Unexpected

| xix | if you loved me

xix~ you should have left me alone

xix-xix-xix-xix-xix

Erin knows that her time is near when she gets a phone call. Usually, such a thing would be trivial and in fact commonplace, but as her children have all moved out and her grandchildren prefer to text her using their handy-dandy cellular phones, her landline is rarely used.

Her old bones creak as she stands. She knows who is calling, and she knows that if he has waited eighty years he can wait a few more seconds. Once she gets to the phone, it is nearly on its last trill.

She picks it up. Her voice shakes with age, but her heart with something else. She swore to him that she would never speak to him again, for as long as she lived. Well, she is breaking this promise at the very last moment of her life.

“Hello?” She says.

“Erin,” he sounds breathless, but still like the eighteen year old boy she loved once upon a time. His voice was never crippled by age; his bones were still limber, his heart still ice and his ideas still mischievous. He never grew up. Hell, he never got the chance.

“Is it time for me?” She asks. Erin’s eyes catch sight of a photo that hangs on the refrigerator. It is of her twenty years ago, when her grandchildren were still young and her children had no gray hairs. Her husband is standing beside her feebly. His health was never the best.

She will be strong, even in these last moments. For them, she will be strong.

“I won’t try to force you,” for once, his voice is genuinely kind. “Not again.”

She remembers the many times he tried to bring her too soon to the world beyond. “Grayson,” her voice sounds almost young again. “Even if you succeeded, would we have been together?”

“I don’t think so,” he sounds so sad, like how her children did when they were his age and they went through a break-up. “You were too good for me. You still are.”

“What’s brought about this?” Why is he suddenly so nice?

“Everyone’s here,” now he sounds more chipper. “My parents, Stephanie, Madie, Will, Ian, Leala, Rosie-- sorry, i mean Gabe--, and Dan. I think Dan likes Stephanie, which is weird because he’s old enough to be-Well, he’s like sixteen years older than she is.”

“He was only nineteen,” Erin says as a gentle reminder. “He never grew up.”

Grayson’s side of the line is quiet. Finally he speaks, a whisper among the static. “Are you still scared of me?”

Erin thinks of those terrified years after he betrayed her trust. How she was locked away because nobody believed Grayson Carin to be capable of such things. How she kept seeing him in everyone she met. How her life, for so long, was like a nightmare where she was waiting for him to come for her.

She knows now that he was just a naïve little boy who just wanted a friend. She feels sorry for him, if anything. And so she answers, “No.”

There is dial tone over the phone. Confused, Erin sets it down. She hobbles back to the living room, only for a familiar figure to be blocking her way.

He looks the same. His face is still slightly plump and he has not been hunkered down by the weights of age. His hair is still that clear dark blond, and his hands still look dried by chlorine. But, even in this young body, his eyes are old and tired. He has been waiting for her for too long.