“Leah, wait.” I pushed her away slowly.
Fuck. I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t…
“Stop looking at me like that. Stop looking at me as if this was a goodbye. Don’t you love me? You told me…you told me we all live in a yellow submarine.” Her voice broke, and I bit my lip, holding back.
“Of course I love you. But this can’t be.”
“You’re not being serious.” She brought a hand to her mouth, and I watched her erase the kiss that we had just given each other, taking it away in her fingers.
I came close to her. Every inch that separated her body from mine was fucking torture. And when I thought of how far apart we would be after that, I wanted to hold her until she begged me to stop.
In another life, at another time, I would have…
“Listen to me, Leah. I don’t want to come between you and your brother, because I know you, and I know you’ll end up regretting it.”
“That won’t happen. I’ll work it out with him. I just need time, Axel.”
I continued because I had no other choice but to continue. “And you’re young, you’re going to go to college, and you need to enjoy that time without anyone tying you down, without me, without this fucked-up situation.” I was suffocating as I watched her eyes grow damp. “Grow, live, like I did in those days. Meet guys, have fun, be happy, babe. I can’t give you all that.”
“Are you suggesting I go out with other people?” She held my eyes, trembling, crying, with a grimace of incredulity.
And I…I wanted to die, because the very idea of someone else’s lips touching hers, other hands holding her…
“Axel, tell me you’re not being serious. Tell me this was a mistake and we’ll start over from zero. Come on, look at me, please.”
I took a step back when she tried to touch me. “It was a mistake, Leah. That’s what I want to say.”
She brought a hand to her chest. Her cheeks were coated in tears, and this time, I couldn’t wipe them away. I had gotten so used to holding her up when she was in pain in those months, helping her to channel it, to face it, to accept it…and now I was the source of her pain.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I love you, even if you can’t understand.”
“Don’t love me like this!” she shouted in a rage.
We looked at each other for a few seconds in silence.
“I’ll still be here,” I whispered.
She laughed amid her tears and wiped her cheeks. “If you break up with me now, you know I’ll never come back.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated and looked away.
That’s how things were. How they needed to be. I’d been tossing it around for days, like staring at a picture from a thousand different angles trying to understand every line and every shadow. And I had reached the conclusion that everything was against us, that our relationship had been pretty, idyllic, but that it wasn’t real. She had molded to me. To my routines, my life, my house, my way of understanding the world…and selfishly, I wanted to keep going like that, because it made me happy, but there was something that didn’t fit, like a puzzle piece you’ve wedged in between two others, and even if you aren’t sure for a while, you realize it doesn’t belong here, that it needs to go somewhere else.
Leah came close to me before I could light another cigarette. Looking at her…it hurt. I needed her to go now, before I ended up doing something I shouldn’t again or going back to staring at my own belly button.
“What were we all these months, Axel?”
“Lots of things. That’s not the problem, the problem is all we never were. We didn’t just bump into each other one day at a bar, it’s not like I looked at you and liked you and came over to ask for your number. We didn’t go on a date. I didn’t say goodbye to you with a kiss in front of the door to your home. We couldn’t even walk down the street holding hands without thinking of anything else. We never could have all that.”
“But I never cared.”
I lit a cigarette. I should have thought about how Leah was, how she wouldn’t give up, would hold onto what she felt because she lived for the emotions that shook her, and they determined her world. I closed my eyes when I felt her arms embracing me from behind. Fuck, why? Why? I couldn’t take it anymore. I turned around and she let me go. She was still crying. She was still trying to understand. I thought I would try to drive the nail in deeper.
“What the fuck do you want? A farewell fuck?”
She blinked. Her eyelashes were gleaming with tears. “Don’t do this, Axel. I swear I won’t forgive you.”
“Believe me, I’m trying to be delicate, but you’re making it hard for me.”
“Oliver was right.” She sobbed, and finally, she took a few steps back, pulling away from me. “You’re incapable of fighting for what you love.”
I looked at her and clenched my teeth. “I guess that means I don’t really love then.”
I was able to see the exact instant when her heart shattered before my eyes, and I did nothing to avoid it. I stayed there, imperturbable, wanting it to be over soon, to forget the moment when Leah’s eyes met mine for the last time. And I saw hatred. And pain. And disappointment. But I held on. I held on until she turned her back to me and hurried down the porch steps. I watched her walk off up the drive as I had so many other times, but it was different, because there wouldn’t be more. She wouldn’t come back the next morning pedaling her orange bike. There wouldn’t be more mornings together or more nights of words and kisses and music.
There are end points that you can feel in your skin…
I stood there a few minutes without moving, still anchored in that instant that had vanished and was now part of the past. Then I went inside and took a drink from the first bottle I found. I smashed it against the sink, grabbed another, and followed the scent of the sea to the beach. I lay on the sand and drank and remembered and repeated to myself that this was probably the biggest mistake of my life.
I don’t know when I finally returned home. But I know my heart was pounding against my rib cage, and I had to light one cigarette after another to keep my hands busy and my fingers still. Because the impulse was there…shouting at me, whispering to me. I grabbed the stepladder and went to my room. I climbed up and looked at everything. I looked at my failures piled up on top of that dresser, full of dust and spiderwebs. And when I realized I was incapable of facing them, I went back down and stayed there, still and silent in the middle of that room that had been ours.
I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and looked up at the painting over the bed. The notes of a song about yellow submarines floated through my head and accompanied me through the night, until I understood I had lost her forever and that those traces of color and skin and afternoons making love were all I had left of her.
* * *
I got up when the doorbell rang. It was already morning, and I think I was still a little drunk, because I stumbled as I walked through the living room. I opened up. Justin was there with a coffee in one hand and a portion of cheesecake in the other.
“I, uh…I just wanted to see how you were.”