invisible string ✾ lrh

0.5 - august,

"Maggie."

Hell. This is what hell feels like. She knows it. She can taste it on her tongue, the chills running down her spine caused by more than just the bitter cold in which she had just escaped.

This was her coffeeshop. It had been for the last five years. And there was absolutely no way she was going to let the boy whose voice she hadn't heard in what seemed like forever come in and take it from her like he had everything else.

In a stroke of boldness, she turned her head in his direction.

He was sitting at her table. The one she sat at everyday while she worked. And she couldn't help but feel like the world had something against her, because there was absolutely no way that this boy was sitting by the same window that she had looked out of too many times in the last few years, thinking about what she would say to him if she ever saw him again.

And now he was here.

He looked different from the last time she had seen him two years ago. More confident. More sure of himself. Not blackout drunk, not standing at her door like a lost puppy while she hurled every insult at him that she had been holding back for what felt like forever. Not wrapping his hand around her throat and kissing his way down her chest with the stench of alcohol lingering between them.

No. He was just Luke Hemmings; previous lover, heartbreaker, singer.

While she stared at him and he looked back at her, his thoughts reminded him of his seemingly inescapable past.

If there was a single defensible claim to be made about Luke Hemmings' actions, it was that he didn't know how to function without Maggie by his side.

The first few months of tour were simple. He would come home often, spend the night with her, feel like himself for a few days before they hit the road again. But eventually the long stretches of shows kicked in and he wasn't home anymore. Eventually Maggie was focusing on school and couldn't spend her nights listening to his voice on the phone.

The small moments he was able to spend with her were arguably the last fleeting signs his bandmates saw of the Luke they used to know. They saw the way he squeezed his eyes shut when he wrapped his arms around her, the smile on his face whenever she laughed, the way he looked at her with so much love that it was genuinely hard to handle. Typically, they were only home for a day or two. They'd spend a bit of time catching up; telling Maggie how life on tour was while she told them about school and the people back home.

When it was just the two of them, Luke felt invincible.

He would hold her tight in his arms when they slept, wake her up with breakfast in bed the next morning, take her out for lunch, get reservations for a fancy dinner date. He would hold her hand in the car and kiss her at red lights and stare at her when she wasn't looking. They'd go back to her house and their moans would mix together like a beautiful eulogy, a bittersweet goodbye that Luke would hope to erase as he would kiss her and whisper, "You're the only one. It'll always be you. No one else."

But then she'd be laying in his arms afterwards, half asleep and making it hard for him to leave. And he'd run his fingers through her red hair and kiss the top of her head with his eyes squeezed shut tightly, praying that the tears forming in his eyes wouldn't betray him and slip down his cheek.

His alarm would go off and they'd both soak in their last few moments together and Luke would try to delay the inevitable by tickling Maggie's sides and getting her to laugh loudly, until she would grab his hands, look into his eyes, and say, "It's okay. I know you have to go."