He sat cross-legged, resting his arms against his knees as his eyes fluttered feverishly over the collage of items laid out before him.
His floor was covered in things of Sara.
A shirt she left when she slept over, just after her dad had gotten sick. Pictures of the two of them at the junior prom last spring. A pamphlet from her funeral. His comb she’d used only once and yet still carried her scent. And photos. Dozens of photos of her, clipped from yearbooks and newsletters and albums. One of them she’d taken herself, holding the camera out in front of her as far as she could. In it, her eyebrow was cocked up comically, a fraudulent scowl smeared across her face.
It looked right through him.
If you’re innocent, you’re hurt, or you’re scared... I’ll be there.
The words rang through his head again, followed immediately by the memory of all the times he’d tried to live up to that promise and failed, like cars following a train.
“It’ll never stop. Never be over,” he said to himself, his voice calm and steady all but for a slight waver at the end.
This is the choice you made, he reminded himself inwardly. To take either that road... or this one.
He stared down at the gun again.
Composing himself, he wiped the sweat from his palm onto his shirt and picked it up again. He brought it to the side of his head again with only a second’s pause, bracing himself as he started to pull the trigger.
Put it down.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Xander Drew, put it down,” Sara Johnson said, echoing her own words. She sounded like springtime. “Are you going to? Or are you going to make me repeat myself again?”
Xander looked at her with surprise and puzzlement, not for the first (or the last) time. “And again I say, excuse me?”
“You have been at those damn Chemistry books for ten hours straight. You need to relax, and something tells me that I’m just the person to help you.” Her back was arched, making her even sexier then Xander could’ve ever thought possible. She wore cut-off jeans with a sleeveless pink tube top, a modified fishnet stocking providing a sleeve for one arm, which held a smoldering cigarette in it. The summer sun beat against the back of her head, creating a halo effect around her blonde hair. She looked like an angel.
“I can’t. I really can’t. I’d love to, really... but I can’t.”
“Give it up,” she huffed, smacking his books to the floor. “Come outside. Have fun. For me?”
He looked at her for a moment, raising one eyebrow suspiciously.
She tipped her head to one side, batting her eyelashes extravagantly. She didn’t say another word.
“Let me get my coat,” he sighed.
“Yay!” she chimed happily, thrusting her hands up into the air and making V’s with both of her hands for ‘victory’. She bounced as she walked with him into the main hallway of his house, barely able to contain her excitement. As he was putting on his sneakers, she bent over quickly, giving him a tiny kiss on the top of his head. “Love you, Xander,” she chirped, then opened the door and walked to the end of the porch to finish her smoke, giving him a cute little two-fingered wave as the door closed between them.
He watched the spot where she had been in bewilderment, smiling as he finished lacing up. Even though he knew she was just being playful, something in her eyes had been serious. Had made it seem like even though it was a joke, it was still true. “I love you too,” he replied with a happy sigh, as he opened his front door and followed her.
“I love you, too,” Xander said aloud.
The gun fell to the floor with a dull thud.
He clenched his fists until the knuckles turned white, the skin stretching so tightly over the bone that it became transparent. Grunting angrily, he squeezed even harder, falling to his knees amongst the small shrine he’d built for her on his floor. The skin split, causing blood to flow down his arms and fingers, tracing the familiar contours of his flesh.
After a moment, it began to flow a deep black.
“No,” he pled with himself, bending over and rocking back and forth until the growling, pounding feeling in his right side faded away. It didn’t leave completely though. It never did. Never.
When he opened his eyes again, he was staring directly into the picture of Sara, only inches in front of his face. He made a sound that was so wrought with grief that it didn’t even sound human.
The tears came now, making his eyelids bulge and his cheeks get hot. He slammed his fist against the floor three times, each one harder than the one before.
“Fuck!” he screamed, getting to his feet and grabbing the chair that sat next to his computer and hurling it at the wall with all his strength. It shattered into splinters, one leg driving into the cheap plaster and remaining there like a bony finger pointing at him accusingly. The splinters flipped and tumbled everywhere, bouncing off his chest and getting caught in his hair, the tiny sound each one of them made becoming an earsplitting chaotic cacophony of white noise when heard together. His face red with tears and rage, he picked up his whiskey bottle by its stubby glass neck and threw it blindly. It crashed into a clear lamp filled with seashells, both shattering upon contact with each other and adding a rain of tinkling, sharp shards of glass to the wood that peppered the floor. Both halves of the lamp fell in separate arcs, banging against the wall on their way down. The bulb shattered, its
