A/N: I recommend listening to Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight to this prologue of the story.
May 25, 2013
When Maya thinks of her first time, it's all sighs and flashes of his warm eyes. However, most of what is vivid to her about the day it happened are the moments afterward, with the remembrance of choosing to do the right thing and how it did not save her from the inescapable reality of losing him. What she attempts to do on the days she allows the memories to come back is cling to the good from the day she left Campbell-surviving and hopeful-heartbroken. Whatever good is left. Maybe the fact that he was just left surviving.
Maya stood bleary-eyed and hesitant by his hospital room doorway. She had no real plans to visit him in the middle of the night, but she had had a terrible dream of him actually dying, the way he intended in the first place. When she moved forward without greeting him, she threw her arms around him, crowding him in bed. He told her he was here, and somehow his gentle caresses heated her skin. He protested her request for him to touch her, nervously eyeing the door she had left slightly ajar, but then she whispered desperately near his ear, telling him her fears. When she returned from closing his bed curtains, he tried to calm her with a chaste kiss over her wet, salty lips, whispering his promises, but even he couldn't deny that his skin was just as fiery.
She didn't have to ask him twice.
He's all sighs and warm eyes.
At dawn, when she overhears the midnight nurse cursing to another one about her too long nap just outside his room, she narrowly escapes a severe lecture on family visitor rules. Luckily, it's Nurse Samantha, who is a sometime unprofessional sap about young love, letting her leave only with a final warning.
It took her half an hour to get home from the bus stop outside of the hospital. It took her another half an hour to bus to the public skating arena near the school. Then there's the time she took to lace up the skates that she hadn't worn in two years, when her father first purchased them. By the time she was gliding through the middle of the rink, she wondered when Cam would wake up to his empty hospital bedroom.
His sighs, sharing her sighs. His warm eyes, her misty ones.
She remembers shivering from the fresh memory of their nakedness, and how new she felt as she sliced through the middle of the ice rink again. Making a wide, lazy circle over the ice, she tilted her head up, closing her eyes, to dream up a night sky above her. He took her under the stars once, where they had just looked up and talked about nothing and everything. Her imagined twinkling stars weren't as bright as she remembered, so she blinked her fantasy away, and skated on.
It should have felt romantic, it should have all felt terribly romantic, like the movies Tristan and Tori made her watch from time to time. There was that one movie with the guy blasting music from an ancient-looking boom box outside the girl's bedroom window; they laughed about that a lot, though they swooned over it even more, admitting they would not have minded their boyfriends to try the grand gesture. So, she wondered why she was quick to leave Cam's embrace. He was warm and even the unflattering fluorescent light that flickered over him could not obscure how beautiful and peaceful he looked fast asleep. She supposed it was the fact that he looked so beautiful, so peaceful. It reminded her too much of how she found her mother before she died. 'Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch, Ms. Dawes had once recited in English class, and it was painfully fitting that it looped over and over again, weaving through the thoughts she strained to distract her.
She returned to him in a daze much later in the day, telling him she went skating, telling him that she knew why he skated regardless of the pressures he faced on the ice, when he skated for himself. She remembers his wide smile and his gratefulness for 'getting him'. But, Maya could not bring herself to smile back, and he only appeared to be concerned for a moment before he started complaining about the chilly temperature of his room.
In fact, he remained almost too blissful for the rest of her visit. Even when he wrapped a red ribbon around the charm bracelet he had given her months ago, as he told her he had read about red strings that tie people together by fate (from a magazine she had read to him one morning while he was recovering on his first day awake), even when he offered her the most sincere commitment he had ever made to anyone about his health, she told him, "What does it matter?"
"Maya, I promise." His resolve finally starts to crack, his too wide smile weakening.
"No!" She cried abruptly, startling him. "No, you can't. No one can promise that." And the practiced words she had been rehearsing to herself since his attempt in the greenhouse came freely.
He was in tears almost immediately, as if he had been anticipating this, and she recalls her fleeting plea for time to repeat so she could take back the breakup speech, but she continued, cringing at the sound of the words grating in her head, "I'm sorry, Cam, but this doesn't mean you're fixed. This doesn't mean you're never going to feel this way again. This doesn't mean that things won't get worse. Things always get worse."
She saw him struggle before he hurriedly assured her of his new found stability, though she already moved from her seat next to him, standing at the foot of his bed. "P-pl-please," he tried through his spluttering, and she wondered what her eyes looked like if he feared what he saw in her just then.
"I'm sorry," she said through her own tears, covering her face. "I'm sorry I can't," she finished, and then she ran, bumping past an unforgiving nurse who did not share the same sentiments of Nurse Samantha.
The rink was full by the time she came back, full of families and couples she knew and strangers. She smiled some, brushed off her disheveled appearance to friends she noticed from school, and sat alone in the bleachers, continuing her internal monologue. What does it matter that her mother's prognosis promised a real life, if it was ultimately shortened without notice? What does it matter that Cam survived, when there was still a lingering sadness in his voice?
She remembers contemplating the guy with his boom box in that movie again, remembering the way she crooned her desires for 'a guy like that'. But, they aren't real, and these situations aren't real, she mused. And soulmates are for people who ignore how much distance there actually is between two people who love each other. And red strings of fate are beliefs for people who forget the pain there is when lines are easily severed by simply living or dying. At fourteen, she wanted to scold herself for her pessimism, find a silver lining, and be done with it. But, then losing her mother and not causing, but most definitely missing signs of her boyfriend's almost successful suicide attempt in a span of her freshman year may not have that glimmering horizon she hopes for.
After a summer of true radio silence, she remembers asking Mike Dallas about Cam leaving for his real home at the start of her sophomore year. She remembers she tried her best to bite back tears because she had to find out through Mike Dallas. The gnawing regret that had been dormant since leaving him in the hospital hit her too hard when he told her that Cam definitely did not leave any farewell messages, written or electronic or otherwise.
It took a week of throwing away everything that reminded her of him in her room (it almost looked as though she were moving away near the end of the clean up, with a number of boxes and empty space). And all this work made her realize the glaring truth about herself. She was and always would be a sentimental person at heart, even if she still cringed at Niners who talked about true love, even if she scoffed at the idea of forever-long promises, even when they take down his Ice Hound jersey from the glass cabinet in the main lobby and she did not shift in the slightest. She's the kind of person who wears charm bracelets braided with red ribbon with more meaning than she has left people to believe. And when people dare to ask, she's the kind of person who does not have the courage to completely discredit its value, even finding a spot on her dresser for it, where it would always beckon a memory of him, especially on mornings she would wake and almost forget he's gone.