Chapter 26 – “Repeat Until Death” - Novo Amor #2
I lead her through the kitchen and out the back door.
A broad deck leads down into the overgrown lawn.
I don’t maintain the space out here much, other than the rose bushes I planted along the back fence when I first moved in.
Lights are strung around the deck, and two lounge chairs sit side-by-side.
I lie on one, patting the other beside me.
Instead, she crawls right into my lap, pressing her back to my chest.
It’s dark, the April air breezy and balmy, though the clear night gives way for a perfect view of the stars. “Sometimes, I think that if I’m outside, it’s easier for him to hear me,” I whisper against her neck. “I’m sure he’d love to listen to your voice.”
She drops her face into her hands, overcome with emotion again.
I let her cry it out, keeping my arms tight around her and running a soothing hand over her back.
She doesn’t like to cry, period, but she especially hates allowing other people to see it.
I learned over the years that it’s best to let Elena sit with her pain for a second.
She bottles up her emotions, and when they break, they burst. She needs time to wade through them, or she’ll drown within them.
I’ve held her like this a million times, letting her soak my chest with tears for another man. My own brother. I used to wonder if we’d ever escape it, if it would ever cease. I used to be petrified of the idea that she’d be crying on my shoulder over him for the rest of her life.
Now, I know for certain that she will. Not every moment or every day, but we’ll spend the rest of our lives warring with our grief, and somehow, I find comfort in that knowledge.
Maybe all those tears before were preparation for this.
For all the future heartache she’d need me to soothe, and maybe a part of her won’t ever stop loving someone else, but I guess I’m happy that it’s him.
That he was loved that way. And I’m happy it’s me, that I get to offer her solace in all of it.
I think I understand it better now. Now that I know what it’s like to lose him too.
“I feel guilty for crying to you when I’m missing him.” She lets out a shuddering sigh.
“Don’t,” I rasp, choking on my own tears. “I miss him too.”
“Do you think…if he can hear us, can he see us?” She tilts her head, looking at me. “Do you think he hates to see us touching like this? I feel guilty about that, too, but I don’t want to be apart from you.”
“He wasn’t a stranger to my drying of your tears.
He knew how you liked to be held. He knew you felt safest with me.
I think he’d be glad to see that you’re finally done battling this on your own.
” I kiss the top of her head. “How many times have you broken down like this and forced yourself to bear it alone?”
“Felt like what I deserved.” She shrugs.
“Sometimes I stop myself in moments of happiness, or when I begin to feel like I’m living again, because I remember that he’s dead.
” Elena’s voice breaks on the word. “Why should I get to move on—experience joy—when he can’t?
When I was responsible for so much of the darkness in his final moments? ”
“I feel the same sometimes,” I admit. “But I guess, on days like that, I try to feel the joy for other people, even if I think I don’t deserve it myself.”
“I only feel like I’m allowed to grieve.
Any other sensation seems stolen to me.” She’s quiet for a moment before she continues, “That’s why I left.
Why I moved to New York. I hated seeing my family try to help me when I didn’t want to be.
When I came to you that night…” She lifts her head, meeting my gaze with glistening eyes.
“I knew that you could be the one to do it. You could heal me. You could love me, and I didn’t deserve it.
I guess I was so focused on my own self-loathing, I didn’t think deeply enough about how it would affect you.
Or maybe I thought you deserved it too…” She presses her hands to her temples, shaking her head.
“I don’t know. I can’t make sense of what my headspace was like back then.
All I know is…” She knots her hand in the fabric of my shirt.
“You’re the love of my life, but he’s the boy I loved to death.
How am I supposed to move on from that? Why do I deserve to? ”
“The presence of grief does not equate to the absence of happiness,” I say, grasping her jaw and tilting her head so that she can see my eyes. “What a disservice to the human condition it is to believe something like that. We’re so much more complex, Elena.”
She stares back at me, contemplative, searching my eyes for some kind of answer before finally asking, “How am I to call life happy when it ends in death? What is it to search for a happy ending if it still means there is an end?”
I search her eyes, too, but I find every answer I need. She’s the answer, always has been. “Everything ends. Choosing joy with the certainty that it’s fleeting is the purpose of life, I think. The ending is preexisting. Happiness is what you aim to find.”
“Do you think that we could still find one?” she asks just above a whisper. “A happy ending?”
“I think we’ll have to work harder for it, harder than we expected to.” I brush my thumb over her jaw, watching her eyes flutter closed as I press my lips to her forehead. “But yes.”
One of her tears cascades over my finger, and I swipe it away as I lower my hand, letting her head fall against the crook of my neck.
I hold her there, savoring her touch as the sea breeze kicks up.
A gust bursts across my face, and something rolling across the bottom step of the deck catches my eye.
One lone rosebud must’ve fallen off the bushes from the back of the lawn, now fluttering in the wind, as if answering in agreement.