Page 141 of Burn

THE MAN BEFORE me with the dull green eyes and dark circles, the one with the five-day beard and the mess of dark hair in his eyes, this isn’t the Caleb I met two months ago. I don’t know if I know this guy.

Or, and this is a shocking reality to grasp, maybe this is him. Maybe this is what I’m left with. Maybe this is who he’d become.

I get it thought. I bet there’s a lot of people in this very city who have been in this mindset in some form or another. A dark place where your life and everything in it isn’t what you want it to be.

Hell, look at my professional life in the shitters right now?

Case. In. Point.

Anyway, the life you have suddenly resembles none of the elements it did in the beginning, and now you’re left wondering where it will end up?

I ask Caleb all the time if he’s all right and he says he is. He doesn’t want to talk about Evan, and I respect his wishes. I want to comfort him, take away this pain he won’t share, but I can’t. I’ve never felt so hopeless in my life as I do in the moments I’m with him.

I want to tell Caleb I love him and I’m here for him when he’s ready. They’re words on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t in fear that’s not what he needs to hear.

“What do you want from me, Mila?” Caleb whispers in the dark. Complicated eyes draw mine toward his. He’s on his side, facing me, the moon lighting up the side of his face.

It’s late. I’m at his apartment, giving him what he wants, but I’m so tired I can barely keep my own eyes open. Oh how quickly we fell right back into the “whatever” status.

Believe me, I’m ashamed, but here’s the thing, I look at him now, and I don’t feel the same way I did before. I’m out of the “like” stage and face first in love.

And I think in some ways, I’m here for this, what I give him in the darkness where my roots me because he talks to me, like this, when the sky’s painted in stars and nothing else matters.

“I don’t know.”

His tone is frustrated as he repeats his question. “Tell me what you want.”

Love. You, maybe some babies.

“You.” I settle on one. For now.

I can’t lay it all out there right now.

“You already have that. I’m here.”

Look at us. Two people both silently trying to find themselves in the aftermath of destruction. He’s still a man lost in his thoughts he can’t put into words, and I’m trying to burn my way through the walls he puts up.

If you have an open flame and you smother it, the fire will die. Without oxygen, everything dies eventually. Without oxygen, you suffocate. I’m suffocating not knowing what to say to him.

Forcefully, pressing his eyes shut, he sighs.

He struggles with what to say, his eyes narrowing as he looks away, and then he asks, “Do you love me?” His voice is like gravel, and my heart an open wound.

I want to tear this feeling from my chest. Rip the motherfucker away. A slow burn crawls up my throat as I find the words, “I think you know I do.”

Caleb gives a nod and shifts his stare back to mine. There’s something intimate about the moment that has me wanting to breathe him in, taste his very presence before he closes his eyes, then opens them slowly, watching me. An emotion hits him, devastation twisting his face that someone loves him and it’s enough to bring me to my knees.

Why can’t he see that it’s okay for me to love him. There’s no harm in it.

Suddenly flustered by the intensity of his stare, I begin to ramble, “You put up a good front. You do. But I see you love me too.”

He doesn’t say anything. No reaction at all.

IT’S EARLY IN the morning when I find Jacey on the couch in the living room, Owen at her feet. They must have fallen asleep watching a movie last night, and she’s wide awake wearing Evan’s SFD T-shirt.

Love can make you do crazy things. It can make you hold on to something when you should be letting go. It can make you see things you didn’t see before, good and bad. It can be the cure, but it can also be the destruction.

“I hate that people are moving on. Damn it,” she tells me when I sit next to her with a cup of coffee. Caleb’s still sleeping, so I creep around careful not to wake him. “It’s been a month, and I feel like I’m thinking about him less every day, and it makes me so fucking mad. I don’t want to move on. I don’t want to forget.” And then she touches her belly. “Everyone else may forget, but I never will.”

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