Trapped in Forever

30 ~ Fragments of Broken Hearts

“Did your parents name you after him?” I asked after a moment of watching both of our knees as the acmes of our kneecaps continued to touch, a fleeting graze or a faint brush that kept creating brief pauses in my mind as I tried to determine if it actually happened, or if I was imagining that transitory, light touch.

He craned his neck again, Adam’s Apple extending from beneath his skin, and I followed his eyes to the constellation of greenish yellow stars stuck onto the ceiling, adorning the white surface and waiting until the darkness seeped into the room, allowing them to shine, in honor of Orion, The Hunter, and his belt. “In a way,” he replied, the muscles in his neck relaxing as he tore his gaze away from the makeshift constellation, and glanced at me, his own smile turning sheepish, and he reached a hand up to the back of his neck. “They were in college, and my dad wanted to make a move so one night, after one of their classes, he showed her Orion’s Belt and told her his story.”

As I rotated my gaze away from him, where I was able to focus on his profile as his skin tinted pink, and the golden sunshine highlighted his skin, I tried to imagine it. To imagine two college kids, maybe one with blond hair, maybe the other with murky hazel eyes, perhaps hidden behind the thin, tinted lens of a pair of sunglasses, and with their heads tilted toward the stars, their light cascading down onto earth from millions of miles away. But it seemed impossible—not that he had parents that obviously had to have met somewhere, but that there was ever a time in the world that he didn’t exist. That what was happening now didn’t exist. Worlds like that might as well have been as far away as the stars they gazed at that night.

“So,” I murmured after a moment, my eyes still trained onto Orion’s Belt, vaguely hinting at the shape of a man’s body, but it just seemed like cheap, plastic stars to my unfocused eyes, stuck onto my ceiling, reminding me of a warrior that never existed as I fell back onto my bed, curled underneath my covers, and tried to close my eyes, “they named you after him because of that?”

He shook his head, just as a crooked smirk graced his lips, tugging at the left side of his lips, and he let out a somewhat muffled snort, then he craned his neck slightly to glance at me, his shoulder brushing against mine as he did, a swift graze of warmth that tingled my bare skin, nearly making me forgot that he was staring at me, still smirking, even though on either side of his neck, his skin was tinting pink. “Not exactly,” he replied, and I felt his knee bump mine again, as his eyes flickered away from mine, briefly. “My name is Orion because after that, they went back to my dad’s Volkswagen and did it. Coincidentally, though, that happened nine months before my birthday.”  

“Aha,” I remarked, with a slight smile, more at his faint blush than much of anything else, let alone the idea of Orion’s conception. I wouldn’t allow myself to admit it—out loud or even as a thought, blocking it out of my mind every single time it kept trying to pave it’s way though my brain—but he almost looked cute, with a dim, pink blush shading his neck and how he bit his lip slightly after I said this, giving me a brief nod. But instead of allowing myself to really think this, I broke down the letters of those words and constructed them into two other words: Roxanne’s Boyfriend. “She, um, she wanted me to put him up there first. When I bought the stars, I mean,” I blurted out, suddenly, feeling as my pulse tingled and my heart began to hurt from its abrupt speed.

I watched, as the dull ache in my chest spread from my heart to my lungs, seeming to infect each of my ribs, and then the pearls spine, as if my entire body was susceptible, as his smile changed. At first, his lips seemed to pucker, releasing a tiny exhale that faintly smelled of mint, and after a moment, I realized he was going to say something—Who? I knew, without even hearing the breath he sucked in before he spoke that he was going to say who—but then he stopped himself. His lips fell closed again, slowly falling from the smile they held a moment earlier, exchanging the embarrassing story behind his namesake, and his eyes flickered away. “You mean . . . ,” he said, after a moment, a muscle in his neck twitching, and I could see a hazel orb glancing out of the corner of his eye at me, “. . . her.”