1. MATTHEWS

MATTHEWS

2017

“Cael, don’t,” I warned, putting my hand up to stop him from coming any closer. He stalked me, his white t-shirt sticking to his biceps and abs, covered in mud and leaves from the creek, with the devil's smile on his face. “I swear to God, if you touch me, I will kill you!”

I screeched, stumbling backward as he chased me up the embankment, away from the rushing river of the creek that ran between our properties. My feet slipped in the wet dirt beneath my toes. I slid down before I could get to the top and crashed into Cael. His legs flew out from beneath him as he collided with me and wrapped his arms around me to protect me as we rolled to the base of the hill and back into the creek.

“Cael!” I gasped as I broke from the surface. My whole body curled up from the frigid temperatures and I barely made it back to the shore before my toes and fingers began to feel stiff and numb from the water.

“That wasn’t even my fault!” He helped me out of the water and we rolled onto our backs, sopping wet and breathing heavily.

His head lolled to the side, the sun bathing his tanned skin in the warm light that peaked through the covering of trees above us. His hair was so light from the summer sun that it was practically bleached blond, and I had the insane urge to brush the streaks of mud that clung to it around his forehead and ears.

We lay there like that in the grass, with only the sound of heavy breathing and the wind pushing through the trees filling the silence.

“Momma said you’re leaving early.” I used all the courage to say the words that had settled heavily between us in silence for the last three weeks of August spent together.

“The job in Rhode Island at the University needs him up there before the season starts,” Cael inhaled sharply. “I don’t wanna go, but…” he trailed off into silence.

“You don’t have much of a choice.” I shrugged. I wound a piece of long dark hair around my finger, trying to avoid the devastating look that swam around in the glassy color of Cael’s eyes.

I could count the random flecks of green that stared back at me, heartbroken and already so tragically lonely. Cael and I had never been apart. Not in our entire seventeen years. We had been born three hours apart, in the same hospital. Our mothers best friends, our houses on the same land in backwater Texas and two hours outside of Austin, our hearts beating to the same rhythm.

Cael was a part of me and, in the most bittersweet way, I was a part of Cael.

“What’s going to happen?” I asked him, terrified of the answer.

Distance and time didn’t apply to us. It never had.

“We’ll talk daily on the phone,” he said, rolling over onto his stomach and inching closer to me. “We can email, and I’ll even send stupid letters.”

At this distance, I could count every freckle on his face and trace them until I found all my favorite constellations. The most noticeable was the cluster that decorated his left cheekbone. Sharp and smooth, I was tempted to reach out and touch it. Curious to the point of being in agony over whether or not Cael felt the same about me.

If he loved me like I loved him.

“Clem.” My name rolled from his lips. “Did you hear me?”

I knew that the pain was written all over my face. It wasn’t something I would be able to hide much longer, if at all anymore, and Cael had always been able to read me like an open book.

“Letters,” I said softly, dropping my stare and focusing on the tie around my dress. “I want letters.”

“Every day,” he promised, brushing his finger beneath my chin and raising my gaze to meet his. “Mama will get sick of buying stamps. I’ll send so many.”

“We were supposed to leave together,” I whispered, so softly it was barely recognizable over the breeze.

Letters wouldn’t be enough. Words on paper couldn’t satiate the sadness I felt. Cael would go off and charm every pretty girl in Rhode Island. He would fall in love, find himself, and never think of me again. The thought of slowly fading out of his existence was terrifying and heartbreaking, but he didn’t seem to care.

“Now I’ll be alone.” The words left my throat, choked and clumsy, as I felt a tear slip down my cheek.

“You won’t be alone, Clem. You got other friends. I’m just one lame guy,” Cael suggested, trying to bring my mood up. “You’ll be okay.”

“I don’t have any other friends, Cael,” I said as I sat upright in the grass.

His grip on my chin suddenly felt too hot and I needed space. He moved with me, sitting up, the fabric of his dirty white shirt tugged against his skin and crumpled around his hips.

“You have other friends. Everyone loves you ! I’m just the chubby girl you take pity on because we grew up together. They don’t see me as a friend. They see me as your little sister, and so do you!”

I swallowed so tightly that it hurt my throat.

“I’m just your shadow.”

Cael flinched like I had slapped him.

I did everything in my power to hold the wave of tears at bay as they pricked the corners of my eyes and formed a lump in my throat. He would never love me the way I loved him. I pushed from the grass when he didn’t say a word, his blue eyes glossy from fighting his emotions. He simply watched me walk away. I stomped along the path, taking out all my anger and agony on the trees and moss around me. When my house came into sight I inhaled a long breath to calm myself down before breaking out into the backyard.

“Hey, Lovebug,” Momma cooed from the porch as I straightened myself out and wiped away the tears. “What’s wrong? You’re all covered in mud, Baby.”

My mom stood from the garden and wiped her hands on her overalls, making as if to stop me before I entered the house through the back door, but I just brushed past her, avoiding her gaze.

“Nothing, Momma, I just tripped.” I couldn’t look at her. My mom would see through the facade and lies, furthering the breakdown that edged closer. “I’m going to go shower. Tell Cael I went to the library… if he comes looking. I don’t wanna talk to him.”

As the back door swung shut, I heard Mom call out for more explanation, but I kept walking up through the house to my loft where the world couldn’t hurt me, and Cael couldn’t come.

Once I was inside, I clicked the door closed, making sure the latch was tight and no one could bother me, before climbing into bed in my muddy dress and muffling my sobs with the soft, clean fabric of my pillow.

I cried myself to sleep, my shoulders sore and head pounding, every part of my body in pain over preemptively losing my best friend. The reality that he was leaving had finally sunk in, but the truth that the distance would change everything about us had hit me like a freight train.

When I woke, the sun had gone down and my pillow was damp from the tears I cried, making my face sticky and clammy. I groaned, pushing from my bed and stripping from my dress, leaving it in a puddle on the floor near the foot of my bed. I wandered to my bathroom, still painted sky blue from my sixth birthday, when my dad let me pick whatever color I wanted. I ran warm water, briefly staring at my pale, freckled face and stringy dark hair in the mirror.

The girl that no one could love.

Cael Cody’s shadow.

The water seemed to ease the tension from my shoulders but only made my headache worse and, after a while, made me dizzy enough to sink to the floor of the tub and put my head between my knees. I had been so stupid to think that Cael would ever see me as anything but a friend.

I distinctly remembered the moment I saw Cael as something more, the exact day to the hour the sun casted differently on my image of him. He had stepped down from his porch, baby blue button-down undone at the top to show the gold necklaces he had stacked up on top of each other before the party. His hair was longer than usual, and chunks of dirty blonde had fallen against his forehead. He smiled at me that day, and I felt my chest open up and swallow the feeling of being loved by him whole.

I climbed out of the shower, trying to focus on anything, but my mind kept slipping back to his face. A year ago, somewhere between being kids and turning into teenagers, I had forgotten how to be his friend and started to become a lovesick puppy. I just hadn’t realized it until that moment.

I rummaged through my drawers for shorts and a tank top, changing into them and drying my hair, before chucking the towel back into the washroom. Quickly, I changed the dirty sheets on my bed, kicking the muddy ones into a pile and crawling back into my fresh-smelling bed. I pulled my journal from the dresser beside me. The top was carved apart and painted on with tiny little doodles that I couldn’t get out of my head.

I kicked around under my sheets until my feet hit the tiny knit bag full of pens, and I dragged it up to myself, picking out my favorite black one before throwing the bag somewhere into the void of my messy room. I could hear my parents in the house below, dancing in the kitchen to Tim McGraw like they always did.

I sighed. I had been taught that love is forever. It’s like cement. Once you're in it, there’s no getting out. I craved it, longed for it, and it seemed to always pass me by in the form of watching Cael pull girls into his lap or flirt with the cheerleaders during lunch hour in the cafeteria. I had a list as long as my leg of the girls Cael had loved that weren’t me.

Time seemed to creep by, and as the sun set in the sky, a soft knock came on my door, scaring me into hiding my journal beneath my pillow. I padded across my ugly, thrifted floor rug and turned on the small, dingy lamp on my desk beside the door before popping the latch and opening it.

“Mrs. Matthews said you didn’t eat,” Cael stood before me, his eyes cast to the ground like he was in trouble holding out a plate of my favorite fries. “I went and got them from Duke’s.”

“Why?” I asked like I didn’t know the answer, my door still half closed like it might protect me or even stop me from letting Cael come in.

“Because I made you sad, Clem, and I didn’t mean to,” he looked up at me through his thick lashes, and I could see that he had been crying too.

“You didn’t make me sad, Cael,” I bit. “I made myself sad, wishing for something I couldn’t have. ”

“What do you want? I’ll go get it for you,” he said without hesitation, and I felt my heart shatter like a piece of china inside my chest.

“What I want, you can’t just go get,” I said, strained and twangy.

“Just tell me what it is, Clem, I won’t leave until I know. Your Momma and Daddy went to a movie, you’re all alone in this big house, and I sat outside for two hours until they let me in. And Mr. Matthews threatened me with a gun before they left, so you better tell me what you want before he comes back and shoots me.”

“Stop!” I yelled louder than I ever had before, and Cael’s head cocked to the side in surprise. “I can’t tell you.”

I said each word with purpose and intent so he understood that it wasn’t something he could buy from a store and it wasn’t something he could fix with his pretty smile and perfect jokes.

“You can tell me anything, Clementine,” he said, pushing his foot against the door, “and you're gonna tell me right now what's making you so sad.”

“What if saying it out loud makes you sad?” I asked, backing away as he made his way into my room.

His flowery blue eyes scanned his surroundings and, for a second, I forgot that this was the first time he had ever been here. My daddy was strict about boys being in my room. Even having known Cael from diapers didn’t give him special privileges.

“I’m already sad Clem; I have to leave you.”

If my heart wasn’t already cracking in two, Keith Urban started to play over the radio in the kitchen below, and the lyrics to Making Memories of Us cascaded up into the loft.

His soft voice made me want to cry. “Don’t do that.”

“What?” he asked. He set the plate of food on the dresser as he explored further into my room. “Tell you the truth?” he shrugged, his jaw flexing as he looked around and avoided my stare. “Come into your room?” He asked with a soft smile. “It smells like lavender in here.”

“Cael!” I said, my emotions bursting, “Don’t force me to tell you. ”

“We don’t keep secrets from each other.” He played with the threaded friendship bracelet on his wrist that I gave him... It was sun-bleached and frayed, but he never took it off.

“This isn’t a secret,” I replied, walking back until my heels pressed tightly against my side table.

“Then tell me,” he begged now, a sound I had heard from him so often that I thought myself immune. But his eyes seemed bluer, his voice pleading, and all resolve in my body cracked under the weight of the sound. “Is this about him? Did something happen?” He asked.

“I want you,” I whispered just to get him to stop talking, cheeks red and tears rolling down my face. Everything had been ruined by that day, all my worst fears, but it made it clear that all I had ever wanted was Cael.

“My first kiss, my first time,” I swallowed the cotton ball in my throat. “I wanted you—”

When I looked up, the tension snapped like a rubber band. Cael closed the space between us, and his hands were tangled into my damp hair without hesitation. His fingers pressed into the back of my neck as he collided with my mouth, his lips tracing my own shape. Breathlessly, he pushed into me, begging silently to come closer, but I was paralyzed, my hands gripping the table, my toes curling into the carpet.