Track 12
JAKE
MY HEART IS a painfully melted mess, dripping through my ribs in slow motion, a puddle of sorrow pooling in the hollowness it’s left behind.
Knowing the smile she’s held and the light she has carried all this time has just been a mask to hide a shattered truth that lives within her is a weight of its own.
How on earth can it be possible that one seemingly perfect girl could be so broken inside?
Broken, but beautiful.
Insanely beautiful. A beauty that’s unreachable by anyone else but her because it is her.
The way she saw me, the way she understood things about me that I never would have shared.
It’s something so unique to her, and still, I feel like a failure for being so lost in my own shit that I couldn’t see hers until now.
What she just shared is changing everything for me. I no longer care to preserve myself or my heart. I only want to keep her together. This need to shield her and never let her be wounded again—it’s unfamiliar, yet somehow, settling. Purposeful, as if this is the exact reason I was made to exist.
All I can see is her—the tremor in her hands, the way her eyes can’t quite meet mine, the crack in her voice that keeps echoing through me.
Somewhere in the middle of her breaking, something inside me splintered.
Shattered like a glass house. It doesn’t matter what I thought I knew or what I told myself to feel.
All I want is to gather every fractured piece of her and hold them steady, even if it means losing myself in the process.
I’m not afraid of it.
To see the eyes that have warmed my soul be so torn down, so lost in a sea of sorrow—it’s something I can’t unlive.
It’s something I can’t bear to see again, and I wouldn’t have known it if she hadn’t shown me.
I wouldn’t have realized how the switch in my chest had already flipped for her if she hadn’t just shared the deepest parts of herself with me.
The gravity of her father’s statements hit me hard. The heaviness she must carry being torn down like that by the one man who’s supposed to protect her most. Supposed to love her effortlessly, unconditionally.
“Allie, you know what your dad said on that voicemail… You know it’s not true, right? You have to know you’re nothing even close to what he says of you.”
Her eyes dart away from mine in clear disagreement as she chews on her cheek. More tears well in her eyes, and her throat stops as she holds her breath.
“Alana.” I take her arms in my hands and bend my head down, forcing her eyes to meet mine. When they finally do, they’re empty and lost. There is no light shining in the gemstones I’ve memorized. “Alan–”
“I’m sorry,” she says with a shake of her head. “I’m a mess, and that was a lot. I-I don’t why I said all that.” She grazes the tips of her fingers under her nose to catch the drip. Another tear falls, and I wipe it away with my thumb, my palm cradling her neck and jaw.
“I’m glad you did.” My voice sounds thick and heavy, as if the desire to heal each of her wounds is sewn into every syllable. I am glad she told me. More than anything, I’m glad she’s given me this suffering piece of her if only to let me hold it for a second so she doesn’t have to.
Her breath hitches at my touch. A quiet, broken sound that lands somewhere between relief and exhaustion, maybe mixed with something else.
I feel the shake of her breath against my wrist, warm and trembling, and my entire body starts to buzz with an electric current.
The world outside of this small, fragile moment disappears.
It’s just her, vulnerable and unguarded, and me, wishing I could pull the pain from her chest and make it my own.
I’ve never felt this weight for someone before. This innate need to protect someone so wholly. To comfort them so deeply. I’ve never belonged anywhere the way I belong standing in front of her, on this damp Austin sidewalk in the darkness of the middle of the night.
I study her in awe , seeing her in a new light I’ve known she’s always had. Her golden-streaked hair illuminates like a halo above her. Her stunning blue eyes are piercing into my chest, into my soul. She’s exhausted, understandably, and I just want to hold her, warm her and keep her safe.
“Can I take you somewhere?” I exhale in a deep whisper. She nods slowly, her eyes still unfocused and drawn.
We turn and begin the trek to my truck. We’re closer than we were before.
The back of her hand brushes against mine as it swings forward and back.
I force myself not to grab it, my hand nearly convulsing with need to fit hers into mine.
I stretch it out, extending my fingers hard just to alleviate the building pressure.
We don’t say a word the rest of the way, but I am hyperaware of everything about her.
The swallow she forces. The little shake of her head as if she’s trying to escape her own mind.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been there before, but I can feel it, her discomfort in her own skin that’s riddled with a past she wants to forget, or at the least, ignore.
When a chilled breeze blows past and makes her shiver, I pull my hoodie over my head. “Here. Put this on.”
She shakes her head, pulling the sleeves of her shirt down over her palms. “No, that’s okay. I'm fine.”
Stubborn, but beautiful.
“It wasn’t a suggestion.” I stop midstep and grab her hand to pull her to me.
Her eyes widen slightly as I slide the hoodie over her head and watch as it falls well past her hips.
Her eyes are ice blue right now, less gray than they sometimes seem.
They look even colder against the dark of my charcoal hoodie, but they offer a warmth that overrides the cooling air of the night.
She wiggles her arms into the sleeves, and a grin begins to give way on my lips when they swallow her hands whole, the hem of the sweatshirt settling near her knees.
“I think it’s too small,” she says with a tilt to her lips. A throaty chuckle escapes from me, and I marvel at her ability to create lightness even in the darkest of moments.
We turn again, finishing the remainder of the walk in comfortable silence.
I open the passenger door of my black Ram for her, taking her by the waist to hoist her up before I walk around the front of the truck to hop into the driver’s seat. I crank up the heat the second the engine starts.
The melancholy air is thick and heavy, full of a despair I can’t do anything to save her from. All I can do is drive. So, I do. I drive to the only place I know can take some of it away.
The stars begin to brighten as the city lights fade behind us. We drive down the MoPac Expressway, taking the exit that will lead us to Mount Bonnel. I take the off ramp, then drive down quiet backroads that will lead us exactly where I want to show her.
I pull up slowly until we’re nearly at the edge of the cliff I know well, the headlights shining bright into the nothingness, making it nearly impossible to see.
“Where are we?” she asks, her voice tired, weary.
I flick off the headlights and the ones on the dash, draping us in complete darkness and then set my eyes on her.
She gasps a little, first startled by the change in light, then amazed at what's put into view.
Tiny lights—green, yellow, and white—shine and shimmer from the landline, dancing across the water below us.
Being up here reminds me that perspective is everything.
We’re nearly eight hundred feet above it all, insignificant to the people below.
Just another blink of light swallowed by the distance.
We’re an unreachable part of the sky to them, but to us, this height makes everything else feel small enough to survive.
The stars above are bright and bold, like holes in the dark earth showing the way to Heaven. I silently watch her as she takes it all in, my eyes adjusting just enough to see her in the darkness of the night.
“It’s stunning,” she breathes.
“Yeah,” I agree, but my eyes are locked on her.
I take a minute to collect myself, forcing my gaze to the stillness of the water and swallowing hard as I remember why we’re here.
“I came to this spot a lot during my darkest days,” I tell her.
“For a while, I felt like I had lost everything. My purpose, my drive. My future was one big question mark in a way I never expected it to be, and I just… I didn’t have any hope or direction.
Not for who I was or where I was going.” I sigh, letting my words fall out as they may.
“I used to think loss was the end of something. That once something broke, you couldn’t build anything new from the pieces.
That it was just dead and it always would be.
But then you came along, and you showed me that loss isn’t an ending—it’s just the road that brings us closer to where we’re meant to be.
It’s like the storm-filled miles you have to suffer through to get to where you’re going.
And even though you don’t know where the next one will take you, you just have to keep moving…
“I’m not saying it’s easy, or that life makes sense all the time, because it doesn’t.
It doesn’t make sense why good people have to go through bad things or why shitty people can sometimes leave the world without even a bruise.
I think the point is that you don’t have to understand it.
You just have to live through it so you can get to where you’re meant to go.
You keep showing up even when it hurts, because somewhere along the way, someone is going to need what you’ve been through to get them through their day.
And that matters. There’s no promise of an easy trip, but if you’re lucky enough, you’ll find something or someone in the storm that makes the suffering worth it.
” My gaze finds hers from across the bench, and the pure honesty in me continues to pour out.