Trained To Kill

eighteen: explosion.

Karma sat in her room, sketching in one of her sketchbooks. She had been drawing more than usual, now that Jacob was gone. She kept drawing him over and over again, torturing herself.

He had been missing for months now. A little after the school year started, he just completely disappeared. Karma waited for him to send her some kind of sign, some kind of message that he had just runaway because he was sick of this place and that he was coming back to get her. That’s what she suspected had happened. But he never did. Since he had been gone, she hadn’t heard a word from him.

It hurt.

Why would he just leave me like this? Why wouldn’t he take me with him? Was there something I did wrong? Were the questions that played over and over in her head day after day. It was torture. She cried her eyes out nearly every night when she came to the realization that he wasn’t coming back.

Then there was another thought- had something happened to him? Karma knew that together they often did stuff they weren’t necessarily supposed to- dangerous things. But as far as she knew, he never did that kind of thing without her. Had he ventured off alone and gotten into serious trouble?

These thoughts made her cry once again, right after the tears from the first few weeks stopped.

All in all, Karma was a wreck. She went to her father and cried in his arms. She yelled at the police when they would report that they couldn’t find anything and there wasn’t much more they could do. She snapped at everyone constantly. She was hurting in her chest, an actual pain that was so real it made her feel like her heart was stopping.

Where did my Jacob go?

So to cope with that, she drew. Pictures of him, pictures of them together, pictures she had taken of his hands, his lips, his hair, literally anything she could find to make him feel real again. It made her sad, but at least it kept her distracted from the ache in her chest. She had known something bad was about to happen in her life- she knew that things couldn’t stay perfect forever.

Disrupting her therapy, there was a knock at the door. She checked the time and it was 9 o clock. Curiously, she walked down the stairs slowly. She thought it would be the police coming to tell her that they found his body. She thought it would be his mother telling her that Jacob sent a note home saying that he never intended to come home and that he was sorry. The possibilities were endless, but as she approached that door she never expected anything positive to appear behind it.

But when she did, there he stood, dressed in black loose fitting jeans and a fitted black t-shirt. He had been looking away, but when the door opened he slowly turned his head to face her. His eye met hers and she thought she would combust right then. A literal chill ran along her skin as they shared looks, and suddenly there was something wet and hot running down both of her cheeks.

He stepped forward and casually wiped her tears off with both of his thumbs, then held her face softly while kissing her gently. He kissed her once, then pulled away, then kissed her again, this time with more force. He ran his tongue across both of her lips and then pulled away again before anything got too heated. The whole time he had been leading them inside the house, and once he was finished kissing her he softly shut the door behind him.

When he turned back around, she fell against his chest, gripping the material of his shirt so tightly so that he couldn’t get away again. “Oh my god.” She sobbed into his shirt. His hand held the back of her head while the other caressed her back. “Oh my god, Jacob.” She cried harder. He quietly lead her over to the couch, since it was nearby and sat her down so that she was sitting in his lap, still softly crying into his shirt. He could feel the tears seeping through his shirt and wetting his skin.