Hollow Sight

by Kristie Pierce

  “And what would that be?” He sounds as if he knows exactly what I’m about to say. He rests his back against the couch cushions and lets his shoulders slump, keeping his fingers pinched over his nose.

  “Why…” I inhale a deep breath and blow it out. “Why did you leave me?” I ask bluntly.

  Liam sitting next to me causes the memory of having him and I together, what we used to be, that much more painful. And well, since I’m still in pain after losing him so suddenly, I might as well get to the bottom of the reason behind it. The real reason. I don’t think I can hurt much more, so what’s one more explosion to my charcoaled heart? The scorching burn is making its way back through my chest, so I figure that I deserve to know why I’m forced to suffer with it every single minute of every single day.

  “I have a right to know,” I murmur after he doesn’t answer. He stays paralyzed into his position.

  “I don’t get it, Liam. I thought you loved me. You said you loved me. So in one second you just change your mind? I thought that I’d taught you how to love again. I’m not buying that excuse you gave me about Evie. I know that you loved her, and maybe you still do, and that would be…” gulp, “acceptable. But I really don’t believe that you think of her when you’re with me. No, that can’t be true. I know it’s not true. So… how could you just leave me like that? I understand the situation was a bit… weird… but I thought we were stronger than that.”

  Liam quietly sighs, but remains locked in his tense position. His jaw is held tight and I’m afraid he might snap his own nose with how hard he has his fingers pinched around it. But I continue anyway. Although I know I’m not making complete sentences and my words are coming out in a jumbled mess, I’m on somewhat of a roll.

  “Liam, I love you with every ounce of my soul, every part of my being and with every beat of my heart. I… well… since I’m being honest, as I always am with you, I’ll admit that I still do. I wake up thinking about you even though I have to admit I try very hard not to. It hurts too much. But I go to sleep thinking about you and you’re in every thought I have in between. Fighting against it is pointless. I thought that I could, that I could ignore you, ignore my feelings and the memories, but it kills me to see you every day acting as though I don’t exist. Have I really affected you so little that you can go on as if you and I weren’t ever… that we didn’t… that you didn’t….” and I’m crying. Not just silent, delicate tears running down my cheeks, but noisy embarrassing sobs. The kind of crying that shakes your body and makes you sound like you’re choking for air.

  “Liam, I love you.” I blubber. I reach out toward him but quickly drop my arms when I see no reaction in him. “I can’t breathe without you… my heart doesn’t beat willingly without you. I only breathe… because it’s necessary although it… doesn’t help the pain… and… my heart… burns with… every beat… it takes.”

  It’s hard to speak in between sobs. I look up to Liam again to see if he’s still sitting immobilized in the same position as before. He is.

  I try again, closing my eyes. “Liam, please… I… please…”

  Nothing.

  “I love you,” I whisper again. “Please…”

  That’s when I get a response. Finally. And although it isn’t the response I’m expecting, and it took begging to get, I take it gratefully.

  Liam’s hands wrap around my waist, lifting me onto his lap causing me to straddle his hips – so quickly that I’m not sure it’s really happening – and crushes his soft lips to mine. I gasp and open my eyes. But my sobs do not quiet. Tears still flow noisily down my cheeks as I put my hands to his face and close my now widened eyes. This is the kind of kissing that makes my heart threaten to jump out of my chest. He tightens his hold on me and then moves his lips to my salt-watered cheeks, wiping away the tears with his mouth. He puts his hands on either side of my face as I open my eyes once more, matching his fingers with mine, kissing the tip of my nose, my forehead, my jaw. I let go of my hold on his face and wrap my fingers around his wrists, holding his hands to my hot skin, watching him. I don’t want him to let go. I don’t know if I could bear him to let go.

  He continues to kiss my forehead, my cheeks, my neck, my throat. I keep my eyes wide open, I’m afraid he'll disappear if I close them again. I’m sure that I am imagining things, allowing one of my daydreams to spiral widely out of control. Although I have not daydreamed since that horrific day months ago. Instead, are the scattered thoughts I battle everyday bouncing around inside my achingly tired head. But with Liam here, I feel more like myself than I have in months. The headache is gone, my heart manages to pump painlessly and gratefully, and I can focus on the touch of Liam’s mouth moving with mine as he moves back to my awaiting lips. But although I’m beyond happy in this moment, I continue to weep. He kisses every inch of my face, occasionally moving his lips to my wrists or my palms. If this is a daydream, when I snap out of it, I'll be sure to need therapy.

  I’m unsure how much time has passed, but he eventually puts his mouth to my ear to whisper, “I’m so sorry, Breckin. I’m so, so sorry.” I nod while his hands move into my hair. “I love you, too,” he whispers now. His breath tickles against my ear.

  I want this moment to last forever.

  He persists to kiss me some more, softly and then urgently, as he finds the skin at the small of my back. My sobs eventually become muted as I get lost in the moment. I’m so beyond enthused with his change of mind that I can think of nothing else but him. My charcoaled heart suddenly becomes whole a second time, healed. It’s as if the burning sensation of slow, smoldering lava has never poured throughout its chambers. My breathing is rapid, but not in reaction to pain or my remembrance of the loss or panic I’d felt from him leaving me. Pure joy flows through my veins, electrifying every nerve ending in my body.

  I pull away first, gazing into his eyes, and I’m glad to see that they’re back to the beautiful aqua color I’ve missed so much, rimmed in their beautiful deep-blue sapphire outline. I blink away tears and he wipes the last of them away with his fingertips.

  “Can you forgive me?” he asks.

  Just as I think I’ve gotten my weeping under control, I again begin to cry. I have no justification for it now, but at the same time for some unknown reason, I am powerless stop it. I’m just so overcome with emotion that my body doesn’t know any other way to react. It’s almost embarrassing.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he says as he pulls my face back to his. I laugh under his kiss. “I love you,” he whispers again. “And I haven’t known who I am without you. I was so stupid. I am so stupid. I’m so very sorry. For all of it. I didn’t mean any of what I said. I thought I’d die after I said it. You’re all I think about, too, and I never meant to hurt you. That’s the last thing I’d ever want.”

  “Then why?” I mouth.

  He studies my face and then sucks in a deep breath. “This isn’t easy.”

  I raise my eyebrows. Whatever it is that he has to tell me, I’m sure that I can handle it. After telling him about my gift, I’m positive that there won’t be anything I can’t handle. And like I had said before, I have a right to know. I need to know.

  “Okay. I’m sorry,” he says after reading my face. “You're right.”

  He leans down to kiss me and I’m instantly sidetracked. His mouth moving with mine seems so perfect; molded together as if made to do just that. My heart is still pounding so hard that I can hear it in my ears. I put one of my hands against his chest and I can feel that his heart, too, is beating to the same rhythm as mine.

  “Are you done distracting me?” I ask against his lips.

  Liam pulls away and strokes a stand of hair away from my face. “If you prefer.”

  I smile.

  “All right. The truth,” he murmurs.

  Chapter Twenty

  Liam rests his forehead to mine. “I love you, more than you can possibly know.”

  “Do you really?” I whisper, a little skeptical. I can’t h
elp it. The memory of our last day together, and the way he’d looked and sounded so cold at his house today, is seeping its way back into my head. “Or is that just a misunderstanding, too?”

  “I guess I deserve that,” he whispers back.

  He sits back against the couch cushions as if in defeat and lays his head back so he can stare at the ceiling. He’s quiet for a long time. Normally his silence wouldn’t bother me, but now his quiet demeanor appears to be a troubled quiet. This isn't the quiet I’d become accustomed to with him before.

  “May I ask you something?” I finally manage in a small voice. He’s turns his head to look at me. “Why did you decide to come here today?” I murmur.

  Liam raises his own eyebrows now in what looks like hurt surprise.

  “No, please don’t take that as a negative. I’m really happy… no, I’m beyond happy that you did. But I really wasn’t expecting you to.”

  “I almost didn’t,” he replies in a whisper.

  “Oh.”

  Liam quickly sits up and tucks me against his chest with his strong arms after reading my pained expression.

  “Breckin, this is so difficult,” he says while stroking my hair.

  Silent tears run down my cheeks. Why can’t I manage to stop crying today? I endeavor not to let him see the relentless tears now, it’s just humiliating how much I’m crying. I tuck my chin into my chest and mutely wipe away the evidence of my crying with my shirt sleeve.

  “All right, I’m going to do the best I can to try and explain to you… why I…” He sucks in another deep breath and gently pushes me away from him so that he can study my face. He wipes away more of my tears – the ones I've missed – takes both of my hands in his and squares his shoulders. Liam then shifts his eyes to our interlocked fingers and holds them there. When he continues, his voice is low and very sorrowful.

  “In the moment I’d figured it out, the moment I put together that your pain was caused by him, I snapped. I completely lost it. I'm afraid I have a bit of a problem with impulsive anger.

  “When I’d lost Evie, I thought it impossible to ever love again, feel again… live again. I wasn’t lying when I told you that you’d taught me to love again. I’ll never forgive myself for taking that back. There are a lot of things that I said to you that day and I wish that I could take them all back. There aren’t words to describe what it did to me to do that.

  “I was so lost for so long after she passed, and then you came into my life. I first saw you in the gym that first morning of school. I was mingling with some chaps I’d come to know over the summer from practice, and of course, from Chad. And then there you were, like a ray of sun breaking through the clouds after a hurricane. I noticed first, your smile,” he smiles as he remembers. Liam speaks in a tone that remains quiet and beautifully accented, expressing to me the love he feels with his voice. “Even though I could tell that your smile was only placating for the topic of your conversation, I could see that is was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then your big brown eyes met mine for the tiniest fraction of a second as you looked around the room and I was totally disarmed. In that moment, every noise became muted and I was blind to everything else in sight. Blind and deaf, to everything but you.

  “I was trying to figure up a reason in my head to come and sit next to you. But what would I say? You for certain would’ve thought I was mad. Of course that didn’t stop me, now did it? I was pleased to find that I was able to come to your rescue,” he chuckles as if I’m missing something and he continues to stare at my hands while he goes on. “When I approached you that morning, I felt things again inside me that I thought had died with Evie. Only with you, they were stronger and much more potent. Almost toxic. My heart raced in my chest and quivers filled my stomach. My skin literally tingled with the thought of touching you. My head swirled with different topics of discussion, but I couldn’t come up with a proper subject, however, I wouldn’t let that keep me away. I had to know you. I was drawn to you.

  “You made me feel like I was alive again, Breckin,” he says as he finally makes eye contact with me. “It had been months since I’d felt anything close to that. Well no, actually since I had felt anything. I was shutting down, and when I saw you, it was like my world had suddenly and abruptly been brought back to life from extinction.

  “I thought luck was with me when I noticed you in Calculus at the end of the day,” he says as his gaze moves back to our intertwined hands. He plays with my fingers. “There you sat, doodling on your notebook and gazing out the window. I wondered what you were thinking about and led myself to believe that perhaps you were thinking of me. I was thrilled when my teammates caused you to drop your things later that day, after school. It gave me another reason to talk to you and it just so happened that none of them thought it proper to help you – so luck was with me again. I suppose I gave away a little too much after revealing that I’d been looking for you, but all the same, I didn’t care. It was as if I wanted you to know. And then with each time that I saw you after that, I was plotting for the next time I’d get to spend any time with you at all. Remember me telling you that I can be pretty persuasive when I want to be?” he asks, peering up to me through thick, black lashes.

  I nod, too lost in his words. I’m completely speechless by what he’s told me thus far. Liam has never opened up to me like this. Not unless it was about Evie, which I thought would be a much more difficult topic to discuss.

  “Well, after you confirmed that you were on the swim team, I convinced Camille to allow us in the pool for a little cool down. I was hoping I hadn’t missed you being our practice had run over that day due to the rain. Funny for anyone to believe that we would need cooling down after practicing in such a torrential down pour, but she was willing enough. I think she knew what I was up to.” Liam smiles his heartbreaking smile and it’s genuine now, lighting up his entire face with the happiness he remembers. I give him a small smile in return as he lifts one of my hands up to his mouth to kiss it.

  “Breckin, I have fallen so deeply and helplessly in love with you. There aren’t enough words in all the languages in the universe to explain to you exactly how much I love you. That’s why I had to do it. That’s why I said I couldn’t do it. I could see that I was the reason behind your pain, and to have to sit and watch you endure such agony to my expense was absolutely maddening.”

  I interrupt. “What do you mean, ‘I was the reason behind your pain’? Liam, you hadn’t done anything then.” I’m unable to say he hasn’t done anything at all because he has. Even though he’s right in front of me, declaring himself, I can’t deny that he has broken me.

  “It was like a jigsaw puzzle being put into place,” he goes on. “In the instant I saw your… pain…,” he shudders, “I could see that it truly was being caused by him, and then after realizing who he was, I put two and two together. I could only see one reason for his appearing to you. Me.”

  I’m silent. I don’t know what exactly to say. I can see his point – a little. But for Liam to ever think that I’d be better off without him is what’s maddening to me.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, Breckin. Every day I would see your face, although I tried with every ounce of strength I had not to. It didn’t matter if it was in person,” he says as he put his hand to my cheek. “Or simply in my thoughts. I never stopped thinking of you. I would remember your laugh and your smile and the way your entire face lit up. I would see your brown eyes when I closed mine at night and remember how those small flecks of green and gold inside them would flicker when you were excited. The way you made me feel when you said my name. I would think of the way your hair smelled and how amazing it felt to have you in my arms. I dreamt every night of the way you tasted when I kissed you and with every time you said that you love me, that you really meant it with every ounce of your soul. No one has ever loved me the way you do. I thought it was going to kill me all over again to be without you.”

  I close my eyes tightly as more tears
escape, remembering the way he made me feel that day, when he’d said he never loved me, that I was just a replacement for someone he was still hanging on to, that he was unable to forget her memory if he was with me… I never once thought that he was as destroyed by our being apart as I had been. Liam had seemed so unaffected by any of it and I truly believed him after that day. He put on a very, very good show. I wrap my hand around the one he has to my face and squeeze it.

  “You never had to be without me, Liam.” I murmur.

  “Not in your eyes, I didn’t. Breckin, how can you expect me to stand by and watch your suffering? To stand by and not be able to do anything and to know, too, that it’s my fault. If it weren’t for me, this man would never have approached you. If not for me, you never would have endured such… such…” he can’t finish. “And now, thanks to me, you have been hurt in a way that I’m not sure I can fix. I said things that were terrible, beyond terrible. Yes, I loved Evie once, but it’s you that I love now. The only time that I led you on was with the preposterous lies I told you then, that day in the driveway. I was wrong. And for that I am so, very, truly sorry.”

  “You’ve been saying that a lot.”

  “Because I can’t say it enough! I’ll say it every minute of every day if I have to.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  He shakes his head. “But I will if it meant that you could believe me. I can see what I’ve done to you. Every day, I could see that you were miserable – that you are miserable, and I thought that to be a proper penance for me, but certainly not for you. I continued to hope that you’d move on and forget about me -”

  “Not possible,” I interject.

  He places both of his hands to my face and forces me to look into his aquatic eyes. After searching my unsure stare, he leans in very hesitantly to put his lips to mine after he’s found whatever it is he was looking for. I sigh in contentment.