Warmth

 

I’ve already smoked too much at this desk, too many cigarettes to type any other introduction. Other than the soft haze of smoke wafting about from the room’s heater, only the blurry hues of the moonlight on snow seem to distract me. Somewhere outside the window, snow continues to fall as it had last week; the sky is still as gray and miserable as I chose to see it. Somewhere outside the double-pane, I see the chariot of my ill intentions, a vehicle I drove in the subconscious desires to destroy my perceptions of my closest friendship. Beneath every poorly constructed phrase on this screen, the permeating macabre wreaks outwardly. I cannot seem to vent these frustrations. When I discover an appropriate word for this feeling, I will narrator it into this story. Until then, I welcome the interest of an outside presence, a reader of these amorous obsessions. Let me explain.

I’m typing this story of me to you, but you cannot relate it to any other. I promised to keep it to myself, to hide it as a memory for only my eyes to recall, and only my neurons to bathe in. I keep this audible vow by exchanging the emotions into words. You cannot hope to hold her as I have, to sink into the soft warmth so different than any other. When you curl against the nude body of a mythos chiseled into your soul, how can I hope to tell an uninterested critic the sorrows now digesting my heart? Review my contribution to the love loss genre. Review, read, experience only a minute percentage of all that I hold dear. I have only this suggestion. Think of the times when you held coveted that which you could not hold, and remember the missed opportunity when loyalties to friends finally gave way to all the love you knew you could hold tight to your chest. And bedamned the responsibilities and judgments.

            There, of course, was more to this improbable relationship that I cannot exchange into flowery language. It would be easy to say that these words could not express how I felt, but they can. The problem is the message was lost somewhere between the definitions of the phrasing, the spaces in the lines, and the rhythm of the syntax. They say that it’s “pretty” to read, or that the story exists somewhere and it must just be told. I’m telling you the story exists in the page so ineptly, that the words portray too many thousands of murky pictures. It’s much more convoluted to say that, “I loved as no other has,” since this is true for me: No other slid a shivering hand against the warmth of her neck, stealing unfairly any affection which she did not consciously give to me. There was some type of incidental breakdown between her thoughts of a distant boyfriend and an unintentional predator withering inside.

She had pleaded carefully sitting atop the covers, pleaded incidentally for something she wanted and yet refused to embrace. I, on the other hand, had waited patiently with the knowledge she would eventually give way into something both our eyes lied to have. Hours passed with blanket pulled to her nose, she slept softly in the car seat next to me; her chestnut dyed hair resting chaotically on the sides of her head. So many miles had passed since she had objected before relenting. I lied as much as she had at the time, and now could only feel worse for doing so. There was a deep, sunken part of my heart that disapproved of what happen, but I couldn’t help but yearn for more of the warmth shown to me, replacing all the lost hopes.

The radio’s female siren sang to my intentions: A female cover of some Presley song told me that I was as stupid as I believed. Gazing down at the speedometer, I accelerated in objection to the calm, tranquil ups and downs of her voice. Where Presley sang to the female of his foolish desires, this girl sang away to me. With a snap of the wrist, I shifted to fifth and eased back into cruise control; the digital dial on the radio seemingly turned on its own to a station I didn’t know. It sang on without me and once again I drove mindlessly.

Elizabeth shifted her feet on the dash, distracting me from my mechanical driving. She wore the annoying mismatched socks that every girl I knew seemed to find cute. You know society has begun to crumble when the norm becomes mismatched socks. The warmth from her feet left weird prints on the windshield.

The road was boring and not even the occasional flurry greeting the windshield could distract my attempts to be distracted. I sat in the seat. I drove the car. I dreamed away any thoughts of the mundane trip. She’d told me this awkward feeling would not exist between us. Fortunately for the both of us, she was some sleepy realm and I was in the Automobile Traveling Prison. Instead of awkward conversations, I existed in a detached realm of serenity broadcast through some DJ’s song choices. When Hotel California started whispering to me of hotels, I found myself looking back on the past evening in a cheap hotel room designed for lonely truckers.

What the room found occupying it were two disjointed and disengaged college students with plenty of delusions on the mind. She had a boyfriend she loved and I had a love I wanted. No matter how much lust I poured through my eyes, she never commented on it. I kept my mouth shut, sealed those desires to vent through two orifices at a time. Well, that’s more of an elaborate way of saying I was afraid to tell her how I felt. I was the type of person that would gladly take a bat to someone’s head, but the audible connection to fairer sex made me buckle in fear. And she never made it easy for me.

She was committed to him. She told me on the car ride to the motel: “I’m committed to him, I always have been, and I’m trying hard to make sure I don’t mess things up,” she’d said swimming her shoulders back and forth to one R&B song after another. “You don’t understand, Kevy, you wouldn’t.” There was a pause where I could have said I understood, but, since I didn’t, it was a moot pause. I’d normally have made up some line that confused the issue, maybe referenced a movie where love lasted longer than it was supposed to. Some John Cusack movie she would have watched in high school.

So many million miles had passed in that hotel room. Now, as I write the story from the time I began to think, I can’t help but deal perspective a slight of hand. The only reason I bother to tell this story is to clear my conscience of the events which occurred. You see, I took a vow to keep the interaction to myself. With this in mind, I tell the emblazon white of the computer the deepest love I have ever felt. They say that you can touch many people in your life, but only one will leave a mark which you will judge other against. I found this mark, I discovered it hidden beneath the conventions of romance, lies, and desire. Someone else claimed my mark, and I broke certain unstated promises to my best friend to awaken it. So, let’s return back to the past of the car, back to the me listening to the sirens songs singing soft melodies to my past, still drugged self. Forgive the lapses in the story, the true yet poorly written dialogue, and the sorrows constructed from truth where fiction is suppose to reign. I was a driver and a fool, but never a writer with pen.

Let us return back to the car and start from there. I was being hummed into a coma via singing and Lizy was unconscious in the seat next to me. Her feet were on the dash and the warmth form the car kept her sleeping sound. I was driving away from the hotel, I think; yet, the parking lots of random other hotels off the highway brought back memories of pulling slowly in a parking spot, somehow knowing just where the front of the car ended and the tail of another started. It glides in and you feel the weight of the car lurch before stopping.

Without thinking, I reached down put the car in first and set the e-brake. She was sleeping, a trend popular to anyone riding shotgun for long distance trips. I leaned over and gently sat my hand on her shoulder. Elizabeth awoke with a shake, blinking her sleepy eyes and looked at me confused. “We’re here,” she wasn’t awake enough to regard me with anything more than a blink, “The Hotel, Lizy, the Hotel?” she put her head back down and I decided to simply carry in the things. That done, I’d come back for her.

After slinging all our gear, the laptops, and stuffing the random 20 ounces into my pockets, I felt like a lame pack mule crossing the tundra, if pack mules did such things. The check out clerk was a prick. I stood just outside the door struggling to open the damn thing, and he simply looked at me. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t walking towards me either. He just stood there with some ape expression: “Hey bud, put a bag down and open the door, you look like a pack mule crossing the tundra.”  Ape.

Eventually, the luggage’s fabric gave enough to squeeze myself through. I struggled to the desk. Resisting the urge to make a smartass comment, I beamed at him, “Hey bud, can I get a room for two?”

He pounded one handed on the keyboard like an otter cracking an urchin, “how long: Hourly, nightly, weekly?”

I looked at him, raising an eyebrow, “If I wanted it for an hour, I wouldn’t be dragging 10 fucking bags, would I? I’d be hauling a goddamn condom and a grin and we wouldn’t be having this lovely discussion,” the guy just stood there. It took me a second to realize he couldn’t have been more than 18, and even then looked like a kid with a beard trying to hide it. “I’m sorry, long drive. Just a night,” the conversation devolved into the trivial prattle exchanged between an employee working the night shift and the drowsy patron.

After exchanging the fiscal sum of another fiscal mistake, I started back out to the car. There was frost safely forming on the corners of the car, an impending storm against the receding heat, and Elizabeth slept with her head against the window. Her lips were pursed just enough to allow air to escape them. Standing outside the car, I couldn’t hear anything from her breathing, but the small wisp of air occasionally drug a reluctant warmth from her lungs; it seemed the only way I knew her alive. She’d finally pulled her small feet in and under her. They say you curl up the same way when you’re cold as when you were in your mother’s womb. So, like a drunken doctor bearing forth a child, I slowly pulled her out of the car and contemplated carrying her to the room. Was the effort worth it, I asked myself. A friend would bear a drunk/sleepy/injured friend to wherever they needed to go. Then again, I drew back from the concept of her skin against mine; so, wrapping her in the blanket (careful to keep her sock-covered feet in the air) I carried her into the hotel and down the lobby to the elevator. Leaning against the wall to ease my slight discomfort, I held her suspended until finally the lift binged its arrival. She looked sleepy at me for one second, as if she was not hovering in my arms and I not the person I was. Maybe those eyes registered too much compassion towards the wrong person, or maybe I read them wrong and they were a friendly gesture of gratitude. Either way, I bore her into our room and sat her on the bed. She awoke with a start.

“Are we here?” She yawned and, rigidly in her sleepy disposition, squirmed until covered by all the soft, gray blankets.

“I’m going to get the bags,” I said before jogging out the room in the realization I had left my door open and my car, though it didn’t matter with the door open, unlocked. Snow had already begun to accumulate on the ground and pale reflection of moonlight off it somehow felt distant to my distant mind. Gripping my coat to my body, I slithered next to the freezing chassis of my car and slammed the door shut. With a satisfied depression of the remote lock, I started my trek back towards the motel, sloshing sideways as I walked.

Something clicked an upset conundrum in my head, a temporary glimpse of sanity; there was a snuggled girl in a hotel bed upstairs, and I had no clue what possessed me to continue in my plans for the evening. I couldn’t help but lie to myself. At first, when she’d first approached me in need of a ride, I decided I needed a break. The narrator of this story felt he needed time to relax outside the insensitive and dominating dimension of academia.  She’d offered me a chance to drive (my car) to visit her boyfriend on a rival campus (I think it tactful not to divulge this information for fear of incriminating myself to any familiar party reading this story). I jumped at the offer. I hadn’t seen him since the prior summer. Well, my thoughts weren’t really on him at the time. They lay somewhere rightly between the feet and head of his girlfriend. With all the pent up urges towards her, I’d spent the entire ride he running scenarios in my head. Funny, most of them ended with us sleeping together.

Now, as the snow began to accumulate on the brim of my hat, I struggled desperately to find a cigarette in my pockets. Mercifully, my coat produced a pack of Lucky Strikes. With a snap of my wrist, the lighter aided my lungs aboard yet another express elevator to cancer, a certain downward descent into a demise I couldn’t yet care about. In the snow, cigarette in hand, I wondered what would happen if I climb into her bed and she screamed. With a wanton breath, I breathed enough that I felt dizzy. Then, when I felt prepared, I walked inside, shook the snow from my coat and hat, and made my way to her room.

Cross-legged, she sat on the bed with open eyes and a straight face, “how’s the car? It’s still there I hope.” She blinked for a sleepy second before regaining her disposition, “Let’s get this conversation out of the way. What’s the matter?”

“What conversation,” I was honestly confused. I sat there watching her say things that I was hoping had to do with us, but reasoned had to do with the voyeuristic glances I’d been giving the entire drive. As it sat, she remained on the bed with a deviant look of disgust.

“Come on, Kevy, don’t play me for a fool. You’ve been watchin’ me out of the corner of your eye since we left school,” she frowned a little. “Why? Tell me what’s the matter with you,” she said, “cause I can’t help but think there’s, I don’t know, something different between us,” she shrugged her thin shoulders, rotating her neck in the process, a stress release ritual.

The words made sense to us, and, though I relate them to you distantly and in complete knowledge of the occurrences, I find myself rather conflicted as to how to explain the prominence. Looking back on the story, we didn’t have anything to lose; we didn’t have any true height to fall from. The love stories of the past echoed triumphant collapses of dynamic characters.  The subjective story is hard to explain. To me, the words oozing from her soft lips meant the world. Maybe they would have meant something grand had she been a princess and I pauper, or I the son of her enemy and she the bastard child of a king, but I could not help but feel my heart tear all the same.

My fantasia seemed to collapse on its own, without the intricate works of some Machiavellian Shakespeare character. I just simply felt the urge to say, “I’m sorry, Lizy”.

She giggled, “You’re sorry cause you think I’m pretty?” she laughed. I don’t know if that made me even more depressed, but I felt pretty morbid all the same. Somehow, the comment made me feel slighted. I knew any response about her attractiveness would simply fuel the female ego, that annoying habit of feeling wanted. I all of a sudden felt lonely. I felt like a lonely, obsessed creature in love with another guy’s trust, his relationship, and a foreign feeling of his happiness. In a weird twist of cliché Goth atmosphere, I felt like driving a stake through my own heart.

“I think you’re amazing, Lizy, and I know you don’t want to hear that…”

She turned her head like an interested dove, “you do?”

It was a trap. Always was. This ego sinking feeling you get when you’re lost in someone’s eyes: a succubus with the intentions of seeping your soul through her lips. Intentions, why do you lead me astray? She sat there, small toes moving against her wrists, and her hair dangling down weaving spider in a web. You think you can control the lust in your lips until you taste some type of infuriating thunder locked in her heart, a wonderful nectar specifically designed to bait male hummingbirds. To bait and trap, slowly digesting them over the course of decades. And the worst part about the whole thing: you consciously slide your beak into the nectar and drown with every deep breath.

“Of course I do. I have for awhile now. How am I supposed to say that? Hey, Lizy, I’m...’ I trailed off there. I don’t know what word almost slipped through my quickly clamped teeth. It wasn’t love, that’s for sure. I could not have hoped to breathe that word in her general direction, not utter those useless syllables in a brief glimpse of romance. And, in that moment, I felt disgust for any concept of longing I felt towards her. I regarded that posture of hers as some type of female inclination towards superiority and a dominate hierarchy; I felt stupid for the desires, like she knew I’d buckle if pushed in the right direction.

“And what’s to come of this,” she said to me; her lips squeezed together in a line I took for disgust. “I cannot find love in a lost cause,” she slowly folded her hands in her lap, lacing her fingers until the red tips all glared in discontent. “You’re too far removed. I have a boyfriend, Kevy, one that I love,” she finally stopped talking with this epiphany directed at me.

‘I’m not saying you don’t love him. Hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying,” something possessed the soles of my dark dress shoes, and I slinked my way towards the bed. My shoulders hunched in regret, “I’m sorry Elizabeth,” I sat down on the opposite bed, never taking my sullen eyes from her apathetic face.

She slowly rose from the bed, her soft parachute pants gleaming warmly in a green hue. She slowly lowered her head, cocking it in the subconscious angle designated for an emotional, forbidden kiss. As her eyes met mine, her eyelids lowered with a flutter. Our lips pressed together.

There was no magic spark to speak of, but I felt like I was being liquefied into the soft press of sensation on sensation, rapidly drying saliva exchange regulated into an all-in-one combination of lust, zeal, and contempt. I say contempt for I can’t think of another word to describe the desire I felt in my heart, a desire I was having trouble reeling in. She was there, padded breast just touching my chest, with hand subconsciously weaving its fingers into my short-cropped hair. I can’t say it was the best kiss in my life, but my body seemed to yearn for the lower lip to remain hinged between my barely inhaling mouth. Then her lips pulled back.

I opened my eyes into hers; she blinked, pulling her feet under her. “What?” she asked quietly. ‘What are you thinking?” It was not the same voice I had been despising seconds ago. Her eyes were opened wider than I’d seen them before. This was not the girl I had driven here.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly with the assured knowledge that was the wrong answer. I quickly added, “I’m thinking,” then I hoped to my feet and pressed her to the bed, embracing her lips with the same barely contained lust. Maybe it was the pheromones they claim controlled erections, but I gained moment in what became a blur of sleepless mistakes, too much contemplation, and a desire to merge. It was as if all those moments when my head forgot to stay focused, those moments when you think you’re alone in your head, but the projections of intentions reads clearly to a girl viewing you; That was the moment I was living. As she squirmed from her underwear, I passionately expected the ceiling to fall on my head.

I must apologize for cutting away from the scene like this, but I can’t seem to remember the following moments clearly. I haven’t forgotten, far from it. I can still feel the acquiescent, transparent hairs of her inner leg still glided against the course, barbaric hairs of my body. I remember her eyes passionately elevating with each pulsing push, pupils completely dilated in the darkness, and the short gasps exiting her lips sung tones no bird could ever emulate, no piano ever compose. Those beats were lost in the moments.

And I cannot recall the exact memories. They say the mind represses memories of traumatic experiences, keeps those car wrecked headless corpses locked in a secret primitive enjoyment; whatever that was suppose to mean. I can only say that as I lay there the next morning, the sheets barely covering my surprisingly naked body, I felt the enjoyment of small hands on my back and warm, short breaths of a small frame. She was lying on her side, hips against my back, and I breathed deep, conscious breaths. The clock was ticking on into the night, but it seemed that I was present next to her for only the short, unhealthy nighttime crawl. Unfortunately, someone in the hotel decided it a good time to pull the fire alarm.

It was a stupid screaming, a wailing siren, that provided the death of my enjoyment. She was up and out of the bed, spinning in sleepy circles. “What’s going on!” she muttered, rubbing the dust from her eyelids.

I stood up from the bed as well, consciously dragging my boxer shorts up and over myself. “World’s on fire,” muttering to myself, “death of my desires.” It was lame, but summed up what was to begin the end of my shadowy pursuit. “We need to go into the lobby,” she started walking for the door and I pulled on the blue hoody I had been wearing.

Like good patrons, we went down the stairway. Fire + elevator = bad, the sign told me in a mock math equation; we listened incase it was real, which it never was unless you didn’t evacuate. As we exited the dirty staircase, avoiding the occasional garbage littering the floors, we found ourselves in the lobby with close to two hundred other people.

“I want to sit down,” she said walking towards an empty bench.

“Okay, everyone out, we have to evacuate the building completely. I know it’s cold, but there is a kitchen fire,” a helmeted firefighter spoke, flinging the door open violently. His turn out gear was covered in soot from a past campaign, and he looked like he was as thrilled to be there as we were of standing outside. Walking past, he began to strap on his breathing apparatus.

“The power to destroy a planet is nothing next to the power of the death star,” I said. He looked at me and shook his head. Must not have been a fan of Star Wars.

“He smells like mold,” she said, quickly stepping out into the cold. Something about the two of us stood out in the crowd of other survivors; couldn’t have been their heavy warm coats and fully clothed bodies. Neither one of us had bothered to grab our clothes. “It’s cold, Kevy,” she said, bouncing around and rubbing against me. I hugged her against my chest, wondering if it was too perverse that I enjoyed her freezing because it allowed her to be against me.

“I know. These guys’ are quick, they probably are miserable to be outside anyway.” She tucked her red nose into my armpit, burying her face in my hoody’s sleeve. “God, all we need is for the Titanic to sink and me to drown,” I laughed at my own joke.

“Are you my Jack then?” Elizabeth muffled into my sweatshirt, “And he didn’t drown, he froze.”

“Well then sign my ass up, cause I’m freezing,” I spoke into her hair. She looked up at me. I leaned down to kiss her on the lips, finally glad an occasion had permit it, allowed me a chance to return to a position I longed for.

“That was lame,” she burrowed back into my shirt, her lips pulled safely away from mine. We didn’t talk after that. It was the prolonged wait to return to the bedroom standing between us, and I couldn’t help but think that the cold was God’s descending judgment. Not that it mattered to me. I just hated being cold and hated being away from her skin. I seemed to be in a hate mood.

After about a half an hour, the firemen came out dragging a garbage can of burnt biscuits. Few minutes after that, another firemen pulled out a collection of destroyed ceiling tiles and what looked like some wood paneling. Seconds later, the fire chief came back out, “okay people, we’re sorry to force you outside, but you’re safe to head back inside,” he moved aside for a couple hurrying through the door.

Car doors began to open and slam behind us. People were shutting off their cars and heading inside. “Why the hell didn’t we think of that,” I said to her, feeling around for my car keys. She rolled her eyes and started through the double glass doors; I followed.

She waited for me to crawl into bed before crawling into the other one, pulling her fresh, cold covers over her warm body and leaving me to sleep in the remnants of our warmth. Its subtle message made me sad. I eventually, after a few minutes of being depressed, fell asleep. Every few hours I’d wake up and look over at her, wondering if it had really happened or not, then I’d see our clothes piled up together. Despite its affect on our sleeping, the waling siren seemed to be the only reminder of what I had before it woke us up.

Given the escalating frigid atmosphere in the bed, I opted to take a late night shower. For some reason, when you stand there naked for the split second before getting into the shower, you don’t feel as warm as you do clothed. Maybe it was the closed door, the massive metal heating vent, and the missing window, but I still rotated around in the bathroom. It was late. For some reason, the hotel establishment decided it was an okay idea to put a clock on the wall. The big dial read 5:43 in the morning, an arbitrary number given the horrible sleep taste in my mouth. The steam floating over my head clued me in that the heat was on, and I climbed into the shower.

I hate the taste of shower water in my mouth. The warm water destroyed all the cool saliva in it. I let the water flow over my head, enjoying the wet nature and rubber feeling it made my fingertips experience. I was alone, outside of any contemplation of the girl in the other room, happy in solitude. Feeling refreshed for not having used soap, I turned the shower off. Then I began to freeze.

I had forgotten to look for towels, and it seemed as if we had been robbed of them during the fire. Some maid haplessly picked them up before the alarm and forgot them to give them back; some hapless maid who must have come in when we were sleeping, stole them, and forgot to bring them back. I stood there, dripping wet, and was forced to use my clean boxers and shirt to dry off. Then, with wet boxers on, I walked outside, carefully covering myself incase Lizy was awakened by the shower. I quickly changed clothes and crawled into bed with wet hair and clean boxers: the final climax of a shitty day.

She woke me up dressing. Lizy didn’t seem to want to talk to me; so, we didn’t start talking until after the mundane check-out routine was over. I’d bore you with the details, but I didn’t particularly spend much time worrying about them. Instead, we ended up driving a few more miles into what began yet another boring drive. Despite the freezing cold outside, the sun burned through the windshield with intent to bother my sensitive eyes. It wasn’t until we were 20 miles from our destination that she decided to open her eyes.

I wasn’t paying attention when I heard her say, “What happened last night is a standstill for us.” I turned my head with a jump. She opened her green eyes with motivation; they read of serious intent. “I had fun, but you know you’d make a horrible boyfriend,” she continued to explain her reasoning. Most of the points I remember, but my ego forced me to block the others. Of the ones I remembered, my being a horrible boyfriend was one of the worst, on superceded by the one following it, “he’s your best friend.”

Oh, the desperate rage fueling me then. I wanted to rip the steering wheel from the column and, well, do something violent with it. The implications drove me made. He was my best friend, an injustice to say the least, and I, therefore, must have broken the unstated regulations implicated by our relationships. You see, he did not, in fact, sleep with my girlfriend (nor attempt to, though without asking, go out with her). These reasons it seemed were enough to doom our relationship to an impossible mistake, or even worse, a temporary lust grievance. Not since the bedroom had I felt her condescending eyes gaze down on me.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“You mean he’s not your best friend,” she replied calmly. What the hell was she talking about now? Was she paying attention to the argument my white knuckles drove into the steering wheel? There were implications and dilemmas, a list of sagas made up by some inner female logic simply to spite my happiness. Somewhere above, I could hear the chronological chart dooming not only my now despised relationship with her boyfriend, but my new found love, if you could call it that, for Elizabeth. 

“Of course he is, but...” how could I say what I couldn’t even figure out in my head. There were times when I just hoped the words would fall out of my mouth and change the disaster into something else. I definitely was no Jack. I was that Billy Zane character, the one with the gun.

“There’s no hope. Let’s just be happy something occurred and keep it at that,” she summed up.

“Isn’t there something I could,” Words!

She moved her hair her eyes. “Kevy,” my name felt like the worst combination of syllables uttered from the best lips I had ever touched. It hit me during that stupid car ride. I don’t think I love her, that’s too strong a word, but there is some type of foul connection driving me into contemplation. I couldn’t help but try and keep her from my mind. Was there not some point of our culminating?

I down shifted the car, lurching around a turn violently. She didn’t say anything, just fidgeted in her seat. There was too much confused hurt going into my arms to drive much better. I felt a sinking drunk feeling going through my head. “Did it mean something?” I had to ask for the sake of my already destroyed ego. “There had to have been something,” I blamed her. It was the female’s responsibility to say no. The man, to be sexist, was the stereotypical pursuer. It was the female’s role to choose her mate.

“I love [her boyfriend], that can’t be helped. You don’t choose who you fall in love with. I know his parents, I know his underwear size. I’ve washed his clothes, and I know where he hides his condoms from his parents. I was there when he first watched Commando, the movie you two quote so much. Kevy, we’ve had some good times together, hell, I know just about as much about you, but I couldn’t see myself waking up in your arms.”

I was broken.

“You don’t even know my middle name!” she exclaimed, turning the ring chained about her neck. “What I let you do last night helped both of us. I needed to see if I felt the same way you as you did about me,” she reached her hand out to touch my hand; I subtly moved it to the radio, skipping stations. “Is there a reason you’re skipping the stations around,” she said, rotating back around in her seat.

“I don’t want to listen to this shit,” I said, finally turning the radio down.

“You can just turn it off,” she reached over to switch the radio off.

“No, leave it on, just low,” putted my head down, just keeping my eyes on the road. His building came up a few minutes later. Another dorm, so many miles from what it was last time I saw it. The snow from last night died away sometime ago, but there were melting reminders all over the place. I ended up stepping in one trying to get out of my car. It just made me feel all the more emotional.

I saw her boyfriend running out of the house. He flailed his short arms in a stupid effeminate way that had always annoyed me. His hair was combed all to one side, some type of Kurt Cobain reference, I’m sure. He had ugly clothes on, and stupid looking shoes. Some type of yellow and blue bracelet lined his arms and I felt like I was in high school again when those lame Chinese bracelets were popular; he probably wore those too. She, of course, went over and put a huge show into kissing him: their lips pressed firmly, his hand on the small of her back, fingers just on her ass, and shake of his shoulders. I felt ill.

“Kevy, how are you!” he examined, taking time from his kissing, he bothered to waved to me. “Thanks for driving her down, cuz.” The southern college had ruined his vernacular. He sounded like a hick.

“No problem, [his name], but I’m feeling pretty sick. I think I’m going to drive to the store for awhile.” And I left. I avoided the both of them with lame excuses the rest of the week. Neither seemed to mind much. When Friday finally rolled around, and I’d seen every movie at the theater, read all he magazines at Barnes and Noble, and smoked one too many cloves, she finally decided it was time to go. I waved from the car as she got in, tossing her bag into the back seat. Elizabeth’s eyes burned holes through the car from far away, up close, they melted me like balefire.

“You’re an asshole,” she said, “where have you been? I had to tell [her boyfriend] you were sick in love with some girl you met on the internet. And he just barely believed that!” she exclaimed looking through the window. I didn’t respond and kept our conversations to mundane questions like, “you hungry” and “you need to pee again?” The ride home felt like a shopping list compared to the ride there. I didn’t feel like stopping at a hotel; so, as she slept away the night in the car, I drove on. When we finally arrived home, she gave me the meanest of her mean looks, and took the bag from the back seat.

“Why are you being mean to me?” she said through the open window in the door.

“Cause I want you to be my girlfriend, and you have a boyfriend. That’s the relationship we have from now on. Don’t worry, I’ll drink this shit away and you’ll be fine,” I said, starring through the windshield, constantly pressing and releasing the clutch. “Close my door.”

And her face blurred, “I don’t want you to be hurt,” she said, kneeling down next to the car window. She looked beautiful with the snowy background and the dark fur about her head, “Can’t we pretend to go back to normal?”

“Why the hell didn’t you say no?” I said, patting the steering wheel in barely cathartic thwaps. “What the hell is the matter with just saying no?” I put my head against the steering wheel, the car jerked ahead and stalled. I must have put it in gear and stalled. Elizabeth squeaked and jumped away from the car. “I’m sorry, I said.” I started the car back up.

“Stop, don’t be mad at me,” she said, pulling the fur tighter around her.

“Go inside, I’m sorry I brought it up. I should have…” I waited for that thought to be completed in my head but finished with, “I don’t now, just leave me alone for now. Let me figure out how I feel and I’ll,” she cut me off.

“I know how I feel, Kevy, doesn’t that matter?” she took a step back, pulling the clothing bag over her shoulder. “I’m staying with David.” The words burned right through my ears and into the soft, gray flesh of my brain. My heart, unfortunately, was too broken to hear.

“That’s good,” I said, putting the car in gear and driving away. I managed to control myself just long enough to not speed in front of her. We haven’t really talked since then. Though, my heart still needs time to heal. Maybe, after I have super-glued it back into some former shade of itself, I will allow her to read this farce of a story. If I could write my feelings into this story a little better, maybe she would read it with a softer gaze. The worst part of this artifice is the heart I can’t put into words. It just seems to beat with incomplete ideas of what she was, I am, and her boyfriend had.

In the end, I feel like the smoke burning my lungs could only help me breathe a more apt air, one heavy with carcinogens. The keyboard is warm from finger tips I can’t make type anything but banter. Truth be told, I miss sharing the bed and the warmth of her body; I hate losing her before I began. As this radio croons behind me, the subtle, annoying lyrics of Hotel California sing in the distance. I think I hate the Eagles.