Forever & Always by Jasinda Wilder

  There was nothing, suddenly. Nothing to the world, just me, and the coffee table, and Alex, my new friend, and the sketchpad open to a blank page with a charcoal pencil. I hadn't noticed those until just then. I picked up the pad and pencil, and let my right hand do what it wanted. It drew a circle first. I watched with interest as my hand drew without consulting my brain. The circle became ovular, taking up most of the page. Then the line down the center and the slightly curved cross-line near the top of the oval. I was drawing a face, then. Hmm. I felt like maybe Alex was watching, which was fine. Everything was fine.

  Or no, it wasn't, really; I knew that, but I simply didn't care. I was drawing, and it was really great. I hadn't drawn in forever. Since...since before Luisa and I had our break-up sex.

  Eyes, a delicate nose. Not Luisa's nose, and not her mouth. Who was I drawing?

  It was when the hair appeared, curving across her eye and left cheekbone, that I knew. Ever. I was drawing Ever. But...it wasn't Ever from my memories of camp. It was the Ever from the dream, that crazy dream she and I had shared. The differences were subtle, but I saw them. A sharpening of the gaze, sadness in the eyes. A tilt to her mouth that spoke of laughter and a willing smile and something else in her eyes, something kind of dark and hot and needy. It was all there in the sketch, and I couldn't take it. I had to look away, but my hand had other ideas, so I continued to draw her, the lovely features becoming more and more detailed and more and more haunting with every line.

  I was done suddenly. My hand stopped moving, and there was Ever, staring up at me from the page.

  "Dude. You're...fucking amazing. That's fucking photorealistic shit there, man. Who is she? And why the fuck is she so sad?"

  "She's...someone I met a long time ago, and she's...important. To me. She's sad because...well, that's not my story to tell. And I'm also not entirely sure why."

  "Enlightening," Alex deadpanned.

  I shrugged. "I didn't mean to draw it. My hand just...took over. She's kind of a private thing, I guess."

  "I can't honestly say I have any people in my life that qualify as 'private things,'" Alex made air quotes around the phrase, "but I guess I can respect that. She's got a lot going on in her eyes, though, that's for fucking sure."

  "You say 'fuck' a lot."

  "Happens when I'm high, which is most of the time, so yeah, I guess I do. That bug you?"

  "Nah." I tore the page free, carefully, and set it facedown on my thigh. I couldn't handle Ever's charcoal gaze, not while this sky-wheeling, earth-spinning feeling was coursing through me.

  "The closest thing to a person who's a private thing would probably be Amy. She's my fuck-buddy."

  "Can't be that private, if you're telling me about her," I said, leaning my head back against the couch cushion, staring at the ceiling and feeling the rotation of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the streets and the glint of the stars.

  "Well, you're my roommate. You've smoked my pot. That makes us bros. It's not really anything crazy, though. We just meet a couple times a week and fuck."

  "Just sex? You don't talk or anything? Or hang out?"

  "We usually smoke a bowl, fuck, eat some snacks, and then go home. Here, or her place, just across town. She goes to Wayne. Lit major. Crazy hot, but also just crazy. I mean, just loony. Talks in these metaphors that don't make any sense and goes on and on about how she's gonna write this book someday. Has it all planned out and does research and writes notes, but never actually writes it. But she's obsessed with it. I get her stoned so she'll shut the fuck up about it." Alex shot to his feet and lurched into the kitchen, came back with two cans of Bud Light, tossed me one. "It's actually annoying as fuck. Like, write the damn book or shut up. Jesus. Character this and plot point that and subplots and arcs and motivations, but I've never seen her writing it or heard her say she made any progress. Nothing. Just talk. But she knows books, that's for damn sure. Read more books than I've ever heard of. Fucks like a goddess, though, and that's all I care about. She knows it, I know it, we talked about it."

  I couldn't wrap my head around that, for some reason. I mean, sure, I wasn't in love with Luisa, and I never had been, but I cared about her. She meant something to me. We'd shared almost two years of our lives together. But it was never just sex. It was companionship. It was never fucking, even if it wasn't exactly making love. There wasn't a word for it, I decided.

  "If it's not making love, 'cause you're not in love, but it's more than fucking, what would it be called, do you think?" I asked Alex.

  He didn't blink an eye at the randomness. "Shit. Not sure. That's a damn good question. Fucking is...it's hot. It's hard. It's dirty. It's about the act, the feeling. That's it. Making love...that's about your heart. It's about sharing shit. Y'know? I had that. Before Amy. She broke my goddamn heart, that bitch. Lisa. Lisa Eileen Miller. I loved the shit out of that bitch. Five years. Tenth grade until a year ago, and then she went and fucked my my best friend. Had his baby, married him. Left me without a backward glance. Fuck him, fuck her, and fuck the both of 'em." He glanced at me, seemed surprised. "Shit. Sorry, kinda vented there, huh? I'm a chronic over-sharer. Pot kinda severs the filter inside me, you know? So yeah, I don't know what that would be. Emotionally relevant sex? Meaningful fucking? I don't know."

  "How do you do it? Have sex without getting attached at all?"

  Alex picked up the pipe from where it had been sitting unattended on the coffee table, hit it, passed it to me. "It's all about picking the right chick, I think. I got lucky, you could say. I met Amy at a bar. We talked about our exes, talked about how we both wanted sex without the emotional strings, and that was that. We both agreed that's all it was, and if it ever started to be more for one of us, we'd say so. I guess you just don't think about it too much. Don't make it personal."

  "I don't know if I could do that."

  "You had a girl you loved?" Alex took the sketchpad and pencil and made a haphazard line across the page. Then another, and then an arc, and then a series of jagged angles, and suddenly there was aesthetic meaning taking shape.

  I shrugged. "That's why I asked. She wasn't...we both agreed it had never been love. But it wasn't nothing, either. Somewhere in between. Filling a need, but in our life. We were together for almost two years."

  "The girl in the picture?"

  I blew out a stream of smoke as I shook my head. "No. She's...something else."

  I was feeling like the inside of my mind had expanded, like the walls of my brain were rocketing away on all sides, like my body was losing reality, losing meaning, losing relevance. Like my soul was a point of light in the universe and I could simply float wherever I wished and simply see, not interact. I felt at once heavy as a planet and light as a mote of dust. I felt, without feeling.

  I could see the appeal of being high.

  Alex stood up. "I got an assignment to finish, man. Your room's in there. You can help yourself to whatever if you get the munchies." He went into a room, his bedroom, I figured, and shut the door, leaving the bowl on the coffee table.

  I couldn't understand how he could stand up or talk or think about an assignment. I was nothing, no one, only a mote of dust. Just dust in the wind. I hated that song.

  My eyes seemed too heavy to hold up, so I closed them, staring at the inside of my eyelids, discovering fascinating whorls of light upon them.

  Darkness woke me. I'd been dreaming of Ever. Of her face, drawn in charcoal, speaking to me. Her words were lost when I woke, but her expression, heated need and sadness, haunted me.

  I tried to fall back asleep, even went into the bedroom, but discovered that I had no bed, and the room was completely empty. I found a blanket in a closet by the bathroom, lay on the couch, and stared at the ceiling, wishing I could find the reason for dreaming of Ever, wishing I could write her but realizing I wasn't sure what to say.

  Ever

  I watched Will sleep. His hair was long, brushing his shoulders. He'd let it grow the past year and a half, and he'd
been cultivating a carefully trimmed goatee. I didn't like it, but didn't hate it. He was still hot as hell, just in a different way. We were in my room, in my one-room apartment in Birmingham. He was attending U of M on a music scholarship, double majoring in music and business. He came to see me on the weekends, and we filled Friday evening, Saturday, and Sunday with dinner at expensive restaurants, concerts, long walks through downtown Birmingham, and sex. It was...idyllic, on those days.

  Then, when he left to go back to Ann Arbor, I wondered. About everything. About Will. About our relationship. About myself. About the secret stash of paintings I had in my closet, hidden from Will and from myself.

  He'd found my letters from Cade a few months ago. He'd freaked the hell out, said it wasn't fair. Yelled, shouted, scared me pale as snow. He hadn't listened to a word I'd said, hadn't given me an opportunity to even speak. He had no secrets, he said. He hadn't come down the next weekend, hadn't responded to texts or calls, but he'd shown up the following Tuesday with a bouquet of silver roses and a bottle of champagne that I'd imagined was insanely expensive. He'd spent an hour apologizing, then got me drunk and cooked me an effortlessly perfect chicken cordon bleu and made love to me on the sofa, slow and sorrowfully apologetic, whispering that it was fine, he forgave me, we were fine.

  I'd never apologized. I'd also never forgiven him.

  I'd held on to his shoulders as he moved above me and watched the way his hair fell across his face and wondered if I really dared call it making love, if I loved him, if he loved me. I'd come quietly, shallowly, slowly. Drunkenly. Sloppily.

  Now I watched Will sleep and wondered what he would do if I showed him the packet of letters, now thicker by three (only three in the last six months, how sad, how strange, how remote my dear Caden was, and I wondered but didn't dare ask him why he seemed so far away) and I wondered what Will would do if I got up right then, still nude, and pulled the twenty-six paintings from the walk-in closet where they hid beneath my pile of old coats and a ragged Harvard stadium blanket that had belonged to my great-grandfather.

  Twenty-six paintings, ranging in size from four inches by six to six feet by six feet. All of them were of the same thing. Various takes, colors, poses, lights, stages of realism. Caden. All faces of Caden. Serious, thoughtful, sad, laughing, looking away, looking directly at me. In one of them, he was gazing at me in a soulful and seductive way, as if he was beside me in bed staring at me with afterglow eyes.

  I couldn't seem to help painting Caden's face. When I was stuck on a particular piece, or stressed out by a paper or a deadline for an assignment or by Will's increasingly jealous and possessive behavior, I would find myself painting Caden. It would start out with his eyes, always. The expression in his eyes and eyebrows and then his mouth, and the rest would fall into place. It helped me stabilize emotionally.

  Will turned in place, rolling to face me. His eyelashes were full and dark against his cheeks. His sculpted arm was draped across my hip, and his mouth was open slightly. He was handsome, oh, yes, he was. My breath still caught sometimes, just looking at him, like I'd gotten caught in a daydream. Sex with him was a dream. Dates with him were a fantasy, each one a textbook example of Hollywood perfection romance.

  Yet...I was discontented. Unhappy. Off balance and confused.

  He would call me at random times to see what I was doing. He would demand to know my schedule, hour by hour, day by day. Once he even asked me for a written schedule of what I was doing and when. If I deviated from what I told him I was doing, he would act as if I'd betrayed him.

  I would sometimes catch him sending surreptitious text messages, after which he would tuck his phone in his pocket and act nonchalant. "Plans for Monday," he'd claim, eyes shifting away.

  He was lying to me. Oh, yes. I knew it. I painted my conviction of his dishonesty once. It was a dark piece, floorboards stretching into the distance, a door standing ajar. A distorted likeness of Will stood partially out the door, looking back at the viewer, lit by a streetlamp on the other side of the door, out of sight. His eyes were haunted, in the painting. If you looked closely, you could see he was clutching his cell phone in his right hand.

  Why would he lie to me? Cheat on me? What had I done wrong? I'd devoted all the time and energy to him that I could. He didn't make me happy; I didn't love him. But I cared for him, I enjoyed him. He was my friend. He was my only real companion. Except Eden, of course, who had her own apartment a few blocks from mine, and she went to Cranbrook as well. For now, at least. She'd mentioned Julliard and the Boston Conservatory and other exclusive musical academies and conservatories. We had lunch every day and often would watch movies together at night at my place or hers, eating too much ice cream and being giggly girls.

  But Will? He didn't make any sense to me. I lay beside him, watching him sleep, feeling some indefinable ache in my chest erupt and grow and spill out until I couldn't lie still anymore.

  I crawled out from beneath Will's arm, wrapped my purple fleece robe around myself, went into the kitchen. I set a pot of water on to boil, stared out the window at the orange glow of a streetlight, watched a black Mercedes slide into the pool of light and out of it, vanish. When the pot whistled, I dunked two bags of peppermint tea in it, and tiptoed back into my bedroom. Will was sprawled out across the entire bed, snoring gently. I stopped in place, watching him. I saw his pants on the floor, a pair of artfully faded and ripped True Religion jeans. I searched the pockets; no cell phone. He rolled over on the bed, onto my side. I checked under the pillow. Yes, there it was. A black iPhone 5 in a black protective case. I held the phone in my fist, watching Will, waiting for him to wake up. Nothing.

  I left the bedroom, closing the door with a near-silent snick behind me, and poured a mug of tea. Steam curled, and I tapped the "home" button. A photograph of Will with Wynton Marsalis appeared, taken in New York City when Will was seventeen. Will had performed at Lincoln Center and met Wynton, who was one of his heroes. I slid my finger from left to right. I knew his code; I'd watched him type it in enough: 1-3-9-5, his birthday.

  I found the green icon with the white quotation balloon symbol in the top row of apps, second from the right, next to Instagram. The list of text message threads dizzied me: Aimee, Jay, Dolly, Jake, Ben, Julie, Mackenzie...and, at the very top? "Sweetheart." I assumed the thread under the name "Sweetheart" was me. Only, when I opened it up, it wasn't a conversation with me:

  OMG Billy I can't wait for you get back here and fuck me I want your cock inside me. If you come home right now I'll blow you so hard you won't be able to see straight.

  jesus Kelly, youre gonna get me in trouble if she catches me with a hardon she'l know somthing is up.

  I don't care. Let her find out.

  Not yet.

  Why?

  I'm not ready to get rid of her yet.

  You promised Billy. By Thanksgiving. You promised you'd come back to Arlington with me and meet my Dad.

  It's not that simple. You wouldn't understand. She's...delicate.

  WTF is that supposed to mean? And am I supposed to care?

  She called him Billy. She wanted him to meet her dad? She knew about me, and wanted Billy to dump me. He thought I was delicate. Delicate?

  She gave him blowjobs. He'd asked me once, and I'd refused. He'd been upset, irritated. I had wanted...other things. He'd...not quite begged, but nearly. I didn't want to, I'd said, not right then, maybe another time. He'd gotten up and left the room, and he'd never asked again. And I'd never offered.

  Maybe that was part of why he'd gone to her, because she did that for him when I didn't.

  Something else about the thread niggled at me, but it took me half a cup of tea worth of rereading to figure it out. If you come home right now... the message said.

  Home.

  Where she was, was home to him, and her.

  When he came here, he brought a backpack with a change of clothes rolled up tight. Jeans, boxers, a T-shirt, socks. Cologne, a toothbrush and toothpaste, hair pa
ste, and deodorant, all kept in a leather Armani Collection toiletry case. He never left anything here. Never took a shower, unless it was with me, for sex. He came on Friday, stayed Saturday, left Sunday evening.

  I wasn't home. She was home.

  My head was spinning, breaking. My heart was...numb. I wasn't sure how my heart would react, how my soul would react, when reality caught up to me. I didn't care. I finished my tea, sipping calmly, and then poured another cup. While that one was cooling off, I put Billy's phone back under the pillow. But not until after I'd changed two tiny little things. "Sweetheart" was now "COCKSUCKER" and "Ever" was now "GONE".

  It was 4:30 a.m., and I finished my tea, dressed in comfy clothes, tied my hair in a bun, and left. I drove to Cranbrook, went straight for the private studio. Locked the door and pulled the blinds and turned on the ventilation fan and changed into my paint shirt, just the shirt. No bra, no underwear, no pants, just the button-down shirt, bare feet. Sleeves rolled to my elbow.

  And I painted. Caden's face appeared, sad for me. Angry for me. Needing me.

  And I painted Will, as a twisted demon all black shadows and flames. And Will's blue eyes. No. Not Will. Not anymore. Billy. Billy fucking Harper.

  I painted without seeing what I was doing. Shapes and colors, back to abstractions, back to what excised the demons from my soul. Hard reds and angry yellows and burning oranges, swathed across the most massive canvas I could find, a ten-by-ten I'd stretched, intended for a self-portrait project. Raw anger on canvas, confusion and rage and some strange sense of...freedom.

  A key scratched in the lock. I didn't turn around; only Eden had a key.

  "Felt you needing me," she said, wrapping her arms around me from behind. "Is it Will?"

  I slapped a vivid path of blue so hard it spattered on my shirt and cheek. "Billy. It's Billy."