Page 16 of My Lovely Tragedy
After dropping my things onto the countertop, I begin prepping for dinner. I’m keeping it simple tonight with an easy chicken garden salad with ranch dressing. The pressure in my head has moved to my stomach, and I know if I try to eat anything heavier, I won’t be able to keep it down.
Chopping the veggies is melodic in the repetitive rhythm of the knife against the cutting board. I let my lids fall as I keep my pace, the samethud thud thuduntil everything is chopped and sliced.
I toss everything into two separate bowls, but before adding the dressing, I wrap Brooklyn’s and place it on the top shelf of the fridge.
Bowl in hand, I meander into the living room and take residence on the chair I slept in the night before. The familiar angle makes my neck throb, but as my eyes flicker upward, the pain is lost as I watch Brooklyn’s shadows cast along the wall.
He has turned on the lamp, along with the radio. Soft tunes carry down to where I’m seated. I can’t quite make out what is playing, but I think it’s soft rock. Something that I normally wouldn’t listen to, but right now it feels as if I am almost listening to it through Brooklyn’s perspective.
I have always had the utmost respect for all genres of music. You can always distinctly hear the passion an artist—or a group of them—has put into their work. In the melodies and chords strung out, in the lyrical dispositions.
And as I told Brooklyn earlier, I have always leaned more toward instrumentals. Mainly piano because that is where my heart lies, but I cannot deny I find his taste in music comforting.
I force myself to take another bite as I watch the enlarged, blurred shadow of what must be his head bobbing slightly to the enchanting tune of the one song I do recognize: “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
His low hum barely carries over the stillness of hushed silence and space, but I focus on it regardless.
And when his low, melodic voice carries through the air, I lose my breath.
My bowl clanks on the tabletop as I lurch upward to retrieve my laptop and journal. I’m already pulling it open and typing my password before I sit down, a fresh, blank document staring me in the face. A perpendicular line beaming back at me. Flashing.
Asking.
This will not be like anything else I have written. I can already feel my voice has shifted. My tone and the way in which I will tell it all.
Every part of this is unlike me but the very best of me.
Swallowing the lump in my throat and the throb at my temples, I close my eyes as my fingers settle against the keys.
With Brooklyn’s voice floating down to me, flooding my ears with his cadence, I write.
* * *
A throat clearinglulls me out of an unconscious fog. I blink wearily against the sun’s rays gaping through the curtains to find Brooklyn standing directly in front of me, radiating his own form of light.
Still caught in the lingering effects of sleep, all I can do is stare and blink lazily. Hypnotized. Enthralled and slightly confused.
Brooklyn’s hair is slightly tangled around his shoulders, but the knots do nothing to take away from his beauty. His face is still creased from his own sleep, eyes far too wide yet bleary, as if he just woke up himself.
Cerulean irises bore into my own auburn eyes before I have the chance to even think to avoid the intensity. And it is so much stronger than I remember.
I’m sucked into the pools of color, swirling with exhaustion, worry, and—dare I say—a little intrigue. Pupils dilate, swallowing color, and I loathe the action marginally, if only because I miss a second of their beautiful color.
My fingers curl inward, begging for the soft, creased indentation of my palm. When my blunt nails scrape against something with a sharp scratch, I’m jolted out of my skin.
I rip my gaze away, focus falling to the laptop keys beneath my fingers. My screen is black, telling me it’s been at least five minutes since I was last on it, but gathering from the heaviness in my skull and the aching in my back, radiating up into my neck, I assume I have been asleep far longer.
“Did you sleep like this?” The sleep-raspy tenor garners every ounce of my attention. I straighten up, all too aware of the fact I’m still laden in the clothes from yesterday, now wrinkled and probably smelling of musk and sleep-sweat.
I make quick work of surveying the room. My bowl is still on the coffee table where I left it, less than half eaten. My journal is tucked against my right thigh, still closed and untouched. Laptop, still cockeyed atop my thighs, but otherwise where I last remember it being as I hammered away at the keys, long after the sound of Brooklyn’s sleep infiltrated the soft stillness of the night air.
I rake my fingers through my own sleep-tangled hair, getting my index finger caught on a curl that really needs a brush through it. “Yes.” I nod. “I must have—though it was entirely unintentional. I just…” My words die on my lips. The very words about to explain to the boy in front of me that I spent countless hours writing abouthim.
Brooklyn’s lips twitch at the corner in a knowing expression. “I get it. When inspiration hits, it’s nearly impossible to fight it.”
My smile cracks across my face, eradicating the lingering traces of sleep from my skin in the wake of happiness.Joy.
“You get it?” I ask, hopeful.
