Page 52 of Fall From Grace
“Yeah,” I say with a frown. “I do. You feel—”
“Lost.”
I meet her dark eyes. In the ambiance of the bar, they look almost black. “Yeah. Lost. That’s exactly it. So goddamn lost you worry you’ll never find yourself again, never get back that spark of life. So lost that sometimes you even wonder…” I swallow hard and rub the back of my neck. “…what’s the point of going on?”
She listens to me, so intent, so intent her expression is enough to make me forget about the hairs on the back of my neck. So intent the rest of the bar fades away around us, andit becomes just the two of us. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced before.
It’s kind of nice.
“What did you lose, Logan?” When Wren asks me that question, she leans a bit closer to me, like she doesn’t want anyone else to hear. She studies me so hard I feel as if I’m under a microscope, like she’s studying every aspect of my body language. Or maybe that’s just me feeling like I should run, that coming here was a mistake.
Old habits and all that crap.
I can’t tell her the truth, or at least, not the specifics of the truth, so I say something generic: “Everything.” Still, as generic as that is, it’s true. I really did lose everything, and although it didn’t happen just weeks ago, not like Wren’s wound, mine still hurts like a bitch.
“If you lost everything, you’re doing pretty well for yourself,” she says. “You’re going to school, have a house all to yourself—if you lost everything, it makes me wonder just how much you had before.”
Shit. She’s right.
I try to play it down by saying, “It’s… maybe I didn’t lose everything, but at the time, that’s what it felt like. Still feels like that. It’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there. You can’t know what it was like, just like I won’t ever know what it was like to lose what you lost.”
Thankfully, she lets theeverythingthing go as she says, “Right, because you’re not the kind of guy who sees himself getting married, I bet. Never had a girlfriend, never a long-term relationship. I know everyone views it differently, but… I can’t imagine spending my whole life like that. Don’t you ever feel lonely?”
I force myself to bark out a laugh. “And why would I feel lonely when I could have my pick of girls, hmm? I bet I could take home half the chicks in this place, if I wanted to—”
“Just because you’re with someone doesn’t mean you’re really with them,” she says. “You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone. I think you know that.”
As I try to think of something to say to that, the duo on stage bows, finally finished with their last song, and the people in the bar all clap, including Wren. I don’t, because those people sucked. So off key, and even though the screen with the words was right in front of them, during the last verse, the girl on the right totally fucked it up.
The bartender must have his own mic behind the counter, because once the duo are off the stage, he introduces the next group—a group of four. Oh, this should be good.
It’s only once their first song starts playing, a song by a boyband from the nineties, I finally respond to Wren: “It doesn’t matter what I know. Doesn’t matter what you know. No matter how hard you try, you’re always one step away from losing it all.”
“Some people would say it’s not about how you fall but how you get back up.”
“Those people don’t know what it’s like to fall from high heights. When you fall that hard, that fast…”
My memories flash: me on stage, wearing all black. My mask snug on my face. My black-painted fingers curling around the mic stand as I become someone else in front of a sea of nameless faces. The bright lights flashing overhead, blinding, making the temperature so goddamned hot I worry I’ll sweat off my body paint.
The screams. The cheers. The desperate look in the front row’s eyes as they hope to God I’ll notice them. Nothing will ever match that. How the hell am I supposed to go on knowing I’llnever get that kind of adoration again? That I will forever be a nobody?
I’m just as fucked up about it now as I was when it first happened, and I don’t know how to get better. Getting better wasn’t something I ever thought about. That life was all I knew.
“Sometimes you can’t get back up,” I finish. “Sometimes you’re just broken and there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.”
Wren’s eyes are suddenly full of empathy, empathy I definitely don’t deserve. “I don’t believe that, and you shouldn’t believe that, either. If you’re still alive, you can get back up.”
“And what if I’m not?”
She blinks at me. “Not what?”
“Alive. What if I’m not alive anymore? What if I’m just a shell of who I used to be, totally fucking dead inside, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it?” I can tell she wants to say something else, probably to comfort me, but she needs to know I’m beyond fixing. I’m the definition of unfixable. “Sometimes things are just broken, and no amount of trying to piece it back together again will fix it. Some things can’t be undone.”
She stares at me for a while before she whispers, “I don’t believe that.”
“Of course you don’t. You’re naive.”
“Does having hope really make me naive? Maybe you’re just too cynical.”
