Coda
"When someone leaves your life, there aren't any words you can use to fill the space. There's just one empty, swelling minor note" - Jodi Picoult (Lone Wolf)
Gill
She's shaken by the way he approaches her in the dimness of the quiet coffee shop. He kisses her lightly on the cheek, so light she hardly feels it. All that she can feel is her heartbeat growing louder, faster in her ear as she watches him fold his hands together, avert his eyes, mumble the words that crescendo and drown everything else out. She doesn't move, even as he walks away. She doesn't move, even as she feels the presence at her shoulder, even as she struggles to hear the barista's worry over the pounding drums in her chest increasingly painful against her ribs. She stands abruptly as it all comes together in her mind, fortissimo instantly piano.
Cal
He wasn't supposed to listen to me, at least not right away. It had been different with the men who had come before, with Alec and Burns and the banker in between. Those had been prodding infiltrations, carefully plotted. They had dug out space for doubt to creep up between the two, carved larger by every word I'd spoken. Those had come as gradual cycles, so slow that the ends bled into the beginnings and made her question there was anything there to begin with. Those times had been perfect, allowing her to feel the touch of happiness before it shattered into pieces before her, let me comfort her and never have her disagree when I told her they weren't good for her. But, this time was different. This time, I let patience lose. This time, I stood to lose everything.
Gill
Her body vibrates with the music of it, something akin to a sonata stretching out slowly in a minor key. She doesn't want to admit her knowledge, won't risk losing them both. She had already lost one because of the other. Now, he was all she had left in her life. But could she live like this, hollow notes filling up the spaces in her bones when all she wanted to hear was the timbre of his voice, tipping softer towards her? Could she really live like this, giving him so much trust only for him to trample all over hers, gut her so cleanly that it almost didn't leave a mark (she thinks the knife had slipped a little this time)? Her fingers tap on the steering wheel to the beat of the song she can feel beginning to fade, so quiet she strains to hear it, can only really feel it. She makes the illegal U-turn, heading straight to the place she knows she'll find him.
Cal
I hear her before I can see her, stiletto heels playing a staccato beat across the tiles and stunting my breath just the same. I sit taller, setting up a faux air of power and pride to cover all the regret and shame I feel. I focus so hard on keeping my own composure that I almost don't see hers slip in that moment she first lays eyes on me. There is deflation in her slump, hurt on her face; it's all at my hands. But she plays powerful, too, flicking her hair over her shoulder and setting her jaw. I see it waver against all of her wishes. I think that's what I am to her, part of her that she can't control but wishes would obey. A connection she could maybe survive without, but would never have the same happiness and ease of living if she tried to. Maybe that was enough to make her stay. It probably wasn't.
Gill
She walks into his space without thinking, just breathing, just trying not to say anything before she's ready. She sits on the edge of his desk, awfully close, close enough to make her stomach turn even as she faces mostly away from him. She can hear his breathing now. After moments have past, she looks at him, notes tripping more quickly as she catalogues the expression on his face, the shame he wants her to see, the apology. Today, it's not enough. She settles on honesty. In the space of a quick rest, a deliberate silence, she opens her mouth, ready to make her own music.
"I couldn't survive without you, Cal. But I don't know how to love you and live at once," she admits, the words falling off of her tongue like scales off of trained fingers. Tears begin to trail down her cheeks, beginning the melancholy rise and fall that's as continuous as it is painful.
"We just keep dancing around this and then it gets too close and you just, you end up pushing me away. And I can't. I just need- if this isn't going to be something, then can't you just let me be happy?"
Cal
Her shrug is almost pathetic and she looks so tired. However, I can't keep my mouth shut. It's why I don't deserve her, really.
"He didn't make you happy," I say with a shrug. "You deserved someone better."
She sighs deeply in a measured way, in that frustrated way that is much too reminiscent of that time when Emily'd… oh, no. I look up, unable to hide the widening of my eyes at the yet unasked question whose weight I know will be astronomical.
"Well, are you planning to be that someone or just drive away every man that could be?"
The words are a sucker punch I didn't see coming quick enough to prepare for. I don't stop myself from fidgeting as I go over the possibility that maybe that particular sigh is some sort of innate signal all women know will get men to wise up and pull their heads from the sand. The honest truth of it is that I don't know. I don't know 'what I'm waiting for' or if I ever plan to stop waiting at all. I have no clue, not with Gillian, not with the one woman I have to make certain doesn't leave me, but I always, always push away. She is the constant of every equation, yet always the variable I had solved for. I'd never seen her on both sides of the equal signs like this. I'd never seen her cancel out. This time, the answer is different. I wish I could say it with some measure of surety.
Gill
She looks at him intently, searching over his features with quiet fervour. With a different sigh altogether, she stands and smoothes out her skirt, refusing to meet his eyes. She turns around, preparing to leave, but feels too cruel, the beat quieting to almost nothing as she steps away from him. She lets herself see him in the moment he hadn't prepared to be seen, mouth pinched as he sat watching her walk away. A flutter of hope settles between her ribs. Maybe, she got this all wrong.
"It's okay, Cal, if that's not what you want," she offers, hearing her own vulnerability and desperation and inwardly cringing. "I'll be okay."
He stands, too. Her heart slurs as he moves towards her. "It's not that I don't want this. I don't know how to have it."
"You just have it," Gillian says, holding her hand out to him in invitation.
He takes her hand, pulling her close to him and turning them in a slow circle, dancing. She can feel his heartbeat, too, where their chests press together. A duet now, his heartbeat fills in the spaces between hers like the harmony she hadn't realized was missing.
"Cal? You just have it," Gillian presses her forehead against his, her hair a curtain that makes private the moment when his lips touch hers, first soft and sorry, then hard and demanding.
She can feel his heart still, when they pull apart, though the dynamics have changed. It's enough to know these are not the reverberations of a final note in her chest cavity. It's the end of something and a beginning not completely detached, complementary. This composition has a coda and it's going to be beautiful, going to cut away all the past pain from the melody. How could any music the two of them make ever be any less?