Trapped in Forever

13 ~ The Fall from Heaven

A/N: Unrelated note to RHS fans, do you guys remember Peyton? As in Erin and Peyton? If not, they were Silvia's old best friends before the boat incident. I love doing that little Easter egg thing (The Boy in the Santa Hat? It took place in the same apartment complex as the one Rick, Silvia's drug dealer boyfriend, lived in.) Abe and Silvia had a small cameo in Chapter Five as well. If you catch any references to past novels/SSs, let me know! :)

The patio door had only just slapped close, a crushed paper plate with orange grease pooling at the bottom from what I guessed was from pizza wedged in between the glass and the white doorframe, when I grasped my hand around the handle, oddly warm from use, and yanked it open, fresh air that didn’t smell of stale beer or cold pizza or perfume and almost complete silence striking me with the contrast to the living room inside. On the patio, where streamers had carelessly been tossed around, dangling and drifting with only faint rustling sounds in protest to the wind and a lone barbeque off to the side, pressed against a polished, wooden rail, I found Orion, reaching down to snatch a red streamer and crumple it in his hand. When he heard me draw back the patio door, he glanced in my direction with a mere flicker of his eyes, his knuckles turning white with red squeezing in between his fingers.

“Amanda—”

I couldn’t let him finish, not even if it meant that I would finally get the explanation I—and Roxanne—had been waiting for all autumn and now the explanation I would be waiting my whole life for, but now I couldn’t let him finish. My blood was boiling and my heart rushed its beat, as if to keep up with the muffled music blasting from the speakers inside, and my outrage was threatening to spill over, my knuckles beginning to match the color of his own. He didn’t have the right to hear her name every time someone called him, just to leave a simple message, or when some college girl would press down the digits of the phone number he wrote down for her on a bar napkin.

My heels clunked against the wooden planks as I stormed over to him, a shaking finger pointed in his direction. “How dare you,” I hissed, wanting to scream but my voice was as unsteady as my heartbeat, going a thousand beats a second. “You do not get to play that song and relive a summer that broke her heart—that broke her.”

Orion’s eyes never met mine, keeping them focused on the streamer being strangled within his grasp, his jaw grinding his teeth together in his silence.

“She trusted you with the biggest thing of her life and then you—you—” Like the steamer trapped beneath his blood deprived, ashen fingers, the words were being strangled in my throat. They cracked and fell apart, crumbling to somewhere unknown, and leaving me breathless, my eyes stinging. “You betrayed her and now she’s dead, Orion! She died because of what you did!”

He unclenched his fingers, one by one, until the crumpled steamer, creases stemming from the center, fell from his grasp and floated to the ground beside his feet where it then flew away, caught in the wind, and wrapped around one of the barbecue’s wheels. “Shut up, Amanda,” he growled.

“What?”  

His eyes squinted shut, crinkles stemming from his eyelids and crumbling the skin by his sockets and fading off as they neared his hairline, golden stray locks flickering in the light breeze brushing against our bare arms and chilling the tips of my fingers, and he turned away, rubbing his left hand across his forehead, and right before me, he aged ten years. Wrinkles furrowed in the spaces between his fingers, pressing deep into his skin until it turned white from the pressure, and all he seemed to do was exhale. His footsteps creaked beneath the wooden planks of the patio as he neared the railing, wrapping his palm around it, with a lone bottle of Bud Lite a few centimeters from his pinkie finger. His shoulders caved, blades sinking beneath his skin, and another breath escaped him, the air turning into white mist looming over his nose and then, as it traveled away from his profile, it disappeared—blending into the air surrounding him.