Fix You ~Completed~

Act Sixty-Four

The rest of the trip was mundanely tame; Gale, feeling heaps better, dragged us around to all the cool sites San Francisco had to offer, including a drive across the bridge, a boat ride around Alcatraz, and a fifteen minute trip to the zoo. (We arrived right before closing and had no opportunity to really look around. I thought I saw a kid dressed as a zebra in the parking lot, but Eddie swore it was supposed to be a panda. That was the closest we got to animal sightings.)

Gale spent a good portion of the trip worriedly checking his phone for texts from Dame and gasping in exasperation whenever a couple would pass us. "Someone has separation anxiety," Eddie murmured while we sat perched on some stools at the counter of an ice cream shop. The girl and boy doling out the sugary goodness were both pausing from their work when they found themselves without a customer to serve. It was obvious by the way they were giggling and swatting each other on the arms they were a little more than simple coworkers.

I smiled down at the sundae Eddie and I were splitting, and immediately felt my whole face became inflamed despite the freezing temperature in the shop. We'd told Ale we were sharing because neither of us were all that hungry but I'd never had sundae before and Eddie thought that was blasphemy. It was Gale's idea to get ice cream in the first place, not ours, so he bought it.

"Would you guys be mad if I video-chatted with her after we got back to the hotel?" Gale mumbled, acting as if he didn't hear a word Eddie said. He was staring directly at me, his sweet eyes filled with longing.

It didn't take much to convince me. Ale knew I was a sucker for that kind of stuff. "Of course not! Go ahead and tell your girly we said hi," I said, playfully punching him in the shoulder. I was sitting between my two friends, my right elbow perched on top of the counter right next to Eddie's. Whenever one of us went for a bite of our ice cream, the tips of our elbows would knock together and we'd shoot grins at one another.

Somehow, Gale was none the wiser.

"I'll tell her you both said to let me take her on a date when I get back. Wow, why on earth do I miss her so much? It's been days. We haven't even been gone a week!" Gale paused, horror passing over his freckled features. "Oh dear god, it'll be a whole week before I get to see her in person! Seven days! Going that long without properly seeing one another cannot be good for the relationship!"

I took a lump of ice cream on my spoon and swallowed it without a thought, a feat I'd managed to perform more and more often lately. "Eh, it can be. One time, Kyla and I didn't see each other for a whole month one summer because he was at this behavioral camp a few states over, and I don't think we ever got along so well than we did when he got back," I brought up, looking up at Gale. His face was frozen. He was staring at me as though I'd just spewed out that I tried to assassinate the president or something. "What?"

"Um..." Gale cleared his throat, dropping his eyes from my face. With a small grimace, he forced a large bite of his M&M ice cream into his mouth and carefully avoided glancing back at me. "It's just, eh, you never talk about Kyla. That caught me off guard. I'm sorry."

Eddie pressed his hand against my forearm and carefully slid his fingers down so that they were tangled with my own. There was a very good reason I didn't talk about Kyla and he was sitting right beside me. How could I key my friends in to how much I still- disgustingly enough- missed him when Eddie was right here, as he always was, treating me better than Kyla ever could?

I wanted to talk to them after Kyla died. I wanted to tell them how it felt to have my life-preserver wrenched out of my hands. The words escaped me each and every time I'd lay eyes on one of them. Whenever they'd catch me curled up somewhere, cradling his urn or sobbing into my pillow or fondling the edge of a razor, I would put myself back together quicker than you could say Filthy Liar and make up some cover-up. "I had a nightmare," was what I tended to go with if the scene occurred in the middle of the night. "I was confused. I forgot where I was. I didn't remember what happened."

The sad thing was, I always remembered.

Eddie deserved that. He deserved for me to be better for him; he didn't deserve to have me cracked and pining away for an asshole who beat the shit out of me for years. Why should I miss Kyla when I had such a beautiful person who loved me and would never leave me?

At least, I didn't think Eddie would ever leave me. I knew I could never be angry with him for leaving me because I was a nightmare to deal with, but something about the way he was with me clued me in on the fact he had no intention of ever removing himself from my life.

"I didn't really think before I said it," I explained sheepishly, shooting Eddie an apologetic look. "Sorry, guys. That situation is different than yours. Distance doesn't usually make the heart grow fonder in all honesty."

"I actually agree with what you said earlier. I go a few days without seeing Gale and I always like him a little more after that break," Eddie spoke up teasingly, earning him a swat.

Gale had to lean over me to get to Eddie's arm to make the light hit, and it was then that he realized we were holding hands. "Oh, what a sight!" he murmured in a faux-French accent, wiggling his eyebrows at us. "Two young lovers in Paris!"

"Asher, we're still in San Francisco," Eddie groaned, looking away quickly. His whole face was splotched with pink. I had to grin when he squeezed my hand, letting me know he had no intention of letting go.

He was proud of us? It didn't embarrass him to be seen with me?

"I guess the two of you will never realize if distance makes you feel closer because you never stop clinging to each other," Gale chuckled, returning his attention to the small bowl of candy ice cream sitting before him. He downed the last bite and jumped off the stool. "God, you are just too cute!"

"Do you wanna push him in the bay or should I, Clem?" Ed joked, following Gale's lead. We only had a few chunks of ice cream left and I didn't have stomach for any more, so we let Gale had the rest. "You guys wanna head back now? It's already nine o'clock here, which means it's probably closer to midnight back home."

"Dame will be awake. She has tomorrow off work and, on her free days, she doesn't sleep a wink," Gale explained, extending his arm so that he could loop it through my free one. My other arm was now slowly being brought up and tangled in Eddie's, which light my face up once more. I absentmindedly set my head on his shoulder, grinning like a ninny. "Jeez, you two couldn't be more obvious."

The smirk on his face made me want to be the one to do the honors of shoving him in the harbor.