The Best of Us

twenty six

DECEMBER 2014

WHATEVER ANSWER THOMAS had been looking for in the sky, he did not find it.

When we first arrived outside, time had stopped. He was waiting for something that would never arrive and I was waiting for him. But when he gave up, when he finally looked at me, his face blank and his gaze fixed, it was like all of our missing minutes rushed forward to fill the empty space they'd left.

At first, all we did was look at each other; eyes locked and gleaming like pale lights in two vacant houses, waiting to see who would be extinguished first.

I watched him, caught the way the white moonlight and the blurry shadows fell over his face, slanting down the hollows of his cheeks and sloping across his forehead. He was stretching his neck and swallowing hard as if to fight the words that might come out, his jaw tight and his tendons tensing against the taut flesh of his throat; his anger pooling beneath his skin like a bruise, an animal clawing its way through him; the lion getting ready to spring out of the tall grass.

His lights went out first. He looked away from me and faced the murk of the desolate parking lot; the lonely, scattered cars and the cracked asphalt and the frosted grass springing up in small tufts where it was allowed. It looked like a photograph. Or a bad memory.

He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, intentionally, and then huffed out a hollow breath. When he opened his eyes again, he was half-turned towards me, watching me closely.

I forced myself to hold his gaze and tried to lock my body into a kind of stubborn stillness, even though I was too cold to stand up straight, eager to appear calm and collected; outwardly unperturbed by the familiar signs of his suppressed rage. My heart was beating in my ears, steadily throbbing inside of my rattled, aching ribs like a bird too big for its cage.

"I feel like," he began in a low, stiff voice, a slight rasp caught in the back of his throat and his hands held rigidly in front of him, his knuckles shadowed  and his veins like silver rivers running through his body, "fucking killing you."

Silently, I watched him and made a statue of myself, my face blank and body stiff and head spinning.

"But before I do or say anything else," he continued, a shadow of rage looming over his slow, wavering voice, "I'm going to give you a chance to explain yourself." His breath came out in a quick white cloud and his hands relaxed, but he still held them in front of him like he was trying to talk me down from shooting him; his brows raised and his eyes wide with ruthless impatient. "Why are you here?"

I looked away and shrugged. My head was light and sore, a tension pressing against my temples, and maintaining my composure was growing more difficult with every passing second. Though the bitter air had at first refreshed me, my face flushed and the cold crawling beneath my clothes, it had completely seized me by then; I was freezing, and stupid with drunkenness.

There was no singular, clear thought in my head; it was more like a vague collection of fragmentary ideas, a hundred unplanted seeds. All I had to keep me grounded was my pounding heart and the metallic taste in my mouth; my blood surging hot and quick as I tried to hold the weight of his judgement. I felt like Atlas, with stiff muscles and burning veins, trembling under the heavens.

When I was steady enough to speak and glance towards him, my voice was half-slurred and rushed. If I hadn't been so focused on the movements of my mouth, of my scratched throat, of my teeth and tongue and blood, the weight of the words in the air; birds pushed from the nest, then I might not have recognised the sound as my own. It sounded detached from the rest of me like it had come from someone else. "I don't feel like I owe you an explanation."