Halftones Apart

PROLOGUE | WES

Before I flip the sign on the door, thus opening my coffee shop for business for the first time ever, I glance around at the eclectic images on the walls. The idea for the decor took me some time, but after careful consideration, it became obvious what I wanted lining the walls of my space, the place I wanted to share with her. 

Abstract images of instruments ranging from pianos to ukuleles look like pixels with the coloring in each of them just a mere halftone apart. 

That part seemed the most fitting. 

My eyes scan the large frames.  Some are pink, some are purple, some black.  But my favorite color is the one that's the perfect shade of ocean blue.  Not just any hue, but the exact ones of her eyes.  The muted version being what they looked like with the lights of the bistro dimmed, and the brighter one the way they looked when the lights hit them just right.  That image isn't of an object, but rather my memory of her.  Her voice is the best damn instrument I've ever heard—perfect pitch and timbre.

I must have looked at hundreds of paint swatches before I discovered them.  As soon as I saw them both, I knew immediately because, for a moment, I could close my eyes and see her staring back at me.  It seemed like forever to find them, but if that was forever, then I'm not sure how long I stared at them willing those paint chips to magically become her almond shaped orbs. And the rest of my days without her will certainly be eternal.  All I wanted was to see her blink, to witness the way her lashes fan her cheek when she holds them closed just a moment longer than she needs to as her skin turns the color of the pink harmonica I strategically hung beside it. 

Even now, as I stand here while taking one last whiff of the rich, nutty house blends—the moment before my life changes even more than it already has—I beg the photos I commissioned based largely on her, to be a siren to her. I beg whoever's in charge of this universe to send her a premonition they're here and connected to her, attracting her to visit this place, and just once to walk through the door. 

Who am I kidding? 

What I really want is to know that she is somehow sired to my soul, and that she thinks of me as often as I do her. That she'd not just walk through the door once, but every day for the rest of our lives.

I wonder if it ever crosses her mind that it shouldn't have felt so right while it was so wrong.  I wish I could let her go, leave her and the haunting sound of her laughter out of my mind.  I smirk because it's not like I gave myself much of a chance when I decorated the entire freaking place based on her image.  No, who am I kidding?  I didn't just decorate it.  That's equivalent to a mild obsession—a mild addiction. 

My body has craved her smile, her scent, her laugh, her everything, since the moment I saw her. And no matter how many times we were together, none of it was ever enough.

So, it wasn't sufficient to fill the place with reminders of her.  The only way I could think to honor, preserve, and savor the craving I have to the connection we shared was to name the whole damn place after what I think represents whatever it was that we had. 

We were so close, yet so far away—so different.  It was wanting to fit together as one, but no matter how close we'd get, always having the knowledge we'd never work—that no matter how close the keys are on a piano, when played together, they're minor, dark, and the perfect symbolism for the destructive path our relationship was heading toward.  I can't blame her for ending it.  But god dammit do I miss being able to talk to her, the way her warm skin felt against my always cool fingers when I'd brush them against her accidentally on purpose.

There's no doubt I fell for Kennedy.  I've known love before to be able to recognize it. But this was more than that, and I still can't figure out how that's even possible. The only comfort I have is that maybe I'll find someone eventually that makes me feel a fraction of the way she did.  Maybe the reason for her being in my life was to let me know that my heart has the capacity to love unlike I ever had before.  Miraculously, it apparently doesn't even have to be sexual.  Although, to be clear, my balls are begging me to make sure that next time it is.

I chuckle, but my throat constricts like it's being squeezed in the same way my heart has been since she walked out of my parent's bistro and my life a year ago.  Closing my eyes, I clench my jaw tightly, as I hear the hushed single word I mumbled as her back got farther from me, "Goodbye."

Yet here I stand knowing I'd trade all of this in if I could find the good in that single word.