Katie
Once, a boy and a girl loved each other, and for a while that was all they needed. They knew exactly how their story would end: they'd grow up and get married, and have nine beautiful children, and everything would be perfect.
They did grow up, and that was the tragedy of it all. They did get married, but to different people, and their nine children were the nine years it'd been since they'd really looked each other in the eye, the near-decade since she'd run away (alone; she'd never intended that) and he'd gone off to medical school in a faraway state (he told her he'd be top of the class, make her proud, but this one quiet guy, Shephard, was impossible to beat). He met a woman with wavy hair and green eyes, and she found someone with long fingers and a kind face, and when you closed your eyes at night it was almost the same thing.
The night they finally met again, in the muggy mid-August heat, she put on the make-up heavy and thick and let her hair curl down around her shoulders in a crazy attempt to recapture the 18-year-old who'd been in love, and she caught him unawares in his faded blue scrubs, and he didn't know it but he looked like a little boy in his pajamas more than anything else. They dug up a box of stale treasure and listened to their own voices, cartoonishly young, prophesy a future that would now never be into the muffled interior of his old car (the one he'd bought at 16 with his life savings and her I dare you, Tom, live a little humming pleasantly in his ears).
They didn't find what they needed in each other that night (the great fear that choked them both was that perhaps it'd never been there at all). And in the bright clear brilliance of the next morning she killed him, killed the man she loved, and didn't even stay behind to make sure the right words were said at his funeral.
Her too-nice shoes click-clacked, a panicked uneven Morse code on the concrete as she fled, and the thought that looped through her brain on endless repeat was that this is what a black widow must feel like when she's unfortunate enough to have a heart.
Freckles
Once upon a time, there was this guy, and he had a thing for this girl. (Did she love him back? Sometimes even she didn't know.) They had no idea how their story would end or whether it had even started, and that made it all the more exciting.
They were stunning together, they both felt it, with a dark beauty that smacked of Shakespeare (comedy or tragedy, now that was debatable) and saltwater, smooth and heavy on the skin. They fit easily; almost too easily, she thought sometimes, when he predicted her behavior better than a meteorologist reading the weather report.
She was all he ever thought about, pathetic as it sounded, and if that made him a spoony or a sap he didn't show it (or at least he tried not to). He only glared when she slapped him when his words came too close to the truth; only glared when he would have much rather cried at the futility of it all.
Eat that, Shakespeare.
The day they left he whispered a charge to keep in her ear, pressed one long, last lingering kiss to her mouth, as if to seal the deal, and jumped feet-first into the choppy ocean. He sacrificed himself to save her, (it didn't hurt this much in the movies) and that was never the way it was supposed to be.
So she closed her tired eyes and let herself shed one clear tear for him, as if that single drop of water could wash away the truth.
That she was never supposed to let him love her, not like this, and that she was especially never supposed to love him back.
Kate
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a man and a woman fell in love, in that cosmic coincidental way that you might tell your grandchildren about (if you are lucky), and it was almost more than they could handle. He didn't believe that he deserved the murderer, and she didn't think that she could ever make herself good enough for the hero: they were a walking oxymoron, a study in symbolic storytelling, but English had never been his best subject, and she couldn't fix them any more than he could.
She knew that if they were a fairytale he would be the noble knight galloping in on a white charger, ready and willing to save the maiden, vanquish the giant, do whatever needed to be done.
She thought that she would be the great green dragon, scaly and frightening and hoarding her gold like the minds and souls of men (and maybe they were, maybe the dragon believed in reincarnation). Her fairytales always had two possible endings: either the dragon incinerated the knight, burning him into a tiny heap of ash, or she, silently, without a single reptilian cry of pain, let the knight stab her to the heart, his sword sharp and shiny in its good intentions.
There was a reason that she'd never liked to play make-believe.
The night before they left, she went to him because she was terrified and childless (barren, she felt barren: the word tasted like death) and cold, so cold, and if he wasn't safe at least he was warm.
And can you blame the dead for wanting to feel alive?
Afterwards, the room dark and still, unearthly, around their tangled limbs, too dim for any but her cat's eyes to navigate, she pressed one shaking palm to his still-slick chest (she could almost feel his pulse fluttering against her fingertips) and murmured a question, not because she didn't know the answer, but because she needed to hear him say it.
Do you love me. The last part of the phrase--still--after all I've done, after all you've done--hung behind her lips, but she knew that he heard it all the same.
Yes, he whispered matter-of-factly, his breath ghosting on her skin, his hand moving to cover hers, his eyes soft and dark and full; he seemed puzzled that she should even need to ask.
Yes.
Of course I do.
Yes.
And she felt the hard shell around her heart split and shatter for the millionth (for the last) time.