8 Billion

I wish more than anything that everything stayed like that. I wish that we stayed in that happy couple, honeymoon, just moved to a big city, lovey-dovey couple. I wish that Vic didn’t come home two weeks after we moved in to find me packing my bags and trying to make a quick getaway. I wish that loving him would have been enough to keep me with him.

11 Days Ago- The Incident

“Kellin! I got off early! Where are you, babe?” I cursed under my breath when I heard Vic open and close the front door to our apartment. Mike was away for a few weeks, he was touring with a new band that he got into with friends. Vic had been at work all day, all week actually. Scratch that, he had been at work nonstop since we moved here. He was working full time at a record shop somewhere in town. I hadn’t actually gotten a chance to go see him seeming as I haven’t left the apartment since we moved in. I wiped a tear from my eye and tried to throw my suitcase behind the bed but he had opened our bedroom door before I had the chance.

“Kels? What the hell is going on?” He dropped his jacket on the floor and walked over to stand next to me. “What’s wrong?” He pushed the suitcase across the bed and sat down, wrapping his arms around me and trying to get me to sit with him.

“No, Vic, stop! Don’t do that! You’re going to hold me and wipe my tears and tell me everything is going to be okay and I’ll forget I was upset and I’ll stay and I can’t-“

“Kellin you’re speaking nonsense. What happened? Why are you crying? Why are you packi- you can’t leave, Kels…” His voice cracked and I felt my heart melting as he looked at me with pleading eyes. “Can you please explain…?”

I sat down next to him, both of us in tears, and told him why I had to leave. “It’s that night, Vic. That night that you brought me out of Denning and I cried and I lost it? Living here, it’s that day every day. I can’t leave the apartment without having a panic attack. I tried to visit you at work the other day, I was going to bring you coffee or something, just to get out of the house and to see you, ya know? I got down the steps of our apartment and I was surrounded by people that I didn’t know and I was in a world that I didn’t know and I came inside and I cried and you weren’t there, Vic. You’re never there. It’s like you dropped me off on another planet and told me to go explore but I step outside and I can’t breathe the air.”

I stopped talking for a while so I could catch my breath. It was true. I felt so alone out here and I loved every minute that I got to spend with Vic or with Mike but when I was alone I was suffocating. I couldn’t do anything except stare at the walls. I didn’t want to leave, but I couldn’t stay.

“I have to go back, Vic. I have to go back to Denning where it’s familiar and it’s home. This isn’t home, Vic.”

“No I’m your home, Kellin!” Vic said through tears. “We agreed that day when we left that we were each other’s homes. When you said you love me that was you telling me that I was your home. You don’t belong in Denning, Kellin, you belong with me!” His voice came out in a strained shout and he let tear after tear fall from his eyes while looked at me. All at once I was thrown back Denning. Sitting class watching Vic shelter himself from the world day after day until he finally opened up to me. No one else in the world would be able to see him like this except me, and now I was the one making him like this.

“I do belong with you, I know that. I promise you I will never ever forget that. But I can’t live like this, Vic. I have to go back. You can come with me! We’ll go back together and it will be just like before.”

“Like before? You want everything to go back to how it was? Where I was too scared to tell you my name? Where you were absolutely miserable because all you wanted was to leave? You want to go back to that? I don’t, Kellin! I like it out here where we can be whoever we want to be!”

“Then stay here! Stay here, Vic, and be whoever you want to be with whoever you want to be with!” I stood up and tried to walk out the door.

“I want to be with you, Kellin. Only you. Please stay.”

“Give me one reason why I should stay after what you just said.” I begged him. “You just told me that you don’t want to go back with me. That you want to stay here and be free. I’m allowing you that, Vic. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t walk out this door and never look back.”

“Well, you left your suitcase on the bed.” He said, standing up and walking towards me. I let out an exasperated laugh through tears. He walked up to me and kissed me. Suddenly I forgot that I was mad, and I kissed him back. I wrapped my arms around his torso while he weaved his fingers in my hair. Soon he pulled away and looked at me. “Because I love you Kellin Quinn. Because I will quit my job and be homeless with you, or I will buy a boat and we can isolate ourselves in the middle of the ocean, or I will buy a ranch in middle-of-nowhere Kansas and it can just be you and me and a pig.”

“But you won’t go back to Denning with me?” I asked in a whisper.

“I won’t go back to Denning with you because you don’t want to go back there. And I’ll prove it. Give me ten days. I will take you into the real New York City. I’ll be right beside you the whole time. You can live it and breathe it and feel it and photograph it and I will be with you the whole time. If at the end of those ten days you still want to leave then we’ll leave. I promise.”

“You’ll stay with me?” I asked, resting my forehead against his and bumping our noses.

“I’ll always stay with you, Kels. I love you.” He said, pecking my lips quickly before looking back at me questioningly. “Ten days?”

“Ten days. I’ll give you ten days.” I said, smiling at him through my tears as he did the same. I nodded my head “Ten days because I love you. And no matter what happens after those ten days I will still love you.” He laughed at me before picking me up and wrapping my legs around his torso. He kissed me and carried me over to the bed, both of us laughing the entire time, and he pushed my suitcase off before laying back with me on top of him.

“We’re not gonna need that anymore.” He said laughing before I kissed him again.

Not for ten more days, at least.