Puzzle Pieces // m.f

0.2

"My name is Mark." He looked down to Jamie as she continually almost fell asleep, occasionally hitting her head against her laptop on accident.

"I know." Jamie's simple and matter-of-fact tone was unusual to Mark when dealing with fans and he looked at her with a new area of interest. "I'm Jamie." She looked up at him, her eyes tired but devoid of emotion.

"Well, Jamie, I think you need to call it quits for right now." Mark gestured to her computer as he spoke and at his action she brought her hand up to her forehead and gently rubbed the red mark brought about by hitting her head on the same spot one too many times.

"No." Jamie shook her head in a most childlike manor, reminding him that she was still just a teenager.

"Please?" Mark raised an eyebrow at Jamie as she shivered because he was anything but cold at the moment.

"I need to finish." Jamie muttered, more to herself than Mark, and looked down at her keyboard to see nothing but blurry letters despite her glasses.

"You're not going to finish tonight and if you keep this up you're gonna kill yourself." Mark watched as she squinted at the keyboard and typed only with the index fingers of either hand. "As a favor to me?"

At this, Jamie stopped moving and then nodded slowly, closing her laptop and putting it in the pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. She turned toward the aisle and curled up in her seat after pulling her hair out of its messy bun and allowing the chocolate colored waves and curls to frame her face in their entirety. Mark rolled his eyes at her behavior after she placed her hair tie on the arm rest. Without really thinking, he slid it onto his wrist before pulling Jamie towards him so that she could lean on him, like she had before, instead of falling into the aisle, like she was about to.

Mark thought about the way Jamie talked; with the air of confidence that maturity brought, but without arrogance and with fear. The way she tried to sit as far to the right as possible when she was awake to avoid making him uncomfortable. How she shied away from eye contact as if by looking into those wide, green eyes he could see her soul. And the way she spoke of love. It was like she'd been in love or she was in love and simply didn't understand it.

When Jamie woke, Mark was staring at her hands and marveling about how someone could be as fragile looking as she was. He had taken off her glasses when she fell asleep and now pulled them out of his pocket, putting them on for her. She went to pull away, as she had before, but stopped when he wrapped an arm around her without looking up.

"What happened?" His question was sudden, and one that he had thought about for a long time.

"What do you mean?" Jamie kept her eyes closed, but the shadow of sleep was slowly letting her go.

"People aren't born sad. We break them until they stop thinking they can be happy. Who broke you?" Mark had learned about the signs of depression long ago when dealing with fans and Jamie seemed to embody all of them.

She sighed, not sure if she wanted to answer. "His name was Andy."

"What did he do?" Mark pushed away all thoughts about how they didn't even know each other. He felt somehow connected to her by now.

"We went to college together. He was twenty, I was seventeen. We didn't like the same music, we didn't watch the same tv shows, we didn't even have the same sense of humor. But we both came from broken homes. And we both tried to put each other back together. He didn't understand that things don't get better unless you fight for them to get better. Andy was too far gone. I went to his dorm one night because he left a voicemail. It sounded like he was crying. I was terrified and perfectly content to sit with him and listen to Nirvana if it would make him feel better." Jamie paused then and let out a small laugh, as if she suddenly remembered a joke he had told her once. "He - uh - he left a letter for me. About how I would do better without worrying about him. How I was going to be a great mom. He said to tell my kids all about uncle Andy one day. So that-" Her voice broke and she put her hand over her mouth, not wanting to wake up any other sleeping passengers. "So that they would know what mistakes not to make. He also left me CDs. Stacks of them. His voice was recorded onto them, telling the story of how we met and he fell in love with me. How he was leaving because he loved me. He was letting me go before he broke me. That's what he said."