Gold Fever (m×m) ✔

XXIV: The things we don't talk about

《 ELIAN PHOENIX 》

The last sparkle held onto its dear life long after the others had dimmed out. It flickered, faded until it was almost gone and then sparkled up bright for one last time before disappearing for good. I kept my eyes fixed on the spot, still seeing the ghost image of it.  

With it, the blissful ease I had wrapped myself in for weeks ebbed away, and the reality was like a splash of icy water on my face. It was a lot like coming down from a manic episode, except this time I knew with certainty that wasn't the case. It wasn't my brain malfunctioning, but the magic doing.. well, its magic.

"Elian." Rain whispered, making me glimpse at him. He never called me by my first name, and it took him a while before he realized his mistake. "Phoenix. For how long?"

"Have I had it?" Anxiety spiked in my chest, when I realized that in order to convince my friends, I needed to tell them the truth. "It started when I was twelve, give or take, when I was 16 I was convinced I was possessed by a demon, and I was diagnosed when I was like 20 or something."

"Why didn't you just tell us?" I could see hurt in Rain's eyes, and I couldn't exactly blame him for it.

"Well.." I shrugged, and then had to press my hands over my rumbling stomach. For the first time since taking residence here, I felt hunger twisting my insides. "We all have things we don't talk about, and this is mine."

I've spent a lot of time looking back, but right then I just wanted to focus on the now; my friends were back, I knew how to improve my magic and we had something solid to work on. There was so much to talk about and the mere thought of it was exhausting, but I owed these people an explanation.

As I was trying to come up with a starting point to the story, I wasn't thinking about uncle Tim, but the colorful lights reflecting from the droplets of rain on the windshield. The pebbles hitting the bumper, and the beaten-up car which belonged to my beautiful, sweet ex-boyfriend.  

"My parents wrote me off of their will." I figured it was as good a place to start as any other. It wouldn't explain it all, but somewhere deep down I was dying to share that humiliation, to make it lessen. "I didn't walk away from them, I'm not that idealistic." 

"But.." Najwa was unable to voice the question they all had etched on their pained faces, in their sympathetic eyes: why would they do that?

More than Levi, I was thinking about the Murrays, even though I knew it was by no means their fault. 

They were this family at the end of my parents' street who made their front yard a spectacle of lights and tacky decorations during holidays. Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, you name it. It could be anything and everything from huge, glowing turkeys to 10 feet candy canes sticking from the frozen ground. Believe me, they were distracting. Anyone would have been too transfixed by them to keep their eyes on the road.

"You remember Levi." It wasn't a question, but Rain and Najwa still nodded their confirmations. "I saw him one evening. We hadn't seen each other for like a year or two, and we weren't exactly friends at that point, and.. anyway, he came to talk to me at Harris Teeter, because he didn't like how things ended up with us, and we bought coffee and sat in his car."

I was focusing more on the padding I plucked from a crack in the leather upholstery of the seat. Levi's fingers tapped the wheel, drumming faster the more frustrated he became. My thoughts were all over the place like a rubber ball bouncing inside a small space, and I kept interrupting Levi so many times that eventually he snapped and asked if I cared at all what he had to say. 

Instead of answering, I tried to kiss him. Levi was still just as handsome, with the same dark curls and thick, black rimmed glasses, and I was keen on finding out how much had changed underneath his clothes.