened to rip his fingers from the branch he was only just holding onto if she didn’t save him this time. ‘Baby I’m here.’
Ryan tried to shake off his stupor but the tears were flowing from someplace deeper inside him than the darkest reaches of the gorge. But Callie pulled him up, her hands gripping him, her fingers brushing away his tears and then tilting his face to hers.
‘Cal?’ He wondered if he had hallucinated her. He could still hear the song that had torn him apart, could still feel the presence of thousands of people only feet away. Hunter was singing, and he sounded incredible, and for a moment, Ryan’s gaze drifted from Callie’s and settled on his best friend who was not so much in the limelight, but the source of all light.
‘The Dancer spins enchanted, eyes closed on pointed toe! She’ll spin until the end of time, my love she’ll never know…’
‘Yeah.’ Lips brushed against his. ‘I’m here sweetheart.’ Arms tightened around him, a cloud of black hair swirled against his arms, the brim of her hat pressed into his collarbone as she pressed her cheek to his chest and sighed. ‘Where I belong.’
‘Belong?’ Ryan looked down just as Callie looked up, and he felt his chest expand hopefully when he saw how focused her gaze was, how doting. She wasn’t looking at Hunter. She wasn’t running away. She was in his arms and beaming up at him.
‘Yeah,’ she whispered again. ‘Belong. I belong with you, Ryan Weaver. I was wrong to leave you the other night. Wrong tonight, to make you believe that I didn’t, that I couldn’t-’ She swallowed, tears streaming down her face. ‘Oh Ry…’ her brows knitted together. ‘I’m so sorry. I hope you can forgive me!’
‘Forgive you?’ He echoed. God if I’m dreaming this let me die in my sleep. Ryan thought, thawing as her warmth melted the ice in his veins. He lifted his hands, knocked her hat slightly up so he could see every inch of her face, pushing her hair behind her ears so that nothing obstructed her striking eyes. ‘What for?’
‘For being conflicted. For needing him. For running from you. For… for …’ tears streamed down her face and she reached up onto her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around his neck. ‘What I’m about to do…’ she whispered, and then smiled forlornly. ‘I love you Ry. I don’t need a working heart to do that forever.’
‘Callie…’ Ryan groaned her name as his heart swelled beyond capacity and overflowed. How long had he wanted to hear those words? His parents had never said them. Marnie had never said them. Hunt, who he loved dearly- had never said them either. But if Callie meant them, then that was all he needed to believe that someone could. He pulled her towards him, tilted her face back and slanted his mouth across hers. Passion exploded within him as the crowd roared their approval. Her lips melded to his as perfectly as their bodies had intertwined in the rainforest and when she sighed blissfully, he moaned again, kissing her more deeply, their lips sliding over their salty tears and her cherry gloss, his hands sliding up from her waist to her back under her shirt, needing to feel her hot skin, needing to know that this was not a dream as he brought her to her feet. Absolute joy, concentrated sunlight seemed to blossom in his chest and he knew, without a doubt, that he would kiss her for the rest of their lives if he could and her returning passion told him that she felt the same. She felt the same. Those words in itself were a ballad she would play for him for eternity just by smiling at him now.
‘I love you Ryan!’ Callie whispered between fierce kisses, half-sobbing, half-laughing as he crushed her against him. ‘I love you, I love you, more than anything...’ she made a sweet noise in reaction to his emboldened kiss, melting heavily in his arms.
‘I love you too Callie,’ Ryan caught her, laughing. ‘Clearly.’ He tried to upright her, but her legs didn’t straighten. She was still in his arms, and her head was falling forward, her hat catching his shoulder and popping off her hair. It was like he had gone from holding a wild snake to a broken marionette.
‘Hey… Cal!’ Confused, still too intoxicated by her kisses to think clearly, Ryan knelt, cradling her shoulders, supporting her weight as he eased her onto the ground.
‘Melody…. I can’t breathe… Melody…. I can’t breathe….’ Hunter’s voice was fading as Ryan realized how limp Callie was. Her mane of hair had fallen over her face when she’d dipped forward and now, when Ryan brushed the silken lengths back, his heart contorted. Because although Callie’s cheeks were still flushed, her eyes were closed and her lips did not part for breath.
‘I can’t breathe…’ Hunter’s voice was fading with the outro. ‘I can’t breathe…without Melody...’
‘No!’ Ryan felt anguish begin to evaporate every other good feeling he’d collected in his life as he pressed his hand to the logo on Callie’s chest and felt her warmth dissolving like the lingering moments of heat after a sunset. ‘Callie no!’ Ryan leaned down, kissed her lips, and sobbed when she did not return the pressure, when he did not taste her breath.
Her heart had failed! Her life was gone! It couldn’t happen, and yet it had! The last note of Hunter’s guitar dropped out and though the crowd roared, the atmosphere seemed to die as quickly as it had ignited like the flame of a match shooting high then lapsing to blackened smoke. The applause waned, and for a moment, there was nothing but hushed silence.
The music had stopped, and Ryan knew that for him, it would never start again.
There was no music without Callie.
*
The silence was so heavy that Hunter’s eyes flew open as though he’d been asleep and was only now just waking from the most powerful kind of nightmare, wrapped in a dream. He’d turned away when he’d seen Callie face tilt to Ryan’s, closed his eyes, focused on the song, let his pain make it brighter, richer, more real. He was an artist after all, and pain was their greatest weapon. He’d never known it, until Callie had broken his heart and now that she’d given her own to Ryan, Hunter wasn’t sure if he’d ever know anything but heartache again.
He looked at the screen first, thinking that if he had to see Ryan and Callie stealing his thunder with a lip-lock from hell, he’d be better off
pretending like it was just something happening on the T. V, to someone else.
But Callie and Ryan were not kissing. Instead, Callie was crumpled in Ryan’s trembling arms on the stage floor. Her shirt the brightest red, his hat the palest pink, Ryan’s grief the blackest of black as his silent tears shook loose from his face and onto Callie’s hair.
Hunter immediately knew that she was dead. He didn’t know how, but the silence hanging over the stadium did not belong to a world where Callie was alive. Yet despite the grief already closing over him he ripped the Schecter off his head and tossed it to the ground, hearing it crack like his heart as he raced towards his friends, hoping against all hope, that he could be Callie’s hero this time, the way she had always been his.
The feedback was deafening and the silence was not only broken by it but shattered. As he skidded to his knees on the ground beside Callie, he heard the shrieks become wails, cries of surprise, laughs like they’d just pulled the publicity stunt to end all. In his peripheral vision, he could see that the camera was still focused on them, and that the emergency medical people were racing in from backstage. The announcer was saying something but the words were garbled to Hunter. He pressed his ear to Callie’s chest and felt his own heartbeat cease in reflex to the silence and stillness beneath her breast.
‘What happened?!’ Nick sounded shocked as he came to stand beside them.
‘Is she okay?’ Clarice asked, breathless.
‘Oh shit! Shit you guys she looks-’ Rathe’s words broke off.’
Ryan was shaking his head. ‘She’s gone…’ His voice sounded resigned. Lifeless. ‘She’s gone.’
‘No…’ Hunter pressed his head to Callie’s forehead and let painful tears burn down his face. ‘Oh you silly girl… why didn’t you just leave Cal? You knew your heart couldn’t take this!’ She looked so sweet, so peaceful. She was eight year old Callie again, napping on his couch while listening to him unsuccessfully attempt the opening bars of Nothing Else Matters for the fiftieth time in a row. He sobbed, and tried to commit every inch of her face to memory before the ambulance could pull her from him. He needed to remember it. For another life. A life where he got to keep the Melody forever.
And when Ryan got up and lurched away, leaving Callie in Hunter’s arms, he held her so tightly against him that he wondered why he’d ever let go in the first place, and cursed her for running too fast for him to follow.
32.
Callie expected to be pulled lightly from sleep gently from dreams of Ryan’s arms and to open her eyes in Helicon again and probably surrounded by several freaked-out looking Muses who would call to her, search for her but never find her. But instead, she felt her eyelashes flutter for only a second between her final glimpse of Ryan’s own, before they opened upon nothing. Thick fog, a sense of grass beneath her, a sense of the sky caving in. But there wasn’t a Muse in sight. No Ardos. Not even Hendra’s ghostly presence- and not a sound. Just Calliope, completely and utterly alone with a yawning chasm within her chest.
‘Ryan…’ She whispered his name and parted the fog slightly, clutching at her heart when she felt it spasm, pressing her other fingers to her lips as though trapping the memory of his kiss there. Her eyes squeezed shut on still-leaking tears as she tried not to hear… nothing. There was nothing to hear. Not her heartbeat, not her breaths. She was in Oblivion, and she was alone, and the music abandoned her as she had it.
Calliope rested her elbows on her knees, caught her face in her hands and cried violent, breathless tears as the hole in her heart grew and grew and grew until all she felt was hollow. The kiss had been worth it, the love in his eyes, the peace on his face… she’d given him the only gift she had to give and he had deserved it. But he’d deserved more. He’d deserved eons of her time and she needed him so much now- so so much to fill that void. How long would it take Ryan’s memory to fade? How long until the scream of songs unsung broke her spirit and she began to drift away like the fog?
‘Calliope!’ Her head jerked up and when she saw Ardos through the mist towards her, his gorgeous face twisted in anxiety even through the heavy veil of air.
‘Ardos!’ Her shock was staggering, her guilt instant. Had he been sucked into Oblivion with her? Was that part of the soul mate deal? Calliope felt panic make her new heartbeat skitter like bare feet on ice. ‘What are you doing here?!’
Ardos answered by smashing into her and wrapping her into an iron-tight hug. ‘Callie!’ He sobbed her name. ‘You’re here! I was so scared Cal! I thought- I thought that was it!’ He pulled back, caught her open jaw in his hands and began to press frenzied kissed all over her face, his hair as golden as a halo around his head as he damn near squeezed the new life out of her. ‘But you are here! You waited for me!’
‘Waited?’ Calliope squeaked, stilling his hands with her own, wrenching them off her, turning away. ‘I don’t understand! Why are you here? How can you touch me? See me…?’ She looked down at her open palms which looked familiar, but not as familiar as the ones she’d been staring at for over two decades. ‘I’m supposed to be…’
Arms encircled her, tears were wet against her shoulder. ‘I’ve always existed on the brink of Helicon and Oblivion Calliope, dependent on you to keep me corporeal- on your thoughts to pull me near.’
‘So we’re in Oblivion together now?’ She asked, horrified.
‘Yes…’ Ardos pulled her hair over her neck and planted a feather light kiss there. ‘But I can draw you back to Helicon Callie, like I promised I would. My love for you can restore you now!’
Callie cringed away from his kiss, which promised to bring her pleasure if only, if only… She began to sob. ‘But I don’t want to be pulled back! I don’t want to feel anything, don’t you see?’ She pressed her hand into her face and wept brokenly into it. She’d counted on Oblivion to numb her pain and until the fog engulfed her, she would be forced to endure the loss of Ryan. That was going to be hard enough, without Ardos hanging off her, weighting her down with guilt as well! The pain burned her, emptied her- but it was her pain, it was Ryan’s memory, and she wanted to be alone with it before it slipped away. ‘I deserve to hurt! I betrayed the only two things dependent on me for one perfect moment with the man I loved; you, and music.’ She fell to her knees. ‘I feel like I’m dying, but I need to suffer. Music needs its Muse to have a broken heart, as much as it needed Hunter to. More.’ She wrapped her arms around her stomach and heaved in a painful, thin breath. ‘And I certainly don’t deserve to be rescued, least of all by you.’
Arms turned her, lifted her face to his, and dazzling blue eyes bore into hers where green ones should have been. ‘But you didn’t give your heart to a human, Calliope.’ Ryan’s blood-flushed lips spread into a glorious smile. ‘You gave it to me.’
Calliope felt the world tilt dizzily when Ryan rubbed his thumb over her bottom lip and leaned down to plant an achingly-soft kiss there. But she pushed him back, mystified. ‘What..?’ she sank her fingernails into his shoulders, testing his mass for authenticity. Then she slid her hands up and let her fingers trace the outline of his throat until his face was in her hands- Ryan’s face! Ardos had vaporized and left her love in her arms, his stubble raking against her fingertips. ‘Your face! Am I hallucinating this?’
‘Actually no this is the first time that you’re seeing me with clarity.’ Ryan’s eyes shimmered like precious stones, the whites so stark against his dark skin- not tanned, not Japanese hues passed down from his mother, but Grecian, like hers. ‘It’s all perception here Calliope, remember? You were told that I was this perfect specimen of man, a golden god, and so when I first tripped you, and you looked back up at me with that furious glare of yours…’ he chuckled softly. ‘ And that was how you saw me; Golden. Too perfect to be real or intriguing to you. And that was how I stayed. Until now.’
Calliope swallowed. ‘What’s changed?’
Ryan pulled her into his arms, drew her hair over her shoulder and kissed her temple. ‘Your heart is finally ope
n. Everything looks as it should be and this face is my own. It was how I looked as a human, before Zeus brought me here Callie.’ He raised one dark eyebrow. ‘The hair cut is new though… but it’s growing on me. Just like the name Ryan is.’
Calliope gulped, afraid to believe what she was beginning to believe. ‘Was it always you?’
Ryan nodded, stroking her hair. His fingers were in constant motion, he couldn’t seem to stop shifting his weight against hers as though he needed to press against her in every way possible. Callie understood, for her fingers were twisted in the fabric of his shirt, hanging on for dear life. Her poor heart had never had a work out like this and when the thinnest tendril of fog came between their skin she felt bereft from the separation, however temporary.
‘It was, only, well I didn’t always know.’ He nuzzled the tip of her nose. ‘When your sisters were about to agree on the curse I flew into a rage and made them see me. I was too weak to influence them, and part of me actually agreed that you needed to open your heart in order to do your gift justice-’ he raised their fingers to his lips, kissing each knuckle as he spoke. ‘-so although Imogen got her way, your mother approached me after they left and commended me for my strength of will. She was a mess, Callie, and to add to her horror, she sensed that she was going to fade away in your absence, and knew that I was the only one left who would try to protect you after she was gone.’ He turned her hand over kissed her wrist, inhaled her and smiled drunkenly. ‘But I was trapped here, and would be blind to your human life, so she asked me, that if she could manipulate me into a human like you, would I exchange my mortality, for the chance at a fresh start with you? To return to Helicon only when you did, to die as a human if that came about before our souls found one another.’
