"Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they're even born." -F. Scott Fitzgerald
When eight year old Beau Ruby met twelve year old Colton Caine, she had no idea she was meeting the love of her life. She had no idea she'd grow...
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On, off, on, off, on. I had been watching the streetlight flicker for nearly an hour. The apartment was cold, but I didn't care. There was so much to not care about on my list. Don't care about a cold apartment. Don't care about that flashing streetlight the city won't fix. Don't care about how loudly Mitch is snoring in the bed across the room. Don't care about Colton. It was a mantra I repeated to myself every night for the last two years.
I drew my knees up and leaned back against the wall on the window seat and watched from my spot as Mitch stretched a long arm across the bed, probably knowing before his hand hit the sheet that I wasn't there. I was never there. All the Ambien in the country couldn't make me sleep soundly these days. I played with a lighter in my hand, watching the flame turn on, off, on, off, on, off, on.
It was 4:47 in the morning, and here I was, drinking bourbon out of a Bama jelly jar by the window watching the same damn streetlight I watched every single night. Aunt Verne would have laughed at the jelly jar and asked me why I didn't have some proper dishes. Oh, that reminds me. Don't care about this jelly jar.
I swirled the brown liquor in the glass jar and listened as the ice made small tinkling sounds when it hit the sides. I knew I was lying. The lie itself was the reason I was drinking. The liquor burned my throat, but if I didn't drink, my thoughts burned my heart. My thoughts burned their way into my mind, making my head and my heart ache. I quieted my mind for a few minutes, turning off my mantra of all the things I don't care about. I wondered briefly if he was awake and pulling on his Carhart pants for work. I wondered if he was drinking his black coffee yet. I wondered if he was wondering about me.
I shook the thoughts away. Don't care about Colton. Don't care about Colton. Don't care. Don't care that he's most likely just getting out of the shower. Don't care that he probably has someone new who would never leave him like I did. Don't care.
I knew it was time for me to finish my drink and slide into bed. Mitch's alarm would be going off in exactly eleven minutes and I hated his third degree when he found that I had been awake all night. A year and a half and he still had no clue what kept me up all night. I never tried to explain. We were simple creatures. He didn't ask a lot of questions, and I didn't volunteer a lot of information. He had a bad temper and yelled way too much. I didn't have the fight I needed to walk away from the apartment that he pretty much paid for. Aunt Verne would have a fit if she knew about the fights we had that drug on into the morning when the sun came up. She would have a fit if she knew that usually by five in the morning, he was hugging my legs and calling me 'baby' and apologizing profusely. I knew it wasn't healthy relationship. It was the relationship I had, though. I had learned to self-medicate. It was easier to get yelled at by someone else than think about how much I hated this apartment and this town and the fact that it was two hundred miles away from the only person I really wanted to be around. It wasn't always bad. We played cards some nights. We binge watched episodes of our favorite television on Netflix for hours on end without talking. We always had the liquor cabinet stocked, I never had to cook because he worked constantly, and he didn't ask any questions that I couldn't answer without opening Colton's version of Pandora's Box.
