by Eden Butler
Completely, ruddy done for.
Autumn’s smile was genuine, honest, and I returned the stare she gave me as I came. My mind warred between the shatter of my body and the way her eyes moved over my face. I wanted to tell her everything; why I walked away, how I couldn’t stop thinking of her, how I belonged to her, but the only thing my mouth let me utter was muffled behind her lips when she kissed me.
“What did you say?”
I didn’t care that I was vulnerable, that she probably didn’t feel the same. She had to know. I had to tell her. My voice shook, whispered with the sigh I released. “I said, ‘I love you.’”
Her face gave nothing away. Her expression was shocked, taken aback, eyes wide, mouth rounded. “I…”
“Don’t, will ya? I don’t think I could bear to hear you reject me. Not yet. Don’t say anything until you know it.”
I wanted to stay there with her. Her wrapped around me, my confession floating around us, but I couldn’t take the shock on her face. What if she didn’t want me the way I wanted her? What if all of this was just a bit of fun for her? If she was thinking anything of the sort, I wasn’t prepared for the letdown. Not just then. So, I left her in the shower, left her later that morning when Joe called me saying that he didn’t feel right. By the time I got him to the hospital, it was almost too late.
Heart attack and then, chaos. Him rushed to surgery, me out of my mind with worry. Autumn and me that morning, the night before, got pushed to the back of my mind. So did Joe’s secret, which I never got around to telling her about. It all seemed so unimportant in the wake of what was happening to my stepdad.
And when she came to the hospital, when she watched Joe laying weakened, near death on that ICU room bed, everything flashed back. Everything. What Joe had left behind in Cavanagh all those years ago, surfaced in an ugly, ungraceful, hurtful way. And I had known about it. I had known and never told Autumn. Where was Joe’s protection now? Where was the benefit in keeping these secrets?
I had betrayed her.
And so she abandoned me.
I only wanted her to hold me, to tell me that this could not be the end of my world, that Joe would survive, that she would forgive me.
But she didn’t. This time, she was the one who left. She left me to face the mortality of the only father I’d ever known, alone. The shock, yes, the shock for her must have been devastating. I cringed to think of it. But after what we had shared, I was completely adrift. Scared. And shite, but I didn’t know what to do. The doctors wanted decisions made. They had questions, courses of action to follow, preparations to make. They needed more from me than I thought I could give, but there was no choice. I couldn’t pause my life and wait for it to make sense again.
So I sat there in the waiting room with the sting of Autumn’s rejection still sharp in my mind, clueless. And then Heather appeared, like fog on a sunny day. She was talking, saying things that didn’t register before I even noticed her sitting next to me.
“And you’ll have to make sure he doesn’t move unless the nurses are there. Don’t try to help him on your own. They have rules about that kind of stuff.”
“What?” I said, as though Heather’s face was just coming into focus. Everything else had gone blurry, like I was just waking from a nightmare.
Heather touched my hand and I didn’t swat it away. “It’s okay, Declan. I can help you. My Daddy, last year, he had a heart attack too.” She fixed my collar, pulled it straight. “Do you want me to help you figure this out?”
I would have said no, should have reminded her that I’d told her to fuck off, but I looked around the empty waiting room, then down at my hands. I had nothing to hold, nothing that would give me the strength I knew I needed. Autumn should have been there. It was her place, but her words came back to me, cut even deeper than they had when she first spoke them.
“I…I don’t love you, Declan. It’s over.”
“Declan?” Heather said, filling my empty hands with her small fingers.
“Yeah,” I told her. “I could use some help.”
N O W
Two Days Ago
She’s like a bird on the water, touching the surface. In her element, on this track, running, Autumn shines. It’s like me on the pitch. Free from shovelfuls of shite the world dumps on me. She runs, her body solid, firm, her expression focused and every inch of skin, every hair on her body glows.
I could watch her all day and never get bored.
She knows I’m here, watching, waiting. I wonder if Joe told her we spoke. I wonder if he’s let her know that I apologized. Autumn, at least, isn’t running away from me. Not yet. I’ve noticed that she’s always running away from things. Never toward anything. I wish she’d stop that.
When she enters the final curve on the track and heads my way, I stand, shake the grass from my jeans and wait for her. Rhythm slowing, feet at a jog, she catches my eyes, but doesn’t smile. Behind us, Donovan is on the pitch running sprints, but there is no one else around. The air has turned cold, just like Autumn likes it, and I can’t help but worry that she has only a thin jacket to keep her warm, that her pants aren’t thick enough.
“Hey,” she says, stopping just in front of me, jerking the buds from her ears. Her voice is cool, but not unfriendly.
“Good time?” I ask when she checks her pulse. She doesn’t believe a run is worth the effort unless her heart hammers hard.
“Yes. Could have been higher.” I get a quick glance, a glimpse of a smile before she starts walking away.
“Will you talk to me a little?” I say, unable to keep my eyes off her body.
“I’m not stopping you from following me, you know.” The banter is calm, but not the comfortable jabs we’ve shared over the past four months. I miss that, her, us, and would do anything to get it back.
But she is walking too fast, arms swinging too quickly and I can feel the wall around her; how she won’t let me walk too close to her. How when my finger brush hers, she instantly curls her arms over her chest.
I can’t take it.
“Stop,” I say, tugging on her shoulder until she spins around to face me.
“What do you want, Declan?” Autumn is shorter than me, hell everyone is, but I’ve always loved how her head fits just under my chin. A perfect complement to me. I want to tell her that I miss her, that I can’t breathe without her, but those are words that won’t mean anything at all. She doesn’t want words.
“This,” I say and pull her to me, cover her face with my hands, her lips with my mouth. It felt like coming home. For nearly two weeks now I’ve needed this. I’d been a homeless beggar missing the comfort she gives me. She doesn’t resist, not immediately and I take the quick lick of her tongue against mine as an invitation, pick her up, move us back to lean against an oak tree. My hands circle her back, protect her from the rough surface and I move against her, work my hips into her body so that she knows that every part of me has missed her. And she’s missed me too. That much I can tell by the way she pulls on my collar, how tight her legs squeeze my waist. “McShane,” I say breaking away from her, breath heavy on her neck when I rest my forehead on her shoulder. “I love you. I miss you.” There are tears glistening in her eyes, shining against the moonlight above us when I look at her. “I’m sorry. I’m so fecking sorry, love.”
“You hit him.”
“I did.”
“You wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t explain.” She loosens her hold on me, removes her legs from my waist, but doesn’t push me away when I lean against her.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
My thumb moves to her bottom lip on its own. I can’t keep my hands off her, can’t stop kissing every bit of skin I see. When my lips attach to her neck, up to the spot under her ear, Autumn represses a moan, pushes me back.
Her arms are straight, flexed, keeping me from touching her. “You walked away from me, Declan.”
“Love…” I want to hold her, kiss her until this time apart is nothing but a n
ightmare that never happened.
“No. You did. I didn’t know what happened. You wouldn’t listen. Stop that,” she says when I lean in to kiss her again. “I’m still mad at you.” I drop my hands, scrub my fingers through my hair and she watches me, so stubborn, still so angry that I can see her cheeks turning pink. “I walk in and Joe’s on the floor and I’d never seen you so angry. You wouldn’t listen and when I tried to explain everything Joe told me, when I wanted to comfort you, you…God, Declan, the way you looked at me.” Autumn’s eyes close, and she gives her head a shake. “You’ve never made me feel disgusting. Ugly. Wrong. But you did that night.”
She can’t be serious. I remember looking at her like she was mad because she so easily believed everything Joe told her, but disgusting? She has to know I’d never think that of her. “I was angry. You have to understand. I was just angry.” I take her hand, give it a squeeze but she pulls back, draws her fingers into a fist. My ginger angel, running away again.
“That’s not an excuse. You just, wouldn’t listen.”
Stubborn, pigheaded woman. I can only look up at the stars, trace the patterns of the constellations because I know if I speak, a row will rise up between us. I forgave her for the stupidity between us. I hack her off. We argue, but she’s never been so bleeding set on holding on to her anger and it pisses me off. When I look at her standing here, back straight, chin up like she’s daring me to deny what a stupid arse I’ve been, my temper flares.
“I wouldn’t listen? You mean like you wouldn’t?”
The realization moves in her eyes, narrows them and I know she remembers how I let her rejection go nearly as soon as it happened. But Autumn has a hard time admitting when she’s wrong, admitting when she’s being pigheaded. She won’t let this go. Not easily. “That’s not fair. The situations are completely different.”
“How do you reckon? I begged you, Autumn.” Her head goes down and I move my hands to my hips, kicking my foot against a tree root. “You know I did. You wouldn’t listen.” It had been the lowest moment of my life. She knew I loved her, she knew how sorry I was that I hadn’t told her the truth about Joe. And even when I explained everything, when I was so raw and open that I let her see my tears, she still slammed her door in my face, had me beating against it and begging her like a pathetic idiot. I’d hit the wood so hard that the door shook on its hinges. Three hard thumps and I’d hit the floor, voice cracking between my sobs. “Autumn! Don’t do this. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry! Please. Please, I love you. I can’t breathe for how much I love you.”
“You ripped my fecking heart out and all I wanted was you to listen, to let me explain.”
“I was angry and—”
“And so was I when Joe gave me that letter.”
“I apologized, Declan, a billion times.” Autumn pulls on my jacket when I turn away from her shaking my head at how fecking pointless this argument is. “You said it was forgotten. You said it didn’t matter.”
“And it doesn’t.” Her chest connects with mine when I tug her close and this time she isn’t pushing me back. “I’m just trying to make you see that this situation is the same. I tried to apologize to you. I’ve tried for over a fecking week. But you shut me out, like you always do.”
“I do not—”
“You do! You did then. Hell, you won’t even discuss a future with me, any kind of future.” And she won’t, not ever. Gives me a bit of a complex, like she’s not as serious about us as I am. “Every time I mention our life after university you get all wobbly and change the subject.”
“It’s not intentional.” She is all over me, grabbing my face, pulling me down to look at her and I want to forget this fight, store it away for another time. But that won’t help. It won’t settle anything. “It’s not something I like to think about,” she says. “I know nothing is permanent, nothing is forever.”
Her words were like a slap, a jab straight to my gut. She’s unbelievable. Couldn’t she feel what I felt? Didn’t she know that she was it for me? I pull Autumn back, at arm’s length and grip her shoulders. “I am. We are. I fucking love you. I’d die for you. I’d kill for you, but I won’t let you throw happiness away with both bleeding hands.”
I grab her again, kiss her until the low moans I love hearing from her vibrate against my chest, until she leans against me because her legs wobble. “You and me, McShane. The fecking end. You best get that idea in your thick head.” She blinks, mouth open as I hold her face, hoping that my eyes tell her I mean every fecking word I say. “I’m not going anywhere, love. But if you need time…” I have to close my eyes thinking on spending even another day without her. When I look down at her, she is frowning and I feel the quick shake of her fingers when she holds onto my hands. “I can give you that, love.” I don’t want to step away. She feels too good next to me, smells too sweet and when I walk backward, our hands pull together, as though she isn’t so sure she wants me away from her either. Three more steps and Autumn curls her arms around her stomach. “I walked away, yeah, but I never left you.”
Yesterday
“And that was it? You just left?”
The equipment bag’s zipper catches on the thick material before I zip it up, answering Donovan’s question with a shrug. “I’m done begging, mate.”
“Yeah, sure you are.” That wanker’s smirk is insulting, but I let the gibe go, wait for him to pick up the other handle on the bag before we head back to locker room. When he speaks again, Donovan is grunting from the weight of the bag. Pouncy bollocks. “I’m just…saying…I know you.” We reach the front entrance of the Athletic Building and then head straight into the equipment locker before my best mate finishes. “No way are you giving up.”
The door to the equipment closet thuds hard when I slam it. “No shite, arsehole, but I’m not going to continue to make myself look like a wanker just because she’s hacked off at me.”
Donovan’s hands go up, mildly conceding, before he trails after me into the locker room. “Isn’t that the point, man? You showing Autumn you didn’t walk away from her? Actions, not words?”
“Yeah, but—” His soaked shirt lands straight in my face, and I instantly recoil at the smell of grass and sweat. I throw it back at him, grabbing a clean towel from my locker and Donovan is next to me, his head shaking. “What?”
“I’ve known Autumn my whole life. We weren’t exactly close, didn’t run in the same crowds and she is a couple of years older than me, but you don’t grow up in a place like this and not know things about the girls here.”
“And?”
Donovan stretches, runs his hand across his damp hair, but doesn’t answer me immediately, only gives me a sigh before he relaxes on the bench in front of the lockers. My best mate nods toward the bench and I join him. “When I was seven, my dad threw me this huge birthday party; fun house and balloons, clowns, magicians, even this big son of a bitch dressed as G.I. Joe.” He looks down at his feet, to his bag before he continues. “Now, I didn’t give a shit about the clowns or the magicians, but the girls there did, Autumn among them. A bunch of them in their stupid little bows and pink ribbons sat down in front of the magician, all wide eyed like pulling scarves knotted together out of his mouth was this huge, incredible thing. They were all oohing and ahhing and highly impressed.”
I smile to myself, having a good sense of where Donovan was going. “Not Autumn, though, yeah?”
“Exactly. Not Autumn.”
When something yelps through the room I stand up, thinking one of the freshman had stayed after practice for a long shower, maybe fallen. But I don’t see steam coming from the bathroom and otherwise don’t hear the sound again.
“Probably nothing,” I say to Donovan who again looks at his bag when I sit back down.
“Anyway,” he says, “my dad told me later, Autumn sat there watching this idiot flick his ‘magic wand’ around his hat, pull out a rabbit; watched him pour milk into a rolled up newspaper with her eyes were all narrowed and skeptic
al.” Donovan throws the towel in his hand across the room to the hamper and my smile only grows.
I could almost see Autumn at seven, ginger hair pulled up into piggy tails and that full little mouth pouting out in disapproval. “What did she do?”
Donovan laughs, shoulders moving at the memory. “Dad said she badgered that magician for two hours straight asking him question after question, trying to guess how he managed this trick and that one. The pour guy ended up telling my dad to keep his money. He just skipped out to get away from her. And all she would say to him when he finally began to let some of his secrets spill was ‘prove it. Show me.’” My best mate lowers to his bag, unzips it and I think I hear him whisper, say something to himself, but his back is too wide, his movements quick.
“So what are you saying?”
He only moves enough to look over his shoulder at me. “Just that Autumn is a stubborn woman. Always has been. You can’t just tell her you’re sorry. You can’t just make her think you mean whatever you say to her. She wants you to prove it. Show her.”
“But how the hell am I supposed to—” my whiney little question is cut short when I hear a distinctive, loud bark coming just from Donovan’s ankles. “What’s that?”
His shoulders lowering, he pulls his bag open and lets a tiny little lapdog run around the locker room floor. It is white with great, thick curls covering its entire body. There is a pink bow between its tiny ears and a rhinestone collar that spells out H-O-N-E-Y. I know this dog. Shite. Donovan has really stepped in it now.
“Mate, you didn’t.”
“What? It’s just a prank. It’ll be funny.”
“She’s going to kill you.” I laugh when Donovan’s eyes go wide as though he’s only just thought of how stupid it was to knick Layla’s baby.
