A breeze shifting brown hair. A ray of sun flashing downward, highlighting cerulean eyes. Nervous touches, soft skin, the shuffling of paper. Another page of the book flips.
She comes to me in flashes, in musky scents and rosebud lips, in bursting laughter, a forkful of food. Indian? She'll have to burn down the house.
Rory is all around me. She is in every gust of air, every settling of pen tip on empty canvas. She lingers on in every typed out word of every manuscript I read. At night, she sidles through, sweet and nonchalant, almost perfect, a building pressure behind my eyes. I push it back, push her away. But every night, she's back, with that stupid pressure. The process repeats again. And every time…I fail.
I close my eyes and let the images slink away into their shadowed tombs. They'd come out again at night. They always do. In the meantime, I lock my Rory-mausoleum as best I can, praying that the locks may hold, despite the fact that they never do. There are a million defiant skeletons in my mental closet, and they all manage to get past my desperate barriers, no matter how formidable the roadblocks I set up. I was out of luck. Hell, I never had any to begin with, really. The only times I'd been lucky (when I moved in with Uncle Luke, when I met that perfect blue-eyed girl, when Rory and I….) I'd ruined it. I had that tendency. To ruin things.
I move into a dusty corner with my broom, sweeping back the cobwebs and dirt. I hear the door open behind me and wince as it slams shut. There are no footsteps, just the quiet creaking of a singular floorboard, as someone shifts their weight back and forth, back and forth, an oscillating blade, sweeping over my neck.
"We're closed," I hear myself say, voice flat.
The creaking continues, vaguely intensified, and spreading from one floor-board to two. I really needed to get the opening flooring fixed, I mused vaguely. The broom hits a baseboard with a muffled thwack.
"Did you hear me?" I ask irritably, still facing the stubbornly filthy corner. I needed to get at least one thing right. I would succeed in making every inch of this place clean, if it was the last thing I did.
"Sorry," A voice whispers. I choke. It is her voice.
And then the floorboards are groaning and the door is slamming and I am chasing, and, again, she's running. Only this time, unlike with that stupid fair, she doesn't stop. An engine roars and when I whisper "I love you" it's not to a panting, furious, somehow- best-friend-I've-ever-had, but an empty night, retreating car, and the shimmering ghost of what never was.
I stay there for the next several hours, my locks shattered, bars melted, doors broken down. I know I didn't make her leave, except that I did… Jess Mariano ruined something again. I can't even be surprised. This is what I'm like, after all. I've been denying it, thinking maybe I've changed. When Rory and Luke were here just earlier tonight, I was so convinced. I changed. I matured. After everything, somehow I was the adult. Except that here I am, being stupid and weak, and falling apart over someone I probably never even had.
'I don't deserve this Rory…'
What the hell had I been thinking? No, I didn't want her that way, when she'd go off with some other man after exacting her stupid, so-not-Rory plan of revenge…but she'd come back! She came back to me…there had to be a reason. I could have found out. Maybe she'd seen adult Jess and…That stupid pressure is back. I'm not him right now. I'm screw-up Jess, the pathetic bad boy chased by nightmares and held down by pride. Rude, indifferent, razor-tongued. The fuck-up. Rory came back and I lost her again.
Because Jess Mariano is no grown-up. Jess Mariano is a sadistic child touching butterfly wings. Watching them wither away beneath his callous touch. His hope vanishes on the horizon and he swallows the lump in his throat and laughs it off. That is who I am. Time to face the truth.
I get up, start my car, and run away again.