“I don’t want a good relationship with him. I want a good relationship with you,” she pushed.
“Babe, you’ll always have that,” I said. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to hate anyone because of something that happened between me and that person in the past. He’s my dad and he’s going to be around for at least the next while. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives together and I don’t want the two of you starting off like that. I hope that he’s really going to make it right so there’s that.”
“He’s finally woken up,” she said. “He’s scared of losing you, even though he hasn’t been here…” She was thinking through it, working it through. “Sorry,” she said. “Wanna go back down?”
“Don’t be sorry.” I stepped back and smiled sadly. “Yeah, we should probably go but thank you for bringing me up here. I love it.” I looked around the tree house. “You should tell me about when you used to come up here. It’ll do me good to think of you all cute and little.”
“Well,” she smiled, coming up behind me and kissing my shoulder. “I used to get mad at my parents and disappear up here for days.” She ran her hands over me. I felt her holding herself to me with a hand at my shoulder and another at my hip. Her breasts pushed lightly at my back and I loved them. “I’d steal food from the kitchen, take journals and books. I’d just sit up here and think about how independent I was, how self-sufficient. It was stupid. I didn’t know.” I felt her rest her forehead on me and just hold me from behind. “In the end I’d get sick of no one coming to look for me. I’d go back down. Or I’d get scared, like if there was a storm or something with lightning and thunder. My mom would smile and ask me how my trip was and if I liked it. I’d go upstairs and sleep alone…”
My smile disappeared. We were so different and so similar. “The first part of that story was great and then it just got sad. I wish I’d been there to hang out with you. We would have had fun. The great thing is that you’re not going to sleep alone again. We can figure something out but I’m not dealing with people trying to split us up. I don’t care where we are. Here, my house, whatever, we’re together. Deal?”
“Sometimes I get so sad I don’t know what to think,” she breathed in shakily. Then softly, a bit later. “Deal,” she whispered, still holding me and trying her best not to cry.
“I know you do. Same here. We’ve just got to fight through, I guess. It’s what we do. None of this is okay but we’re alive and we’ve got each other. That counts for a lot.” We were dangerous to people because we were two broken souls and we knew how to survive. Even more so now that we had lifelines in one another.
I felt her breathe in deeply and run her hands up my back, her forehead resting on the back of my neck as she gathered and found her strength.
“Let's get this done,” she said faithfully.
I had to smile at her gathering herself. “It’s like we’re going off to battle. I’m feeling very Joan of Arc right now.” I stepped away, holding her hand and brought it to my lips to kiss before I went to find the suit I’d been wearing.
“I’m sick of battle. I want the eternal honeymoon,” she said, moving to help me find what she knew I was looking for.
“Me too. Far, far away where there are no parents.” I grabbed the bottoms and slipped them on and when I looked up she was holding out the mangled top. “Well, this got kind of twisted and weird. I wonder what could have happened to it.” I untangled the mess and slipped it on, happy that it actually still worked. “Guess I’m not as strong as I thought,” I said, straightening the straps on my shoulders.
She walked right to me and kissed me slow. I felt her hands at my face and her kissing speed up before she stopped herself and rest her forehead on mine.
“One more dinner,” she chanted. “One more dinner. One more dinner. One more dinner.”
“One more dinner then we can go upstairs and you can show me this box." Even now in my sadness I could think of nothing better than to pay her back in kind for the pleasure she had just given me.
Chapter Two
Olivia
I wished we could stay up in the treehouse for days and days just like I used to. Time has this way of rushing on despite our wanting it to.
“Here,” I said, opening her suit bottoms and pushing her to step in. As soon as she did I pulled them all the way up her body and made sure they were on right.
If sex fixed things I was all for a lot of sex.
Our lives had been messy for days now and the only time we felt grounded was when we touched.
That was something I understood, something I counted on now.
And sex with her here was just...
My childhood playground... My fantasy world in the sky was an excellent place to exist with her. Up here our cocoon expanded to include a glorious people-less world, with beauty and presence and such awe.
I stood up and walked to the window to look out. Down the land, past the bushes and the trees, past the pool, past the house, I could see the ocean far off in the distance as it stretched out nearly limitless only stopping where the sun made it end- a magical glowing boulder at the edge of the world.
The sun was setting right into the blue, a strong limit point, like one large glowing stone. On the water I could see its burning triangular trail. It stretched out toward us, shimmered, to try and reach us but failed, cut off by the cliffs and the presence of land. I felt sadness in its failure. I wanted it to touch me. I wanted it to succeed.
The sky lit up orange and red just for us.
I pulled Avery’s hand into my own and forced her to come see.
“Take a look,” I said, leading her hand up to my mouth and kissing it.
She came up behind me, pressing her body to mine and looking out over my shoulder as she held me tight.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
I couldn’t remember ever seeing and having it feel so very real and so very right.
“I’ve seen it set up here so many times,” I mumbled quietly. But she couldn’t know.
I used to study it. Used to wait every day, stalking my world watch, then running up here, climbing up to the top and sitting at the observation deck with my telescope ready, filters and all, and all to stare at the sun. Which is something I’d been told explicitly not to do before dedicating so much precious time to the practice.
My dad thought I was crazy. I had charts and drawings, a large journal where I was tracking the placement and the times and any changes, any important things: cloud cover, smog, discoloration in the sea, big boats, random specs on the air, any anomalies. Occasionally I’d try to capture it, take several pictures, draw my heart out, try to paint it with acrylics and then watercolors and then oils. I’d make charcoals; I’d make renderings all with negative space. I did weather studies, position studies, water studies. I studied it all.
But this was...
“I’ve never seen it like this,” I said, my lips moving somehow. My words rushing out in an exhale and emptying from inside of me.
A new first.
I realized at once.
I turned in Avery’s arms, turned into her body. I felt her face with my hand. Kissing her lovingly, desperately. I needed to keep her and have her. I needed her to have me too.
Life was so short, just like the days, just like the sun. One day we wouldn’t be here anymore. One day we’d have to slide down beneath the ground to maybe somehow rise again.
As I kissed her I felt myself growing weepy and strange. I pulled away to try and still myself into feeling calm.
The sun was down now, all the way down. I’d kissed her so hungrily, I lost track of the time and the place, I could barely stand. I shifted my feet.
"We should come here all the time and you can show me your world." She pressed her forehead to mine.
“You’re my world,” I said, my breath hitching.
That’s why I felt this way. That’s why the sunset actually changed.
I felt tears in my eyes
and then laughed slightly, my knees buckling as I shifted and caught myself.
“Come on,” I said, pulling her to follow me out.
We walked the swinging bridge in the civil twilight and took the ladder down a lot quieter and a lot slower than we had done coming up.
When we got down by the pool I think we both felt the silence.
Being together sometimes just felt correct. I think it scared us both awake, sobered us in certain ways.
Inside, we took a shower together, a quiet shower that soothed us both and made us clean. We took turns washing each other’s skin. Occasionally we kissed, rested our bodies on each other’s, let out telling breaths that spoke volumes about what we wished we could do.
When we got dressed in the room it felt strange to know we’d been so wordless for so very long.
“Sorry, I’ve been so quiet,” I said, hoping it’d been mutual and not just me.
“I’ve been quiet too,” she said, reminding me.
“I know,” I laughed feeling heavy. “Sometimes are moments are just too right,” I said, knowing I’d been sort of taken again by her. She often took me. Where? Somewhere else. Somewhere secondary; not this place. Or maybe this was what it felt like to actually want to exist.
“My dad’s on his way,” she said from the bed. She had her phone in her hands and she was staring down at it.
“Are you scared?” I asked.
“I dunno what to feel,” she said. “I just don’t want him to hate me.”
“He doesn’t,” I said, pulling her hand into mine and sitting down at her side.
“17 or not, I had sex with my teacher. That was my choice.”
“But you couldn’t have known,” I said. This wasn’t so much about Ben being a teacher as it was about Ben being a bad man.
“It was stupid though,” she choked out. “I was so lonely. I let myself be open to him in ways I wasn’t to people who actually cared about me.”
“Avery,” I said, pulling her into me. “No,” I shook her, holding her. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t.”
If anyone knew how addicting Ben could be it was me.
“I loved Ben,” I said. “I loved Ben like a brother. He was like this smooth older guy who everyone loved but nobody really knew. And I thought I knew him more. Just like you did probably. And that was addicting. He can make you feel like you’re the only one who matters.”
I sighed. I didn’t know if that was true for her. He could be making her feel the opposite. I didn’t know.
“We couldn’t have known… What he was. What he’d do,” I stressed my point.
I was sick of her blaming herself for everything bad that happened to her, everything bad that shouldn’t have happened. All the ways in which other people intentionally let her down.
“There is nothing unlovable about you,” I said angrily. “You’re gorgeous and sexy and funny and smart…” I let my mind think back on our first day again. I thought of that so much. “You have pain, pain you don’t want to know about, don’t want to feel. That’s why it got complicated. Why the ground beneath you seemed to suddenly just swallow you up... When nothing matters, nothing matters,” I said, knowing how stupid it probably sounded to her.
All I meant was, I knew she couldn’t be moved and she was trying to feel.
“You were numb,” I said. “He made you feel something. And I get that.”
I had to say it plain or she wouldn’t know I knew. As I spoke she closed her eyes and tensed. She was reliving that time.
“You wanted to feel something. Needed to feel alive. That’s not shameful Avery.”
“Murakami has this book,” I said, biting my bottom lip and remembering a quote. “There’s this character that falls in love and knows that the other person will one day leave them. They know when it comes, they know they’ve known all along.” She tried to speak but I stopped her. “Anyway, the quote goes: I just feel pain. A lot of pain.” I pushed, looking down on her. “I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
My brows furrowed as I thought of that simply.
“I can’t know what you felt but I know I’ve probably never come close to the amount of pain you had to endure to feel so broken and so numb. I’ve never lost someone so close like Adam. I’ve never had anyone even close like that to lose, until now,” I swallowed hard, hating to think of her gone. If she died that would kill me. And she lost Adam. She lost someone like that.
“Needing to feel wasn’t stupid.” I shook her hand in mine, needing her to know. “You were dead inside. You couldn’t feel.”
I didn’t know what else to say.
“You’re right. Everything I did made it worse though.”
“Worse how?” I asked.
“The more things that happened with him the more I went somewhere else. I checked out sometimes and I think I would have stopped if he hadn’t been so persistent. Always waiting and looking, he never let me be when I was around him. We never even did anything nice. Unless you count that diner where he took me.”
“I’m just saying it’s not your fault. He was the only one trying. The only one being persistent. Of course you lost yourself. You didn’t have many choices.”
I thought of Skylar and wished…
It made no sense to do that now. Would I trade Avery now for Avery being saved from Ben? I didn't like the question, and I knew I didn’t have to ask myself that because I couldn’t go back.
I heard the doorbell and knew it was her dad.
I stood up and wiped my eyes. My makeup in the mirror was almost all gone from all the crying I’d done. I pulled some liquid foundation and a small contour and blush kit from my bag and put some makeup on. No point in looking as dead as I felt.
Beside myself I thought of another quote:
“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.” ~ Laurell K. Hamilton, Minstral’s Kiss
Instead of saying it out loud, I thought of it and kept it in my own head.
I ignored the muttering from downstairs and found my eyeliner and eyeshadow.
Avery was just watching me quietly.
I smiled in my mirror, catching her eye, unsure of what to say.
“You okay?” I asked, trying to busy my hands and my mind and everything else.
“Yeah. You know this isn’t even the hard part. It’s talking to strangers that will make me more nervous. You’ll be there too, right?”
This dinner was going to be odd. Our parents wouldn’t know what to say. It’d be on us and Avery wasn’t ready to talk about Ben, she’d probably never be ready. No one could blame her for that. I know I’d understand.
The hearing on Tuesday though would be a whole different situation. The thought of it terrified me. I’d probably learn even more that was hard to hear. I’d have to be strong for her. I’d have to be brave.
“Of course I’ll be there,” I said. “I always want to be where you want me to be. Especially if it’s going to help you. As far as tonight goes though, if they push you, you don’t have to talk. You can just say it hurts to talk about it. That’ll be fine. They’ll understand.”
“Come on,” I said, pulling her up to stand.
Her hand in mine felt soft and warm. As she walked close behind me I felt a glow in my chest, a happiness to have her so near.
“There they are!” My mother called.
At the bottom of the stairs I could see Avery’s dad crack a small smile at the sight of us. He’d been looking up the stairs nervously before but when I caught his eye and smiled awkwardly he did just the same. He must’ve been having one hell of a shit day. A little friendliness couldn’t hurt.
“Ready and willing,” I teased, walking us both to stand near.
“Your father couldn’t come,” my mom said and it worried me. “He had a dinner date already. Something technical and boring, no doubt.”
“Right,” I sighed. But I wondered if he was avoiding me acti
vely. That’s something he would do. I still didn’t know what he thought about Avery and me. If I had to guess he thought it was bullshit but I didn’t want to guess, that wouldn’t be fair.
My mom led us all into the kitchen, past the island and to the dining room.
There were places set, candles lit. My mom had the lighting on low. It was actually perfect.
We walked around and sat down. The table was large so we all sat very close to one end.
Paper Dolls [Book Three] Page 4
