Tess Sharpe - Far From You

“The funeral’s on Friday,” he says.

“I know.”

“My mom…” He stops, swallowing hard. His gray eyes—so much like hers that it hurts to look into them, like she’s here, but not—shine with unshed tears. “I had to go to the funeral home by myself. Mom just couldn’t deal. So I sat there and listened to that guy talk about music and flowers and if the casket should be lined in velvet or satin. All I could think about is how Mina’s scared of the dark, and how messed up it is that I’m letting them put her in the ground.” He lets out a tight laugh that’s painful against my ears. “Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?”

“No.” I grab his hand, holding tight when he tries to pull away. “ No , it’s not stupid. Remember that Snoopy night-light she had?”

“You broke it with a soccer ball.” He almost smiles at the memory.

“And you covered for me. She didn’t speak to you for a week, but you never told.”

“Yeah, well, someone had to look out for you.” He stares out the roughly framed window, anywhere but at me. “I keep trying to picture it. How it happened. What it was like. If it was fast. If she was in pain.” He faces me now, an open book of raw emotion, wanting me to bleed all over the pages with him. “Was she?”

“Trev, don’t. Please.” My voice cracks. I want to get out of here. I can’t think about it. I try to tug away, but now it’s him who’s holding on to me.

“I hate you.” It’s almost casual, the way he says it. But the look in his eyes—it turns his words into a tangle of lie and truth, bearing down on me, so familiar. “I hate that you were the one who survived. I hate that I was relieved when I heard you were okay. I just… hate you.”

The bones of my fingers grind underneath the pressure of his hand.

“I hate everything” is all I can say back.

He kisses me. Pulls me forward with a sudden jerk of movement that I’m not prepared for. It’s jarring; our teeth clack together, noses bump, the angle is all wrong. This is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is the only way it could ever be.

I get his shirt off with little difficulty, but mine is more trouble, tangling around my neck as he gets distracted by my bared skin. His hands gentle, soft to the point of reverence, moving over skin and bone and scars, tracing the curve of me.

I let myself be touched. Kissed. Undressed and eased back onto the wooden floor scarred with the remnants of our childhood.

I let myself feel it. Allow his skin to sink into mine.

I let myself because this is exactly what I need: this terrible idea, this beautiful, messy distraction.

And if somewhere in the middle both of our faces are wet with tears, it doesn’t matter so much. We’re doing this for all the wrong reasons, anyway.

Later, I stare at his face in the moonlight and wonder if he can tell that I kissed him like I already know the shape of his lips. Like I’ve mapped them in my mind, in another life. Learned them from another person who shared his eyes and nose and mouth, but who is never coming back.

NOW (JUNE)

For a long, frozen moment, Trev and I stare at each other. I’m caught in his gaze, hungry for the slightest glimpse of her, even if it’s just similar features in a familiar face.

They always looked so much alike. It wasn’t just their high cheekbones and straight noses, the way their gray eyes tilted up at the edges. It was in the way they smiled when they were trying not to, lopsided. The way they both fiddled with their brown curls when they were anxious, how they couldn’t stop chewing their nails for anything.

Trev is all I have left of her, a handful of echoing characteristics buried underneath what makes him Trev: the honesty and goodness and the way he doesn’t hide things (not like her, not like me).

Mina had loved him so much. They’d been inseparable since their dad died, and when I came along, Trev had stepped aside to make room, though my seven-year-old, only-child self didn’t understand that. Just like I didn’t understand things like daddies dying and the tears Mina would sometimes shed out of nowhere.

When we were little, whenever she cried, I’d give her the purple crayon out of my box so she’d have two, and it made her smile through the tears, so I kept doing it. I stole purple crayons from everyone’s crayon boxes until she had a whole collection.

And now Trev stares at me with her eyes like he wants to devour me. His hair’s long, veering into mop territory, and his jaw’s prickled with stubble instead of smooth. I’ve never seen him this scruffy. I can feel the hard edges of calluses on his palm where he’s holding my arm. Rope calluses, from handling the sails. I wonder if that’s where he’s been spending all his time—on his boat, trying to sail away from it all.

He lets go of me, and the feelings battle inside: relief and disappointment wrapped up in a neat, bloodstained bow.

I step out of the doorway into the sunlight, and he backs away like I’m poisonous.

He sticks his hands in the pockets of his shorts, rocks on his heels. Trev is strong and tall in that way you don’t really notice unless he needs to use it. It makes you feel safe, lulled into this sense that nothing bad will happen with him around.

“I didn’t know you were home,” Trev says.

“I just got back.”

“You didn’t come to her funeral.” He tries to make it gentle, not like an accusation, but it hangs between us like one.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not the person you need to apologize to,” Trev says, and waits a beat. “Have you…have you gone to see her?”

I shake my head.

I can’t go out to Mina’s grave. The idea of her in the ground, sealed forever in the dark when she had been all light and sound and spark, horrifies me. When I force myself to think about it, I think she would’ve liked to disappear in flames, the brilliance and warmth all around her.

But she’s in the ground. It’s so wrong, but I can’t change it.

“You should go see her,” Trev says. “Make your peace. She deserves that from you.”

He thinks that talking to a slab of stone will make a difference. That it’ll change something. Trev has faith in things like that, just like Mina had.

I don’t.

The belief in his face makes me wish I could tell him yes, of course I’ll go. I want to be able to do that. Once upon a time I loved him almost as much as I loved her.

But Trev has never come first. He’s always been second, and I can’t change that now or then or ever.

“You think it’s my fault, too.”

Unable to meet my eyes, Trev focuses on the kids playing on the jungle gym a few yards away. “I think you made some big mistakes,” he says, tiptoeing around words like they’re land mines. “And Mina paid for them.”

It hurts more than I expect to hear him confirm it. Nothing like the shallow cuts my parents have left in me. This is a blow to a heart that was never quite his, and I almost crumble beneath his disappointment.

“I hope you’re clean.” He backs away from me like he doesn’t even want to share airspace. “I hope you stay clean. That’s what she’d want for you.”

He’s almost down the walk when I ask; I can’t help myself. “Do you still hate me?”

He turns, and even from this far away, I can see the sadness written on his face. “That’s the problem, Soph. I never could.”

THREE AND A HALF YEARS AGO (FOURTEEN YEARS OLD)

The morphine has worn off. The pain is all over, a sharp edge that relentlessly carves through me.

“Push,” I say between cracked lips. I move my hand, the unbroken one, trying to find the button for the morphine drip.