Hemorrhage.

I rested my head on his shoulder, my mind weighed down as we stared out onto the street. Nick and Jared were already up, packing the trailer with the essential boxes of instruments and amps. They were moving so mechanically, their arms extending towards each other, Jared handing Nick the boxes to stack neatly. I kept my eyes on Jared more than Nick - Nick still kind of made me uneasy.

I hadn’t really seen him in a while, since that one time at the show. I wasn’t concentrating on him, though. I was concentrating on John. Months, destitute of John. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do it. I was so dependent on him, because he mattered so much to me.

He looked down at me, his eyes half-lidded, thick with sleep. He wasn’t used to being up this early - when John was home, he had a strict policy of never getting up before nine, and even then, he was like a zombie, walking around aimlessly and answering questions with only a half-audible ‘hmm’.

His arm was wrapped around my torso, pulling me closer to him. It was seven thirty in the morning, but it was still about eighty degrees. My jeans felt heavy, but I didn’t want to wear shorts, in case someone saw the thickness of my thighs. I did allow myself a tank top, though.

“This sucks,” he said, his voice low. I didn’t expect a more complicated sentence from him - poor boy’s brain was barely functioning.

“Yeah, it does.” I agreed. It did. I didn’t want him to leave.

Call me selfish. Call me an ungrateful, self-centered bitch. When it came to John and him leaving, I was. The thought of him thousands of miles away made my heart ache.

“I’ll call you, though.” He said, pressing his chin to the top of my head.

And this is where things got complicated. Because I wanted to believe him, I really did. I wanted to believe that I would be texted constantly and called at least once a day with updates. I wanted to believe that this closeness - this intensity in our relationship - would remain the same, and that nothing would change. But it would. Because I would doubt this.

I was going to rely on intermittent phone calls and text messages, sent between three hour time differences and the promises of a missed call later in the day. I was going to rely on the hope that things would be boring, that he wouldn’t be busy, so that he wouldn’t forget about me.

I was not letting myself factor in the fact that he was going on tour, that he had fans, and that he would most likely be constantly pulled in fourteen different directions for fourteen different things. I was not factoring in that I was no longer going to be his number one priority. I was also not factoring in the way that knowing that was going to rip me into an emotional oblivion.

But I wasn’t thinking about that right now. I refused to let myself think of that right now.

“Okay. I’ll answer, and we can talk.”

“We can talk a lot,” he said. “I want to know how you’re doing - I want daily updates.”

I laughed. “So you want to know when I’m peeing, how much liquid I release, and the color pigmentation?”

“And how strong the smell is too - don’t forget the smell.”

I smiled up at him, and his smiling visage made me feel slightly better, if only for a few seconds. We were both pretending, but it was obligatory to make it through these last few hours.

“You’ll have fun,” I said. “You love Warped Tour.”

“I do,” he agreed. “Warped Tour is amazing - I just hate leaving you here.”

“I’ll have Molly.” I shrugged. I was not voicing my thoughts - that I could go. I would go. All he had to do was ask. “She’s still staying, and she said that maybe we could hang out, if I wanted.”

John nodded enthusiastically, which was uncharacteristic of the hour, but I think that it was finally settling in that this was the last time we were going to have a face to face conversation in a month and a half. Other people had longer absences, I knew, but other people didn’t have this - this thing - that everyone seems to think that I was dealing with.

“You guys should hang out. You need to do something to keep yourself occupied - take a class, take up a hobby, sleep, something. Have a fun summer. Is your mom still thinking about letting you come out in August?”

I nodded. “She’s thinking about it, which is stupid, because we both know that I’m going to go anyway. I’m over eighteen - I don’t exactly need her permission to go somewhere.”

“True, but if you get up and leave in the middle of the night, you might just give her a heart attack.”

“Nah. She’ll just call you, confirm the dates, and calm down. She likes you - she’s totally down with me visiting you. It’s me that she doesn’t trust.”

John just shrugged, turning his face away from mine. I kind of expected him to say something in retaliation from that, but maybe he didn’t want to start a fight this early in the morning, with the end looming so close.

“So…are you all packed?” I asked.

I just wanted to make small talk. I was fully okay with having a meaningless conversation, as long as I could still hear his voice.

He nodded. “Two suitcases. I’m not factoring in laundry, because we never do laundry.”

I laughed at him with shaking my head. “You really need a girl to go on tour with you - you should hire an assistant!”

“To do what? Laundry and get me water? Occasionally keep away hordes of teenage girls? The application process alone would be horrifying.”

We both laughed, even if it wasn’t a particularly good joke, but just because there was an awkward tension in the air, and this sense of saying goodbye. I didn’t want to say goodbye.

I wanted to attach myself to his pant leg and beg for him to stay, just like that first day of kindergarten.

But that wouldn’t work.

“What time are you guys leaving to go to the bus?”

John rubbed his eye. “Sometime around eight, I think. We have to drive up to like, Sacramento.”

“At least you have a driver, now.”

“True story. Fuck, I hated driving at night. After a while, all of the highways start to look the same and you get confused.”

I pouted. “Poor baby.”

He playfully rolled his eyes at me. “I’m going to miss you, you know.”

“I know. I’m going to miss you too.”

“Good. I just want you to know that I’m going to miss you, and that I love you.” He said.

There was something about hearing him say those words that made my heart flutter.

“I love you too.” I said.

Nothing else. No hesitation. No thinking about the platonic meaning that he might infer behind it. I loved him, and he loved me, and that was all I could ever hope for right now.

I moved my head to look up at him, and he moved his head to look down at me, and for once, I decided that I might be the one to initiate something.

I closed my eyes and I pressed my lips against where I thought his might be. And for once, I was right about something, because his lips were right there, right against mine, and he didn’t pull away.

He pressed his mouth against mine, and we just stayed like that. I didn’t move, and he didn’t try to do something weird in my mouth. We just stayed there, our lips touching, relishing in the feeling of something that made us feel alive.

And then he moved, but it was in the opposite direction from what I expected. He started to move his lips, firmly against mine.

I mirrored his actions, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that I was sitting there, kissing my best friend. Maybe it should have registered something in my mind - some loud, screeching alarm was supposed to go off, probably, but it didn’t.

I just sat there, and I kissed him, and fuck, did it feel good.

When we finally pulled away, it seems like a joint decision, mainly because it was getting hard to breathe, and I really was getting overwhelmed by the feelings that were stirring up inside of me.

“Heh,” I said, letting out a slow breath of air.

John exhaled slowly, closing his eyes for a second before opening them again.

He looked like he was about to say something, but then Nick yelled something from across the driveway.

“We gotta go soon, man.” He said, and there was something about the way his face pinched when he said that that made me think that maybe he just witnessed something he wasn’t too fond of.

John sighed, but nodded.

He turned to me, opened his mouth, closed it, and then got up and went inside of the house. I stayed sitting there, my eyes still wide, my mouth still tingling from an unforgettable sensation.

I just kind of sat there, reliving that moment over and over again. And then it hit me that he was leaving and things got a little bittersweet.

I think I spent thirty minutes sitting there, staring out into the street and the splits of sunlight that were coming through. Everything seemed illuminated.

All of the sudden they were wheeling suitcases out of the house and sticking them in the van. All of them looked tired, hot, but mainly really, really excited.

I wasn’t very excited. I was the opposite of excited. I was anxious and nervous and everything else except for excited.

John chucked his suitcase in the van and then suddenly everyone was there and we were saying goodbye. I stood up, stretching my stiff limbs, and walked over to where he was standing.

I didn’t think that I was going to be the last person that he said goodbye to, because I saw Mia there, standing behind Molly, and I knew that maybe that was where he was at. That made me want to cry, but I wasn’t thinking about it.

I wrapped my arms around him and I hugged him. And he hugged me back and we just kind of stood there, hugging. And then he pressed his lips to mine one more time and he said that he loved me and he turned around and he went into the van and he didn’t look back.