The Fray Theory: Resonance (11 page)

She savors his taste, the pressure
and traction of his lips, wishing
moments like this could be kept.

That they weren’t
as fleeting as a thought.

Dylan slides his
hand under her thigh and pulls her leg up against his hip. He releases her
wrists, and with his other hand, lifts her up against the wall until they’re
both navel to navel.

Neve grips the
back of his neck to steady herself, gasping a small moan when his hand slips up
under her shirt. With her free hand, she starts to unbuckle his belt. And he
gazes deep into her eyes, letting her know how long he’s been waiting for this.

It’s happening
, Neve’s heart flutters.
After all this
time
. And suddenly there is blood gushing from a slit in Dylan’s throat.

Neve screams and
grips his neck, trying to contain the crimson spurt.

“Neve—” Dylan’s
strangled voice barely makes it out.

Neve looks up into
his eyes to find confusion and not fear. And when she drops her terrified gaze back
down to his neck, the blood that was spilling through her fingers—wet and
slippery—is gone.

Gone
… she stares with wide eyes.

Dylan rests his
hand onto hers and taps lightly for her to let go, and in a state of shock and
disbelief, she gently releases her grip to find his skin unscathed.

Nothing
..? She pants, incapable of taking her
eyes off Dylan’s neck.

“I’m s-sorry,” she
stammers as he lowers her back down. And once she wills her gaze back up to
meet his, all she sees is a pained frown weighing down on his brows.

“I don’t know
what came over me. The things you said probably put all these images in my head,”
she tries to make light of it, but Dylan just averts his eyes and starts to
buckle his belt.

“It’s not you,”
she approaches, but he shifts past her and grabs the doorknob.

“Don’t go,” she
says, ego be damned. “Please.”

“You should get
some rest.”

“Then stay,”
Neve’s brows rise as she smiles. “Just come and lie down with me. We don’t even
have to talk. There’s plenty of time for that.”

Dylan gives her a
look.

“Hey—
nothing
is going to happen to you, okay?”

Dylan nods,
though his mind is clearly elsewhere. “There’s something I need to do,” he
turns the knob and opens the door.

Neve’s hand
slides off his arm and she steps back, feeling smaller than she’s ever felt
before.

“Okay,” she says
softly, and he turns to face her in the door frame. “Do what you gotta do.”

The
workshop’s buzzer blends into the disc-sander’s
scratchy screech. Romer shuts off the machine, pulls his goggles up onto his
hairline, and heads towards the entry. On his way, he takes a peek out the
window and notices a seaweed-green vintage Porsche parked across the street.

At the sight of it, he
stops dead in his tracks and bites down on the bitter smile creeping onto his lips.

He knew this day would
come. He’s been counting every waking moment. But now that it’s here…

With a slight shake of his
head, he makes his way back to his work station, pulls down his goggles, and turns
the disc-sander back on.

He waits for the machine
to gain momentum, but even once it has reached maximum speed, he finds himself
just standing there, staring at it.

A few more agonizing
moments of stagnation pass and he can no longer take it. He exhales a sharp
huff and bangs his gloved fist against the power button.

He pulls his goggles off
and casts them aside, then marches to the nearest window and sneaks a peek at
the street.

The Porsche is still
there.

He unlocks the window and
pushes onto it, then sticks out his head to peek down at the entrance one floor
below.

Where did he
—

A loud creak startles him from
the supply room.

He grabs a pipe wrench off
the wall and marches towards the back of the shop, turning the corner just as
Dylan jumps down from the clerestory window.

Romer drops the wrench and
strides over.

Dylan rises to his feet,
only for his jaw to be met with Romer’s powerful fist. The punch propels him
against the shelves, making them rattle.

“Ro—”

Romer grabs his collar and
punches him again.

“Just let me explai—”
Dylan chokes on the words as Romer knees him in the gut.

“YOU, SON OF A
BITCH
!”
Romer grabs the back of Dylan’s neck and shoves him down. “He then wraps his
arm around Dylan’s neck and pulls him back into a tight chokehold.

Dylan’s hand creeps up to Romer’s
forearm, but his grip is weak and submissive. He isn’t putting up a fight,
which quite frankly enrages Romer even more
.

“THINK I’M BLUFFING!?” Romer
shouts into his ear. “HUH!? THINK I WON’T DO IT!?” Romer tightens his chokehold,
but Dylan doesn’t retaliate. His body is starting to weigh down on Romer’s arm,
his mind teetering on the verge of consciousness.

“You worthless piece of
SHIT
!”
Romer releases his grip and shoves Dylan back down. “You think you can just
worm your way back in?” he kicks a metal barrel over, the woodchips in it
flying everywhere. “You think it’s that FUCKING EASY!?” he shouts, body burning
hot.

Dylan struggles onto all
fours with his hand on his throat, coughing. The shelves are still quivering as
if due to a small quake, but start to settle as Romer’s rage wears him down.

He bends at the waist and
rests his hands on his knees, burying the urge to weep—the urge to purge
himself of the pain running through his veins.

He looks over at Dylan, and
then makes his way back into the main space.

Over his shoulder, he
watches as Dylan wipes the blood from the corner of his mouth and rises to his
feet. But before their eyes meet, Romer looks away and leans forward onto the rim
of his work table.

He drops his head and inhales
a deep breath, but his shaking persists.

I’ve made my point
, he thinks to himself.
It’s done
.

“Is that it?” Dylan’s
coarse voice reaches him from behind. “Three years, and that’s all you got for
me?”

“Oh I’m going to kill
you,” Romer enunciates. “As soon as I’m done planning my escape to Mexico,” he
grabs a pencil and starts to whittle its blunt tip with a utility knife.

“You need to hear me out.”

“No… I really don’t,” Romer
leans over the table and starts to scribble meaningless notes on a scrap piece
of paper. He waits for Dylan to start groveling, but no such satisfaction comes
his way.

Rage is swelling back up
inside him, burning like acid. Sour, and utterly intolerable.

He pushes off the table
and straightens his back.

Every moment dragging by feels
like the length of his sentence, stretching the space between them.

“Why,” Romer asks. “Why didn’t you
help me?”

“I couldn’t.”

Dylan’s response makes him sick to
his stomach. “Let me guess,” Romer turns to face him, “you were too busy
throwing yourself a pity-party to give a shit about anyone else..? Well guess
what asshole—
my hell
wasn’t the kind you WAKE UP FROM!”

σ

~Three Years Ago~

Today was
exceptionally chilly, especially for spring. Though the sun has already set,
the blue sky is yet to yield to nightfall.

Twilight: Romer’s favorite time of
day. When the city comes alive with a vibrant palette of color and light. When
early-birds and night-owls alike walk the streets.

Holding an alarmingly cheap bottle
of champagne, he walks up to a stunning beachfront mansion. And although this
visit could easily be his thousandth, the building’s minimalist design takes
his breath away, yet again.

He loves how the walls, columns,
and ceilings are really nothing more than concrete rectangles cutting into each
other. How the planes extend beyond one another, creating overhangs, depth,
privacy.

Had he designed this house
himself, it could not have been any more perfect than it already is.

If only Dylan’s dad would be away
more often.

With hopes of avoiding any
unwanted encounters, he drifts towards the side of the mansion, hops over a
small fence, and heads down the walkway towards the pool-house in the back.

He walks past rows and rows of
bamboo planters and obsessively-trimmed bonsai trees, each step he takes
revealing more and more of the infinity pool up ahead.

With the pool-house in his sights,
he pulls out a folded envelope from his back pocket and grins at the ‘UBC
Faculty of Architecture’ stamp on its upper left corner. And when he looks over
the shoulder at Dylan’s father’s mansion, it finally dawns on him:

His dreams have materialized into
reality.

Romer refolds the envelope and
slides it back into his pocket. He can only begin to imagine the reaction on
Dylan’s face.

Today has been a lifetime in the
making. Today just might be the best day of his life.

He fiddles with the bottle’s cork,
and unwittingly pops it a few feet shy of the pool-house’s welcome mat. The
swelling froth fountains all over his sleeve.

“
Goddamn
,” he mutters and
quickly unites his lips with the bottle’s rim.

A few gulps into the endeavor, “
ugh
,”
he cringes. “Even
I
think this tastes like ass.”

He checks the label, and then vows
never to cheap out on celebratory alcohol again.

“KNOCK KNOCK, BITCH,” he pushes
the front door open and enters the pool-house.

There’s no sign of Dylan.

“D!” Romer calls out. “I started
without you,” he puts the bottle down on the bar counter. “But don’t worry—we’re
breaking into your dad’s cellar later.”

His glee is met with silence. Is
Dylan in the main house, he wonders?

Nah
… he thinks. Dylan hates it in there even more than he
does.
He’s probably just taking a nap
.

“D!” Romer shouts even louder as
he swings open the nearest cabinet. He scans the dwindled selection of clean
glasses and mugs, shrugs, and then pulls two bottom-heavy whiskey glasses off
the shelf.

“Man—I’m buying you a new charger,”
he makes his way over to the guest bedroom. “I called like—”

He freezes at the threshold upon
noticing a hand peeking from behind the bed.

Terror twists his core.

He drops everything and dives
forward onto the floor to find Dylan with his eyes shut, sunken heavily onto
himself.

“D—” Romer holds up Dylan’s
ghostly face and pulls up one of his eyelids.

His pupil is alarmingly dilated.

“What did you do..?” Romer barely
gets out with what little air he had trapped in his lungs.

He frantically looks about the room
and spots an empty bottle of prescription drugs on the nightstand.

What did you take
?

He leaps to grab the bottle and discovers
a folded piece of paper right underneath.

A letter he doesn’t need to read.

σ

Behind the
wheel of Dylan’s vintage Porsche, Romer swerves out of the driveway and onto
the main road.

“IF YOU DIE I’M GONNA KILL YOU!” Romer
shouts as he cuts through the evening traffic.

“Hold on, hold on, HOLD ON!” he stomps
down on the gas pedal, narrowly making it through a yellow light. But further
down the road, a string of finicky traffic lights await the screeching of his
tires.

“Oh, no no no, please—please turn
green—TURN GREEN!” he screams, and inexplicably, the upcoming traffic lights start
to flicker.

Regardless of whether they’d just turned
yellow or red, they all revert to green like a chain reaction.

“Yes!” Romer jolts in place. “What
the fuck—YES!”

He swerves left onto the leftmost
lane and speeds up, not accounting for the aftermath.

WHIPLASH.

All color and light blend into horizontal
strokes as his collision into an unsuspecting vehicle swerves him violently out
of control. And as the Porsche spins sideways, all Romer can think of is how he
needs to survive this so that he doesn’t rob Dylan of the same opportunity.

They skid to a screeching halt
with Romer’s hand firmly pressed onto Dylan’s chest.

Groaning, Romer rests his aching
head back onto the headrest, unimaginably grateful to be alive.

The world is still spinning, and
the pulsating pain in his skull is intensifying with every heartbeat.

He squeezes his eyes shut to ward
off the pain, and opens them again to a blurry world.

He turns his stiff, aching neck
and looks in the direction of the car he crashed into. And all he sees is the fuzzy
outline of a dark blue vehicle with a huge dent in its passenger’s seat.

The driver is clutching his head
with both hands, screaming something, but Romer can’t hear him over the ringing
in his ears.

With his hand still on Dylan’s breast-bone,
all that Romer’s aware of is the stretching silence between the beats of his dying
heart.

He turns back around and looks at
Dylan’s sallow face. How he made it to the hospital, he can barely remember.

σ

“You know
what they charged me with?” Romer asks, smoldering beneath his icy exterior.

Dylan just stares, his lips glued
together.

“First Degree Man-slaughter,”
Romer says, feeling sick to his stomach. “They said if I hadn’t driven back to
the crash site on my own, they would’ve slapped me with a felony hit and run
too.”

Dylan lowers his head, a choked
breath escaping through his strangled vocal cords.

“See, you may not have given a
shit about
your
life, but I never—and I mean
never
—thought you’d
throw
me
to the wolves.”

“Is that what you think I did?”
Dylan looks up.

“You ran away!”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Oh so what—you just woke up one
morning and just
happened
to be in New York!?”

“Yes! That’s
exactly
what
happened!”

Romer stares, at a complete loss
for words. There seems to be just enough conviction in Dylan’s eyes to make him
second-guess himself.

“When I opened my eyes,” Dylan
continues, “I was hooked up to a bunch of machines in what I
thought
was
a hospital in Vancouver. I didn’t even know I was in New York till I overheard two
of the nurses talking.”

“You actually expect me to buy
this bullshit?”

“I swear to God, Ro, I racked my
brain for months, trying to remember how I got there, flight, packing,
anything
!
But it was like all my memories had been erased since I—” he swallows, and then
just stares at Romer with pleading eyes.

And all of a sudden it feels like
life itself has been drained of Romer. “You had three years,” he says in a
firm, but broken voice. “Three whole years, and
this
is the best you came
up with?”

Dylan stares at him, utterly
baffled. “Do you think if I had three whole years to think of a bullshit story,
this is the best I could come up with?” a faint frown darkens his expression.
“Do you really think I came over today to make excuses?”