Scarlet
Theo leaves. I collapse onto the mattress and close my eyes. When all the life inside is gone, there is nowhere to go except in dreams. What happens when dreams die? What happens when the mind can’t find any more stories? What happens when thoughts die before they ever truly form?
Time passes. Minutes? Hours? My mind can’t make sense of it. I stopped counting: minutes, seconds, breaths.
“Goddammit! Why are you still here?” Theo is so mad at me. Why is he mad at me? I love him. I’m his song.
“If I find you passed out, when I find you passed out, I’m not calling for an ambulance. If you want to kill yourself, a gun would be a helluva lot easier.”
“You have to leave! Open your eyes.” Pain. There’s so much pain to that voice. I can hear it, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything. I like not feeling anything.
Fuck you, cancer.
I pull the trigger.
Nothing.
“I take your life. You don’t get the fucking choice. Do you understand?”
Calloused hands grip my face. I fight the heavy weight, the bright light, and blink open my eyes.
“You,” I whisper. “You take it.”
Theo’s forehead wrinkles, eyes squinted. “Take what?”
“My life.”
His jaw clenches and I see something I never thought I’d see—tears.
They fill his eyes like he’s choking on his next breath.
“Jesus …” He presses his forehead to mine, squeezing his eyes shut, and his tears fall onto my face and become mine.
Silent sobs wrack his body. “I can’t take your life …
” The words rip from his throat. “So, fuck you…” more tears “…because you’ve already taken mine.
” He grips my face harder. “You’ve ruined the man I need to be…
” more sobs “…You’ve turned me into a fucking failure because all I want to do is this. ”
Theo kisses me, slow at first, then more urgent. I don’t kiss him back. I can’t. Everything is still too numb—my lips, my hands, my heart.
His mouth moves to my cheek, my jaw, my neck.
Nothing.
He releases another sob. My heart tries to feel it, but it can’t. It’s too late.
“Don’t … don’t do this.” His mouth covers mine again.
Nothing.
I should cry. I’ve waited so long for him to give me this. I blink.
Nothing.
Pushing away, he kneels by the mattress, sitting back on his heels. He rips off his gray beanie, exposing his closely buzzed hair. His hands cover his face, shoulders curled inward, body shaking. “No … no … no… Scarlet …” He whispers my name like he’s using his last breath to say it.
I gasp as if his last breath is my first. One blink and tears run down my face. My heart drums with so much pain … pain that I feel.
Theodore Reed has never said my name. Not. One. Single. Time.
Until now.
Inch by slow inch, I bring myself to sitting on the edge of the mattress in front of him. My hands wrap around his wrists. He sucks in a shaky breath and holds it as I pull his hands away from his face. When he releases his breath it’s everything.
“Scarlet,” he whispers again.
Chills. I never thought it was possible for someone to whisper life back into another person. I was wrong.
He swallows hard. Eyes red. Cheeks stained with emotion. “Live for me.”
Love?
Hate?
It’s love. Love wins.
Biting my quivering lips together, I nod once.
Theo cradles my face. I cradle his.
He kisses me. I kiss him.
He tears at my clothes. I tear at his.
He moves down my body, bringing it back to life one kiss—one bite at a time. My back arches as my hands move to his head. I curl them into fists, finding nothing to hold. I miss his hair.
Sucking in a sharp breath, my fingers clutch the sheets next to me instead. His tongue drags between my legs so…
Very. Slowly.
I feel my pulse right where his tongue stops.
Feeling.
I feel again. His name lingers on my lips, but I don’t have the breath to bring it into existence. There’s too much emotion in my chest. Breathing is its own feat.
He nips and sucks at my flesh all the way up to my lips again, thrusting his tongue into my mouth, claiming all of me.
The swollen head of his cock teases between my legs. What if it’s a dream? What if I’m dead?
I have to know if this is real. “Hard…” I breathe as he sucks the sensitive skin along my neck “…unforgiving…” I pant “…or not at all.”
His forehead drops to the mattress above my shoulder as his hands hook behind my knees. Pulling my pelvis off the mattress, he drives into me. Hard.
I cry out, pinching my eyes shut.
“It’s the only way I know how,” he whispers in my ear between labored breaths.
*
My lips press to his chest, relishing the warmth of his flesh against mine, our limbs tangled, the sheets twisted in chaos. The physical questions have all been answered with sex. But … to exist in this world together, we have to acknowledge emotion and reason.
I wanted to die, and for a moment in time, I honestly thought he wanted me dead too. Some things—certain emotions—cut so deep they become physical wounds to the soul. They bleed into the next life. Words can’t heal. Time can’t erase. At best, love can make them bearable.
We took each other to the breaking point, and I don’t know about him, but I think I actually broke. I resented every breath my lungs took, every blink, every heartbeat. I found peace in not wanting to exist. The darkness no longer felt cold. The pain evaporated.
“I need you,” I whisper.
Theo kisses the top of my head.
“I need you to help me not need you.”
He pulls back to look at my face, his head resting on his folded arm, confusion a roadmap on his forehead.
My fingers pinch my bottom lip, tugging at it gently.
I feel as much confusion etched in my own face.
This is so hard to articulate. “I want to beat this cancer for you … but I need to beat it for me. I’m living for you at the moment because I …
” Tears sting my eyes. Rolling my lips together, I blink them away.
“I’ve lost the will to live it for myself. ”
This is the lowest of all lows. Admitting I don’t want to live. I’ve never felt so weak, so pathetic, so nothing.
The pad of his thumb catches my tear before it gets away.
“I need you to teach me to walk again. Show me how to live with you, not for you.” I shake my head, swallowing past the remnants of my pride.
“I thought I had it. On Tybee, I felt peace, strength, grounded, unafraid. The cancer started to shrink. I was happy. I was different, and I loved the new me. I loved life.”
His thumb brushes my cheek again like its sole purpose in life is to catch every piece of me to do what he does best: put things together—put me back together.
“But then you left, and I started to fall apart. That’s when I realized everything I did on Tybee was tethered to you and the farther you were from me, the more I unraveled.
I was the bird who built my nest in a beautiful oak tree.
I was so proud of my nest, my home. Then a storm came along and knocked down the oak tree. ”
“I’m your tree,” Theo whispers.
I nod.
His thumb moves to my lips. There’s so many unspoken emotions in his expression.
“Scarlet …”
My name. Will the day ever come that my name passing his lips doesn’t bring tears to my eyes?
My name is Scarlet Stone and kids make fun of my name. I don’t understand what’s wrong with my name.
I didn’t recognize the man who threatened to kill me, and I don’t recognize the man before me with so much regret in his eyes. The muscle in his jaw ticks and his nostrils flare on a long exhale like his silence is the only thing holding him together.
There is nothing I can do to take away the things he did to me. Nor is there anything I can say to make it okay.
“There are no words for what I’ve done to us—to you.” Sorrow deepens in his eyes. “You will be my greatest masterpiece. I will build you with the strongest materials. Nothing will be rushed. Even if it takes a lifetime … every little detail will be perfect.”
No human has ever said “I love you” as poetically as Theodore Reed just did.
He ducks down and brushes his lips over mine. “Scarlet,” he whispers with choked words. “I am so … incredibly…” his voice cracks “…incomparably … infinitely sorry.”
My lips part when his tongue brushes along the seam.
“I will spend a thousand lifetimes making it up to you.”
*
After I drift off to sleep, Theo retrieves my stuff from the hotel and brings it back to his flat. In the morning, we lie silent in the emotional rubble. I slip out of bed; we share sad smiles. What’s left to say? I grab some clothes.
“Scarlet?”
I stop before rounding the corner to the bathroom. Without turning back toward him, I just listen.
Nothing.
He may live. I may live. We may overcome this. But … part of us died. Every day will be a test to see if we hit our tipping point. Did the cancer of revenge and lies take too much? I hope not. Theo doesn’t have to say any more. I feel the same fear that’s in his voice.
“I forgive you,” I whisper. It’s impossible to forget. This is all I can give him. It may feel like nothing, but it’s all I have. It’s something.
When I get out of the shower, he’s in his room loading all the weapons back in the trunk. I pause a second to admire his body, no shirt, beautiful ink, dark jeans, and the minimal hair on his head and face. I do miss his hair.
“Now what?” I ask, draping my bath towel around my neck.
He locks the trunk and turns, taking a seat on top of it, hands folded between his legs. “Food. I show you where I grew up. Maybe we happen upon a horse or two and I teach you how to ride.”
Can we step over the remnants of destruction and move forward? I smile because Theo is trying to lay the foundation for the life I never even imagined. I think it could be a good one.
My smile falters. “And Braxton Ames?”
He blows out a long breath. “I have no direction right now. I’ve spent years feeding on rage, existing in an aftermath of regret, living for revenge. If I let Ames walk … then what?”
I shrug as I straddle his legs and drape my arms behind his neck. “Then us.”
His brow wrinkles with what I know is pain.
Asking him to choose us probably feels like he’s letting his parents down.
I don’t want him to let them down. I want him to let them go.
This is not a life, and Theo is too young, too talented, too loved to not have a life that’s worthy of rock-star status.
With a slow nod, he whispers, “Then us,” like he’s searching for the true meaning of those two words.
There may never come a day that he can completely let go.
I think revenge is a very animalistic part of human behavior that is ingrained in all of us from birth.
Even on a very basic level of a mother’s instinct to protect her child, humans have that capability.
And like certain animals, we can tame it, control it, but it never completely goes away.