Chapter 100
Mireya
Play - Lonely Day by System Of A Down
Falling
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes in the car next to him until we park in front of his house.
Thirty minutes of silence and thoughts circling.
Nothing makes sense. Not with the wind tearing at everything, not with the ocean like a black void below the cliff, not the sound of his breathing and the memories of him getting me out of the party.
I walk closer to the edge without giving him the time to react. I can feel him behind me before I hear him. “Step back.”
I almost laughed at this. “Why?”
The wind hits my face hard enough to sting. I deserve it, honestly. I deserve it all. I’ve been a bad sister, a bad daughter, a fucking bad person. Why am I still fighting ? For him? It can’t be right, and it can’t be enough.
“Because you’re too close to the edge.”
I tilt my head slightly, still not turning, and then I open my arms, as if I could fall into the wind if I wanted to. That’s when I turned to look at him. “I used to want to jump when I was a kid.”
“Don’t,” he says immediately. He sounds afraid. But it’s okay, I am not scared of it.
I swallow, “I grew up thinking that her thoughts were mine too.” A tear falls down before I continue, “and then I found out it wasn’t true, thanks to you…And suddenly I don’t even know what part of me is real anymore.”
I open my arms wider now, like I’m daring the air itself. My eyes don’t leave his as I take another step to the void. “Would you miss me if I jumped, Damien?” I say, and a second tear slips down my cheek.
His face changes instantly. Broken. “I’d die,” he says quietly.
“You already saved me here once,” I say, with a shaky voice, “I was in pieces. I was bleeding. And you stayed, you took care of me and made a wish too.” I look at him properly and add, “You remember that, don’t you?”
“I remember everything about you,” he says.
I wipe my cheek quickly, angry at myself for crying, like a child needing proof that it’s going to be okay. “I want to stop,” I whisper.
“It scares me, Mireya,” he says suddenly. “What I feel when you do this, it terrifies me more than anything.”
I hate that my chest tightens. “I don’t know how to stop,” I admit.
Then he moves closer. “Then stop trying to do it alone.”
I shake my head. “You don’t get it. I want it to stop,” my voice breaks. “All of it.”
He steps forward again, right up to the edge with me. Like if I fall, he will too.
“I’ll stop your pain,” he says quietly. “Trust me.” And I hate that I almost do. I hate that I believe him more than I believe myself. His hand grips my arm, holding it carefully as if I was on the verge of breaking into small pieces, “If you go, I’ll go with you.”
My eyes meet his, and he smiles, sadly almost.
“Would you?”
“I’d do anything for you,” then, quieter, “I don’t want you like this.”
And that’s the problem. Because I don’t know how to exist in a way that doesn’t hurt anymore.
He pulls me in, not away from the edge, into him. And I don’t resist. The ocean disappears behind everything else, the wind, the salt, the weight of his arms, the unbearable closeness of him. And when he kisses me, it doesn’t feel like falling into the void anymore.
This feels as if something that was already happening and I just finally caught up to it. Us.
There’s a second where nothing fits properly, our lips colliding, his tongue brushing mine, our breath catching… Everything is messy. My breath stutters into him, swallowed halfway through the kiss like I forgot how lungs are supposed to work.
Should I even breathe? Or is it okay if I died in his arms?
His hand is on my jaw, holding me still so I don’t disappear out of instinct. I make a sound I don’t recognize and it gets lost between the wet kiss, and the sound of the waves crashing against the cliff.
The wind is still there somewhere, but I can’t feel it anymore. Only him. I only feel him.
His thumb shifts slightly against my cheek, trying to memorize the way I react without thinking. I lean into it, not pulling away to breathe. And when he breaks the kiss, our foreheads hover close enough that I can feel every inhale he’s trying to control.
“You’re shaking,” he says quietly.
His hand moves, guiding me somewhere else. And suddenly I’m falling backward with him, grass hits my shoulders first. He follows me down like gravity decided to give up. His hand catches the back of my head before it fully meets the ground, and then he’s over me.
He’s everywhere.
“Don’t move,” he murmurs.
His mouth is on mine again, slower this time, deeper. Like the urgency has nowhere left to go except through us. I lose track of where I am supposed to breathe. It comes in pieces. Inhale, break, inhale. As if my body forgot how to stay whole.
“You can feel so much more than what you’re used to running from,” he says against my lips.
My breath catches. “Pain,” he murmurs, his thumb brushes my cheekbone before sliding his hand around my neck, squeezing it to the point where my eyes close from the sensation.
“And this,” he continued, his mouth meeting mine again. “This is softness.”
His hand stays around my neck, steadying me when I don’t realize I’m shaking. “And this—” He breaks the kiss just enough for his forehead to rest against mine. “This is danger.”
My back presses harder against the ground, as he’s pushing us off closer to the edge, until my head falls back to the void. “Because you’re not in control when you’re with me like this,” he says quietly.
I can feel the blood pulsing in my ears, in my eyes as he squeezes my neck harder. His mouth finds my neck next, kissing, biting, licking it as I finally breathe again. “I’m going to show you all of it tonight. Do you trust me?”
I nod, stupidly, like I wasn’t on the verge of falling and crashing in the ocean. “I do,” I say, voice restrained by the position I'm in.
Because nothing about me is okay. And nothing about this makes sense.