|
Back Before the Us by LetItBe613
Number of reviews: 6
Print:  Chapter or Story
She couldn’t even hear the waves that were lapping at the shore in front of her anymore. Her thoughts hadn’t been in the same place as her body for about an hour and they didn’t look like they were making any effort to come back any time soon.
Her eyes remained staring out in front of her, arms holding her legs into her body. The piece of driftwood that she was sitting on was hardly comfortable but it didn’t look as though she minded.
It was almost as if she felt that if she sat still enough for long enough, that the world would just come up behind her and swallow her whole.
“You can’t do this to me.” The words that broke the silence didn’t even ellicit a flinch from her. Eyes still on the ocean and thoughts still on the one thing that they had been on since she sat down, her lips moved slowly, in response to him.
“Why not?”
He looked down at the snow white sand before sitting beside her, making certain that his eyes didn’t travel to hers. “If something is wrong, we can talk about it, you don’t need to hide from me.”
“This is how I deal with things, you have known me way too long to question that aspect of my personality.” He raked both hands through his hair that the wind had been playing with since he stepped outside and sighed softly to himself.
“So you are out here trying to avoid me.”
Her eyes finally faltered from their previous view but her thoughts, they stayed where they had been, firmly planted on the man now sitting beside her. “I was trying to avoid talking about this.”
“I didn’t bring it up for you to avoid it. I said it because I wanted you to say seomthing, anything back to me.” She turned only slightly to look at him, even though she didn’t have to look at him for his image to form in her mind.
She had memorized that face by the time she was five, and though it was older now and maybe a little changed from everything they had been through, his eyes and his smile remained they same.
Squeezing her eyes shut she inhaled as deeply as she could while she searched for the words that she had been trying to find all night.
“I don’t think that this is that hard of a situation for you, either you do, or you don’t.”
He was trying to bring some sort of reaction from her, a movement, a tear, anything, but his words seemed to have little effect on her.
“Let me tell you something, ever since we moved apart I didn’t once tell anyone that you even exsisted, and I am prefectly fine living in my little bubble where you don’t.” She looked back out to the water just as he turned to face her, blonde curls whipped around her head as she did nothing to fuss with them.
“You are the best friend from back home, from a place and a time that I would rather not have creeping into the psuedo quasi happy little life that I have going on in Birmingham. You are this entity that stays in the back of my mind and that anyone that has known me for any length of time knows not to mention or ask about. You are this amazing guy that I could love and love and yet as much as he loved me back, it was never the same thing that I felt for him, so I let those feelings slip away and I let everything that was painful about my teenage years slip away with them. I grew up and grew away from you and everything that you meant to me. I’m twenty-five now and I have a real job and real people that I go out with sometimes and I never question myself about them. I was always thinking about you the first couple months after I moved there, but now, if I think about you, it is because of that damn picture that I refuse to take out of my bedroom, and it is fleeting. Don’t take those things away from me. Don’t make me go through all of this again. I felt so alone, I was all alone.”
“I never meant to hurt you like that, I was immature, and I was afraid of getting involved with my best friend, you were for real, for keeps. You could never be just a girlfriend to me, and that was all that I was prepared for back then. I can’t get you out of my mind, every waking minute of my life has been dedicated to figuring out how to get this through to you, without you acting, well, acting the way that you are right now.”
Her toes dug themselves even furher into the sand as he reached over to push the hair away from her face so that he could get a better look at her profile. It was a reflex that she hadn’t expected to come back so easily when her whole body moved towards his touch against her better judgement, like it aways had when they were younger.
“You and I are different people now. You live in a completely separate reality, one that I could never fit into.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” His had hadn’t moved away from her cheek until that moment. She batted it away like it had burned her.
“Really? You don’t know what I am talking about? Have you even met yourself JC?” He rolled his eyes and sighed, staring up to the sky.
She only called him JC when she was trying to prove a point, she only did it to hurt him. And when she said it at this time, she hissed it out at him like a snake, a very dangerous one.
She was, after all, the most dangerous thing in his life.
Always having a hold on him, and the only person that had ever had the ability to bring him to his knees with any emotion.
“Why are you doing this, you know that I would give it…”
“No, you wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t let you. I am not trying to get you to leave your life behind, and I don’t like you even thinking that I would ask youo to do something like that.”
“I wasn’t saying that you would. But you are the reason for all of this hype that surrounds me anyway.” She reached down and grabbing a handful of sand to stare at, giving her an excuse to not look at him when his eyes shifted back to her.
“What are you talking about? You are the reason for you. I don’t want you thinking that anyone else is the reason for your life, you are amazing and all that other shit.”
“But you made me believe in myself.”
“I gave you someone to leave behind. Every big star needs someone like me, someone that believed in them too much, pushed them out of their own grasp, and are soon forgotten.” JC threw himself off the sand and glared at her, if there was one thing that he had not done in the last several years, it was forget her.
“Stop it Corrine, stop playing the part of a martyr. You were never as self righteous as you are trying to make yourself seem. Do I have to bring up the tantrums that you used to throw when I was going to go out of town? Or the nasty little letter that you sent me trying to get out of our friendship two years ago because you ‘couldn’t handle the distance anymore.’ That was a cop out if I ever heard one.” Her eyes glazed over quickly when he spoke his last words.
It was all coming back to her so fast, everything that had happened in the past couple years, all the missed holidays and birthdays, no calls, letters, emails, all the nothing that had come from either of them in the past couple years.
“I forgot about that.” She squeezed her eyes shut to stop the tears from falling, she wasn’t going to give in to the years of pain that she had hidden away for so long while he was standing right in front of her.
“Well I haven’t. I don’t know if I will ever forget the day that I got that damn letter. Do you want me to tell you all about how that made me feel?”
“No, because I know how I felt when I wrote it, when he made me write it.”
“Cowen made you write that?”
“No matter what you ever thought about him, Cowen was a great guy, and he loved me. I know you didn’t like him, you never even met him though, you two would have been great together if you would have just come around.” A fragile grin formed on his face as he lowered his gaze down onto her.
“I am sure he still loves you, and as hard as it is for me to say this, I am sure his heart was in the right place when he had you write that letter, you were hurting and he didn’t like to see it, so he figured that if you eliminated the source of your pain, it would all be gone eventually. You are amazing and beautiful, and he was a lucky man.”
“I was a lucky woman. I miss him so much JC. I still walk into that apartment and expect him to be sitting at the table clicking away on that laptop of his.” Her guard faltered for only a breif second, long enough to let one tear fall to the ground, before the walls went right back into place.
“I just wish that you would have told me that he was sick. I would have come to support you.”
“I didn’t think about needing support through the rough times, we were there for each other, hell he was more support for me then I think that I was for him. You were there when it mattered, and I can’t thank you enough for being there with me at the funeral, I don’t really have anyone else.”
“You have all your other friends.” JC sat himself back down onto the sand and didn’t dare to look at her.
“Yeah, there is a joke if I ever heard one.”
“You just talked about all your friends back home, and all the people that had no idea that I existed.” He began drawing pictures in the sand while she stared at the moon causing her eyes to twinkle and turn almost translucent.
“Well, none of them knew that you existed outside of your public television persona, but they aren’t my friends anymore, they all pretty much dissapeared one by one after Cowen started getting sicker. I never told Cowen about you who you were. He knew you existed but, past that, he didn’t have a clue. Just thought you were some dumb guy that was treating his angel like I didn’t matter.” The last of her words were muffled as if she was embarrased to be uttering them.
“Never?” He had heard her, and yet for some reason his question didn’t hold much force, it wasn’t really a surprise to him.
“Didn’t even catch you off guard with that one did I? I don’t think there is a better way to go about making your boyfriend feel inadequate than telling him that your best friend since birth is a drop dead gorgeous rock star that will always know more about me than he could ever dream.”
“If he really loved you, I wouldn’t have mattered.”
“He loved me and I will not let you take away from that, but you aren’t just another best friend that happens to be a guy. For a long time, and as much as I still fight it now, you are my other half. You complete the memories that have escaped me, you are the reason that I learned what love was, and you are the reason that I know what it is like to have a broken heart. You are the reason that I am the person that I am today. That is a lot for a guy to take in, I am involved in it and it is a lot for me to take in.” Her voice began fading away as she walked out towards the water.
The wind began picking up and the quick rebukes from her hands to her hair were not helping the chaos that it was being twirled into. As he stood, now a hundred feet from her, it felt like a hundred miles. Without warning his eyes filled with tears and he suddenly felt helpless in his own life.
“Why aren’t you willing to give me a second chance?” Her body twirled around to face him again, the wind helping her hair cloud the emotions on her face.
“I have given you second chances, and thirds…” A flash of lightening in the distance shimmered off her eyes, stopping her words in her chest.
“Tyler said you call him and cry everynight. Why not me, I have been your shoulder for 25 years, dammit Corrine, just need me.” He was shouting at her, over the wind and out of pure frustration.
“I need you too much. I can’t cry to you because I cry about you, every goddam night. I sit alone in that tiny apartment and think about you and how much I love you, and I hate myself that I can’t just let that go.”
He tried to approach her, but she held her hands in front of her, silently telling him to not come any closer.
“I had the perfect guy, he was handsome, loving, caring, would have laid his life down on the line for me, but from the moment I met him, I was ever comparing him to you. You two were so much alike, I think I tricked myself into vicariously loving you, through him. The one thing he had that you never would though, he was there, and he was willing to love me, when I was ready to love him.”
“Can’t you see, I am ready now.” There was a fury in her eyes at that moment that he had never seen before and for the first time in his life, he was afraid of his best friend.
“Dammit, I can see right through that JC. The second I go to Florida with you, you will find someone that is more interesting, you will find anything that is more interesting. It is almost like you are frightened by being in love with something for too long. And that above all else is scary to me.”
“That won’t happen again, I am ready to work on you and me. I want there to be a you and me again.” It was almost as if she blocked out the words that he had just said, because she began walking past him up to the beach house.
“I could love you til the ends of time, be afraid of that.” As she reached the first dune, he watched her reach into her pocket and pull something out, and with a flick of her wrist whatever she had been holding fell to the ground as she disappeared over the dune.
JC stood still for close to twenty minutes staring at the place where she had disapeared, it was like the scene was going on over and over again in his head. She dropped something, and he slowly proceded in the direction that she had gone to find out what.
His legs curled up under him as he took a seat on the now moistened sand to look for whatever had hit the ground. The rain that had started only minutes after Corrine had walked away began to beat down on the tiny island and the only man that was dumb enough to brave the early spring storm.
A bolt of lightening illuminated the place where he had crumbled and a soft shining only inches from his ankle caught his eyes.
The beads were aqua and there were blue stones on the ends of a bright red string that was fastened at the end with a sturdy knot. It was the bracelet. The one that he had made at camp, the one that had been passed back and forth between them since as long as he could remember.
Whenever they had a fight, she would give it back, as though she never wanted it again. Somehow though, it always ended up back around her tiny wrist, a miricle that JC was still questioning himself.
He picked it up off the ground, along with himself and brushed himself off as best he could in the pouring rain before beginning to the house.
|
