"What does that even mean?" her cheekbone raised even higher as her head began to slowly pull back.
Honestly, I was surprised that I was even able to get that out. All of those familiar things trucked me at full speed, the things she had so commonly given me and then so quickly took away along with her consciousness. The breathlessness and the speechlessness, it was the same in every way. The way she brightened the world around me with every single word spoken was the exact same. Even if something felt different, was it able to carry any kind of weight if I couldn't tell what it was?
Grace, put simply, was the same as I remembered. The way the ends of her lips curled up towards the sky for the smallest reasons was still there. That smile, that ear to ear grin she showed to the those who needed it the most was like a blinding supernova torching the darkness away from it. Much like everything she did, it was a special sight to see. Yet, her best smile didn't hold a candle to her beauty when she did what she loved doing most. Playing a guitar and singing until her voice gave out.
There wasn't a more beautiful sight than watching Grace immerse herself into a song. Watching her sing and listening to that controlled, angelic voice was like being taken to another planet filled with green fields as far as the eye could see while petals whirled around her in the breeze. It wasn't a sight that could be explained with just words. The beauty she radiated and the sounds that vaulted from her when she picked up that guitar were just something that had to be seen, that had to be heard.
In that sense, Jay was the same type of person. He completely changed with that guitar in his hands and his voiced mirrored all of the pent up emotion he put into it. Even vocally, Jay was able to bounce between grit and softness in his voice, but it was still deep. They were both more talented than I could've ever dreamed of being. People like them had their own select worlds to live in, places I would never even come close to reaching or seeing through my own eyes, places I would never feel the greatness of existing within.
They were both so far ahead, yet they stayed behind and waited around for someone like me.
"It means whatever you want it to mean." I stuck out the tip of my tongue.
Grace pushed herself up from the ground and evened herself out before she bent back over, extending both of her hands to me. In that same instant, using both my own and her strength, I was on my feet and looking her in the eyes. It was a missed sight, seeing those piercing, glistening eyes every day and every night. It felt so surreal, so unrealistic. Looking at her made it feel like the impossible occurred, as though she rose from the dead.
"Hey." Grace traveled to my side and peeked over my shoulder, her hair bouncing with that carefree smile she seemed to love wearing around me. "Is your butt off limits?"
"I don't know." I let my forehead fall into her shoulder as my hands joined around the small of her back. "Why don't you see for yourself?"
"I like the so-" her hands began to slither down my stomach and around my waist until she stopped out of nowhere.
As Grace's voice and movements paused all together, the soft collision between my chin and her collarbone made it clear that she raised her head. What wasn't clear was the person that made her raise it, and her nearly peeved expression only said that she was irritated over her game of grabass being unpleasantly halted by another presence. That presence behind me was still a mystery, but it wasn't exactly a tough guess, either.
Releasing me from her lecherous hands, I was finally allowed to turn around and lay eyes on the person who interrupted Grace. For some reason, I was unsurprised to see Jay standing right in between the green of the grass and the brown of the dock. Whenever something happened, it seemed like Jay always appeared just when the smoke was clearing. In the same way I was a magnet to destruction, he very well could've been a magnet to drama.
Just like everything within my grasp turned to ash, perhaps Jay was pulled towards drama and tension. He just held enough common sense to wait until the initial confrontation was over before doing or saying anything. The days I barely got through in this place were usually because of something he said, something that came from a perspective I never would've thought of myself.
Grace's fingers met and interlaced at the crown of her head as she passed Jay. Stopping on a dime, as though she had forgotten something, Grace turned her eyes back to me and then looked Jay in the eyes. "Mine."
Jay blinked, cocking his head as his brain clearly took its time processing what she had said and meant by that lone word, all while the slow warming of my face went unnoticed in the background. It took me by surprise when Jay started laughing as he looked right back at Grace, holding nothing back. What I had a harder time believing was that Grace bluntly approached Jay Ward and said something like that without any sort of warning or precursor, even if it sounded just like something she would do.
"Lunch is gonna be ready soon." Jay turned to his left and began to walk away, letting her little comment slip into the nether. "Just thought I'd let you know before end up with cold food."
It was clear that Grace knew who he was, because she actively listened to him before our worlds came falling down around us. Grace, for some reason, really enjoyed and respected the music he put out. In her case, it wasn't about the looks he had or the songs that charted. It was the other parts of his music that she liked, the parts that his label never promoted. It was his darker, more vacant music that she liked. That was a nod to his older material, when all he had was a scratched up guitar, a cheap microphone, and a head full of dreams.
Grace always listened to heavier music and veered away from anything outwardly pop or bubblegum. Jay was the only exception I'd seen, but to say he was only pop was also reaching. Maybe Jay was the Garth Brooks to her Anthrax, or maybe there was something she heard that I hadn't, but her lack of shyness around him hadn't been anything to do with a lack of respect for him. As a musician, I was pretty sure that she more for him than a lot of others did.
"You are Jay Ward, right?" I took a few steps closer Grace, half-expecting the need to smack her to arrive.
"Yeah." Jay stopped again, his narrowed right eye catching her out its corner. "From what I've heard, you've got some chops, too. Feel like sharing?"
". . .That would be an honor." Grace smirked as she skipped passed Jay. "Just don't offer me anything. The only person I'll sing with anywhere else is Lynn."
Jay yawned and glanced at me before turning back ahead, brushing his fingers through his hair while his feet marched forward through the grass. "Definitely not a bad choice."
That was one thing about Grace that seriously hadn't changed. Even when she was right in front of me, if felt like she was a mile away. It felt like if I reached out, I would've swiped at air and the nothingness within it. It would have and could have been anything but Grace. If she was a mile away, then I had to focus on her so I wasn't left behind in the dust with nothing but her afterimage. She even said she wasn't going anywhere, but saying that never stopped that heavy feeling inside of me. That if I let her go too far ahead, she would fade away entirely.
He was the same way. If anyone looked away from him, he would be a blur in the distance within the blink of an eye. It was hard enough dealing with just one of those types in Grace, but there was a second right in front of me that was walking right alongside the other as they made small talk. The image of them walking and looking at each other painted a picture, and that painting was painfully clear.
The world and its mysterious ways intended for it to be this way. Grace and Jay almost looked like some kind of Hollywood casting, cherry-picked to look good next to each other. They both had the appearance to be looked at and they both had the talent to be noticed. The both of them were what most would call "a match made in heaven". The talent, the looks, and even the way they thought were the same. The only difference between them was that one of them wasn't straight.
It wasn't long before the door was met, where I was finally given artificial lighting and an air conditioner. Jay gave a small wave as he disappeared down a hallway and then to the left before coming back carrying two guitars a moment later. As Grace took the solid black guitar from his hand, she studied the tightness of the strings and then plucked one as she likely tested the sound it put out.
They both sat down, each holding a guitar and looking at one other. Just like every other time I had seen him play something on that guitar, he closed his eyes for that short moment, as though he was mediating. What followed that was a deep breath and then the opening of his blue eyes, a pair of eyes that seemed to transfigure whenever he picked up an instrument or talked about music. The intensity he exuded with a guitar in his hand was unreal, and the scariest part was that you didn't even have to be near him to feel it.
Beginning to strum, Grace's eyes widened a touch as she seemed to quickly pick up the song he started playing. It was only a short moment after he began the intro that he looked at her and then let a smile loose before he opened his mouth. "Can we take the streets? Because there's a horrible crash. Standing on the high way, a girl and her dad. You say yea. . ."
Grace followed. "It's far too much for me. Far too fast of scenery, but your voice. . ."
"And your lips are moving words that I cannot breach the noise." Jay looked up and around, as though an audience had been around him. "Just remember, always move fast."
She followed his singing with simpler guitar work and a seemingly improvised yet faint harmonization, and then took over once more. "We know you, we own you. . ."
While Jay and Grace continued to play the quiet song, the music and their voices slowly began to fade into the background as my sight was overcome by a sudden, moist blurriness, a blurriness that I hadn't ever seen coming. It wasn't but a second later that I realized that damp blurriness long started falling down my face before my own brain even registered it as tears seemed to rain down from my cheeks and onto my arms.
All the tears my eyes had to offer were falling from my eyes. A mysterious, hidden torrent was released inside of me and allowed to run rampantly to its exit - my eyes. Even when I had the chance to watch two of the most talented people I'd likely ever know, I was somewhere else. I existed in the same room as the both of them, but I was floating in my own distant, vague bubble.
Over the past year, the tears and the emptiness seemed to be the only constants in my life. I cried with the pain and I cried with the terrors of the night. Even as I ran away into my drug-induced fantasies, there was a pressure that always loomed over me and weighed on my shoulders. That pressure was reality and the things I was burying deep within myself, the mounting pressure of the things I didn't to see or confront.
The silently falling tears came and continued without any reason. I was given another chance to watch the woman I loved doing what she loved once more, yet I could only sit there bordering on being a sobbing mess as she was doing the very thing I was there to watch her do. She was singing and she was playing her guitar, but I couldn't hear a thing. I was being deafened by the very tears I was drowning in. What was wrong with me? Shouldn't I have been happy that she was able to still sing and play guitar, shouldn't I have been listening like it was the last time I would ever hear her again? Why was I crying when I was supposed to be listening?
Why did these tears feel so different from all of the others I'd felt before?
"Seriously? You're still such a crybaby." Grace's thumbs carefully rested themselves against the skin of my cheekbones as they wiped the tears away in their own directions. Those thumbs were just as quickly replaced with a pair of arms hanging around my neck and a pair of lips against my jaw.
That was when the meaning of these tears hit me. Grace was really back in my life, and it took her picking up that guitar and singing for that to truly set in. It was the moment she started singing that it all sunk into place, that all of this was real. Her voice and the delicate sound that had always come from her guitars proved that this was reality, that the woman in front of me was the genuine article.
The reality that she was back in my life overwhelmed me to the point of sobbing like some nightmare-ridden child, but the reason they felt different was because they weren't the tears of sadness that I'd grown so used to. They were tears of joy and happiness, a pair of emotions I thought I'd permanently lost, a pair of emotions that I thought I had long buried. I thought the feelings of happiness in me were dead and gone, terrifyingly extinct.
". . .Sorry I took so long."