The car stopped with a jolt as a white fence came to view. Drake stepped out and I followed him, almost tripping by a rock.
"Are you going to rape me, Drake?"
He looks at me lazily. "If I wanted to do that, I would bring you to a nicer place than this. Now come on." That's the most he said for the last forty minutes.
But I follow him blindly.
We were currently in a deserted area of Chevelry, the part with the maze of thick red trees, and their glory had somehow started fading. The leafs crunching beneath my feet.
While I gracefully stumble through, Drake seemed to know the place by heart.
"How the hell...can you walk like that?" I pant as I hop over a fallen branch. "Do you usually take stroll around here?"
"Actually," Drake says, and something in his voice seemed impossible to express by words alone.
"I haven't been here in years."
I blink away the confusion and rather than asking questions I focus on getting to whatever destination Drake dragged me to with all my limbs contact.
Then, finally after God only knew how long, we stop.
And my head drop in the beauty we were surrounded by.
The forest had a grand clearing with a river running through and wild flowers making their existence clear loudly with their many colors and shapes, and the sun hits the river just right so it seems it has its own halo, and the little dwarf mountain by it had a cliff which if you jumped from you'd fall right into the deep waters.
I looked around and wondered how such a treasure has been buried here for long and then I felt as if all the secrecy of Drake's was worth it.
Such beauty couldn't go wasted as many things had the last hour.
Without restraining myself and feeling a need to...be free, I run towards the river and with delight I discover I can't even see the end of it. It seemed to be bottomless.
I stripped my jacket and shirt off and the wind chilled my heating skin.
"What are you doing?"
But I ignore him. I ignore him, my head, my dazed mind, the words, the throbbing heart and I feel infinite as I strip the rest off and dive in, and I feel the cold and ignore it, and soon I dip my head down and it was freedom.
It was freedom of the mind.
I wasn't empty, I wasn't happy, I wasn't sad nor angry.
I was Avery where I swam.
I was content.
I accepted every though that came to mind, and let it drift through to the dark corners where they would wait until I was alone and they'd terrorize me, stealing sleep.
But right now, frankly, I didn't give a damn and I lived, because I was alive and I ought to act like it.
"Coward!" I cry as I see him hovering where I stood a heart beat of a moment ago. He looked at me madly.
"You're crazy!"
"And I love it!" I demonstrated by dipping my head down and emerged from the surface, laughing, the water running down my throat and I coughed, though somehow I was laughing still.
"Is it cold?" Drake steps closer, bending by his knees as he looks at me questioningly, but his eyes were warm, they were so very warm.
"Very!" I push myself up, and gravity pulls me down. "Come. I'm surprised you haven't jumped in yet by the though that I am here in only my underwear."
He smiles knowingly. "The view is good from here."
"But better down here."
We gaze teasingly at each other and then without a word, he stripped himself of clothes and jumped in with me. The splatter makes me laugh like a child.
But then I was in his arms, and he held me by the waist and I laughed more, but then without warning we went down and down and down.
For a moment I panicked and as I was about to thrash around, we were up again.
I heaved in and out, and laughed though still mad and I threw my arms at him, and he fell backwards with me on top. Gravity pulled us down the surface, but I straightened and he came back looking wild.
"That was not fun!"
"It was." I squeal.
And somehow the look in Drake's eyes changes by what I presume is my childish smile, childish look, childish self.
He seemed puzzled.
"Yes, I know." I say, smiling wider. "Not long ago I was very depressing."
"Now very happy."
"I think I'm bipolar."
"I think you are too."
"I don't care.
"I don't either."
I feel an urge so strong, but though I felt very daring, I didn't give in. It didn't seem appropriate. Not now, like this.
Then I finally ask him.
"Why did you bring me here?"
Drake doesn't avert his eyes, he doesn't twitch, he doesn't wince nor does he make any movement I could currently see. He still looks happy, but a light was lit inside his eyes.
"My dad used to sneak us in here whenever he had a fight with my mother. We'd always jump from there," he pointed at the little cliff. "And whoever jumped first would treat the other one ice cream."
"Your father sounds great."
Then Drake nodded solemnly. "Yeah," he says. "He was."
And then as if all the joy out of me was sucked out, I almost sink, but I keep myself up and I keep myself calm for his sake.
This time I had to seem strong for him, and I wouldn't let him think that such information made me the slightest different.
Though it did.
It did, a lot.
"Oh," I say brilliantly. "How-"
"How'd he die?" Drake asks. "That's the real reason I brought you here, Avy."
I don't move because he seemed to take a pause, and I let him, and I let myself wander to a corner of the water where my toes could touch ground so I stood still, waiting.
Drake took his precious time. But when he looked at me again, there were no grief nor longness.
They were just sunk and empty.
"My father took his life here. That time around he didn't have a wife to blame on, or a son, or a friend nor a colleague. He died a lone man right where you are now. He jumped from the cliff. He, and I have his biopsy to prove that, intentionally jumped, crashing his head to the side of the wall and unconsciously drowned."
He sees the look in my eyes and recognizes it somehow.
"If not the biopsy, the letter he left was kind of a giveaway to it. It said 'Death's the most wondrous journey. It's destiny is unknown and only the bravest, courageous ones goes willingly.'"
The oxygen seemed stubborn and I couldn't get enough of it.
But Drake went on, seemingly not touched physically nor emotionally by his own words.
"My dad was a very sad man, but I did love him. I still do. The point is, I never got to say goodbye. I was in London by that time. I didn't know he was dead until months later when a few hikers found him washed up on the grass, cold, dead and alone."
"Yet you, if it turns out the cancer of your father is not treatable, you have a chance."
I let him put his hands on me, pushing my air out as his chest met mine, and I let myself breathe in the safety and the lingering words down to my lungs, filling them with knowledge, with strength, with courage and I breathe freely.
"Don't let the chance go to waste."
I won't, I promise him, I won't.
And we stood there infinitely.