THEN
Sigh No More
"Love it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you / It will set you free /
Be more like the man you were made to be"
- Mumford & Sons
Damon Young stepped off the bus into sun-cooked desolation. At least, that was his first impression of Las Vegas. The Strip, somehow smaller and more careworn in the harsh evening sunlight, glimmered in the distance. It didn't look like he had imagined it would. He was in Las Vegas, but nowhere near the center of things. He was in a place filled with limitless possibilities, but he wasn't headed to casinos and girls. This was frankly never the scenario in Damon's mind when he thought of Las Vegas.
Damon pulled a wrinkled post it from his back pocket and compared it to his phone to figure out where he was going. Somewhere in the heart of the real Vegas, in the rugged and bent wasteland of crumbling strip malls and wilted streets lights was Emily. Every step that brought him closer to the address on the faded paper brought lead to his feet. He didn't know what to feel, what he was allowed to feel.
Deep down, deeper than Damon would admit to, this walk seemed to him to be the final free hours before the guillotine. It felt like an ending, not a beginning. Not the great things they had wanted for each other. Not anything but cold duty for a cold girl who he had been moving on from, who he thought wanted nothing to do with him. If he even wanted to be dragged back in. The guilt mixed with confusion, more potent than the liquor he'd gotten sick on at fifteen with Razor and the guys.
He didn't know who he was, who this guy was, standing on a cracked sidewalk across the street from an adobe half wall that had whole chunks missing. The front yard was long ago lost to desert weeds. Damon knew it was the right place by the peeling paint stenciled at the curb, but he couldn't make himself cross the street, walk up to the gate, hop the fence, trudge through the weeds, knock on the door.
How would it play out? He'd apologize? She'd take him back? He'd be the good and dutiful boyfriend and father for the rest of his life? How she could think this was what happily ever after looked like. Damon was stuck in disbelief that this could be it. He couldn't make the choice. He couldn't go up to the door and knock. It would just be easier and better to let Emily make it for him. She already had, by leaving. All he had to do was go back to Boulder.
The front door cracked and Damon instinctively ducked back into the shadow. Emily, framed by the doorway's spilling light, didn't see the skulker in the shadows. She saw a poor street in a poor neighborhood lined with broken street lamps. As broken as she was.
Emily rubbed her hands up and down her arms, cold and calm. She closed the door behind her and all he could see was a silhouette. Her lithe, spare, strong gymnast's body drew him forward after all. But he paused. This wasn't strong Emily, who pushed and pulled and couldn't trust. Instead, her shoulders pitched forward, collapsing in on herself. Great gulping sobs tore through her armor. The girl who was always in control, who never gave in, was cracking into pieces before his eyes.
She slid down the length of the door, couching her head on her knees. Somehow this was worse, this intrusion on her most private moment. It softened things. She had cried in his arms once and he had been there for her. Couldn't he be enough for her? Damon had once thought happily ever after was being with Emily Kmetko. Maybe he could convince himself that was still true, for her.
Damon melted further into the dark, leaving Emily alone for now. He needed to think, now that he had seen Emily, he didn't know what he was doing. It was strangely off putting to think she might not want him to comfort her. He didn't know what he was doing.
The answer came with the sun and the return to warmth. Damon slouched in his chair at a 24 hour Laundromat, the only thing open for miles as far as he could tell. Emily's meltdown was still fresh. He knew now that no matter what she said about happy endings, this wasn't what she had in mind.
He hardly noticed the long walk back to Emily's place. It was easy walking. And with the adobe wall that came up to his waist easily sidestepped, he was exactly where he should be. It was what it was. Emily, as if he had ordered her, appeared in the doorway, barefoot with her pajamas and old t-shirt. She lugged a bag of trash down the porch stairs without noticing her visitor.
Damon took the bag out of Emily's hands. She had been looking down and couldn't help but jump. The surprise helped dispel the anger. Now the inevitable was here, all they had to decide was what to do with it.
As first, she didn't say anything. Each tested the other, unsure what direction they were heading.
An eternity in seconds later, Emily couldn't process. She couldn't come out of her daze.
"You came," she said, unsure if this was hope or condemnation.
Damon wasn't sorry. He wasn't sure how he felt. But he was ready.
"Yeah," he agreed, "I'm here."
Emily reached out, tentative, fingers against familiar shoulders and into Damon's embrace. It might have been smarter to walk away, but something unknotted, and she didn't want to hash it out. He was in this horrible place with her. That was what mattered. She didn't dare look beyond the impure comfort that's better than being alone.