Where There's a Will (Lost Boys, #1)

by Jessie Walker

There’s only so much time a person’s allowed to grieve before it becomes an inconvenience, I’ve come to learn. Before the clock speeds up, and the world goes on spinning without you, you either pull yourself out in time to catch up, or you get left behind. That’s just the way it goes.

It’s lonely, but...freeing. Loneliness is freeing. How fucking sad is that?

Not to the city where the memories of who I was cling to every nook and cranny, reminding me of what I lost. “I don’t want to go back,” I reiterate my earlier statement.

But I guess the whole out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing only works so long as the matter at hand isn’t being thrown right in front of your face.

I sigh and sweep my gaze over my surroundings, taking in the strange yet familiar sights. I don’t think much around here has changed, but everything looks smaller now. Sharper in a way. Condensed. And yet, I don’t feel smothered by it.

I’m free in all the wonderful and horrible ways a person could be free.

“Let’s just say I know what it’s like to feel like all your shit’s on display. Makes it really fucking hard to move on when no one else lets you forget it.”

Silence stretches out between us once more as old ghosts wrap around us, threatening to pull us under. Down, where no one could reach. Grief is a bitch like that. Taking all that was once good, it cuts through like a knife—leaving a scar that is vile and ugly and permanent. Leaving memories that were once pure and light, forever stained by the bitter taste of loss.

I know what it’s like to live in the aftermath, when the veil of mourning has lifted, and the world around you seems to rush forward. Brighter and louder than ever, while you’re still trapped in the shadow of what you lost.

That defining moment where life, as you knew it, shattered. Severing your life into a Before and After.

It’s hard not to look at everyone around you and not see the person you once were looking back at you. Like a fly trapped behind glass. Never to be reached, never to be forgotten. They’ll keep waiting for you to snap out of it—the ones who knew you in the Before. They’ll glance back every so often as they continue to ...

They try to get it. Try to be patient and understanding. But ...

There’s an ocean of years separating us. Secrets and unspoken questions sluicing through the waves like grains of sand.

It’s not like I have the best coping mechanisms. We all do what we can to keep going every day; that’s life for you. Let us have our vices and kindly shut the fuck up.

It never used to be this fucking hard. Not with us. But what was once solid and impenetrable is now this fragile, broken thing. Memories are now little cracks in the surface; we can try to hold the pieces together with glue, but it won’t erase them. It will never fill the gaps.

“And the harder you try to catch up, the more it pulls you down. Like fighting quicksand. Hopeless.”

“The sun will always rise again.” I shrug. “You just need to make it through the night. Take it day by day—moment by moment if you need to—until you reach the other side. Nothing lasts forever.”

Because not only did we actually, maybe, sort of finally reach some semblance of a middle ground—no, he just had to go an inch further and squeeze my damn hopeless romantic heart with that little speech about freakin’ sunrises of all things, as if it was his God-given right to reach in and take what’s always belonged to him.

Sometimes secrets are secrets for a reason. Especially the ones you keep from yourself.

“Maybe I like being sad.” His eyes drift to some point beyond me. “When you’re sad, nothing else really matters anymore.”

“Because in the end, the only thing we have to fear in the dark are the things we run from in the light of day.”

So I steel myself and make to pull away, allowing myself one final heavy heartbeat to appreciate all the could-have-beens and wish-it-weres before setting them free, once and for all.

“Stop me,” I tell him gravelly, bitterly, desperately, “because I fucking can’t.”

“I hate you.” If this is hate, baby, I think, licking across his teeth, I don’t know if I’d survive your love.

As we hold each other like it’s the only thing keeping the fading storm from sweeping us away, because we’re the center, and as long as we hold the fuck on, maybe morning won’t come for us.

The world will keep spinning, and people will keep on sucking, and some days are going to be harder than others... But at the end of it, I’m still me. And they can take it or fucking leave it.

Living isn’t prolonging the inevitable; it’s simply prolonging the acceptance of the truth our minds keep from our bodies.

It was as if I was no longer in my body, but a bystander to the life I always promised myself I’d never lead. I watched with a numb sort of acceptance as I dug myself deeper and deeper into a hole I was sure I’d never find a way out of.

“Starting from scratch. Building something new. Despite what our brains are conditioned to believe, what’s broken doesn’t have to stay broken. We can change. We can be whole again.”

I never knew a smile could make me feel so full. Like I was worth something. Like I mattered. And I remember wanting to see it as often as possible.”

We’ve each been through Hell and back, and back again, just to get this far, and it’s as if the universe is finally giving us a moment to just fucking breathe. Like time has carved out a little pocket of space just for us, where no one and nothing can touch us.

“It’s important you learn the difference between having fun and trying to escape your problems.”

There’s a fine line between a work-in-progress and a toxic dumpster fire—and we straddle the shit out of that line enough as it is.

But I’m secure enough with my own insecurities to acknowledge that I need some kind of reassurance.

Sure, I get it—in theory. Denial is a powerful drug, and once it wears off, the agony ... It’s devastating. Earth-shattering.

Impossible not to remember how we broke skin with our teeth and made love with his hate. Breathing wordless pleas with every grasp, stroke, and scratch. Sharing tears like secrets lost in the wind. A night, perhaps, we were never meant to remember.

Third Eye Blind’s “God of Wine.”