Three Attempts at Love Stories

Author's Note: I was stupid enough to delete my first post, so I'm posting these stories again. These are my (hopeless) attempt to write love stories without murderous mermaids. I don't believe I did a good job, but here we go. The last story is a repost from my other blog. It was inspired by a guy named Axle Cano (who deleted his FB account, ), who dared me to write a story in under 500 words.

Here you go, dear reader. I hope I don't break your heart too much.

ONE: Tenderness

He just has to break his heart by asking the question, but the tenderness and the beauty get the better of him: 

“Do you love me?” he asks, his voice soft, so soft that it almost gets lost in the sound of the television’s static. Had his lover not been paying attention as usual, had his lover’s mind been elsewhere - wishing, perhaps, that it was someone else asking instead, someone who could be given a happier answer- the question would have been missed. 

His lover would do that when they fuck. When they come, the name whispered was not his. His lover thinks he does not notice. But he does. He notices everything – the reluctant touches, the cold, uncaring way his lover would take him to bed, the blank, faraway looks. 

He knows the answer. It is evident by the way the eyes narrowed, the lips pursed. The expression is harsh in the glaring red light but he thinks of beauty and tenderness still. He thinks of delusions and pain. 

He hears something inside him break. 

And so Nathan smiles in response to the unspoken things that leave his heart shattered, then he kisses Adrian’s hand. Between breaths to stem the flow of tears, Nathan tells him it is alright. 

TWO: Transition

When his heart broke five summers ago, he kept the pieces in a jar and hid it beneath his bed, away from the light and away from the world. The shards were so sharp and so small that it will take many comings and goings of the moon to put it back together.

I will never love again, he told himself as he accepts the blessed numbness of apathy.

***

When he met her four summers ago, she was standing beneath the rain, her long hair plastered to her pale, upturned face, her hands clasped to her breast. Her eyes were closed and her pink umbrella lay forgotten on the pavement, together with the canvas bag she took to school. 

He stepped forward and covered them both with his umbrella. She opened her eyes and looked at him. The emptiness between his chest, mirrored by the emptiness of her eyes, stirred like a dark cloud. Somewhere insignificant, he heard thunder rip through the torrential rain

It didn’t matter, because he could swear there was blood running down her legs and that she was weeping in the downpour.

***

When they first slept together three summers ago, it was after she had graduated as a student and he had left as a professor. He had forgotten her as a student, but he had not forgotten the way she looked in the rain. Nor can he forget her expression when he penetrated her, again and again, until they fell asleep, exhausted. He could never forget waking up with his arms around her and the fleeting hope that, perhaps, he could keep her there. It felt right to have her there.

But he also had not forgotten the pain of a shattered heart.

When she woke up, smiling at him radiantly, he told her, gently and vaguely, that he can never love her. She looked at him with an expression that betrayed nothing of what she felt. Her only response was to kiss his hand and tell him it was alright, before wiggling out of his grasp and cleaning up. She was out the door fifteen minutes later. 

He remembered the bed turning cold in her absence.  

***

When she first slept in his apartment two summers ago, she assured him it meant nothing. They had started seeing each other casually, which would almost always end up in sex. She would always wait for him to fall asleep and leave before day break. 

One night she asked if she could stay. 

I’m just tired, she told him, I’d like to rest a little. She adds with a teasing smile, don’t worry, this means nothing. 

She fell asleep with her back to him, looking small and fragile beneath his blanket. He remembered the tears and the blood and the rain and after a moment’s hesitation, he put his arms around her. This means nothing, he repeated.

As always, she was gone the next day. 

And then the wounds started. 

***

There were band aids on three of her fingers. She told him, almost cheerfully, of how she had mishandled a knife while peeling an apple. He reached for her, perhaps to take her hand so he can kiss the fingers, but the dark cloud was back, the blessed emptiness, the coldness that reminded him of pain, and so he stepped back and turned away from her, mumbling something 

He saw her smile slip. 

 ***

How do you fix something that keeps breaking, she asked him like she did so many years ago when she was a student. They walked beneath the stars. It was late and the moon was bright and the night was cool. The cuts on her hand had healed, but there were new cuts. 

If it keeps breaking then it is really broken, he remembered saying. Replace it. 

She stopped walking and turned to him, her young face breaking into a smile so trusting that he had to remind himself, like many times before, to be gentle with her, to not hurt her because she was so very young.

 ***

When he looked under his bed, in that jar where, three summers ago, kept his broken heart. The dust was covered with dust and the shards which had several times made him bleed were difficult to see. He opened the jar.

The shards were still there, miniscule and cruelly sharp. It reminded him of the pain, of the bleeding of his hands while, three summers ago, he desperately tried to put his heart back together.

A half-formed part of the once-shattered heart lay inside the jar. 

 ***

He met Yvonne three days after finding the heart in the jar. Her hair was long and flowing, reaching her lower back. Her eyes were shaped like almonds, the color of honey. When she smiled at him, those honey-colored eyes promised wonders.

He asked her out for coffee that afternoon. 

And much, much later,  to bed.

 ***

And he begins to compare while he held the fragile girl in his arms. She was much smaller than Yvonne. Her smile had undertones of pain compared to Yvonne’s vibrant ones. Her temper was unpredictable and her manner of expressing them was sometimes vicious and childish, whereas he has never seen Yvonne angry. Yvonne was eloquent and elegant, whereas the girl who slept in his arms, who was right now snoring a little and tightly pressed against his naked chest, was clumsy and silly. Yvonne was gorgeous, whereas the one in his arms was plain and too thin. 

He slowly removed his arms from around the girl. As night bled into morning, he closed his eyes and thought of the woman he shared his bed with instead of the girl that insisted on sleeping in it. 

 ***

When he woke up and saw the girl putting on her underwear, the first thing he asked her was why she never stayed. It was an insignificant question when it left his lips, but found himself truly curious as to why she left him every morning.

The girl put on her jacket, hiding her thin frame, and with red, red eyes, she looked at him and forced a smile. 

I don’t belong in your mornings. 

The girl did no come to him for weeks, but he barely noticed. How can he, when Yvonne’s lips tasted like magic and the sound of her voice were like bells in his dreams? It was she he thought off during the cold nights and for the first time the emptiness within his chest did not threaten to devour him. 

When he looked into his jar and found another piece of formed heart, he thought that maybe he was falling in love.  

***

And when he told the girl two summers ago that he would be marrying Yvonne, she neither cried nor begged for him to stay. A resigned sigh escaped her lips as her began to unbutton her shirt. He stared, transfix at the red line that marred the place between her breasts – a wound he never saw whenever he would fuck her and she would make love to him. Her bandaged fingers shook as she opened her chest and took out the last piece of her heart - the one she broken when she had lost her love and her child so many summers ago, the one she mended just for him. 

She took his hand and kissed it, telling him it was alright. She gently placed her last offering on his palm before turning away and leaving without another word. 

It was two summers ago when the girl who gave him a heart left him. 

She never did belong to his mornings.  

  

THREE: Mother

As tears streamed down her face, Naomi gently touched the sleeping child’s brow. Her son shivered beneath her fingers and moaned pitifully. A grimace formed on his lips.

It broke her heart. But they were safe, she tried to convince herself. She had kept him safe. She had kept him away from the bullies who tried to hurt him,  had found the courage to finally throw out his bastard of a father when she had seen the man attempt to hit her boy.

They were safe.

Outside, the sun slowly slipped off the horizon, bathing the city in blood, like the blood that ran on its abandoned streets. There was no sound except her beating heart and her panting breath. No screams, no shuffling of feet. That was hours and hours ago. Naomi couldn't tell how long ago anymore. It was as if the world decided to disappear beyond the glass doors of the ransacked convenient store she decided to hide in – as if people, as if life, had suddenly vanished.

They were safe, she whispered to herself again, unmindful of the wetness and the stickiness and the distinct copper smell that invaded her nostrils. Instead she bent down to her sleeping son and inhaled the powdery scent that only babies could have despite the heat and the sweat and the running.

He smelled wonderful, her boy. She placed a kiss on his cheeks, his skin warm against her lips, and he shivered again. Despite her fear and exhaustion, she managed to smile. He looked perfect. She decided her son was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

I love you, she told him, aware that in his sleep, he could never hear her, but needing to say it anyway. I promise I will never leave you alone.

Outside, the sky darkened, and very gently, she embraced the sleeping boy closer, his baby scent filling her, relaxing her. They were safe, she assured herself again,  feeling her eyelids grow heavy.

She barely registered the tearing pain on her left thigh and the blood that soaked her jeans as she adjusted her legs to be able to hold the child better. Her eyes fluttered close and she slipped into sleep.

It was only when she could not fight the exhaustion that dragged her under that she realized, with mounting horror, that they were alone.

The boy woke up, a few hours later, held so tenderly by his mother.

‘Nay?...Nay, it’s so cold… Nay? Nay! Don’t-!

Outside, in the abandoned town swallowed by the night and a scream, the dead began to rise.