Page 4 of Echoes of Nevermore
I repeat the same thing to myself that I have for years.
She doesn’t remember.
She can’t.
She’s better off.
These words have echoed inside me for so long that they shouldn’t affect me. But they are just as painful today as they were when they were born.
She gnaws on her lip again, her fingers looping through the handle of her car door. She hesitates before opening it, her eyes lifting to my face again. Her conscious might think of me as a stranger, but the way she stands too close to me makes me think her body remembers. Maybe her heart remembers the beats of mine.
This is the longest we’ve been together in a long time, and I don’t want to let her go. Never do. Never did. Every time she walks out of my life, it gets harder.
Don’t interrupt.
Let her live her life.
She’ll come back.
Eventually…
She always does come back, but never the same. When she finds her way back to me, she’s a little more damaged, and her heart is a little less mine to claim.
“I get it. Business cards are kind of outdated, huh?” I blurt out to prolong her leaving me.
She nods, a small smile playing on her lips.
“How ‘bout I put my number in your phone?”
“Sure. I guess.” She pulls her phone from her pocket, her attention instantly zeroing in on her left ring finger. My eyes dart to the gold ring with a tiny, almost nonexistent diamond perched in the middle of it. “Well, no. I guess I shouldn’t. Scott…” The way she says his name is like poison coming out of her mouth.
That is the asshole’s name that I intentionally blocked from my mind. Scott. He didn’t appreciate her as far as I could tell, at least not in the way she should be. The way I would. He rushed her out of the door, complaining that her pace was too slow for his liking. She was quick to bite back, walking even slower than before. I remembered thinking there’s my girl, but the thought soured when he looped his fingers through hers, and she let him.
“Scott the one who gave you that?”
“Mmhmm,” she murmurs, her baby blues slowly lifting from the ring and then to me. Her lips crease together, and she breathes out slowly. She acts as if the ring is an obligation she must force herself to remember, and not a symbol of a lifetime of promised love. She didn’t smile when she spoke his name—the way one does when they think of the love of their life, simply because they can’t stop themselves.
I want to yell at her and ask her why she’s putting herself through this, but that wouldn’t solve anything. The only thing I would accomplish by doing that is pushing her further away from me than she already is. I refuse to put more distance between us.
So, I stay silent.
Closed off from her.
A severed love.
A lost soul unable to move on without its other half to guide it through life.
Always lost.
Always forgotten.
But cannot ever forget.
“Doesn’t seem like you’re exactly thrilled about him or the ring, Crow,” I observe, even though I should keep my mouth shut.
“I’m not, but I’m also not a cheater. Taking your number feels wrong.” That damned moral compass of hers has always pointed higher than mine.
I snatch her phone from her hand, holding it in front of her face to unlock it, and then I click to add myself as a new contact. She gasps but does nothing to stop me.
