Take Me Home | ✔

Chapter Forty-Six

 [ short chapter because the next one is in another point of view :) ]

ELLIOT'S POV

        Back in Copenhagen, there were other girls in uni. Not girls that I dated, no. But there were a few that asked for my number and purposefully ran into me “by accident” across campus just to say hello or to ask if they could walk with me to class. I didn’t mind the company, but it never went further than making a couple new friends. It was a long year, I was thousands of miles from home, and I thought I lost a couple of people that I would never get back again. Frankly, I thought I would never be able to get back to them at all. The point was, I didn’t date anyone, but there were a couple of parties and nights when a girl would kiss me while we were hanging out, thinking that we would get together, but none of them were like Vienna. Not even close.

       Somehow, kissing Vienna wasn’t something I didn’t know how to do. It was probably the most familiar thing I’ve experienced since coming back to Texas. Like a song that gets stuck in your head for days at a time, kissing her was an action where the after effects (lightheaded-ness, numbing shock, and overall paralyzing fear) was something I’ve grown accustomed to, ever since that stupid but not-so-stupid fifth-grade dare nine years ago.

      I move my hands away from her cheek, fingers trailing down slowly and resting against her neck, mentally apologizing to her if my hands were too cold against her warm skin. She reached out and clutched at the fabrics of my flannels around my chest, her grip tightening against me. On instinct, I pulled her closer, kissing her harder, rougher. I couldn't help myself when I peeked an eye and I saw that hers were shut tight. I could feel the familiar surge of adrenaline with her against me. My lips were freezing before we kissed; now, not so much.

      I was running out of breath, but I was a little disappointed when she broke away first.

    Our lips parted, and she breathed hard, her eyes searching mine frantically. For what seemed like ten agonizingly slow seconds, she didn’t let out a word. She looked terrified and lost. More importantly, her eyes softened into watery pools. Had I done the wrong thing? Was I imagining it when her lips moved just as much as mine?

    “You’ve got give me a warning next time, God,” she said breathlessly, her chest rising and falling quickly. “A girl needs to get ready…for a kiss like that.”

   “I like you better when you’re unprepared,” my face broke into a nervous smirk, and I let out a shaky chuckle.

   But she didn’t laugh like me. Her smiles that were the worst things on the planet was gone. Her eyes veered down to the frozen bench we sat on, her hands falling gently into her lap. Was it just me or was the gap between us getting bigger?

    I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck and feeling my ears heating up more than my lips. “I’m sorry Vi, I shouldn’t have…I should have…--“

   The words were threatening to explode out of me. Like the destructive volcano that buried Pompeii in ashes, like a massive orchestral crescendo building up, I couldn’t hold it back anymore. A year was too damn long and I couldn’t wait anymore. “Vienna, I don’t know how else to make it obvious to you. I’m sorry for everything I’ve done, but I really like you.”

   It didn’t come as big of a shock to her, concerning the fact that I was telling her this after I just impulsively kissed her out-of-the-blue. Instead of her eyes widening and her cheeks being dusted with red, she looked devastated.

   She shook her head, slowly then quickly. “Elliot… I, I really like you too,” her eyes softened, turning glassy, “but…”

   I looked down, sighing heavily, feeling everything inside of me turning numb. Not from the cold.

         “But not like that,” I finished for her.

         “No…”

       When I lifted my head to meet her eyes, they were tinged with the faint glossy look of regret. Her lips fell into a small frown and she was looking at me carefully. I could feel my throat closing up. 

       “It’s just that…a lot of things are going on. With college, and with my family…I don’t even know if I’ll be in the country this year. There’s a lot of volunteer projects I signed up for… in Africa, in Thailand, in Peru. And you’re going to university in Europe. In Denmark. We might not even see each other for a year, even two...maybe longer.”

       “Vienna, what are you saying?”

      “I’m saying exactly this. I have to put things into perspective, I have to look at it realistically,” she said. “I just have to…think, okay?”

    I wanted to burst into fake laughter and paste on an artificial smile and say, ‘April Fools!’ I should’ve turned into a joke and brushed it off. “Okay,” was all I managed to come up with.

      “Elliot—“

      I laughed a little, forcing out a painful arrangement of artificial happiness, “It’s cool.”

      “Elliot.”

     “Vienna.” I mocked her tone with a grin. I’ve done this so many times before. Putting on a forced smile and pushing everything back was like second nature to me. It was easy. “It’s okay. I understand. You don’t have to look at me like I’m wounded…Anyway, I’m about frozen solid. Should we go back to the house? We might get hypothermia or something, and that’s not a good look for the wedding pictures tomorrow.”

      Before she could keep looking at me with those pity eyes any longer, I stood up from the bench and brushed my pants off. I tightened my flannels around me, the bitter cold biting at my beet-red cheeks. Without looking at her and instead fixing my gaze on the trail ahead of us, I said, “Are you coming?”

      “Uh…yeah,” her voice was faint as she quickly got to her feet and joined me as we walked down the dirt path. The sun was completely gone from the horizon and the sky, leaving only darkness. The only sources of light in the woods were the yellow porchlights of the houses peeking through the leaves yards away.

     The gap between us was substantially large. It felt suffocating. The time when I finally thought that everything might actually go right, everything burst into flames. I wrecked it, again.

    It’s okay.

   I guess I just had to face the fact that she would always just be someone else. Maybe someone else’s. Maybe she was right; we were better off as a team, as friends. She was right when she said we would never see each other, because we would probably be in two different continents after Christmas. The sinking feeling inside of me shouldn’t last long. I’d be okay as her friend.  

     Maybe it was time to move on.

     No words were said. They didn’t have to be.