Haunt Me (Heartbreaker Duet #2)

seventeen

The next day, she is waiting for me. I don’t kiss her ravenously, like I want to. Instead, I sit quietly next to her and recite my lessons while we both freeze our asses off.

We do the same thing the next day.

We don’t kiss.

It’s almost as if we take up where we left off. Except, it’s not.

…

“Isn’t that a song?” she asks me one day. I am playing R.E.M. on my guitar. I hadn’t touched it in five years before now. I don’t even know why I brought it with me. Dad taught me to play.

“It sure is,” I reply.

“Sing it to me, would you?”

I do. Just like that, I start singing, not even waiting for her to ask twice. I only stop briefly after the chorus to concentrate on some intricate finger placement for my chords, but when I look up, I stop playing. Eden has buried her face in her hands.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, dropping my guitar to the ground in my haste to reach her.

“Nothing,” she says behind her hands. “I just think I have fallen in love with your voice.”

She is crying. I freeze.

Love . She said it. She said ‘love’. About my voice, of course, but still. My heart starts beating so fast I can almost hear it. I don’t know what to do with myself.

Calm down , I tell myself. Calm down.

I don’t.

…

Little by little, I draw her out.

She tells me that it’s been just her dad and her for as long as she can remember. They used to have a housekeeper and a few live-in teachers over the years, but her dad didn’t ‘trust them’, whatever that means. He is apparently mega-rich, so I guess when you have a lot of money, you get paranoid over people trying to screw you over. Still, I get increasingly mad about how isolated she seems to be, how lonely. But she loves her dad fiercely, so I don’t say anything.

She asks me to talk to her about my dad, and I tell her the same stories over and over again. It’s healing for me, to hear the words coming out of my own mouth—proof that he was here, he was here, he was here.

He isn’t here anymore, but he was.

He was my dad.

He is my dad, always will be.

So I talk to her about him and she listens. And the more I talk, the more the grief-monster inside me gets tamed. It transforms from a giant, ugly beast into a black dog, chained quietly in the back garden. It’s still there, but now it’s not choking me. Now I can breathe through the pain.

She does that for me.

I tell her how I always wanted to make him proud but kept failing. She laughs every time I insist that I am the least musically talented person in my family, so I end up telling her about the music I constantly hear inside my head. She tells me to put it to paper. So I write the melody and she hums along, and then we try to write lyrics together.

I stop myself from kissing her again, even though that’s all I want to do. Sometimes, when she leans over to look at my phone, I get dizzy with need. On days when it’s too cold or too rainy to stay under the trees, we take refuge in an abandoned shed, but I never warm her up. I give her my coat if she needs it, but I have stopped touching her altogether—I can’t. If I start, I won’t be able to stop. Sometimes she catches me staring.

She doesn’t ask me why. She knows.

…

One day, I ask her what she’s reading and I end up immersed in Jane Austen.

I think I’m looking for ways to tell her how I feel about her without actually saying the words. She has been so fragile after that intense day of kissing and nearly dying, I think speaking about it will overwhelm her. Break her. Break us .

And I can’t risk that—I can’t lose what we have. It’s the only thing anchoring me to reality, to sanity, to life.

I have tons of ‘friends’ back at home and here at school. I’m barely alone for a second, unless I want to be. And yet I can’t share my actual thoughts with anyone. I barely text anyone any more. Since tragedy found my family, they have been avoiding me as if I’m a bomb that could go off at any moment.

It makes no difference; I can’t let them see my darkness anyway. The emptiness crawling inside of me. They won’t understand—they’ll get scared and freaked out and uncomfortable.

But Eden is ok with the real me. She gets me, without me having to say anything. I can be silent with her, or I can talk. I can be sulky or I can laugh. She won’t leave, no matter how sad I am.

What she will do, is share her Jane Austen books with me. Whether I want to or not.

…

Today, she is reading Persuasion for what feels like the hundredth time.

“Read it to me,” I tell her.

“Read it yourself,” she laughs.

She makes me read Captain Wentworth’s love declaration letter to Anne until I’ve learned it by heart. All the while, she sits there, alternating between staring at me with her soul in her eyes and laughing at me. Meanwhile, those words have touched me deeply. They are expressing exactly what I feel, and so well. Man, that Jane kind of had a way with words, didn’t she? Imagine being able to create entire worlds within a person just by using words?

The right words, in the right places. How would anyone begin to do that? I can’t even imagine the amount of work it would take.

“Quiz me,” I ask her and she does.

I know every single line by heart, which she finds hilarious. I watch her as she collapses on the floor, laughing.

What if I wrote a song with Wentworth’s words as lyrics and sang it to her? I think. Who will be laughing then? That ought to stop her. Not that I would ever have the skill and talent required to do a thing like that.

“Do you have any more of these?” I ask her.

“These what? ”

“Love declarations.”

I hide my face as I say it, scared she’ll laugh even more at my scarlet cheeks, but she doesn’t. She stops laughing and turns dead serious.

Books do that to her. Books are serious business with her.

As they should be, I am beginning to realize.

“I do,” she replies. “I have more of these. A lot more.”

And that’s how it starts.

We read the ‘haunt me’ scene from Wuthering Heights , the ‘caged bird’ scene from Jane Eyre , the ‘my brave girl’ scene from Our Mutual Friend and the ‘most ardently’ scene from Pride and Prejudice . And I fall in love with these books and with her while she reads from them, as if it was possible to fall even further in love with her than I already was. I can barely think, just looking at her eyes sparkle as she reads, let alone memorize, but I do my best.

“Which one was your favorite?” she asks me in the end.

I swallow. “Honestly, I have no idea what you were talking about,” I say. “I was looking at your lips the entire time.”

She blushes furiously and reads everything again.

“Wuthering Heights,” I decide. “Is that a good book?”

“Horrible,” she replies in that curt, sharp way of hers.

“Why?”

“Because I’d love for it to be true. A boy to worship me, to be my slave.”

“I do,” I reply at once. “I am.”

She laughs as if I just said the weirdest thing, and I don’t mind. She’s laughing, that’s all I care about. I can’t get enough of the sound of her laughter. I close my eyes and drink in the rare sound of pure happiness coming from her. I would make a fool of myself every single day just so she could laugh like that more often.

“It’s so embarrassing,” she says once she’s done laughing. “I don’t even know why I’m showing these passages to you. These books I’m reading… I know it’s wrong. But I can’t stop.”

I raise an eyebrow at that. “How could reading be wrong?”

“Well, I started on the classic literature, but I’ve kind of finished it.” Her cheeks are turning pink again.

“You what?” How can one finish the classics?

“I read a lot of it, or all of it, and now I’ve moved on to more… contemporary authors, let’s say.”

“Your mom’s Victorian romances,” I say. “I remember.”

“Not my mom’s. Not Victorian. ”

She is hiding a paperback behind her back, and I reach for it. It’s got nothing but typography on the cover, but once I open it… There is a couple on a fully-colored page, and let’s just say they that they are hugging a little bit too much and wearing a little bit too little. On a bed.

“It’s a stepback cover.” She tries to grab it from my hand, but I hold fast.

“Show me,” I tell her, letting my guitar fall to the grass. Now this is interesting.

“Are you crazy? Absolutely not!” She goes even redder and I don’t know how I stop myself from grabbing her and devouring her right here right now. She smacks my arm, but eventually she lets me hold the book. Then she goes back to hiding behind her hair.

“There are…” I swallow, “explicit scenes in this book, right?”

“I don’t get them,” she replies, looking away. “They scare me sometimes. Other times, they… make me feel things I shouldn’t.”

“Do you want to keep talking about them?”

She nods.

I leaf through the book while she hides behind her hair, and finally, I read one of the sex scenes in the book (to myself, not out loud). I swallow.

Wow. That was… wow.

I lick my suddenly dry lips and I try to explain to her a few things about what I just read: what is realistic and what is not, what she should be careful about and how everything works in real life. A lot of what I read is just plain ignorant or pure idiocy—but there were some parts that helped me start the conversation. I tell her that personally, I have no experience in this department, and that makes her sit a bit straighter. As if she is relieved.

I am not sure I am the person she needs to be talking about this stuff with, but there is no one else to do this. Apparently, her loser of a dad won’t do it. She and I have already kissed—it’s important that she is educated. And I might be an idiot at explaining things, but I have a mom and she does not. She knows very little except for the stuff she has read in these romance books, so I do my best to explain what I can.

She listens carefully, her cheeks glowing deliciously pink.

As I talk, I can feel myself changing from a stupid, moronic boy that stared at girls’ boobs, to a man who talks to a girl about becoming a woman respectfully and carefully. It all happens in the span of half an hour. I become a man. For her.

I don’t know if I measure up to the challenge .

I only know that I want to.

“Do you have anyone… any girl friend or relative…” I start asking, then pause to swallow. I mean, it’s obvious she has no one: she didn’t even know what to do when she got her period. That’s not right. It’s not fair. “Do you have anyone in your life that you can talk about this stuff to?” She just shakes her head quietly. “Well, you do now.”

I take her hand and, for the first time since our kiss, she lets me.

I am already planning on going to my room and researching the hell out of the subject matter, to be better educated for her if she ever has any questions. If she ever decides to trust me enough to kiss me again.

Or to do more than kissing…

To…

I can’t breathe again. I need to breathe. I need to talk about something that won’t make me lose my mind.

“Which of the classics have you read?” my voice comes out in a croak. “Surely it can’t be all of them.” I hardly know what I’m saying. “All the Austens and the Shakespeares?”

“All the Austens and the Shakespeares, to begin with,” she says slowly, her voice timid after our conversation. If I want one thing, it’s for her never to feel embarrassed when she is with me.

I need to get her talking about books, her safe place. Her cheeks are already dimpling with happiness. Those dimples on her cheeks, man. I’d die for those dimples.

“Several times over,” she adds. “The Brontes as well, Thomas Hardy, Dickens.”

“What else?”

“You seriously want me to keep going? I can go on all day.”

“I’m counting on it.”

She smiles again, and starts.

…

Up in my room that night, I don’t do what’s left of my homework. Instead, I go over the love declarations I have memorized, to make sure I know every word by heart. Then I research safe sex for older teenage girls.

The next time she pretend-quizzes me over the classics, she is laughing again, but I am being dead serious. I need to pass this test.

I need to show her she can rely on me—even for literature .

I’m so anxious I’m sweating. I want to impress her, even though I am a complete idiot. But after that explicit book talk, she keeps looking at me as if I am a god among men, and it hurts, it physically hurts me, how far from perfect I am. It hurts because I want to be the guy she thinks I am, and any minute now she will realize what a loser I actually am. I am racing against time to prove to her that I am who she thinks I am. To become who she thinks I am.

“Ok, once more,” she prompts me. “You got this.”

“Darcy is the smolder,” I say, concentrating hard, counting on my fingers.

“And the change of heart,” she adds.

“And the change of heart.”

“Good. Go on.”

“Rochester is the ‘give me my name’ dude and Heathcliff is the ‘I am Heathclif’.”

“That’s Cathy.” She is already giggling.

“Well, it’s Heathcliff too, believe me,” I say, and she collapses into giggles.

I don’t laugh. I can feel Heathcliff’s pain as if it were my own—and the man isn’t even real. I don’t know why I feel this kinship with the dude, except maybe because he is broken and sad and ruins everything. Like me. My head is splitting from having to keep all those ruffle-shirted dudes straight, but, dammit, I am going to get them right or I am going to die.

“Romeo is the ‘with a kiss I die,’ right? And Rochester… Oh, crap.”

Who is Rochester?

“You’ve done Rochester.” Eden can barely talk she is laughing so hard.

“Well, stop looking at me with those eyes and smiling with those lips… It’s distracting.”

She laughs harder. And she keeps looking at me even harder. With those eyes.

Gosh, does she even know what she is doing to me? I’d have died for her if she was in danger—well, I almost did—but in this moment, I’d have died for her even if she wasn’t in danger. All she has to do is ask, and I’ll tear out my soul and just hand it to her.

“Ok. Focus, Isaiah,” I tell myself. “Austen, ok? Let’s do Austen. I got Austen. Knightley is the ‘if I loved you less, I would talk about it more’ and Wentworth is the letter dude.”

“The letter dude?” Eden is gasping for breath now.

“ You pierce my heart ,” I recite, proud as a peacock. A super dumb peacock.

“It’s soul. You pierce my soul .”

“ You pierce my soul ,” I correct. “ I am half agony, half hope. ” I look at her, and she is shaking with laughter, wiping tears from her cheeks.

She looks so freaking cute and happy my heart hurts. I, on the other hand, am dead serious. If I get started on that letter, I won’t stop. I’ll recite it all. I’ll mean every single word. I will melt at her feet.

“I can go on,” I threaten. “I’ll recite it right now, don’t press me, man.”

The moment I call her ‘man’ as if she is my best dude friend, everything changes.

The tension bursts in my chest, evaporating. Eden snorts loudly, collapsing on the cold ground in a fit of giggles, and I explode with laughter. We roll around in the frozen leaves, gasping for breath, hands gripped tight, legs all tangled up, giggling until we have no air left in our lungs.

“Wait,” I gasp at one point, looking down at our joined hands. “Isn’t there an Austen dude who says ‘are those your hands or mine? I can’t tell the difference’ ?”

“It’s Angel Clare,” Eden says in a whisper. She has stopped laughing and is just calm now. Happy. Tired from all that breathless joy. “He’s in Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Also known as, ‘you’re way off’.”

“Oh, right.”

She is staring at our hands too. Her fingers are tiny and pale, mine freshly-calloused from playing the guitar. I press her knuckles hard, and she presses mine back.

Of course I was way off. Who could concentrate on Angel Clare and Tess of the D’Urbervilles when Eden is here next to me, breathing, laughing, alive?

“Of course, it’s Angel Clare,” I say, as if I have any idea what the heck I was talking about.

I feel her smile.

And then I say, “And it’s us, too.” Before the words are out of my lips, she gets up to leave, but I’m used to her flight response by now. I leap up and catch her around the waist, playfully tackling her back onto the ground. “You aren’t going anywhere,” I tell her softly. “We are like that, whether you’re scared of it or not. ”

She stops struggling, goes still in my arms. My breath comes short as her eyes find mine.

“I am scared of it,” she admits, and my heart is singing because she admitted it, in a way. That she feels it. That we are like that.

That she knows I worship her.

“You are scared?” I repeat, as if in a trance.

“Terrified,” she says, her eyes still on mine. She isn’t blinking, her pupils dilated. By fear. And also by something else.

I lean down and I don’t kiss her.

And then I tell her I love her, but not out loud.

She is not the only one who is terrified.

…

I never know what to expect from this girl.

She just sits there, day after day, nose buried in her book, but it turns out that she is paying attention to me as well. She sees everything I do, and more importantly, everything I don’t do.

“You haven’t been studying,” she says one day.

The frost on the tree branches is beginning to thaw. Spring is here. I have never noticed how the seasons change before this. Slowly, but right on time.

“Don’t feel like it,” I reply.

“Your feelings have nothing to do with it,” she says, “not if you want to get into college.”

She sounds like one of my professors, which is freaking me out a little bit, but ok.

“I keep getting the feeling every time I open a book,” I say.

“What feeling?”

I make a gesture with my hand, trying to find the words. “The feeling I get before I have a panic attack.”

She goes quiet after that, but I notice her frowning into her book, not moving a page. We don’t get more than half an hour together anymore—since my detentions, I can’t sneak away unnoticed, as my supervisors are watching me like a hawk. Still, I manage. A guy finds a way to get his oxygen, even in small doses.

…

The same night, I get a text .

Why do you get that feeling whenever you're studying?

It's not important, Eden.

It is to me.

She has never texted me first before. I’m always the first one to text. I sit up, my head already hot and heavy at the idea that she is thinking of me in the middle of the night. I just wish she wasn’t worrying about me.

I type as quickly as I can:

One of the professors is kind of abrasive. Just a regular old bully. Keeps referring to my dad and how he didn't go to an Ivy, just to get a rise out of me. It's the kind of thing some professors here do. They think it motivates us to be more cut-throat, competitive.

That is repulsive.

Everyone else can handle it just fine.

Everyone else will go on to become a soulless corporate robot.

I smile. But not me?

Never you.

Not if I don't study ever again. That man is right, you know? I don't have what it takes. My dad would be so disappointed.

I don’t know why I added that last part. I wish I hadn’t. Then again, she is the only person I can tell what I am thinking to. I already feel better.

No response.

Eden, are you here?

She is gone. The texts disappear three minutes later. I struggle to fall asleep .

The next day, while I am in said asshole’s class, I don’t take the bullying. I talk back to him, I defend myself. As expected, a few hours later I find myself in the professor’s office for a heart-to-heart.

He starts talking about why I am being aggressive, and I know that I am about to lose it. I should be meeting Eden right about now. These are my few minutes in the day that I can breathe, and instead I am spending them being verbally abused by a small man who should be here to help me grow.

I won’t make it today , I text her quickly, hiding the phone behind my back. Professor’s office.

I don’t expect her to answer. Five excruciating minutes pass. The walls begin to close down on me. I try to calm my breathing.

Next thing I know, there is a commotion at the hall, and the door of the office bursts open. A slender figure stands in the doorway, shaking with fury.

I blink.

I think I hyperventilated a bit too hard, because she looks like Eden.

Here, in my school. Inside.

She looks like an avenging angel, standing there in door’s opening, the afternoon light casing her shadow long and thin on the floor. I blink some more, but Eden (or Eden’s hologram), isn’t wasting any time. My professor gets up, quick words coming to his lips to yell at her for barging in, but instead, she does the yelling.

She lets him have it.

I just sit there, dumbfounded, watching this slip of a girl with her tight braid and her mismatched clothes lecture my school’s strictest professor.

“Who gives you the right to bully your students?” she asks him. Her voice is calm and reasonable, like usual, but there is a fire behind it. “What kind of example do you think you are giving them? Bullying a boy who has just lost his dad? Mentioning him during class as a sort of sick power play? Who gives you the right? Are you perhaps confused, and think that you are a villain on a trashy TV show instead of an academic instructor?”

Her words are razor-sharp, hitting below the belt. My professor turns all shades of puce, then flinches. She just doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise, but her words are not heated. Her fury is quiet and dignified. It’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever seen .

“Trying to make up for any lack in your personal or professional life by bringing one of your students down is the trick of a weak man,” Eden says. I don’t know how she can stand there and say these things.

Except she seems to have thought of them beforehand. Maybe for reasons of her own. If I didn’t know better, I would have said that she has been in the exact same position as me before. Many times.

But that’s not possible, right? She was homeschooled, and her dad adores her.

Then again, it’s not possible that she should be standing here right now, so what do I know? Nothing makes sense.

“I suggest you apologize and watch your behavior from now on,” Eden goes on, “because this student might not have a father to come here and yell at you for your lousy behavior, but he does have a family. A mom, a grandfather, a brother. He has friends who will drag your name through the mud if anything happens to him because of your actions or words. And neither you nor your school will recover from the bullying allegations, I can promise you that. If you are so weak that you can’t handle your students being smarter than you in class, I can guarantee you won’t be strong enough to handle that.”

Ouch. I wince on his behalf, even as my lips curl in a smile.

“Who-who are you, miss, may I ask?” he asks finally, his voice colorless. He is scared out of his mind.

“I am his older sister,” Eden lies without so much as blinking, and then reaches out her hand with authority. Bemused, I get up and follow her.

“Come on, Isaiah,” she says, “we’re leaving. You need to talk to your therapist about what happened here today. Then, maybe our legal team.”

This last part is so ridiculous, that I can barely hold the laughter in until we’re out the door. My professor turns deadly white.

Eden and I run away together, me holding her hand as if she’s my ‘older sister’ even though she is literally less than half my size. The principal has arrived at the scene, and I see him getting smaller at the end of the hallway as we run. He looks slightly pale as well; he must have heard some or all of it from the other side of the door.

We just keep running. Neither dares follow us .

“You’re crazy, you know that?” I gasp as we run to our spot in the woods. “No, not crazy. Fearless. You are fearless.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” Eden replies. “You… You are hurting enough on your own, without these people ”—the way she says ‘these people’ sends chills down my spine—“adding to it. So yeah, that was a little crazy and a little reckless, but I don’t care.”

She is shaking like a leaf.

I drape my scarf around her throat—neither one of us is wearing a coat.

I brush a strand of hair away from her lips. Her fast-coming breath scorches my fingers. Before I know it, they are sliding down all the way to her wrist, feeling its delicate veins as my palm circles it. Her hand is made of porcelain, of pearls, and I turn her around to face me. She lifts her pink lips to mine, open, waiting, and I can’t help myself any longer. I guide her with an arm around her waist, pressing her back against a tree as my mouth comes down on hers hungrily, as if I’m drowning and she is oxygen.

My fingers tangle in her hair, and she grows weak against me, her knees giving way. We both giggle into each other’s lips as I catch her against me and then slide to my knees, holding her, and it’s like our first kiss all over again. I am sinking and I don’t want to be rescued.

“My dad supports this school majorly,” she says, “did you know that?” I shake my head. I had no idea. “I’ll see if I can get that idiot professor fired.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Isaiah,” she replies, her tone serious and slow, as if she is speaking to a child. “He made you feel like you are not good enough, and that’s not acceptable in any way, but especially for you.”

“For me?” I raise an eyebrow.

“Please tell me you don’t know you’re a genius,” she sighs.

I just stand there, dumbfounded for the second time in a single day, my lips swollen from kissing her, my heart in pieces from all the crazy, overwhelming, impossible things she makes me feel.

“I’m what?”

“You are a composer, you idiot. And a songwriter.”

I laugh—that’s preposterous. I am so not . I open my lips to tell her that, but I catch a glimpse of her face, and I freeze. Tears are shining in her eyes and I panic, wiping them to make them go away. Whatever upset her is tearing me apart .

“Hey, no, I’m sorry,” I say, “I’m sorry. Please call me an idiot all you like, I love it. I love it, Eden.”

“I’m not crying about that.” More water is streaming down her cheeks. I am frozen in terror. “I am crying about you. If everyone in your life, teachers, musicians, parents, brothers, friends, if everyone hasn’t told you every single day of your life that you are amazing, and that you can do anything in the world you want… Then they are all idiots. Because you are. Amazing.”

I take her head in my hands and bring her lips to mine hungrily, desperately, and my lips burn and tingle as she kisses me back with the same desperation. My brain explodes in a symphony. My hands find the hollow between her collarbones and run over the contour of her jaw, her shoulder, her waist. We lower our bodies to the grass, which smells of earth and melting snow, and she knits her long, slender fingers behind my neck, bringing my mouth down to hers, deepening the kiss. The wind swirls around us, singing just for us.

The way she is kissing me back, with complete surrender, the taste of her tears on both our tongues, makes me go hard and so weak I can barely draw breath. I clutch the back of her sweater and brace myself on my arms as I lean above her, turning my chin as far as it can go so I can taste her better. More. Just more.

My body is on top of hers, every part of her matched to mine. I can barely move, or I will end.

“This is out of control,” I gasp into her hair. “I’m not… I’m not in control, Eden.”

“Me neither,” she says. Her voice is nothing but a rasp and my bones turn to jelly just at the sound of what I’m doing to her right now. She pulls me down by my shirt, her fingers shaking.

I’m gone. I don’t exist anymore. I lose myself.

And that is the exact moment that I find myself.

…

I saved her life that day in the highway, it’s true.

But my entire life, I will remember the day she saved me from my professor not as the day she saved mine; but as the day she started it.

…

The next day, I’m late to our spot. I nearly got detention again because I got caught jumping the fence yesterday, but I think they were too scared of Eden to actually give it to me. They let me off with a warning.

Late or not, I’m not staying away. She’s here, waiting for me. Shivering. I take her to the shed, warm her up, but I can’t hide the fact that my eyes are red.

I have been crying since I woke up. I can’t seem to stop. The tears just pour out of me and slide down my cheeks, then fresh ones follow.

“You’ve been crying,” Eden notices at once, even though the light is dimming fast. “What’s wrong?”

I can’t hold it in any longer. It’s destroying me.

“I love you,” I tell her.

“What?”

“I love you.”

“You’ve been crying over that?”

“Yeah. It’s too powerful. I can’t… I can’t keep it in anymore, don’t ask me to. It’s too big for my chest.”

She sighs, exasperated. “We’ve been over this, Isaiah. Please don’t—”

“No,” I shake my head, “I’m not backing out. I’m not taking it back this time. It’s real for me, Eden. It’s love.”

“This is too dramatic, even for you.”

“I’m not kidding. I wish I was.”

“Don’t ruin everything, Isaiah, please, I… I told you that I....”

“I can’t take it anymore. I am ruining everything, and I can’t stop. I love you, Eden. I realized it when you almost died on that highway, and that day I said it to you in a desperate, frantic way. But now I’m lucid and calm and everything is perfectly clear in my mind: I. Love. You. I have been crying nonstop.”

“Because you love me?”

“Because I love you.” I bend at the waist, trying to catch my breath.

“That is the corniest thing anyone has ever said,” Eden observes.

“Isn’t it just?” I agree. “Yet here I am. Loving you.”

“Well, stop it. I won’t… I will never talk to you again if you keep saying it.”

I feel the blood drain from my head, leaving me lightheaded. I stumble, but I catch myself. I look her in the eyes. Knowing the risk, I say :

“I love you.”

I fully expect her to turn around and run away, like she always has in the past, but she doesn’t this time. Well, not at once. She just stands there, looking at me, her eyes growing sadder and sadder.

“What?” I ask her after she’s done a lot of staring. She’s still doing it.

“What what?”

“What are you doing, staring at me, looking so sad? Are you trying to bring me to my knees?”

“I’m saying goodbye,” she says. Her eyes are twin lakes, shining with unshed tears.

“Now who’s being dramatic?” I murmur, but I’m already taking a step towards her, panic coursing through me. I’m ready to chase after her. “I am not losing you, Eden.”

“Then take it back. Say you were joking.”

“I wasn’t. I won’t. I’m done taking things back. I’m desperately in love with you. I’m beyond Heathcliff right now.”

“I can barely be your friend…”

“It’s not enough.”

“Being my friend is not enough?”

“How can it be enough after yesterday? After I have tasted you, after I have lied on the grass with you, my body pressed against your—”

She makes a gesture for me to stop. She looks like she’s about to be sick, or faint. Or both. “That was a mistake,” she whispers, horrified.

“Well, I want more mistakes. I want more,” I say. I’m not being stubborn; I am stating the truth. I have discovered since yesterday that I should really start saying what I want. Going after it.

It’s such a relief to be doing it right now.

“What more do you want?” Eden cries. “You see me every day. You know everything about me, you….” She stops. Bites her tongue.

“You know what more,” I say, my eyes burning into her, traveling down to her lips. Staying there.

“Well, there is no more . I can’t give you any more, Isaiah, do you understand? It’s either this, what we have right now, or nothing .” Her voice is heaving, her breaths coming close together, and I want nothing but to take her in my arms and make the pain go away, but we have to have it out. There is no other way out of this but through. “I… I can’t go back to nothing. You forced it out of me. ”

She is crying again—but she hasn’t noticed it yet. She keeps talking, the pain rising in her voice, the tears beginning to pour down her cheeks, and still she’s trying to talk through it all.

“I only knew the ‘nothing’ before, Isaiah. I breathed ‘nothing’, I lived ‘nothing’. But now… I’m alive. You made me come alive. And you’re asking me to go back to ‘nothing’.”

I don’t pretend to understand what she’s talking about—I’m too stupid to follow her train of thought usually anyway. But I get the pain. I see it. I see how it’s breaking her right in front of my eyes.

“Do you like me even a little bit?” I ask her. “Please tell me that.”

She rolls her eyes, as if she’s saying ‘please’. As if I am supposed to know. But I need her to say it. To give me something to hold on to when I eventually go under.

“I like you so much it scares me,” she says in a low voice. “I’m not… I’m not allowed to like things.”

“Things?”

“Yes, not even things. Much less…”

“An idiot like me.”

“A boy like you. You.”

I grab her wrist, my fingers circling her ice-cold skin and she flinches but she doesn’t pull away.

“I won’t lie to you,” I tell her. “I’m not taking it back. I love you. Just… stay. Stay anyway.”

“Then if you won’t lie, will you at least ask me to forget you said it?”

I smile. “No.”

“You are such an idiot, you know that?”

“Yep.”

“So, ask me to forget it, you idiot.”

“Nope.”

We just stand there, staring each other down. I’m on the brink of shattering; I’m barely keeping it together.

“Just stay,” I tell her, my voice breaking pathetically.

She doesn’t answer for the longest time. Then,

“Ok.”

I think I stop breathing as I look at her. The light, filtered through the tree branches, bathes her black hair in yellow stripes. It her white cheekbone, turning the skin peach.

I don’t touch her.

I start trembling again .

I want her so much it scares me. I have to stop myself from wanting her so much, or I will make myself crazy. But I think it’s too late.

My own, personal Eden.

My own, personal hell.

…

I won’t tell her I love her again.

I won’t tell her I love her again until years later. And it will be in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of people.

But I will never stop loving her.

Not for a second.

All this time, I will never stop loving her once.

And neither will she.