Around the Corner (Discontinued)

Chapter 34

"Youth suffocates love. It can't breathe at that age."

Half of me agreed with an itch to criticize the young couple. Step up to their faces and force my broken heart onto them. However, another small, unkept portion of me ran away into their joy, an energy shared but unspoken. Awkward, uncharismatic, so imperfectly they accompanied each other, it was real. Scattered across the steps around them were petals, delicate colors of every flower, like a quiet aisle after a wedding. He gently stole kisses and she robbed them back. She spoke and he listened, and she heard him too. Sometimes there was silence, and neither touched the still animal. They let it be.

Fernanda gazed at her sister and the boy, ignoring the nervous adjustment of my cuffs, perhaps for the fortieth fucking time since we left the cabin.

"Kids need love to be alright." I added, "Sweetheart."

She craned her neck as thin fingers shifted obscuring leaves away. Her gold lined eyes sliced through the dying evening light, giving the sky one last opportunity to witness gold. "He spat on your face."

"He did." Again, my cuffs. I tugged at the left hem. "Not eager to see him again." Hopeful, I glanced sideways. "We don't have to."

"He loves my sister. I haven't for years." Fernanda's large sad eyes drifted from the couple, to me. "When she needs me now."

"If you wanted to go home, I wouldn't have stopped you." That damn left cuff.

"I didn't want to be low next her." Her chest rose when she inhaled. "Laila always made me feel beneath approval. After a while my parents wouldn't see me at all."

"You are just as valuable."

"Am I, Bruno?"

My silence was too heavy for me to carry, cut, mold into words. I tried. Behind those trees, we both knew.

"We don't have to go to this dinner."

"And I didn't have to find money to pay for that studio of yours. I didn't have to calm you down before your big gigs. I'm asking you for one night."

"We don't need this," I insisted. "We don't have to go for–"

"One night Bruno, for your woman?"

"If you wanted an excuse to be with Laila and make amends, you could've done it in California." Stiffly, her hands brushed my jaw, cupping my face.

"You being right doesn't make it right," she growled, like a broken machine straining to work. "And I tried. I can't punch or scratch her problems away." She couldn't do so to hers, either.

"I never said you could."

"You didn't." The night already settled in her eyes, deadened coal edged in a final golden embers, found mine. "I love you for that."

She forced everything into her voice, but it still meant nothing. I would know. The words drifted upwards in the humid, summer air, so lightweight and flaky they came apart before reaching the treetops. Simultaneously, my chest gained weight, and cratered the earth below me as it fell, leaving a hollow man with a hollow mind.

"I love you too."
Mine dissipated faster than hers.

Vincent and Laila quieted at the sight of us treading towards them. He whispered a quick sentence to her before rising, Laila following him down the steps.