Two Punks In Love

Code Black

Trace

I wipe my brow with a dirty forearm, then downshift the front end loader for more traction as I drive into a pile of debris that used to be chicken coop. It took surprisingly little time to demolish the thing with a sledgehammer. It took longer for me to learn how to drive the machine that I'm using to transfer the wood to a burn pile about a quarter mile away.

This is the last of buildings I've demolished. There are nearly a dozen falling down shacks on the immediate homestead property. It seems like several generations built, abandoned, and rebuilt them, many for reasons I can't fathom. Chicken coop, I get. Moonshine still, ok. Smoking shed, sure. But what were the eight or nine other tiny buildings? I'll never know.

Now they are simply dens for mice and snakes, and that means they have to go, if I plan to have anyone on the property. Especially Kat.

Not that I'm sure she's coming here. A month ago when she walked away from me clutching my promise ring, I was fairly confident. I suppose maybe that overconfidence comes from being a rockstar, but I honestly thought she would come to her senses and realize—we're in love, and she's pregnant with my babies, for Chrissakes. The only thing standing in the way of our love is the pain of a past we can't change, but it's a thing we can let go of. I thought she just needed a little time and space to recover her strength and her reason and her mental clarity. I thought when her depression began to lift, she would see the folly of sacrificing our future to the past.

And then the motherfucking wedding video dropped at the worst probable time. Despite the fact that Kat reacted with little to no surprise at the video, and despite the fact that it's existence didn't result in a set-back of her reconciliation with Ash, I figure it's pretty well fucked me.

I mean, I watched it. And right there, in the technicolor of Riley's Iphone, it was plain to see the tenderness I felt for Ashlynn that I tried to supplant in my mind after things went bad. Yes, most of the things that were said on the video aligned with things I told Kat previously, and yes, it came across that both Ashlynn and I were willingly entering into a marriage we had no immediate plans to consummate, but there was that door we left open to one another, just a crack. That crack was easy to see in the gentle teasing, and the temple kisses and the hand holding and the dance and the final kiss.

And that goddamn song. I hadn't even remembered it, but seeing the video, I'm now well aware that it stuck with me during the early weeks of our marriage, when I began teasing Ash by calling her Honey, and then later, with more real affection, Hon.

Christ, seeing all that hurt me, because I imagined seeing it through Kat's eyes . It was pretty fucking hard to take. She has the visual now, to go with the truths I had already told her. Now she knows, I love her best, I love her with all my worth, but once upon a time, I had a fragile and tender feeling of love for her sister.

What the hell is wrong with me? Who goes and falls in love with sisters and thinks either of them could ever accept the situation? Especially the one who thinks she's my second choice?

She's not. I would swear before heaven, hell and all of creation, she's not my second choice. What I feel for Kat is so much more...sacred to me than what I have ever had with Ashlynn, in any of the changing forms of our relationship. What it really comes down to is that Ashlynn was a forced love. I took a girl that I had history with, a connection to, even an attraction to, and I tried to build a love where there was no joy. No magic.

It was a brittle love, and it snapped under the weight of life. It would have snapped even if our problems had been lesser. I truly believe that, because now I know what fully infused love feels like.

There is nothing that Kat could do could break the backbone of my love for her. Not even marry Colin Rieter. Not even share his bed.

I curse and spit to the side of the loader as I park it after the last haul.