Pretty Little Bones

You Can Only Blame Your Problems on the World for So Long

You Can Only Blame Your Problems on the World for So Long

Ava always made it a point to tell me I was her first time. That was important to her for reasons I didn't always understand.

Since I was old enough to get it, I always assumed her aunt's husband was her first real sexual encounter, whether she wanted him to be or not. Sure, we went all the way for the first time, but I assumed he'd introduced her to other things. 

But she always insisted and I never asked. I simply just wondered.

It wasn't until just over a week before I turned nineteen that she finally confessed what happened with him the night that she ended up in the hospital.

And part of me wondered if it had been her plan to confess all along when she invited me out the creek with her.

We arrived on the banks with four bottles of beer, two lighters, and a strange tension between us.

Her family was back in town, visiting for Thanksgiving and she didn't want to see him. The man that turned her childhood into a nightmare was staying with her grandmother and she was almost as angry as she was terrified. 

She didn't want to see any of her family. She didn't want to go through that again.

That's why we were hanging out. She lied about having plans with me so she wouldn't have to go see them.

So we went to the creek like she asked. It reminded me of the night she let me be her first, except colder and brighter and we weren't tangled together.

The only thing that hadn't changed was how much I loved her.

That would never change.

After I built the fire I handed her a beer and she took it from me, forgetting that she didn't drink.

That night she drank like she actually liked the taste of alcohol. She acted like she loved being cold and distant from me.

I sat on an old, dead tree that had fallen sometime in the spring. The bark was fragile and sharp, falling off in clumps wherever you'd touch it. Although I offered a seat next to me, she declined. She sat on the ground with her back against the tree and her gray jacket quickly became spotted with the black crumbs of bark.

Once, as she was hugging her knees and shivering into her gray jacket, I asked if she wanted my coat. She just shook her head, the blonde waves tangling in the tree.

I leaned down and kissed her out of boredom, tasting the alcohol on her lips, wishing we could have a replay of the night that had happened almost two years ago to the date.

But she wasn't interested in sex. She was interested in the fire. She was interested in reaching her hand up between my knees and rubbing my thighs with her long, cold fingers.

She was interested in drinking beer and teasing me.

Always the little tease when we were alone.

We talked for a while, ignoring the fact that something was obviously bothering her, until I'd downed my first beer and cracked open the second.

I asked her how long she was going to ignore her family. When was she going to talk to them again?

She smiled with her pretty pink lips and shrugged the angles of her shoulders. "Dunno," she answered, swirling the beer in her still mostly full bottle. "When they stop being assholes, I guess."

Maybe it was the alcohol talking. I'll never really know. My filter must have been gone too when I asked what she'd say to her aunt's husband.

I should have known better.