Skin Like Dawn (3 page)

He initially wanted to wait until the morning and explain his feelings and his forthcoming actions.  But she wouldn’t understand.  She would only scold him.   

“You’re so stupid, Brandon,” she’d say.  “What do you mean? Do you even know what you’re saying?” 

This is it, he told himself, rising from the bed.  This is it. 

He didn’t even know where to begin.  He scavenged the first bag he could find and begin filling it aimlessly – clean clothes, dirty clothes.  His hands were still quaking.  What the fuck was he really doing? 

It didn’t matter.  This was it. 

And he’d glance at her periodically.  She didn’t move.  God, she was beautiful. 

Once he thought he was finished packing, he moved back toward the bed.  With caution, he slid the blue box into his back pocket.  She wouldn’t have missed it anyway…

Then he looked at her – really studied her.  He educed the nights where he stayed up and watched her sleep.  She’d find a nook in his chest and nestle her head there.  He’d run the back of his hand along her cheek gingerly, listening closely to her every inhale and exhale.  She was with him.  She was his.  In his possession.  And he’d smile at the audacity that someone so precious so could bring him to his fucking knees. That someone understood him and all of his fucked up quirks and nuances.  

His subconscious made one final attempt to stop him as he hoisted his bag over his shoulder and searched for his car keys. 

This will blow over…like everything else…give it time…stop right now…

He did move instinctively toward some action.  He found a pen and some paper and knelt over his dresser. 

Natalie, you and I…

Let’s be honest with ourselves…who were we kidding to think that we could really do this?

I really love you…far more than you ever loved me. So this is…

I can’t think straight…I need time to…

He looked at the crumbled sheets of paper on his bedroom floor. And he huffed.  There was no real way he could make her understand.  But he had to tell her something.  He took a deep breath and picked up his pen again…

Tallie, I’m sorry…

Then he grabbed his car keys, assembled his bag on his shoulder, and he left…

JUST A FEW MILES DOWN THE ROAD, he thought about the audacity of it all.  And unwanted tears marked their course along his disinclined hot cheeks.  It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  Somewhere along the line, it could have been easier.  It would have been easier.  

He shouldn’t have met her.  He wished he didn’t.  So many unwilling truths could have been avoided.  

There was a split second he could have stopped himself – but there had always been something about her.  Sounded trite, yes?

But he could have stopped it from happening. 

His birthday was always at the beginning of any school year, and he’d always treated it as such.  But that particular year was different – one should always do something different for their twenty-first birthday.  And he wanted to, but he couldn’t think of what. 

He chocked it up to his young foolishness.  He thought about a weekend in Vegas, or a drive down the eastern seaboard to Miami.  Just him and the guys, uninhibited for an entire weekend.  

But something had happened…Sophia Baldwin. She watched his every movement and his every thought.  And the night before, they’d gone out to eat, and amongst the loud, collegiate chaos surrounding them, uttered something that sent a cool chill down the entire length of his spine. 

“Why haven’t you proposed yet?”  

He wanted to blame the beer she’d only taken two sips of for her foolish words, but he couldn’t.  She just glared at him, green eyes exposing his skeletal makeup, as though she proudly held the key to his masculinity, wearing his balls as fashionable earrings.  

He unfroze himself and returned to his meal as though she hadn’t said anything. 

“Brandon,” she pressed.  Then, he looked at her again. 

What could he say exactly? 

Suddenly, his mind was tumbling down the shards of their relationship, pieced together shoddily, and torn apart all in the same millisecond.  They were shit, and he knew it then.  

But she was beautiful; man, she was beautiful.  And being with her made sense. 

“What?” he answered dumbly.  He quickly scanned the room for the waiter – he needed to get the check and get the fuck out of there. 

“Did you hear what I said?” 

“I’m not sure, Sophie,” he replied calmly.  “Did you hear what you said?”  

“Of course I did,” she replied confidently, grinning at him.  Suddenly this was his cue to be profound, say something romantic that totally swept her off her feet.  But when it was all said and done, he hadn’t thought about them at all, lasting the length of time that maybe she envisioned in her head.  

He grumbled something.  She wasn’t pleased with the type of response she got.  

“Is that supposed to mean something, Brandon…?” 

Of course it did, but nothing she would like. 

“Let’s just go home,” he suggested, placing his napkin on the table.  “I can’t deal with this right now…” 

And that was the truth.  He couldn’t.  Twenty was no fucking age to discuss such things, especially since he was still financially tethered to his parents, practically indebted to them, and had no real sense of the world outside of his little, comfortable bubble.  

Sophia’s pale green eyes glared into his and he read them plainly.  But he couldn’t really formulate a better way of expressing his unadulterated anxiousness. 

“I’m sorry,” he said simply, pointedly getting to his feet.  “This just isn’t the right time…” 

But he took her home and fucked her anyway, in spite of his innate reticence to sever any type of connection to her.  

He didn’t need this shit.  

HE SPENT THE NEXT DAY cleaning the house on Trent road, and being totally silent, almost to the point that it scared his roommates.  If it hadn’t been his twenty-first birthday then he probably wouldn’t have made an appearance at all.  Tritely and emotionally drained in his early twenties was no way to live, but he couldn’t imagine an outlet.  

Sophia left to shop and to change, and he welcomed the space.  She, too, had detected the disparity in her emotions against his and there was nothing she could really say about it.  

He wasn’t changing his mind.  

But that wasn’t the saddest part: he didn’t know how to tell her.  He didn’t know how to articulate the idea that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with Sophia.  He didn’t like her enough.  

He figured he didn’t love her enough either.  

She called him once around dinnertime, and he didn’t think to call her back.  At that point, he was already on beer number two, lounging irreverently on the front lawn with Scotty watching scholastic passersby.  

Scotty was already pretty close to his limit.  

Whose birthday was it again?

The sun was still higher than it should have been, and the breeze was hot and stifling, but he gazed upward anyway and peered through the trees above him.  He’d never really gotten used to the southern heat.  He missed New York more than he thought.  

He knew that day was different, but he couldn’t have guessed why.  And what the hell was he searching for up there? Guidance, forgiveness, a good ass pat on the back? 

Scotty didn’t seem to notice his strange behavior, but nobody did, really.  Nobody listened.  But even if they did, would he even be willing to divulge?

But, hell, it was way too much to process all at once, and he was far too fucking young.  

The seriousness of it all could wait another couple years before it all manifested and slammed into his face.  

Sophie called again while he was in the shower, and he didn’t think to call her back then either.

He only got dressed while Bob Marley played softly from his stereo.  He even stumbled a bit shrugging into his Syracuse t-shirt.  Despite his athletic prowess, he was never very agile in his basic movements.  And the beer he consumed didn’t help either.  He attributed it to some malady in his brain that never got corrected.  

He just knew that by the end of the night his clumsiness would bring harm to himself or somebody else. 

HE DIDN’T RECOGNIZE A GOOD NUMBER of the people who came to the house on Trent road for his birthday party.  But come midnight he couldn’t give a fuck. 

He was drunk, beyond drunk, abysmally absentminded.  

One moment he was chugging a Bud Light with his old friend from the dorms, and in a split second, Sophia was dragging him into a bedroom, confronting him with mind-splitting anger and glass-shattering screams.  

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her so angry.  

There were a number of ways he could have calmed her down, brought her back to reason, but he stood frozen, drowning in a pool of his own self-pitying thoughts, gasping for air.  

Don’t be overdramatic, he told himself.  But it didn’t work.  

Instead he looked at his girlfriend of three years, tossed his hands into the air, and walked past her without saying a word. 

“Don’t you fucking walk away from me!” she bellowed, pinching at the skin of his bicep.  For a moment he thought about seizing control of her body with his hands and shaking her to remission.  But he stopped himself and simply glowered at her, until she curdled.  

Then he continued on his path, replacing her name in his head with a few harsher, more succinct words.  

He approached the kitchen quickly and Scotty said something to him, but there’s no way he heard it.  Everything around him had become an echo, eerie voices dancing off his brain, clattering around his ears.

He needed air – there were only a few short moments before Sophia came running after him for round two.  He needed to be prepared this time, say exactly what he felt.  

So he grabbed two beers at once and chugged them quickly.  Scotty gave him a fearful look as the amber liquid subdued him.  Something else replaced him entirely then – angry, form-fitting, irate thoughts in his brain.  Shifting deliberations, unsettling views, his innate desperation for youth in its most uninhibited, brutish form.  

And it settled there, as he glared at the room Sophia had just cornered him in, and squeezed one of the bottles in his hand around its neck.  Nostrils flaring, throat aching, resolve disbanding.  

When he lunged back and hurdled the bottle through the air, he immediately regretted it.  He spotted a lanky black girl cross its path perfectly, intercepting its course, and landing cleanly in the middle of her forehead.  

He gasped.  He seemed to be the only one who saw her fall as a result.  The quickness of his following actions startled even him, and in a few seconds time, she was in his arms, out cold, breathing haphazardly, smelling like citrus and peppermint, black hair tumbling down his shaking arms like a stream of water.  

He should have called it a draw then and there…what a wasted, pathetic fight followed in the coming years.  

Who was he kidding?  He loved her then, long before he admitted it, embraced it, drowned himself in it.  

That was the tragedy of it all, really…he never had a choice.  He’d never want to choose.  

It would always be
Tallie
.  

WALK, CRAWL, LIE

IT RAINED THAT AFTERNOON, and they just lay there.  

Isn’t that what honeymoons are all about?  The laying there naked, the sweat, the tingling limbs, the love?  

She was a natural lover.  All ideas of him having to do all of the work for an entire week and a half went out the window on the second day.  He steered away from believing that she’d practiced her fluid art elsewhere, with some obscure man that she’d opened up to and didn’t tell him about.  

He didn’t want to believe that any man could make her as happy as he tried to everyday.  

He’d kill every single man that came fucking close.  

Her head was on his chest, and she drew light paths up and down his treasure trail with the tips of her fingers, eyeing it impassively.  He could feel her grin against his chest. 

“I like to hear you breathe,” she murmured, briefly pausing to press her lips into his skin.  He intrinsically flexed beneath her and released a throaty chuckle.  

“That sounded stupid,” she mused. 

“Did it?” he said.  “Not too long ago I would have paid money to hear you say a thing like that…” 

“Well I’m married to you now,” she replied, resuming the dance of her fingertips.  “I feel legally obligated this time…” 

“Either way,” he whispered, kissing her hair.  “I like it…” 

She hiked the inner part of her thigh against his legs.  

“And your loud reaction to my preceding movements didn’t sound like a… ‘legal obligation’…” 

“No, that wasn’t,” she said.  “That was all me, all natural…” 

“I liked that too,” he whispered. 

“You know, I still despise that you have that effect on me…” 

“What effect, Tal…?” 

“You know…” 

“Say it.” 

She huffed and rolled away from him, propping her chin on her rested arms.  He quickly placed his hands around her waist, pressing his lips in her nude back. 

“Brandon, you look at me a certain way and I lose all sense of myself,” she admitted quietly.  “And I hate it…”  

He sighed but remained silent, still.  

“And I hate that you leaving me did so much to me,” she whispered.  Her voice sounded strained.  He embraced her tighter.  

“I hate that it hurt me so much, for so long.  I hate that I still loved you through it all.  I hate that you went back to Sophia.  I hated that you made me weak.  I was so weak.  I ached for you.  It hurt so much that I couldn’t stand it.  I fucking couldn’t stand it.” 

She was crying, soft inaudible sobs, and he breathed her name and she rolled over to face him, tears in her eyes.  

“But you know what hurts me most?” 

He only stared at her.  

“That I use it to hurt you still…even after everything…that I can bring myself to make you hurt because I was hurt. I hate myself for it.  I hate the way you look at me when I bring it up.”