C

“I know. I know. And it’s okay.” 

Henry hears your voice replaying over and over in his head as he lays on his dingy mattress. You said it like it was nothing, like it was no big deal. You hardly blinked nor furrowed a brow nor sulked. You smiled as you said it, watched as he frowned. 

“I just wish you gave me sooner notice,” you said, laughing. “But I know. And it’s okay.” 

Then, maybe four or so hours ago, he couldn’t find anything more to say. You bid him a goodnight after seconds went by without so much as a sigh from him. Now, he pouts at the irony. He almost thinks that it was intentional — you taking the opportunity to leave the conversation first as he told you he’d be leaving town at last. 

Contrary to him, you’ve always been one to voice your conflict, or really anything else for that matter. It was one of the initial things he noticed about you since that day your family moved into this little nook of the rural south. You were blunt and unphased by his mysterious solitude. He pointed it out one day, several weeks into finally getting used to your company. 

“You talk a lot, too,” you told him, taking a petite puff of his blunt.  

Henry pushed open his bedroom window wider to air out the thick smoke, looking over at you incredulously. “Do I?” 

You laughed at his sharp sarcasm. “I’d say so. It’s not in the conventional way of talking, but they’re similar enough.” 

“Like what?” he asked, looking at you upside-down as half his body hung off his bed. “With my ears? With my ankles?” 

“No,” you scoffed. “Everything’s written on your face, Henry. One look at you is all it takes to know what you’re thinking.” 

He was almost defeated by the disclosure. 

He stifled a smile and stretched his arms above his head, the hem of his shirt rising to expose the pale plane of his abdomen. “Okay. Tell me.” 

“About what you’re thinking?”

“About what I’m thinking.” 

You tilted your head and tapped a finger on your chin, feigning deep thought. “Probably how you want this annoying girl out of your room and how you wish you would’ve never given her the time of day.” 

He reached a wiry arm towards you and plucked the rolled paper from your lips and put it in his own. He took a long drag, long enough for it to be construed as a yearning desire to never breathe in the clear, humid air of this place again. 

“How accurate am I?” you asked. 

“As horribly accurate as any lousy oracle could be.”  

Hence why your lack of communication is bothersome. Or maybe it’s purposeful. Or maybe there’s nothing behind it at all. Thinking about the latter makes his stomach ache. But in a way, Henry’s glad that you didn’t put up a fight. He knows deep down, like the back of his hand or the sound of your voice, that you’d be able to convince him. 

There could not be a ‘sooner notice’. Sooner notice would mean bailing out and not leaving at all. 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. 

3 days before Henry leaves, routine occurs like normal. Almost. 

He wakes up earlier than he’s used to, just by the jolt of his body. He fumbles with his keys as he leaves the lonely expanse of his residence for yours that’s a short distance away. He doesn’t even know if you’ll be up at this time, but he drives anyway. And to his surprise, he sees you trudging up the rugged street as he’s halfway to your house. 

He leans over the console to open the car door. You slip in with a tired ‘good morning’ smile as he reminds you to click on your seatbelt.  

“Can you do yours, too?” you say, flicking at the woven strip of fabric.  

“I’ll think about it,” he murmurs, drumming his fingers along the ridges of the steering wheel. “Why were you out there? You know I’ll come and get you.” 

“I didn’t want to be waiting. Why were you?” 

He decides against responding. You’re courteous to his silence and shrug as you pull his seatbelt on for him. Despite his stubborn front, he helps guide your hand to the buckle. 

He takes you to the broad, placid river near the end of town, hidden by a short hike into the woods. Like always, you trip over some uprooted vine and chide at your clumsiness. He catches you by the crook of your elbow and tells you to slow down. 

You shake your head and tell him to speed up. “We’re on limited time, Henry. If it happens again, just let me fall. I’ll cover more ground.” 

For the first time since he’s met you, he hates how you make him laugh. 

You’re in the water as quickly as you can kick off your shoes and strip off your shorts. The water runs murky yet clear, though it counts just the same as you thrash through it until it wades up to your thigh. 

Henry settles on the shady, sparsely green bank and sifts through the pebbles for flat ones. He watches you for a while, eyes your knees pushing against the thick current. When he’s content with his gatherings, he folds up the baggy ends of his jeans and comes in after you. 

Your eyes widen as he plods over. “What’re you doing? You never get in with me.” 

“I’m getting in with you now.” 

“No, don’t. You like the view from over there.” 

He smooths over your sun-warmed hair. “I like the view from here, too.” 

He sighs a heavy, held breath when he sees the first signs of conflict arise on your face.

“Please don’t act like this is different from any other day that we’ve been here.” 

Your words carry the same bark as a dog who knows that they’re going to be put down. 

“You said that we’re on limited time.” 

“I know, but that’s just, that’s just me talking. That’s for me to say.” You look down at where his denim darkens with the sloshing river. “Please don’t make this feel different.” 

He offers you a rueful smile and lowers his head to try and catch your flitting gaze. “It is different, baby.” 

He hugs you, and he can tell that you have a hard time doing it back. 

The rest of the day is comfortably quiet as he teaches you how to skip rocks. 

When he drives you home, long after the sun sets, you stay in his car just to sit. The air between is tense. It sends prickles up the side of his leg, all the way up to the expanse of his neck to settle between his collar bones. Something in him wants you to leave already, like you had yesterday. It’s only fair, he thinks, to let him feel what that’s like, too. 

“Are you angry at me?” he asks, voice tenderly cutting through the silence. 

You look at him pained. “I couldn’t be.” 

He grips at the dried, mud-stained rim of his shirt from when he wiped your calf clean after you staggered into a dip in the river. 

“It’s okay if you are.” 

“I’m not,” you say sternly. “Because I know that you’re dying in this town. Just one look at you, Henry. You dream like no one I’ve ever seen before. You dream and paint of oceans and stinging cold and somewhere, far, far away from here.” 

He bores a hole into the night outside of his windshield. 

You turn to look at his clenched jaw. “Do your parents know?” 

“You’re the only one,” he says curtly. “I’m not going to tell them. I forget their faces the second that they’re out of sight.” 

You nod and move to slip out of the car. You hold the door open, bending awkwardly to look at him. “They’ll come to me and ask. You know, when you’re gone.” 

“What’ll you tell them?”

“What I told you,” you whisper. “That it’s okay. And that they can’t convince you to be satisfied with the greatest of mountains when you see waves the moment you close your eyes. I’ll say that I know you’re happier out wherever you are. So it’s okay.” 

You stand there, waiting again for a response that won’t come. You bid him goodnight and turn on your heel. 

It’s only when he drives off does he see the thin trail of blood dribbling onto his lap from where his teeth are sunken into his own cheek.  

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

2 days before Henry leaves, he piggybacks you through the woods to his weathered shed. 

A week prior, he took advantage of the winding summer rain and came out here without you knowing. He took down every colorful quilt, every deflated pillow that bordered the small space inside, every remnant that proved the existence of two people. He blinked hard as he did it. Every item he picked up and shoved underneath his arm was just another act of treason. 

The feat could not be upheld, so he spent the remainder of last night undoing his undoing of the interior. And more so, as he hung up lights for one final hurrah. 

He lays you down onto the covered Earth and begins kissing a path down your sternum, sucking and nipping at whatever part of you he can get to next. You pull the cotton of your underwear down to pool at your ankles and bunch the white fabric of your dress at your waist. 

Your hands bury themselves in his hair and tug faintly at his nape as he wraps his arms around your thighs to bring them over his shoulders, pressing his fingers hard enough to make imprints onto the plush.

“You’re so beautiful,” he groans into your skin, eyes locked on your brows scrunched, your mouth agape. “So, so beautiful, my girl. Mine, all mine.” 

You whine and jut your hips up against his mouth, and he thinks that he’d be happy dying here. Just like this, with you on his lips and the warmth of your flesh pressing around his head, constricting his mind from wandering to any place else but here with you. 

You take a hand away from his hair to find his own splayed on your pelvis. He turns his palm face-up to give you free reign over the satiny, calloused skin. When you link your pinky with his, he notices that he’s crying. 

He brings the promise up to his lips. “I wish,” he kisses, “that I,” you gasp breathily, “could have,” he kisses, “you forever.” Your thighs tremble as he licks over your swollen clit, remorseful for stopping. 

“And I’m sorry,” he says, because he knows that it’s an unfair thing to admit, especially now. And he hates, more than anything, to be mean to you. 

“You have me, Henry,” your voice hitches as he lowers his head again, the ridge of his nose bumping into you. “You’ve always had me.” 

When you come undone, tightening stickily around his fingers, he whines your name over and over as he helps you ride it out. He sounds each syllable out like it’s a prayer because, in a way, it is one. 

There’s no such respiteful absolution like the one that he gets whenever he’s with you. 

He pulls your dress over his head as though hoping that you’d let him remain between you. When you tell him that you’re tired, he nods and props himself against the mildew-soiled, wooden walls. He ghosts his touch along your hair, supporting your head in his lap.

“We can stay a while,” he mutters. 

And so, he’s left to his own devices. He thinks of how much he hates the suffocating warmth of this town. But you’re warm, too. And he enjoys the feeling of basking in it. And that throws him for a loop. 

For a moment, Henry mulls over a troubling thought. Stay. Staying. He entertains the concept, kicks it between the ratted up soles of his shoes. He entertains a better one, an incredibly impulsive, gluttony-filled one. 

“Baby?” 

You stir. “Yeah?” 

“Would you come with me?” 

One beat of silence. 

“You’re a good boy, Henry,” you say. “But being here doesn’t kill me like it does you.” 

He grimaces. He wants to tell you that it’ll get to you, one way or another. That it preys on smiles like yours, because they’re real and ingenuous and guileless. So he decides to push just a little bit harder. 

He drags a hand down his face and continues to stroke your hair. Soothing you, soothes him. “Would it kill you to come with me?” 

Two beats of silence. Then a third. “No. It would not.”

That’s all you leave him with before you fall asleep. In his own daze, he swears that he can feel the single, thorny sensation of a tear burning through his jeans. 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. 

1 day before Henry leaves, things feel heavier. 

The feeling is everywhere. It’s literally in the luggage that rests stiffly by the side of his nightstand. It’s buried in his chest, radiating outwards towards his limbs so that every move he makes is sluggish. It burdens him as he contemplates if your words were just blown smoke.

He doesn’t know why, but his father ruffles his hair on his way out to work. Henry goes rigid as he feels the older man’s fingers on his scalp. His cereal spoon is suspended mid-air in shock. The rare act of affection is rough, like how any father is towards his son, and causes Henry’s head to cave forward to the pressure. 

But the gesture doesn’t bring him the deluded protection of nostalgia. In fact, it feels belittling and slapdash and painful. All it does, all it serves to do, is to remind him of your touch. 

Gentle. 

Fond. 

Purifying. 

Henry thinks of an angel, speaks your name on his lips, and fate herself brings you knocking on his door. 

“I brought some stuff for your journey,” you say, flopping down in front of him on his bed. “Small stuff, ‘cause I know you’ll pack light.” 

He’s happy that he only has a twin. Any larger of a bed would mean that your knees wouldn’t brush against his even half as much. 

You pull out several miscellaneous items: his favorite cigarettes, a portable paint set that he left at your house, and a cinch bag of candy. 

“For my sweet tooth?” he muses, fidgeting with the drawstrings. 

“For your sweet tooth.” 

He goes for something sweeter and kisses a trail down your lips to your jaw and neck. “Thank you, baby. You didn’t have to.” 

“Oh, and another thing.” You pull away to rummage through your purse. “I got back into sewing.” 

You hand him your creation — a small stuffed-animal walrus made up of differing scraps of burlap, taupe, and hickory-colored fabric, all held together by thread of your favorite colors. 

Its embroidered mouth grins up at him and its beaded eyes stare. They’re filled with such a soul that could have only been produced at the hands of your craft. 

He toys with its flippers as a familiar conflict comes back to him. That heaviness weighs on him every time he catches you glance at his alarm clock, a flicker of a frown appearing every time you become aware of the time. 

Henry wonders about it, about how maybe meeting you was a predestined obstacle meant to keep him here forever. But he figures that he’s just listening too closely to the devil on his shoulder. Because you’re not anything to overcome. Because it’s never truly been your fight that he’s worried about. 

He has enough of it for the both of you. 

He realizes that you’ve made things difficult, just inherently. He realizes it as he finds himself wishing that you’d made him a hundred more walruses, so that maybe he wouldn’t have to go so far for the real thing. 

“It’s cute, huh?” you say, voice lilting with pride. 

Henry nods and looks at it intently, then looks at you. “He’s got your smile.” 

He spends the rest of the day with you in his room, laughing until you cry, crying until you laugh. 

When the time comes to begin your last departure, you drop a pristinely crisp envelope face-down onto his luggage on your way out of his room. 

“Don’t open it until you’re on the road,” you instruct. “I mean it.” 

His hand is firm on the small of your back. “I won’t.” 

The journey back to your house seems more difficult than any cross-country trip could ever be. It’s quiet and deliberately slow. Henry likes silence with you, almost as much as he does talking. 

When the glimpse of your porch finally comes into view, you stop in front of the curb. You stand facing him, rocking back and forth on your heels. 

“Well, this is it,” you say, then quieter, “This is it.” 

He watches the lowering sun cast its glow on you. He’s seen this sight thousands of times, and every time, he can’t help but blink over and over as if his eyelids were the aperture blades of a camera. 

He closes the distance between you and holds your face in his large hands. He stares until he can no longer handle seeing the tears well up in your eyes. And so he hugs you, and this time, you hug him back and allow yourself to surrender in his arms. 

“A year isn’t enough, Henry,” you sob, crying into his chest. “I just got to know you.” 

He smiles, rests his head over your shoulder. “You know me more than anyone ever will.” 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

The next morning after Henry leaves, you find a strung-up bundle of scrolls and sketch paper outside your door. 

You bring it to the consolation of your room. As you begin to undo the string, a notecard falls to the ground. You squint to try and decipher the message, for Henry’s penmanship was never one of his strong suits. 

Sometimes I don’t have to close my eyes to dream. Sometimes they’re right in front of me. And I paint them — her — too. 

Your tear-stained cheeks are soon washed away by fresh ones as you uncover the mementos one by one and see your own candid expressions staring back at you. 

You’re frozen in time, page by page, painting by painting. There’s sketches of you centered by intangible sceneries. Others are of more intimate things.

There’s little comments with Henry’s thought processes scrawled all over, and you read them in his voice. Some pages even have the rounded remains of teardrops, evident by the wrinkled surface. 

You choke out a laugh when you see that he’s stolen the way you write your arrows — a single loop in the middle. The doodle points to his favorite details, noted by a terse ‘I like’. You guess that he got tired of labeling everything because at some point through the sketchbook, he’d circled the whole image of you and wrote ‘I just like her’. 

On the back of one of them, a painted portrait that displays various depictions of you as a mermaid, he’s written Forgive me. 

It’s crossed out with panicked scratches of a dull pencil. You can tell that they’re fresh. 

Under it reads: 

Don’t 

^ Forget me 

You think of his offer to come with him. 

You think of how you didn’t say no. 

You think again of the note. 

Sometimes I don’t have to close my eyes to dream. Sometimes they’re right in front of me. 

And you just know. You know. And it’d be foolish not to try. 

You carefully stuff his art into a duffle, as well as your clothes, shoes, and whatever money you have shoved in the depths of your dresser. 

And you run with your laces untied and your dire refusal to be too late, your refusal to walk back home with a grief that you know you won’t be able to subdue. You run until your lungs burn, you run until you see that Henry hasn’t left at all. 

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. 

Henry drums his knuckles along the edges of his steering wheel, eyes focused on the empty expanse ahead. The windows are rolled down completely to allow the thrashing freedom of a tempest to flesh out the inside of his car. 

“Did you open it yet?” you ask. 

He smiles and shakes his head. “It’s in the glove box.” 

You fish out the envelope and prance your fingers over where you licked it closed. 

He looks over at it. “What’s in it?” 

“They’re just stuff that I’ve written about you. In chronological order, of course.” 

He hums curiously. “We have a long way to go. Why don’t you read them for me, baby?” 

And as you do, he hates that he can still hear the subtle hissing of the devil on his shoulder. But he focuses on the sound of the angel beside him instead. He focuses on how he can breathe better, focuses on his hand intertwined with yours.