On The Run: Part Two

Chapter Twenty-Eight - "Delayed Gratification"

I froze. A frown formed on my forehead, “What do you mean?”

“Fitch has been wonderful. To you, to Trey, to Ricky, to me and to everyone, really. And you can’t say that just because you’re not together anymore, that he isn’t still important.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know you didn’t, but not being there for him, that’s what’s implied. If I could, I’d go to jail with him. Because when I had absolutely nothing, and he didn’t either, he made something for me. You have to show him that you appreciate that. He needs to know that you care, especially you.”

I sighed. She was so right.

So right.

I leaned back against the wall. “He deserves better.”

She gave me a half-smile, “That’s what I’m trying to say. I know it hurts, but you guys will work it out. He probably just didn’t want you to keep seeing him in that state – in jail. You know how Fitch is. But you guys have something – which I hate, of course – but you had this . . . energy. You were his from the day you moved in, and he was yours. You’ll work it out.”

I smiled, “I really do love him,” I murmured under my breath.

She lay back down and muttered, “Well, show him.” And that was the first and last conversation I ever had with Kayla about our co-habitant elephants.

I stared at his bedroom door – a room which I hadn’t gone into since I’d moved out, and all I wanted to do was travel back to a time which had slipped so fast from my fingers, I had barely had a moment to grasp it.

Slowly, I walked towards the room and pushed open the door.

Everything – and I mean, everything – was exactly as I’d left it that morning when I took Kayla to her ultrasound.

The pillow that Fitch had thrown at me when I’d called him cheesy was still lying on the floor.

My empty glass of orange juice was still on the bedside table.

Fitch’s shirt was still hanging off the bedpost – I’d stared at him longingly as he’d slipped it off and climbed in next to me.

I sat on the windowsill and peered out at the Laundromat – no fighting, not a soul outside. My eyes back on the permanence in the room, I spotted something sticking out of the pillow on the floor. Reaching for it, I pulled out a set of folded sheets of paper.

I sucked in my breath, as the memory came back to me.

“If forever ends tomorrow. Say we break up for some ridiculous reason, or I . . . die, or something; we promise that one day, every month or week, we meet, we talk, we hang—”

I cut in, “If you’re dead—”

He chuckled, “Fine, scratch the dead part. My point is, we don’t erase each other completely.”

“We going to put that in writing?” I asked.

He reached back to the shelf behind him and pulled out the notepad and pen lying in the space.

“You just happened to have that there?”

“No. I was . . . I didn’t know how to tell you about . . . her, so I was trying to draft a letter. I left it in here,” he replied.

“You were going to write me a letter?”

He shrugged, “I have no idea what I was thinking.”