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Nathaniel
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An array of thoughts run through my mind, sheer confusion and consternation being the preeminent. I'm not being able to put any of them into words as I watch Alexia walk into my apartment. She goes directly to the kitchen and pours herself a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
I follow her from a short distance. It would be disingenuous of mine if I told you I have the most miniscule of ideas of what is happening here. Did she just...?
I sense her discomfort by the way she keeps shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and by the irregular clinking of the spoon against the porcelain mug. She's giving me her back and I cannot read her expression, but I did notice how red and swollen her eyes were, as if she had been crying for a long time.
"Alexia," I take some tentative steps towards her, standing by the countertop.
God, this woman confuses me in levels I can't comprehend. I've been so mad at her these past days –so mad to the point that it made me sick.
But I can't pretend that I wasn't even angrier at myself, because no matter how upset I was, how immature I thought of her behavior, I knew that she was as hurt as I was. I knew that I had put her in the middle of a situation that she wasn't ready to handle –that she shouldn't have had to handle – and that knowledge was slowly killing me.
Consequently, finding her casually standing on my door after everything, seeing how distressed she is right now and do nothing would be like swallowing thorns.
"Have you been crying?" She finally turns around, and the biting of her lips tells me she's scared that more tears will appear if she opens her mouth.
"Could you just hug me, please?" Oh, baby.
I erase the distance between us with two long strides, surrounding her with my arms as tight as I can. She buries her face against my chest and I take my opportunity to nuzzle her hair, getting my dose of that ever-present coconut scent that I've been missing.
My moment of indulgence shatters as soon as I hear a sob escape her lips. "What is it? Did something happen?"
"This is one of the hardest things that I've had to do," She sniffs through her nose, her eyes still cast down, "but I need to tell you about Mason –I need to tell you about my brother."
"Okay."
I take her hand in mine and walk us towards the living room. Once we're settled in the larger sofa, her gaze finally raises to meet mine. The pools of honey brown are a shade darker, a hint of melancholy and something else I can't discern...regret, perhaps?
My heart pounds like a racing horse against my chest. I have no idea of what she's going to disclose. She fidgets with her hands on her lap, taking deep breaths, opening her mouth and closing it again several time before she finds her voice.
"When I was six, I started taking ballet lessons. All of my friends did, and my mom loved the idea of sipping coffee with the other mothers every afternoon. But I sucked at it, Nathaniel, I was awfully bad." I think of a little Alexia with rosy cheeks and a ballet skirt and my heart warms. "The other girls would laugh at me and I'd always come back home crying. One of those times, my brother squeezed himself into one of my tutus to practice with me. That's the earliest memory I have of him."
She makes a pause, seeming to be collecting her thoughts. I fight the urge to touch her, to pull my arms around her.
"Like I've told you, I was a handful while growing up. My parents worked a lot and it was more than what they could handle." I knew she didn't have a regular, close relationship with her parents, but to what extent remained unknown. "And although Mason was just five years older than me, he made a damn good older brother."
My gut tells me that this is not a story with a happy ending. Be it by how her eyes look haunted, or the fact that she keeps talking in past tense.
"Do you remember that Narnia lithograph that you saw in my dorm?" I nod my head, a heat soaring through my body as I reminisce about that day.
"Mason gave it to me."
"He really seems like a good brother," I trail off as her eyes drop once more, and I realize that saying this was a misstep.
"When he was fourteen he was diagnosed with a brain tumor." The words roll off her tongue slowly, as if learning them for the very first time. "He got surgery and was under lineal radiation treatment for a couple of months. He seemed fine, but around a year after, he started having seizures."
My hands twist at my side. I feel a strange emotion brewing deep inside my chest. It's off putting, even though she hasn't really said much.
"Everything I remember from those days are the endless visits to the hospital. Mason would let me climb into bed with him, and we would read a book together or solve puzzles. My mom would go mad every time she found us like that, telling me I'd hurt him."
So that's where the puzzle obsession began. Our eyes meet briefly, and I see the building pressure in hers.
"I barely saw my parents. I understood that they needed to take care of my brother. The doctors couldn't simply find what was wrong with him. The CT scans came clear, he was taking various medications, but nothing seemed to work. My mom, she...changed. You must imagine how frustrating it must be being one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and not being able to help your own child."
I certainly can. After I told my mother the truth behind Emily and I's downfall, her being a lawyer, that's the reaction that she had. To a different extent, of course, but I can imagine. And I also did some googling after Alexia first told me who her mother was.
"But I was her child too. And every time she looked at me, it felt like she wished I wasn't there." The sound of tears weaves between her words, and my heart is quiet for a beat. "And I needed her. I needed a goodnight kiss, and someone to be at my school plays, someone to do homework with..."
I feel like the entirety of my heart fills with ache. I inch closer towards her in an attempt to pull her into a hug, but she raises her hands in front of her defensively.
"If you do that right now, I won't be able to finish."
And now I get it. The enigma that is Alexia Saunders is decoded at that very moment. She's so used to being on her own –to always take care of herself and putting everyone else before her, that is no wonder she finds intimacy and attachment troubling.
"Although Mason was going through a lot, he remained the caring, kind, funny guy he was. Until it became too much for him." Like I said, probably the most self-denying person that I've met in all my adult life.
I assumed a lot of things when I met her. Due to the mix of smart and sarcastic façade she's been guarding behind, I let a lot of things slip in occasions when I should have been paying more attention.
"Uhm, when they finally found a treatment that would prevent the seizures for long periods, he was allowed to come back home, but he wasn't my brother anymore. He was rude and bitter, and would say mean things to me all the time. My mother would do that very often, too. My dad had started drinking a lot and had no idea what was going on at home. Mason refused to take neuro-rehabilitation –went to therapy only once. He was no longer the sweet boy that I remembered. And I missed that boy."
I love her.
I love Alexia like I've certainly never loved anyone before.
A love that sometimes feels like a vast fire. And I'd let it burn me alive, delight me with its heat. Because I fear that the absence of it would be sharper than ice.
The absence of her.
And yet she doesn't know that –doesn't believe it, doesn't trust it. The love carved out inside my chest.
I want nothing else than to make her believe that she belongs, that she's loved. And listening to what she's saying frightens and lets me petrified at the thought of not being able to help her overcome that trauma.
What appalls me even more is the realization that all this time, where I stupidly assumed that I knew her better than most, that I had gained myself a place in her life, the truth is that I was oblivious to what was underneath.
"I didn't get it –how someone who used to be my favorite person in the world, my hero, became someone so...cruel." She makes a pause, reaching out to grab her mug from the coffee table and taking a small sip.
Seeing her eyes growing damp and not being able to stop it, to comfort her, makes me feel the most useless I've ever felt.
"One night when my dad came home drunk, I asked him if they had stopped loving me. He said that he could never do such thing, but that my mother resented me because I was everything that Mason could never be."
My sweet Alex. My sassy, playful, kindhearted girl couldn't possibly have gone through all of that. Her sweetness has remained untarnished. And now more than before, I want her to know I'd never hurt her.
Never stop loving her.
Never leave her.
"My relationship with Mason grew more strained with the day, to the point we wouldn't even talk to each other. It was a relief, in some way. From having someone constantly reminding me how much I sucked, to being completely ignored. And as for my mom...well I've done most of my life without her." Angry tears are gathered in the corners of her eyes. She holds her chin high, but I see how her lips tremble slightly.
"The following year I moved here, to Chicago." She smiles at me. A small, hesitant one. Her fingers move nervously on her lap, and I gather that she has finished talking.
"I'm sorry that you had to go through all of that. I really am, Alex."
"Pff...that's not even the worst part."
I'm reminded of one of our surreptitious walks through campus, when a business-looking man approached her and mentioned her brother's name. I had no idea back then, but everything makes sense now.
"During the summer of my second year of college, Mason called. He said that he wanted to talk, make things right. It was his birthday, and he said that if I agreed he would book me a flight and we would take a road trip to the amusement park that we used to love when we were kids."
She stares unseeingly at the window, and then her eyes fall shut, and there are tears rolling down and sparkling on her face.
"I said yes, but...I couldn't do it. I couldn't put myself through that again. I had gone back home during school breaks and every visit just screwed me all over again. I cancelled him last minute."
Not being able to keep my distance from her anymore, I reach out, fondling the side of her face. The warmth of her cheeks, wet beneath my fingers, so much pain embedded in her eyes –it makes me feel physically ill.
"Later that day, my dad called saying that I needed to go home, that Mason was at the hospital and that it was really bad." She adds, her voice drenched in a pain she can no longer hide. My own eyes burn with unshed tears. "He had a seizure while driving and crashed his car against a large tree. When I got there he already..."
She never finishes the sentence. When I peer into her honey, tear-filled eyes, her anguish settles on my own shoulders. I'm not sure what to say, what to do. I want to take the hurt away, make her know that I'll never be the one to inflict in on her.
"They didn't even let me see him, didn't let me say goodbye. My mother was so hysterical and mad at me –the angriest that I've seen her. She said that I was supposed to be there. I know that what she really meant was that it was supposed to be me, and not Mason."
I fear anger and an excessive amount of indignation flooding my veins as I make sense of the words, and I know I'm not anyone to judge a mother's actions, but you're fucking out of your mind if you think this woman is a decent person. How could you ever say something like that that your own child?
I still don't know what to say. I'm sure she knows that by my stunned, worried silence. But this time I won't let silence be everything she receives. With one swift and steady motion, I wrap my arms around her, holding her to my chest as she weeps.
I rub her back and kiss the top of her head several times, enabling her to pour out everything that she's feeling, all the burden she's been carrying on her own for far too long.
I find the words some time later, when her tears have quelled and her sobs have pandered off. "If I could do anything to change what you've been through, I would without hesitation." I tell her genuinely. As if that could erase it all.
"He was the only one who seemed to understand me, to care for me, and then he didn't and," her words are muffled against my chest, and I feel her shoulders start shaking again, "and I was left alone, and I've been alone all this time."
"You're not alone." I tell her firmly. "Not anymore. You'll never be again. I swear it." I mean it. More than anything else. I want to shield her from any more loss, any more stress. Any harm. "Nothing of what happened was your fault, Alex."
"It was!" She snaps, her words sharp and pained. She escapes my embrace, covering her face with her own hands. "If I had not been so selfish, if I had been there with him, maybe...maybe..."
I have never seen her unravel this way. Never seen her so vulnerable. My heart sears with something I'm not sure I've felt before. I think of an Alex –alone, emotionally injured, without her brother, without her parents.
I squeeze her hand, prompting her to look at me. She shakes her head profusely. Not sure if the action is going to vex her even more, I surround her with my arms once more.
"You can't live in the what-ifs, Alex. You cannot relinquish that much control over your life. I cannot imagine how hard it is to lose a brother, but what happened to him wasn't your fault." I keep rubbing her back and nuzzling her hair, trying to soothe her in some way.
"My mom has been trying to make amends lately, but she's not very good at it. She called me today, and what started as a decent conversation to try to make me go home for the weekend, ended in her snapping at me and telling me how after I took her son away from her, now I won't even let her see her only child alive."
A new wave of rage expands within me. I can almost feel the bile running up my throat, and I have to clench my fists in my utmost attempt to avoid saying something I might regret.
I concentrate on her heartbeat against my chest and the ticking of the raindrops against the window. I wonder how many of those conversations there have been in the past months and how oblivious I've been to what she was going through.
"I meant it." She suddenly pulls away from my embrace, looking me directly in the eyes, and I arch an eyebrow at her not catching on what she means. "I love you. I do."
"You do?" I try to suppress the foolish smile forming on my face, giving the timing, but I was greatly hoping to eventually address the subject as I was not so very sure she had really meant that when she showed up at my door.
"I've known for a long time. I was avoiding saying it aloud, because I was afraid that as soon as I did, it was going to be taken away from me."
"I'm not going anywhere, Alexia." Her cheeks are still damp and her eyes glassy, but I can perceive her expression softening, slowly letting room to the Alex I know.
"You're stuck with me forever, do you hear me? I don't ever want to be without you. Not for all the bacon in the world." She lets out that velvety giggle of hers and I have never been so pleased to hear it.
I bring our lips together for a short but meaningful kiss. "You don't have any idea of how much you mean to me. I'd take a thousand bullets to keep you safe."
I don't believe truest words have ever been pronounced by Nathaniel Rowlins, avid linguist. Alright, I might die short after the second bullet, but you get the point.
I'll probably never completely grasp the intricateness behind the word love, no matter how many books, researches, and masters. It might be as D.H. Lawrence said, the flower of life that blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration. It might be something much less romantic and idyllic and be reduced to a neurochemical reaction.
All I know is that in so little time I have loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
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A/N: March 21st marks the one year anniversary since the first chapter of KMKY was published! I personally can't believe it. I'm sorry that it has taken me so much to finish this story, I promise I WILL soon. Once again, thanks for reading!