*CRASH*

I drop my phone out of my hands and it falls onto my bed when I scramble up, rushing out of my room. I look around the hallway, trying to find the source of the noise when I hear a strangled yell.

"Ahhhg!" A thump follows and I turn towards Brandon's room, the door closed and I make my way to his room, flinching whenever I hear him yell. I throw the door open and he lets out another shout when I see him throw his alarm clock with his left arm at his wall.

"Brandon!" He ignores me, kicks his chair, and picks up a picture frame from his desk. "Brandon, stop!" He throws the frame down on the ground and I step back at glass shatters. I see him put his hand on his desk and shove everything off it, screaming and I lunge at him.

"Stop it!" I pull on his arm and try to stop him but he struggles against me, not looking at me. He forces me off and kicks his piano bench and I hear it slam against the wall. "Brandon, stop this your scaring me!"

He turns towards his piano and I see the uncapped anger spilling from his gaze. He grabs the bottom of the keyboard with his left hand, and his arm muscles flex as he starts to lift it.

"No!" I rip his hand off the piano and hold onto his wrist, trying to get his eyes to connect with mine. His hand shakes and his eyes stay closed, and I look down at his other hand, the one hanging limply next to his side, useless for one reason only.

There's a cast covering it.

I pull him towards the bed and I shove him down, making him sit on the edge, and I place my hands on the sides of his face and force it towards me, his eyes still closed. I wipe the unseen tears from his cheeks and I look down at the broken boy, whose first week back at the house has brought him nothing but misery, from losing the symphony and ability to play, and I can't help thinking It's all my fault.

"I'm sorry," I brush back his hair a bit, letting my fingers linger on his skin as I bring it back down to his cheek. "I'm sorry you got hurt. I'm sorry you had to come back, something both of us clearly weren't ready for."

His eyes flutter open and look up at me, and I'm shocked with how they still hold the ferocity from before.

"Are you sure it's something you didn't want? For me to get back to being older brother and son to the people in this house, back to what we now call normal?" He moves my hands away from his face and looks at the mess he made in his room. "I mean, clearly, neither of us thought that I would try to trash my room. And it's not your fault I'm back. It's not your fault I got hurt. So maybe what you're actually sorry about is moving on with Wyatt. Because you know how miserable I am when I see you with him."

I look down at him sadly. "I told you I didn't want to hurt you."

"But you're not worried that I'm going hurt you?" He stands and looks down at me, the anger ebbing but still there. I nod. "Because you don't think I can?"

"I don't think you would."

His nostril flare, "What if I started dating someone else?"

I flinch back and furrow my eyebrows. "I," I stutter, "I don't care." His eyes glare down at mine. "Brandon, I don't care if you move on with somebody else…it's what we need."

"Need? You think we need to deny ourselves our feelings for each other so that a stupid rule saying we can't be together stays unbroken."

"We do if we want to be happy."

"How does this make us happy?" He yells at me.

I step back from him, my hands clenching in fists. "I'm not the one making this hard! It's not my fault that we're like this."

"Like what, fighting?"

"That we're in love." His eyes widen and his mouth opens and closes like he was about to say something and changed his mind. But he wouldn't have been able to say anything because next thing I know, I'm word vomiting. "I'm saying it now because that's the truth. We are in love. Yes I'm with Wyatt, but that doesn't change the fact that right now, what I feel, what we feel is, I don't know, something that I can't even put words to."

I see the intensity in his eyes switch from anger to hopeful, and I can't move under his gaze until he takes a step towards me. I back away from him slowly until my back meets a wall and I feel pinned under his blue eyes as he stands inches away from me. He puts his hands on my arms and trails them up my arm and then back down to my hands, squeezing them and smiling at the goose bumps he left on my skin.

"That's all I need to hear." His face nears mine and I can just feel the electricity charging between our lips, and I know that when they touch it will be like an explosion whose destruction cannot be controlled. And I can picture it in my mind the kind of devastation we will leave in our wake if I let him kiss me, the inevitable rejection he will have to face from me as my common sense slaps me in the face and asks, "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"No." I put my hands on his arms and move him away from me, him easily complying as I feel our two connected hearts break the farther I push him away from me. "I'm…" I start to apologize but I can't force it out when I see the tears form in his eyes. I cover my mouth and run out of the room, my own eyes swimming as I crash into my bed, slamming my door with effect.

I force myself to stay as I hear one final crash, I can just imagine the keyboard lying upside down, and him clutching his hair with one hand as he looks at his right hand, symbolizing every mistake he's made since I came into his life. And I know that as much as he wants to, he will not march in here and demand an explanation, because nothing can be said that hasn't already been heard by him. But I so badly just want him to yell at me just so that I can yell back and show that I care and that he cares enough to just want to show how angry he is at me instead of targeting inanimate objects.

I've never felt this urge, this temptation to just reach out and touch the cord linking me to him, causing a ripple that only he would feel, a sensation that would vertebrate through our bodies, getting stronger as we get closer. And the only solution to this would be to get as far away as possible, hope that I could break this habit, this obsession that is just sucking me down this hole, growing deeper as my feelings for him do.

I know that I can't get far away anytime soon, but getting close is no longer an option, not for us, so the only thing I can do is put things in between us, create obstacles that he continually knocks down because they are insubstantial compared to how much he wants to be with me. And it's like the closer he somehow gets, the less I can throw at him, until he's standing in front of me and the only thing that fits in between our urging wants is the continued response, "No." And it's like a magic spell, because the moment disappears and in its place in an expanse, that one of us will have to cross until we meet again. And I'm tired of this continued cycle of hurt, but it's just a sign that what he said was right. And there's only two ways to end this: turn around and walk away or go to him. And for the first time ever, I'm taking the first step towards him.

My legs are shaking as one foot goes in front of the other in the direction of his room, my fingers fiddling with the hem of my shirt, and I'm biting the inside of my cheek as I reach the doorknob. And then I hear it. A sob that sounds as heart wrenching as the apparent future I have bestowed onto him, and I lean my forehead against the door with my hands pulling my hair away from my face as I turn my head and press my ear against the door, trying to make sure that what I'm hearing is what I think it is. Another loud cry and I'm collapsed on the ground, my knees against my face as my fingers interlace behind my head as I curl up into a ball, as if making myself as small as possible would somehow help me forget that I was the trigger to the nuclear bomb the demolished his life. But it's somehow making its way deep into my core and I just want to run out the door and keep going until the echoes of his cries have faded and I have enough strength to walk through the door and put on a brave face in front of everyone else, no matter how much it may break him. But I'm done breaking him. I want to fix this. I have to fix this.

My hand reaches up, grabs the knob and pulls myself up, turning the knob in the process, and I push the door open, determined to put myself in the room with him. Before I lose this burst of courage, I close the door behind me and lean my back against it, taking in the sight before me of my true protector lying on his bed facing towards me with his hands covering his face, strangled sounds making my breath stop. I take a deep breath before coming to the side of his bed and sitting on the edge. His left hand shoots out and grabs mine, his face looks haggard as he realizes it's me sitting next to him. Before he moves again, I grab his hand and interlace my fingers with his as I lie next to him, both of us on our sides facing each other. Our faces are back to where they were before, inches away and holding out for that one kiss, that kiss that will lead to so many others. And I touch his lips and he just stares into my eyes, the redness harsh but causing the blue to be emphasized against the contrast of colors, and he moves his forehead to rest on mine, noses barely touching.

"I have no right to be touching you, to be near you, because I do not truly deserve you. You may say otherwise, but if you knew how much it pains me to see you hurt, you would also want to run to the farthest place on Earth and stay there, in fear that I may cause you any more pain and suffering. Trust me, I would have never have come back if I knew that I would put us in this position, a position where we would have no possibility of being together. I would have been able to live off the fantasies in my head where we would be in an apartment, and you could make me breakfast, and I could be falling asleep in your arms, somewhere no one knew us. And it would be all right to think this, because maybe someday I would have come back for you, and you would still love me, and we could just run off into the sunset as cheesy as it sounds."

"As a girl that's never had anything good, to find all of it in one place was a miracle, and I just wanted to leave it all behind before it left me." I cup his face as my lips come a little closer and his lips part slightly as he looks down at mine. "But you would have never left me. Even now, when we play this game of tug-of-war, you don't give up when I have come so close to so many times. And if you would only tug a little more, you would've won a long time ago, except I always had the excuse of somebody else to keep me from letting go. And I realize that distance has never been a problem for us, no matter how you far I may get I can't erase you from my head and heart."

"But we keep lying to each other and never knowing exactly what we want. Except now we do, but it's so impossible and crazy that we don't go for it. But I want to and then I don't, because when I'm near you I feel you, everywhere on the surface of my skin and then deeper as you get closer, and that scares me more than being on my own, because at least I can control how close you are in my dreams and how much you overwhelm my senses. And the reason it was possible for us to be together when I was at Girls United was that we only restricted ourselves to a few minutes before saying good-bye again. I knew that I had somehow still kept you at a distance where I could keep track of how far I would go with you in case this didn't work out and you decided it wasn't worth it anymore. Because I don't think I could live if I knew I gave all of me to you and you would just throw it aside like a toy you got tired of."

"But you've proven yourself, time and time again that you will fight for us, while I just let myself give up. And the fact that I continue to take the easy way out for us by being with Wyatt just proves how despite what I think, you do love me more than I do love you. It's not easy moving on, but it's also hard to imagine a life with you when I know how many people will be wounded in the process."

"But I do love you. And you know I do. But that stopped mattering a long time ago. All you care about is if I want to be with you, if I'm willing to give into this dream you have of us living in some small apartment, with day jobs that barely pay the rent, spending every waking second together. And we're just making it by because we're teenagers, and we won't be going to college because we'll be long gone before we finish high school."

My hand goes down to his chest where his heartbeat is matching mine in its increasing tempo and he slowly moves his hand over mine, that little touch that is like dipping my toe into the pool, testing the waters, seeing if I should go on. And I do. "When I kiss Wyatt, it's like a kiss. It feels like two lips are being pressed together. And that's all a kiss really is. Except I can't remember a time where I kissed you and it didn't feel like I was flying, falling, or somehow being suspended in air."

He enjoys that little dig at Wyatt and he finally speaks. "Is that a good thing?"

"I don't know."

"Well, how did you feel?"

"I remember feeling terrified, but maybe it was because we were sneaking around and could be caught at any moment."

"I don't want you to be scared."

"I'm not scared. Not of you. Just what we might do and how that will affect everyone."

"But that's just it Callie, we worry about other people's feelings when the only thing that should matter is how we feel." He exasperates.

This would be the moment I shut him down and tell him that it's not possible for me to just turn off this constant worry over whether I'm doing the right thing or not, that I can't do this to the family. And then the light in his eyes would turn off and he would roll over to his other side and I would be stuck staring at the back of his head while the tension in the room makes it so that I have to leave us at this awful end of the conversation. We'd be right back at the beginning and he'd be forced to go through this without me, something I won't allow.

"I know." He blinks at my agreement. "I just need to be reminded sometimes." I swallow. "There's something else you should remind me of." I bite my lip and he blinks down at them. "How it really felt to kiss you."

He slowly nods his head and put his hand on my cheek, drawing me closer to him like before, and I'm holding my breath as I prepare to jump into this kiss with full force, not holding back. But then his phone rings and he groans as he sits up and looks at his phone, and I find myself looking over his should at the caller ID. He glances at me, as if wondering if he should ignore his mom, and I wish he did because I don't want this moment to be ruined before we even do anything.

"Hey mom. Yeah, I'm fine. Yeah okay, I'll tell Callie. Yeah. Callie is here. No, I think we're the only ones here." He stays silent for a while and stares at me again, looking more disturbed after what she says. "Yeah mom, I'm giving her space. I promise. Have fun with mom tonight. I'll see you later."

He hangs up and puts his phone down, and turns his whole body towards me, begging me with his eyes and expression to not move farther away while every instinct is telling me to. I stand up suddenly and stay next to the side of the bed while he swings his legs over so that he's sitting in front of me. He takes my hands with both of his, even with his cast on his right hand and he pulls me closer so that I'm standing between his legs. "Don't go."

I take a deep breath and move my hands to his shoulders. "I don't want to."

"We don't have to stop. No one will be home for hours."

"I don't want hours Brandon. We both know that we can't make it through this with only a few moments together. It's either forever or not at all. And we both know what we want."

He smiles and moves his hands to my waist and tugs me towards him until his face is almost touching my torso and my fingers are winding around his hair. His hands go under my shirt and his left hand squeezes my side. My legs wrap around his hips and his hands go to my shoulder, pulling down the sleeve of my sweater as his lips ghost over my skin before choosing to press down at the base of my neck. I moan and hold the back of his head close as he moves his lips up to my jaw, and I tilt his head up and look down at him as he looks up through his dark eyelashes.

I grab the hem of my sweater and pull it over my head, throwing it onto the floor and placing his hands on my waist. They wrap around my body and he kisses up the center of my chest from where the bra clasps in the front, his lips going up my throat, and the heat is rising up my body as we come close to kissing. He kisses the corner of my mouth and then places a finger over my lips as I lean in towards him.

"You sure? About everything, about this, about what we will be doing?"

I press my forehead to his. "I can't say no to you again. I don't have enough in me, nor the will to want to. So yes, I'm sure. Now shut up and kiss me."

No sooner do the words leave my lips, his are suddenly on them, and I'm drinking him in, the way he feels, the way he kisses me, how I feel lightheaded after only a few seconds. The contact of his hands on my body, exploring each other's mouths, separating only to pull off his t-shirt, is completely unfamiliar territory for me. But all worries go flying out the window when he mumbles, "I love you," against my lips and I eagerly answer back as he pulls me under him.

He looms over me as he looks down at me, flushed and breathing hard, with a content smile on his face, and I sigh as I reach for his head and brush through his hair.

"Callie there's something I should tell you."

"What?" I say softly.

His eyes leave mine and I have to place my fingers under his chin and bring his gaze back up to mine.

"After the dance, I did something stupid."

"Like what?" His lips part slightly and I can sense him wanting to pull back from me, like he doesn't want to touch me. And then I understand. "Don't tell me Brandon."

"But Callie-"

"I don't care. It doesn't matter. I know you're going to tell me something like you slept with someone and I should know about it because it might come up later, but I don't care. No one else matters at this point. There's only one first time that matters to me and that's my first time with you. With the one person I ever want to be this close to." I reach my hands down to his jeans and unbutton the top button. "So I want you to forget about anyone else you have ever been with and just remember me."

I see his inhibitions leave his face and one agonizing second, later he dips his head down to my neck and he whispers, lips touching the shell of my ear, "Then let's make it something we never forget."

My eyelids flutter as his hands go down to my hips. A small sigh leaves his mouth as we push away the final barriers. We pull each other close, and go the distance.

And we reach the point of no return.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't broken, that the pieces of my heart were only held together with the knowledge that if I let go for one moment, they would fall away into an abyss, never to be recovered. I always thought that finding love would mend those pieces, cause my heart to be whole for once, but looking down at Brandon, whose lips are kissing my collarbone before making their way down my body, I don't feel fixed. I feel...like I'm floating high above the sky while still sinking further into ground, like it wants to envelop me. Like the pieces I've been keeping together with a steel strong grip have finally separated, except instead of falling, they scatter, as if searching for another piece to join with.

His eyes find mine again as he hovers above me and it feels like he is looking everywhere with his hands that won't stop roaming over me. I reach up and touch Brandon's face as if it will shatter, but the look in his eyes just proves that it's too late. He put everything into what we were doing as if it was the last time, and he probably thought it was. He's not expecting me to stay and that just tears me apart.

Unbeknownst to me, tears had formed in my eyes and Brandon quickly brushed those away with the pad of his thumb, his eyes full of worry. I pull his beautiful face towards me and touch our noses together, keeping my eyes open, taking in every detail of the color of his eyes and the dark lashes framing them. I slowly smile and he in turn kisses my nose before turning over and collapsing next to me, a small space in between our bodies.

"Why are you crying?" He says in a whisper, like the sound of his voice will startle me.

"You don't believe me." I take his casted hand and kiss the tips of his fingers. "You think I'm going to tell you that this can't ever happen again."

"It's crossed my mind." He admits, his chest slowly rising up and down as he breathes deeply, and I watch it, wanting to climb on top of it and feel his heartbeat through my entire body as he enters me slowly. But before I do, I need to say something.

"I feel like I broke you. Like I came at you with a hammer and slowly took you apart."

"You did." I turn my head away from him, the guilt rising in my stomach, and feel him move his left hand over my stomach and pull himself close so that my arm is pressed to his chest. "To be honest though, I'm glad you did. I feel less, well not perfect, because I never was, but more raw. Like you helped strip away the layers that protected me and now I can see who I really am." He kisses my shoulder and I look back at him. He pulls my torso onto its side and now I'm facing him, still holding his right hand to my chest.

"You really were perfect though. And I seriously am not."

"People aren't perfect. We're no exception." I put one hand on his cheek and use the other to hold onto his hip as I come closer. "We're just incomplete." He says raggedly, sensing what I want from him, what he wants from what I can tell with the way his midsection is pressing against me.

I nod my head, agreeing with him, as I gently push him down onto his back and try, as gracefully as I can, to linger above him.

"You complete me." I say as I lower myself onto him, his eyes staying open with mine as he occupies the empty part of me, his own uneven pieces matching with mine, no longer wandering, and we find ourselves finally mending in a way we didn't expect.

My heart didn't need a place to stay. It just needed someone to stay with.

Author's Note: Thank you for reading this rather long story. Reviews about how this made you feel would be great since this is a little different than my style of writing. It's a little more dramatic and descriptive and I want to know if it's good or full of garbage. Also, this is a two shot, so please stand by for the second part. Again thank you for reading and I'll get that next part to you guys as soon as possible. Have a lovely day.