He stood for everything she was against and he wouldn't be caught dead befriending someone like her, but when the worst happens and they find themselves in a similar situation, only then will they realize they need each other to discover the anatomy...
When I took that first step, away from her, I could almost hear a rattling inside, like shards of a mirror in a bag. I held my breath, a hand on my chest. Every inhale excruciating, as the jagged pieces of my broken heart cut me from within.
When I regained motion in my body, I walked blindly away, her voice ricocheting in my head. I walked away and ended up somehow in our spot beneath the bleachers. It was where we came to be away from everybody and it was where I would find her whenever we fought and I needed to apologize. Maybe, I thought, one day she'd come here to apologize to me, and I'd always be waiting here for her.
Someone was already there, and at first I thought it must be Farrah, but as I got closer, I could see bright blonde hair through the metal beams beneath the seats. The girl was on the phone, and whoever was on the other end must have said something bad because suddenly, it dropped from her hand as if it had burned her. Her breathing became shallow, and she fought to take a clean breath. Then, like her phone, she dropped to the ground, her shoulders heaving while she spilled the contents of her stomach onto grass. I was about to go help her, but she seemed to recover quickly enough as she wrapped her hand around her fallen cellphone, and got up wiping her lips with the back of her hand. When she turned around, I ducked out of the way before she could see me, as she walked directly towards me.
I knew that face, but I had never seen such vulnerability etched across her features. All snark and irreverence Santana possessed was missing and she looked ghostly white. But no tears stained her cheeks. There was a sort of silent despair in the way her lips trembled and her brow furrowed. I almost felt sorry for her. Her dark eyes never looked up to see me standing there while she walked with her face bowed looking at her feet and away back up towards the school.
As much as I disliked her, I couldn't help but see myself in those haunted eyes. Nevertheless, I refused to feel her pain. There just wasn't enough room in me, so I ignored those dark eyes that kept popping up in my mind and pulled out my own cellphone. Opening up my photo albums, I proceeded to torture myself like the masochist I was. If it brought me back to her, even synthetically, I was going to do it. Every single picture I had on that phone had something to do with her, and soon enough, Santana's dark eyes were replaced by Farrah's bright green ones.
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They looked right through me as she gave me a red lipped smile in the first one. I could look at it for days. There we were at my parent's anniversary party, looking like royalty. There was even one of me sleeping on her bed, her bare arm the only part of her I could make out, but still, I knew she was there. In total, I had 417 pictures of her on my phone, and every single one told me to hold on. To fight. She still loved me, she'd told me as much. I just needed to figure out a way to make that be enough to get her back.
Before I could go and read the thousands of text messages we'd shared, someone came crawling under the bleachers forcing me to look up. Ansel.
"Hey, Caleb. This where you've been the whole time?" He crouched down to look me in the face. "I've been calling you all day, man. I heard about what happened this morning. I'm sorry." He stood with his shoulders shrugged and his hands in his pocket. The typical stance of pity.
