𝗜𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝘁 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘀 | 𝐁𝗼𝐛𝐛𝐲 𝐊𝐞𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝𝐲/𝗥𝗙𝗞

VII: "Love Conquers All"

"We must stop beating around the bush," Bobby uttered with his heart in his mouth. Perturbed, as though he'd die if Evelyn even looked at him with the slightest doubt.

"Bobby..." she only had to look up to see his blue eyes crystallizing with tears, then her mind became undone and fretful that the words escaping her mouth would be drunken, "I can't."

Her plainness had Bobby questioning everything he'd done — what went wrong? Was it the time he left her behind at a gas station as a joke? Was it that he was a coward who couldn't profess his love the moment he'd fallen? But that'd be too early — 13 years too early... or 13 years too late.

"I love you, Evelyn."

Whether it was mere Dutch courage or Evelyn was now a sensible adult, he had done the most difficult thing in the world — admitting he'd fallen into an inescapable trap called love. His lips trembled as pulses thundered against every inch of his skin, his tongue was so dry it stuck to the roof of his mouth and his eyes were wet. There was an invisible sun within him that burned him alive; he was either going to walk out of this dead or alive as ever.

"Not like that," replied Evelyn with a sudden dizziness from the liquor and height. Her mind whispered Je t'aime Je t'aime Je t'aime like a broken unyielding record.

None of this changed the fact that the man was five years older than her and their families would never allow any sort of union to take place. She was birthed into a family of non-believers, and him the polar opposite — a lace curtain Irish Catholic and a French Bon Vivant, whatever could go wrong? They'd vicariously lived through the scenario by watching Kathleen and her English beau; Bobby would be banished from the clan, Evelyn shunned by her parents for wasting a bright future. Though with all that had happened, Kathleen was planning to fly to Paris the same day as her father to secure his blessing for her upcoming wedding.

"You don't love me like that," said Evelyn. The tone was gentler that time, yet the words still pierced through every layer of walls Bobby had relentlessly built.

"I've loved you in every kind of way," he grunted, rising to his feet with a blurred vision. "Platonically, romantically... and worst of all—" a quick self-loathing laugh "—hopelessly."

Evelyn wished she could table the conversation at a later date — rejection isn't her strongest suit. Everybody knows being the rejectee could scar you, but what about the pain of the rejector? To have the willingness to release a rope that's holding someone from plummeting to their death... to pull the trigger on a soul, not the skies.

"It'd be suicide," she calmly explained.

Bobby took a final drag of his cigarette. "Like this isn't killing us already?" He referred to little moments they always found themselves in; in the house, with their bodies pinned against one another, breathing in each other's essences.

The girl bit her lip in frustration — there was some truth to his words, but truth is nothing without conviction.

Bobby returned to his seat on the roughened shingles, loosening his clenched jaw to speak. "Can't we give it a try?"

"When has it ever turned out alright?" Evelyn shot back at a remarkable speed, realizing too late that it cut the man deep from the frown on his face. She reached for his hands, then jolted back as though they were ice sculptures. "Your hands... they're so cold!" She exclaimed, enveloping them in her radiating warmth.

Bobby remained stoic, unfazed by this. He inched closer, voice dropping to a low whisper, "Not as cold as your heart, Eve." A low blow at her unusually hardened exterior. Alas, there was no more fight in him as the Dutch courage had seemingly waned. He tried his best to consummate a fairytale, but the woman of her dream was too much of a pessimist for a French.

The midnight air was thick with tension, a palpable energy that filled every breath. The symphony of crickets and cicadas played in the background, their song lost within the charged atmosphere. Two souls sat together, their lungs inhaling and exhaling in time with each other, sharing the same oxygen in a silent dance.

As the last embers of hope flickered and died, Bobby saw that it was a lost cause. He slipped his hands out of Evelyn's grips and stood to take his leave.

Evelyn lifted her head to look at him as he patted the dust off of his Levi's jeans. There were things she wanted to say to him, but she'd much rather let him leave and live. He was a Kennedy — a soldier, a senator or a governor, a president, someone whose future is guaranteed, a baby born with a million dollars in trust, and she was a nobody that isn't worth the heartbreak.

She was marked by the past, the scars of Paris etched into her body. Scars that deemed her worthless, scars she kept hidden from the world. Most of the time, she managed to conceal them. But at night, when the moon cast its silvery light, it would witness her tears falling upon the raised, jagged lines on her cheeks. With the coming of dawn, though, she would again become flawless, a perfect vision, like the holy Madonna herself — only she never prayed the rosary for her broken mind.

With the moon as her regular witness — a confidant, even — smoke seemingly got in Evelyn's verdant eyes and a teardrop fell from the right one. The burden of love was painstakingly felt; every fiber and every heartbeat cried for liberation. But no one, not even Selene, dared to protest societal callousness. Their love was doomed from the start, foreseeable enough since the moment he introduced himself to her thirteen years ago.

"I love you too, Bobby."

But in the end,
love conquers all.

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