FicWad

Like A Knife Part 26

I said good bye to my friends on the internet and put my lap top away. Things were getting uncomfortable between Brendon, Ryan and I, and I decided I needed some sleep. I lay down in my bed and pulled a blanket up to my chin, thrilled to be in my own bed. The, as my eyes began to give in to the heaviness, my cell phone rang.

“Hello?” I asked, wondering who it was.

“Hey, Cams. I knew you were going to bed,” Brendon said from the other side.

“So you called me? Why did you do that?” I questioned him.

“To say good night,” He said sweetly. I was glad he couldn’t see my face inflame red with a small amount of embarrassment, more the fact that there were movies that I had watched where lovers would do the same thing, happily in all of their affection. There was a small part of me that wished it was like that, and an even larger part that wished it was Ry who had called.

“Oh,” I replied, no other words able to come to my mouth.

“Oh?” He asked curiously.

“Yeah. It was sweet of you to call…Good night, Brenny,” I said. I restrained the ‘I love you’ that so desperately wanted to flee my vocal chords. “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

“That was my line, Cams,” He laughed. “Now what am I supposed to say? Don’t sleep too late?” He laughed.

“How about ‘Good night, Cammy’? That’s what normal people would say,” I explained to him.

“But I’m not normal, am I?” He replied.

“I guess not, Bden,” I agreed.

“Well, then, good night, Cammykins. See you later,” He finally said into the phone, a sigh seeming to fall from his voice.

“Night, Brennybear,” I responded.

He left a smile on my face for the sleep that came so quickly that night, slowly finding its way to make me forget everything and fall into a slumber that I could have floated in for eternity.

When I woke up, it was about noon time, and Patrick’s car was in my driveway. I gasped upon remembering our plans for today, and put on some clothes that I could present myself to him in. He was in my living room, playing with Noodle, a modest, heartfelt smile escaping his face muscles and making my heart melt. His blue eyes filled with ecstasy as he saw me emerge from my bedroom down the stairs, seeming to forget about my kitten all together.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” He greeted me gingerly.

“Good morning…Awake…Handsome. Awake handsome,” I said, finishing my thought. He laughed. “So what are we up to today?” I wondered, thinking about what he had said yesterday.

“I thought we could go to the railroad tracks near Jon’s old house. Like when we used to go there when you were still in high school,” He explained to me, clearly anticipating the day we were going to spend together.

Just don’t let Ry see, I said to myself, remembering the look on his face I had seen him with in Brendon’s car after he had found Pete and I in the meadow.

Everyone must have known I wished things were back to the way they were when we were younger, constantly making mistakes and loving every second of them. They couldn’t have not known, as everywhere I went seemed to be a place that brought back loads and loads of memories.

It was the end of our senior year, the sun coming earlier and staying longer in the beautiful Las Vegas sky. Ry always had new places to show me around the city, out in the suburbs surrounding the sky scrapers and congested traffic. This time he had brought me to Jon’s house at first, which kept me puzzled and questioning.

“Why are we at Jon’s house?” I asked him quizzically.

“We’re not here to be at Jon’s house,” He explained.

“That makes no sense. I’m a human, Ry, not a super computer,” I objected, as he led me through the trees.

“We’re here for this,” He admitted, as we pushed through the trees to find a set of train tracks, surrounded by tall, proud trees invading the Nevada sky. Everything was serene and quiet, like a still life portrait of some remote little town’s railroad tracks in the middle of an undisturbed forest.

“Where do you find all these places, Ry?” I asked him, jumping up on the side of the metal and balancing on it.

“It’s not where that’s important. It’s why I find them,” He told me.

“And the reason for that would be…?” I continued.

“I find them for you,” He said, face in the opposite direction so I couldn’t see his expression. “Because you’re worth every second of my time.”

He left me speechless, with nothing more to mutter out except a useless, “Oh.” I felt horribly guilty, ridden with hopes that I could have given him a better reaction that that. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I would take a bullet for you.”

I felt like an idiot. He had just told me one of the sweetest things I had ever experienced in my entire life, and I came back with a shitty response like that one. So from then on I decided to will myself to stay quiet. Instead of talking anymore, I embraced him tightly.

And then it occurred to me that I needed him more than life itself, but couldn’t find the correct way to express it. I was tempted to kiss him, and I leaned in to do so, when his cell phone rang. I let go, slightly embarrassed that the thought had even occurred to me, and he answered it with a name that I would soon learn to resent more than death.

“Oh, hey, Keltie,” He said into the phone. “Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.” He closed the phone and looked at me with sympathy. “Cams, I have to go…It’s this girl I just met. I like her a lot…”

He didn’t say it, but he definitely implied it. He meant that she was more important than me at that point in his life. Pretty blond girls always dominated over normal friends that you didn’t have a romance with. He probably wasn’t thinking it, but I wished we did.

“I’ll…I’ll stay here, all right? You go ahead. I’ll walk home,” I told him, sitting down on the tracks.

He nodded his head and opened his mouth to say something more, but thought differently and walked away. Then he was gone.

That’s the moment I started losing him from my grasp, when I realized that he couldn’t be mine forever. And the worst part was, he had no idea how much I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him.

I sat on the train tracks and cried, knowing that there was nobody watching. This Keltie girl would be the end of me, I got a strong notion, and wished I had told him when I got the chance.

But instead, I hadn’t done anything. I’d kept my feelings from him, the ones that I so desperately wanted to let spill from my mouth. I would let my heart do the talking, my mouth its mere hand puppet, but it was all too late for that now.

He was gone.
“We should get going now,” I said hastily, shaking off the reminiscence and dreadful nostalgia that was working its way up my throat.

“Yeah,” He agreed. We walked out the front door, locked it, and sat in his car. We passed the time-honored back roads to Jon’s old house, now old and abandoned. As we changed, Las Vegas did, too, and it worried me. I wasn’t ready for my hometown to just revolutionize right before me.

We pushed through trees and stepped over roots edging their way towards the surface. There were the train tracks, long discarded, sitting the way they had been when I sat on them, crying a flood of repentance.

They hadn’t changed a bit, which came as a surprise. I thought they would have been deceased by now, so many years after we had visited them, now reliving our childhoods. A great relief spilled from my shoulders, as if it had been reduced to rubble, I probably would have broken down clear as midday.

And I couldn’t let Patrick see me like that.

Because his concern for me was a knife, glistening in all its dreadful, horrific beauty, waiting for a moment to cut deep into me and wound my emotions.