I Still. . .
Summer
I leave my body, becoming a whole new person, as soon as we walk into the venue.
I’m mesmerized by the crowds of other fans, us all grouped together with the freedom to let loose and forget about whatever’s waiting for us outside, sharing our love for and getting lost in the music.
After the moment of stillness seeing Ten Decembers blown up on a screen in front of me and letting it sink in that I’m breathing the same air as them, as they’re on a stage just below me , and taking some pictures to send to Clarissa, getting Levi to dance and scream with me is exactly what I do.
It could be the live effect and being with our favorite in person, but I want to believe it’s all me .
In fragments, through the flashing of lights, between the breaks for water, I feel him next to me, moving with me, quick brushes and lingering ones.
We’re clammy, cheesing messes, just us, leaving it all behind for just these moments.
Then these moments take a curve as I end up fully in Levi’s arms after their transition into “Legendary,” an almost subconscious stumbling spin into him at the first notes.
“I feel so good,” I half shout with a delirious laugh as he catches me.
“You should always feel good,” he says, his half shout and laugh back less delirious sounding. But his cheeks are flushed, and I want to touch the heat of his skin, not just through his shirt.
So I do, my hands gliding up to his face, his dimple, as another laugh sputters out of me.
“I’d have to always be with you for that,” I tell him, more hearing my voice saying more words before they register with the even faster beats of my heart and the soft fading of his dimple beneath my finger.
His hands move next, gliding up from my hips to my arms to circle both my wrists, a bob in his throat as he tugs my touch from his skin, back down to the shield of his shirt. And he has to tug , because my hands don’t want to let go.
I think he’s going to keep moving me away, because my hands should let go—should they?—until we’re not touching at all anymore, but then the warmth of his palm slips to meet mine, our fingers entwining in a tight grip.
Lights, moving in and out from all directions, fragment the now too familiar torment in his eyes, and I don’t know if my last words were a push or an admittance of something honest or a bit of both, but I release more, drunk now on adrenaline and music and Levi and who I should be.
“Are you gonna drop it this time?” My voice sounds barely there, and like in the cave, we go still, everything around us slowing down as everything inside us speeds up, his heart hammering against my other palm, in a race with mine.
Something is happening, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to keep living like this. Not living. Fighting my own heart. Stopping my lips from wandering to Levi’s, like I wanted them to that night on the Gilligan, when we first listened to this song together.
How many girls have you kissed?
A couple.
Do you want to kiss me? The girl in front of you. Do you want me?
Do. You. Want. Me?
My body tightens with the memory, the question, and I can almost read Levi’s next words from then on his parted lips now as his gaze fixes to mine, two skips in his breathing as he tries to catch it… Fuck, Summer.
“Raven,” he says suddenly, a single rasp from his throat. “Nickname,” he tells the confusion moving along my face. “Raven,” he repeats, now with nerves and a trace of questioning, like he’s been holding on to this for years, because he has, and he wants the nickname he chose to hold up.
This song is sending him back to that night, too, but I wasn’t expecting this.
I knew he had one. And it’s a slight tension reliever, as another laugh sputters out of me.
“Why Raven?” My voice shakes, but it’s not from my attempt to conceal any feelings about the nickname, because I’m not even sure how I feel about it when all I can feel is Levi’s pulse, still racing. His hands, still on me. His lips, so close to mine. As we take back a moment from our past, sharing these low, secret-like words.
“Your hair,” he says, half a tease, a corner of his mouth pulling up after mine does.
“My hair ?”
He laughs, still low, breathy. “There were other things…”
“Oh,” I start, a tease of my own. “My toothpick arms looking like bird legs?”
His laugh now sounds like a choke, his gaze holding an intention that spreads my shaking to my legs. His one hand, back on my hip, presses me into him just a bit more. “You did not have toothpick arms.”
“Right,” I breathe through the heat warming every place our bodies are touching, still trying to tease. “You thought I was hot.”
“I still do,” he says with no hesitation, and my hand still on his chest digs into his shirt as his hand on my hip digs into my dress. “I still…” He hesitates now, and I should be glad. I don’t belong to him—right?
I should want our bodies disconnected. . .
Like he suddenly does.
“I still do,” he repeats, a sigh, then drops me like I really am hot, his hands scalded, brushing past me and everyone else toward the break area with a mumble about water. But a move I see as away from me .
The burn he gave me flares through my skin, my whole body reddened and shaking everywhere.
My throat goes dry as I stand here without him, and when my next swallow hurts, I shove through people toward the break area, Levi’s mumbled water chanting through my head—
I slam into something hard once I burst onto the open walkway area, a drink splashing at my feet.
Our feet.
This something a someone , a woman, who bends to retrieve the fallen cup.
When she bends back up, my apology stalls on my tongue as I observe how much more she went out in her dressing for this concert than I did.
Leather shorts with fishnets and Converse. A tight black crop top that shows off her navel piercing that catches the lights. Short white-blond hair, just past her shoulders, the sleekest I’ve ever seen. Not one flyaway.
“So that’s where my wallpaper went,” she says to me as I’m having the thought to ask about her hair products, and it hits me that, I think, she’s insulting my mom’s dress.
But I did just cause her to spill her drink, so this is her comeuppance.
“Which room?” I ask, to play along, but still with a small clench in my teeth.
“Bathroom.” She snickers at my cringe. “And the hall and the kitchen. You got around,” she says, a smirking assurance that pulls a scoffed chuckle out of me.
But I still say, “This dress was my mom’s and she’s dead.” So think twice.
“I was dead once too,” she tells me, more jokes, then she gives me a genuine smile like I passed some test, and I soften. “Name’s Greta.”
“Summer.”
“You in a bad place?”
I make only a noise in response and she touches her finger to the corner of her eye, then points that same finger toward me to signify my eyes.
“You have something I used to see in mine when I looked in a mirror.”
Dead eyes? I’m not dead. I’m…overwhelmed. By more than I can handle.
I sigh, remembering how easily I would chat up strangers, revealing my wounds, telling them my dreams and desires. “You ever just…not want to be alone again?” I start to this stranger, my stare drifting past her shoulder toward the break area, finding…more strangers.“Not want to hurt again? Want to stop hurting?”
Greta follows my stare, one turn, before she looks back at me, her blue eyes studying me closely. “I know keeping your heart guarded cages you.”
Don’t I know that too. “We know the same thing,” I say with a wet laugh, my emotions spilling up into and saving my dry mouth.
“This is what I did when I didn’t want to hurt anymore.” She lifts both her arms, and when I look down, I see two thick scars, one down each of her wrists.
Not a joke.
“I’m—” I say through a gasp, shaking my head, wondering what kind of hurt this woman knows to make her hurt herself . “I’m not going to do that.” I try to put strength in those words, because they’re true, but I’m still shocked by what she’s just shown me.
She lowers her arms with another snicker. “Well, take it from someone who did. It’s not worth it. It’s really not worth it if you’re brought back, and that can happen,” she adds through her smirk. And I’m not sure if it should, but even through hints of her trauma, her seemingly it’s funny now way of looking at her past lifts some of the weight of my present and has me smiling again with her.
“Life’s always gonna beat you down,” she continues. “What helped me beat it back was finding someone who fights for me. So that’s what I’m telling you. Find someone who fights. Really fights. Loves every scar. Everything you are. Who you do the same for and who gets you. Picks you up when you can’t get off the ground yourself. You do that for each other because we can’t do this shit alone.”
I swallow hard against the sting in my eyes, knowing someone else who should hear from this woman.
If he’d take the time to listen.
The same someone who isn’t the one Greta just described.
Adam and I aren’t those people for each other, and we won’t be those people for each other again.
That sting becomes a blur, my head and my heart trying to focus on anything but the pain of being completely laid open with that admittance.
And I find it, after a few blinks, on Greta’s left hand, holding the empty cup, and wearing an amethyst diamond and wedding band on her ring finger.
“You married that person,” I state low, swiping the falling tears from my face.
She makes an eh face as she looks somewhere past my shoulder. “I can’t blame me.”
My laugh is full this time as I follow her stare now, and she points out the group of three watching the show from a bit higher up, her husband being the one with the dark man bun, standing next to another man, who is the husband to the very pregnant —Greta’s words—dark-haired woman tucked into his side.
“We know the band.”
I whip her a wide-eyed gasp. “Personally?”
I’ve met someone who knows Kai Coleman personally ?
Which obviously means I know him now too.
I share a person with Ten Decembers!
“Yeah, and no, I can’t introduce you.”
My chest deflates as I sigh away that next question right there on my tongue. “I wasn’t gonna ask.”
Her smile says sure you weren’t and she raises her empty cup at me with a step back as if to remind me I’m the reason she has to go grab a new one.
Which she does.
My eyes stay on her back until she passes Levi, his own steps slowing when his gaze connects with mine. He’s holding two cups, one in each hand, and when he stops in front of me, the burn that simmered down roils through my body like a tight and aching heat, and suddenly, I can’t be here anymore.
I can’t hang out with Levi and just be friends.
I never could. It was always hard.
“I can’t do this,” I say to his neck, catching a twitch in his muscles, before trailing up his now set jaw to the most intense scrutiny in his eyes. His brows slowly bend in with the realization of what I’m actually telling him.
I can’t be his friend when I want to be his.
“I’m tired,” I tell him next, finally saying those words myself. I start past him. “Let’s just go.”
“Summer—”
I stop, but keep my focus toward the exit. “I’m tired , Levi.”
And it’s him and it’s me and it’s Adam and it’s this beating down life.
And right now, it’s mostly the way Levi’s looking at me, when I dare a peek back, like he can’t let me go.
But he did let me go.
My lungs seize as I try to pull in breaths on my next shoves through people toward the exit, right as the band transitions into “Blue Lullaby”.
It’s my favorite song and I’m missing it live.
But I can’t turn back to the stormy blue eyes waiting for me, an old heartbreak feeling like new.
If I could let anyone take Kai Coleman from me, it would be Levi.
And, this time, he does.