Care For Me Not, I'll Hurt You Too Much

The two of you had sat there a little longer, simply feeling the rain drip down your cheeks and soak into your clothing. Once, you found yourself smiling lightly at the feeling of the rain gliding slowly down your face, hoping that this time all your scars and bruises would just drip and fade. You hoped that they would bleed and wash away like fresh paint being washed off of concrete, taking all your pain and sorrow away with the water now beading off your skin. Every time you hoped that, and for a while you actually started to believe that that was actually what the rain was doing, washing away your scars. You believed it until you looked down at your skin and finally decided to start noticing their presence again.

You still swayed lightly on the swing, not caring in the slightest that you were practically asking to get struck by lightening by sitting on a metal contraption in the rain. All you knew was that you just wanted all your problems to go away, and that getting struck by lightening might kill you and make it happen…or it might leave you alive and add another blow to your already damaged soul and body. Then that would also prove to you that even nature hates you.

“Hey,” you hear Gerard speak lightly, bringing his voice down to a whisper, probably feeling the need to because of the constant light rumble of thunder, or the simple soft patter of the rain against your heads.

You turn to him and see that he’s smiling at you, but inside you tell yourself that it’s fake. You can see the underlying questions hidden deep behind his eyes. You can see it, the way his smile fades and he stares at you, pondering. He looks nervous again, probably wondering if you discovered his little game and realized that everything he did was all for show. He licks his lips unnecessarily and stares at you for a bit longer before speaking.

“Do you wanna walk home with me?” he asks.

He should have already known the answer, but you nod your head anyway. If he was still willing to pretend, so were you. He smiles again and begins to stand to collect his things, seemingly not caring at all that everything in his bag was probably soaked and ruined.

You walk silently and slowly, allowing the minutes to pass by as if they were hours as the two of you strolled lazily down the sidewalk, you falling into line obediently at his side. The sounds of the rain splattering as it smashed against the concrete beneath your feet soothed your aching nerves and torn apart heart. The soft, but silenced, tap of your shoes soon became drowned out as the drops came down swifter and heavier on your shoulders, making you begin to feel the weight of your clothes pulling down on you. Every now and then, a car would pass by. The grinding of its tires and swish of the wiper blades added to the slight musical sounds that all the pouring rain gave to you.

“Your question earlier.” Gerard’s voice breaks the silence and ceases your wandering mind.

Why was he even bringing that up again?

“Yeah?” you return, prompting him to continue but more out of obedience than actual interest.

“Why’d you ask that?”

You hadn’t expected that, having slightly expected a small scolding instead. But you decide to at least say something, and keep it as true as you could, without revealing to him that you discovered his true reasoning for keeping you on.

“Felt like I had to know.” You respond, sounding a little more apathetic than you intended.

“Oh…” he says, dropping his head and probably noticing the way you were acting. He brought his tone down and made his next statement sound like a question to you, as if he was searching for clarification “because I was nervous?”

“Don’t remind me.” You nearly say, sighing and hanging your head back down.

“You just seemed…” he trails off, thinking.

Pathetic. Useful. Broken. Able to be manipulated. Take a pick. You think bitterly.

“different.” He finishes.

That’s a new one. You hadn’t expected it, but it still fulfilled the same purpose of making you feel miserable.

“You were just…there.” He continues with a sigh. You wished that he would just stop pitying you and be quiet though.

“You were different, and you were there.” He reiterates, but continues soon after. “You didn’t seem like everyone else. They were all staring at me, making me feel as if I had an extra head or something…I didn’t like it. I thought it was going to be like that with everyone.”—he chuckles—“I actually expected it.”

“Then I noticed that you weren’t staring. I figured you knew how it felt…to be new and to be stared at like you were on display. I felt this sort of relation to you. It made me feel a little less…weird.” He sighs.

Weird? Why the hell would anyone think that he was weird? As far as you were concerned he was the normal one out of the two of you and he had no reason to be thinking that he was weird.

“Also, you weren’t like everyone else and I could just see that right off the bat. You were dressed different, dark colors like me, a piercing somewhere other than the ears, and…apathetic. You looked like you didn’t care about anything at that moment. You were just sitting there, being bored with the world around you. You looked like you didn’t care that I was new and I was there. You didn’t even look at me and it made me feel unimportant, but not in a bad way. I liked not feeling as if I was some type of superstar and that thought of being alone just…called to me?” He questions his own statement, obviously trying to determine to himself if that was the right way to put whatever it was he was trying to say.

“At the time, I thought that if I sat by you, and you still didn’t care that I was new or even there…that apathy would just rub off on me and I would stop caring what other people were doing and if they were staring at me.” He chuckles a little at the end.

His simple misinterpretation of that first day makes you smile and roll your eyes a little. What he doesn’t know. You chuckle very softly yourself, but for a different reason.

“You’ve got it all wrong.” The words escape your lips before you realize that you’ve said them.

“What?” He asks. Shit. The smile leaves your face. “What do you mean?” Fuck.

You panic a little and do a nervous glance around your feet. The street and sidewalk seem to taunt you and your Freudian slip. You glance in his direction and see him still staring at you, waiting for an explanation. You weren’t supposed to say that.

“I just…” you sigh, not really wanting to explain, but feeling—and suddenly fearing—as if you had to. “I worry too much…about everything for-, for that to be true.”

You close your eyes and chew on your bottom lip while still facing forward, remembering that the two of you were close to your houses. You were also silently preparing yourself for whatever it was that he had to say again.

“Oh.” Comes his simple reply, making you feel slightly frustrated. You actually expected him to keep pestering you on it, making you explain yourself. Right now that seemed to be better than a simple dismissive and accepting “oh”.

Your houses come up quickly, you having opened your eyes again. You instinctively stop walking right in front of the sidewalk leading up to his house and look up, noticing that there seemed to be no movement on the inside. You suddenly wanted to see your cousin again. You wanted to see the way she would have looked now. You imagined it, the way her hair would have changed, the way she would have grown up, the way she would have looked walking down those steps right now. All of this being if she had lived six years longer than she really did.

You stare at the house, waiting for the imagined transformation to come. Waiting for all the memories to come back to haunt you in hallucinations of the worst kind.

“Come inside.” Gerard says.

Your eyes snap to his face, looking over it to see if he was really serious. He was as he stood there squinting his eyes to look at you through the rain and the slight mask his rain-drenched hair had created. You open and close your mouth repeatedly out of shock, wanting to protest. You couldn’t. It wasn’t until you finally realized…

That wasn’t a request…it was a command.

You lower your eyes and walk with him to his front door.