Celadon

Chapter 6

It's dark, all lights turned off, the city sky polluted with white and the room's atmosphere polluted with the uneven flashes of a quiet movie, disregarded by our desperate minds as we try to cram all the affection we can into this one night. Phil's lips meet mine endlessly, our bodies shifting from laid back positions of vulnerability to entanglements of our arms and legs to simply sat up in an embrace, and I find that even in the dark I can still see the faint brightness of his blue eyes when he pulls back from our kisses to observe me.
"Dan?" he whispers into the dim air.
"Yes?" I breathe back.
"Is this how it's always going to be? Am I always going to be your side project?"
I blink at him, his words a knife in my stomach. "I-"
He interrupts me. "Because I meant what I said at the coffeehouse. I can't share you. It's either you and me or..." he trails off, his mouth shutting to a thin line that finishes the sentence for him.
It's Phil or Charlie, essentially, and I shiver, freezing cold now that his body isn't pressed against mine.
My eyebrows crease with the realization I haven't told him about Aaron, about my slow buildup to finally breaking free.
"I told my brother," I whisper to him.
"You...you what?"
"I told my brother. And he's going to help me tell everyone else," I claim.
The news doesn't quite reach his eyes yet as he blinks vacantly. "You aren't joking? Or lying?"
"No. Of course not."
"Oh my god, Dan, I-" His mouth twitches up into a hesitant smile before he leans in and wraps his arms around me, pulling me close. "Thank you so much," he whispers.
"It might take a little time, but I'm getting there," I reassure him.
He pulls back from me with a new excitement. "Then- then I can meet your family, and we can be like a real couple, and-"
"Phil," I interrupt him quietly. His mouth closes as he looks at me expectantly. "You do realize that once people find out that I'm someone with celadon that has a soulmate...we might not be accepted at all. People all around the community know Charlie and I are together. We might be outcasts. My parents might disown me. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to possibly have to leave this city altogether just to start over with people who don't know about our problems?"
Phil sits back into the couch, reaching for the television remote and pausing the movie, a cold silence flooding his dark apartment. His mouth open and closes a few times, and I watch him collect his thoughts. "I know...I know this is going to be hard. My adulthood has been hard, disappointing, the lot. I've given up on my dreams, I had even given up on having a soulmate." His eyes skim the ground and then round up to meet mine. "But then you happened, and the colors came to my eyes and my heart, too." He visibly cringes, a shy smile slipping onto his face. "That sounded so cheesy. Jesus."
"It's alright," I say, leaning forward to reach for his hand, nodding for him to keep talking.
"I just...I've given up on so many things. Film, money, family. And you don't know most of my story, even though I'll probably end up telling you, but I don't think I could live with myself if I gave up on you just because you come with baggage. That's-" he pauses to take in a shaky breath, bringing his thumb up to wipe at the corner of his eye. "That's not how I want us to work. I don't think that's how love is supposed to work. I wouldn't really know how love works, I guess, but I think sometimes you have to be selfish enough to not give up on someone even when they're prepared to just let everything go. You have to- you have to, you know, keep going even when things are shit. You don't always have to let people go."
I study his features for the millionth time, the way his eyes are always wide, never quite focusing on one spot, the way his mouth is always moving, twitching into smiles or frowns, opening to speak and then closing off the words, as if he thinks a lot about what he's going to say before it comes out, the way his long black hair falls over his eyes, giving the illusion of youth and promise. I can feel my heart in my throat, beating and reminding me of my own mortality, that Phil's right, and that we live for eighty years and then die and if I'm just settling for those eighty years I'm only a waste of oxygen.
"What if we moved to L.A.?" I don't know why the words fall out of my mouth, but I can feel Phil's eyes flit up to catch me staring.
"Do you have any idea how much it costs to live in L.A.? Or how hard it is to move to a whole new country?"
"Yeah, but you could get a job on a movie set and start to work your way up and I could get a job doing what-the-fuck-ever and we could start over in an entirely different country. We could get rid of all this."
Phil laughs bitterly. "Running away from your problems isn't getting rid of them. They come back. And you just gain a whole new set of problems. Plus, you have your family, your little brother. I could do it, just up and leave without anyone really caring. I would just be leaving a spot for a new employee at a coffee shop and a vacant apartment. But you would be leaving so much more."
I'm quiet, I can't produce an argument, because he's right. He's older and he's wiser and in this case he's absolutely right. "Where's your family?" I breathe out, almost rhetorically, a thought that slipped into words.
Phil shrugs. "Somewhere in Newcastle, I guess. We don't...we don't really talk anymore."
I don't prompt him further, but he seems as if he wants to say more, so I quietly wait for him to continue.
"We never really got along. I was an accident, I think. They never really, like, said it in words, but their smiles just seemed bigger in the pictures I've seen before I was born, when it was just my older brother and them. I don't really think they even wanted another kid. And growing up I didn't get good grades like my brother did and that was my parents' thing, that they were both smart kids growing up, and I guess they always just saw me as this dud. And my brother moved out and went to law school and started making money and got married and then I graduated from high school and decided to go to uni for film and it's like any hope that my parents had that I would suddenly reveal I was a genius all along just vanished for them and they gave up on me. And after my father screamed that I would never make it and that I was a failure and a dumbass and a disappointment and my mother sat crying but not saying anything to deny his words I just left as soon as I could and got through university on loans. And we haven't really talked since. They don't call, and I don't call, even though we have each other's numbers, and my brother doesn't call even though I've called him, which stings even more."
I fidget with his hand while he talks, tracing my index over the back of it in soft lines, feeling the smoothness of his oval nails, bringing it to my lips and gently kissing along his knuckles when he falls silent.
"I've always kind of felt that way, too," I confess quietly. "But you aren't a failure. You have a job that you work hard at, and your own apartment. If your parents were right, that the only way to be a success is to get good grades in school, then Albert Einstein was a failure too, you know?" His blue eyes glint in the light of the paused movie, and I continue. "Just because you're not a lawyer or a doctor doesn't make you a dud. Otherwise like sixty-eight percent of the world would be dead beats." I shrug. "Some of us were just born to go through shit and come out a better person, you know?"
Phil's gazing at me in his silence, and it's not a blank stare, just neutral, contemplative. "No one's ever really...reacted like that before."
"Hm?" I question, tightening my grip on his hand.
"No one's ever accepted that I'm not academically excellent and just accepted who I actually am."
"What do you mean?"
Phil takes in a shaky breath. "Anyone that I've ever told about my parents has just tried to deny that I didn't do well in school. Everyone just tries to tell me that I'll make something out of my life yet, something that my parents wanted. Everyone tries to tell me that I should reconcile things with my family."
"I guess I understand that once someone in your life fucks something up, you don't really want to give them a second chance," I answer quietly.
"Yeah," he says. "That's exactly right." I don't push for any more information, instead returning to my soft kisses across his skin, allowing my lips to travel up his thin arm and over his shoulder, leaning closer to press my lips to his neck gently. The simple sound of my buzzing cellphone jolts me out of my sleepy pattern, and I glance at Phil with apologetic eyes as I lean away and pick up the phone, reading my mother's name on the phone. I sigh and accept the call, bringing it to my ear and standing from the couch, pacing away a few steps.
"Hello, mum," I say pleasantly.
"Dan?" she says quietly.
"Yes? Everything okay?"
She breathes in a shaky breath and I freeze as she speaks, as she explains why she's called, and my body begins to shake, muscles seizing, my chest struggling to keep my breathing slow. My phone nearly slips from my fingers before I tighten my grip reflexively. I promise her I'll be home and hang up without an answer.
"Dan?" Phil questions, concern evident as he stands from the couch also, and I can hear him as he approaches me from behind. "Dan, you're fucking shaking, are you alright?"
"I-" my short breath cuts me off, and I turn to face Phil with wide, tearing eyes. "Charlie," is all I can gasp out before the shock sets in and I begin to choke out sobs, tears falling, and Phil rushes forward to pull me in.
"What happened?" he asks gently. All I can do is sob, and when I do finally speak, it's angry, slurred from my disbelief.
"Charlie's fucking dead. She fucking killed herself. She fucking went home and swallowed pills and now she's dead. Because of me. Because of us."