Page 52 of Leah

I wanted to grow old, sharing memories with someone that knew me before I got famous. Someone that didn’t look at melike I was a fucking god. Someone that made me feel like what we had wasreal.

There was only one person that could do that, and that was Leah. It would always be Leah. She knew me inside and out. Had put up with me even when I lived in my denial, hiding my love for her because I was terrified of what it meant. Terrified of fucking it up. Terrified that I’d lose her because broken love was all I came to know as a kid.

I felt like the clock was ticking. She was going to slip through my grasp, fall for someone better, someone more deserving. They would have a relationship born from promises and commitment. Nothing like the past we shared.

The thought made me squeeze her to me as she lay asleep in my arms.

“I don’t want to lose you again,” I whispered, helplessly. But come morning, I would go back to my empty life and fill it with distractions.

Distractions that were meaningless, surrounded by equally meaningless people.

I held her to me tight. She wasmydistraction for tonight. The perfect kind.

I could face her rejection, but I couldn’t face her moving on from me entirely. I didn’t want her to fall in love with someone else.

Maybe it was too late, and my hopes were futile.

Maybe it was over before it began.

So, I just held her to me, and pretended it was us against the world. Tonight, she was mine, forever and always. And in some higher dimension, we would always exist like this, with her in my arms, breathing my air, making me feel whole again.

It was strangely uplifting.

Fourteen

Carter

10 years old

“I’m sorry I ruined your guitar,” she said to me, tearfully.

I swallowed back the lump in my throat and looked up at her standing in front of me. “It’s okay, Mom.”

She sat down next to me on the bed, and I gripped Dad’s guitar with all my strength. It was old and dusty, but it worked nonetheless, and I didn’t want her to take it off me.

She eyed the way my body tensed as I cradled the guitar to me.

“I won’t touch it,” she reassured me, calmly. I stared at her for a while, assessing her. Was she the mom I loved? Or was she the mean one that wanted to destroy everything around her?

“Then why are you here?” She wasn’t around often. She’d been at the hospital for a couple weeks, and Dad said theywere making her feel better. She seemed to be better now, but I knew how fast her moods could change.

“Daddy says you have a beautiful voice,” she said, quietly, running her hand down my back in an affectionate manner that had me cringing. She never touched me anymore. Not for a few years. I wasn’t used to it, especially after witnessing all the destruction that had come out of those very same hands.

“So?” I replied on a shrug.

“So, I want to teach you how to sing.”

“You can sing?”

She nodded with a smile. “Yeah, darling, I can. It’s why…It’s the reason I got upset, and…Well, that’s how I met your father. I used to sing at a bar, and he approached me after I finished one day.”

“She was beautiful,” Dad suddenly cut her off to say. I looked over her shoulder and saw him standing in the doorway, staring at her with love pouring out of his eyes. “I couldn’t resist. I knew if I didn’t ask her to dance with me, I might never get the courage again.”

Mom looked back at him, her eyes glistening as they lost themselves in each other. It was moments like these I realized they loved each other. That all the ugly fights meant nothing if we could have days like today.

So, was that love then?

When you stared at each other like that?

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