End of the Night

“Adalena Maria, open this door,” pounding on my door, matching the pounding of my heart against my chest. The only reminder that no, this wasn’t a fucking dream, and that my best friend didn’t just rip my heart out and stomp on the pieces.

Everything reminded me of him, my sheets, my pillowcase, the pictures of our group scattered around the room, my paintings, his baseball cap that hung from my closet door handle. He was everywhere and yet not here at all. When I needed him, wanted him, he wasn’t here.

I had to be dying. This feeling, this emptiness could only be death, the final stages. Any minute now, I’d be seeing the light; the darkness would wrap its arms around me so I could emerge free.

But once I lift my head from the mountain of pillows I’d cocooned myself in, there is only too much light, and too much silence from the other side of my bedroom door. I sit up slowly, my head spinning and blow my bangs from my face.

The door clicks and I watch the knob twist slowly before my father’s pride filled face comes into view. He glares at me and angrily, stomping into the room, Italian leather shoes sinking into the plush carpet. His hands come to rest on his hips as he speaks, “Care to explain why you’ve been locked in here all day?”

I sink back into the pillows and begin to sob again, pain racing through me and settling into my gut. Death would have been better than this. Had to have been. The bed dips where he sits on the mattress.

“What happened? Is it… a boy?” I want to laugh at his cautious tone, but I can’t, I simply can’t. I wipe the tears from my face slowly and sit up. He grimaces. “I know I’m no good at this, that your mother should be here for this kind of stuff, but I want you to talk to me. I need you to be able to talk to me, no matter what, okay?”

This only sends me into hysterics because god, my Mami should’ve been here. She could read me like a book, and she was always here to tell me what to do. Beautiful Mami, when I needed her… gone.

Everybody, gone, gone, gone

He pats my back softly and swiftly kisses my forehead before getting up, straightening his suit, and walking out. I should’ve cried, demanded the rest of his rare attention, but I’d become so used to his distance, the hole where Mami filled, where she left us both craving the love of my mother, his wife.

Tap

I look over at my window slowly. Dukes was perched carefully on the balcony, cigarette behind his ear, honey blond hair tousled from the wind. I stand up carefully, and let him in.

“You look like shit,” he whispers as if I was going to break or something. As if I was fragile glass, spidery vines already running through my exterior. He tugs my hand and leads me to the bed where he curls himself around me, running his fingers through my hair slowly.

“I slept with him,” I murmur. I feel him nod slowly; never stopping the rhythm he’s got going. “I slept with him and he’s acting like it was nothing, like it never happened,” I’m back to crying, my tears soaking the worn leather of his jacket.

“That’s just Ty, being Ty. You can’t let him get to you,” I want him to be wrong, need him to be lying to me, but I know through the fractures of my heart, that he’s not. Dukes has always been the honest one in the group, never sparing your feelings, letting things be said whenever. I just don’t want to believe it.

“I think I love him,” I’m whispering now. The words swirl into the air, thick as mud, and curl around our bodies until we’re being suffocated by their presence. I immediately want to take them back, leave Dukes untainted by the mess they’ve created.

He says nothing for a few minutes, just combing through my hair, and I know he’s thinking. Thinking of the things he wants to say, the things he will say, the words I need to hear, but won’t want to think about. He’s always been like this, a boy turned man of few but many words.

“I think it’ll take some time before he can ever give you what you’re looking for,” I look up at him, because fuck this is Dukes, and for a moment we’re just staring into each other’s eyes, like shit. This is the moment where he leans down to kiss me, and I realize it’s Dukes that I’ve been missing out on, but he only brushes his lips across the crown of my head and chuckles.

And I get it. Because if it was gonna happen, it would’ve. Ten years, it was our group held together by an impenetrable force, so naïve to the world, so uncaring that a decade from then we’d all be twisted, tangled into each other through words unsaid and wrong words spoken.

“La Lena, what am I gonna do with you?” Dukes says in this honey soaked drawl, twinges of his southern accent filtering through. I smile slightly, feeling my chapped lips split and my face stretch from the nonstop tears.

I snuggle into his jacket, smelling of spicy apples, a scent that is all Dukes. When he laughs, I feel the baritone rumble through his layers of clothes, soothing me until I’m lulled into sleep.