The best mixed CD (that I've ever had)
Author's note: The title is based on the song Mix Tape by Butch Walker. Each chapter is split into the viewpoints of Ray and Neela and I would like to stress they are of different timelines.
Prologue
From the moment he met her until the moment she left each and every song had been about her. He'd written about women before. Hell, he'd even written about love yet it wasn't until he met Neela that he realised what he had written about was hardly real at all. Real women and real love? He hadn't even been close.
Nothing with Neela was ever easy. They bickered like siblings; she was his best friend. She was scarily organised and tidy; he had yet to find his iPod under all the mess in his room. She'd married a guy who was now effectively dead and compensating by dating another; he'd fallen in love with her a lifetime ago and watched from the sidelines as both their worlds broke down around them. They were two completely different people from completely different worlds; they read each other like a medical journal.
Ray had laughed many times about his predicament- typical of him to fall him love when he least expected it (or wanted it) and typical of him to fall in love with a woman who not only was the antithesis of anyone he had ever gone for, but was completely and utterly unattainable. He could never get her to understand how he felt about her (because he sure as hell didn't understand either) and sometimes her troubled mind drove him to such madness that all he wanted to do was to give up. But if he could make her feel for him for one moment the intensity of what he had felt when he poured his emotions into making the CD he held in his hands, then he wouldn't walk away on this. Not yet.
As soon as the tears started they wouldn't stop. Body-shattering, earth-wrenching, pain-staking tears that overtook her entire being; her slight form slumped down on the floor, head against the wall, sobs coming so fast she could hardly breathe, her body aching from her emotional and physical pain from her accident. This inability to stop crying, this mis-attempt to regain composure, this need to quench the ache coming from the middle of her chest…this was heart break. This was what it felt like to truly care about someone, so much so they take your heart and shatter it into a million pieces. This is what they meant about the downfalls of love.
No, she hadn't cried this much when Michael died, or all those many times she had failed in life. Nor did she cry like this is the aftermath of learning about him, instead existing in a perpetual state of numbness. It was listening to a CD that she hadn't dared touch until now that had sent her into such a flurry, evoking raw memories of a person she hadn't been able to think about since the day that changed both their lives.
Song after song…memory after memory… After her accident she had found it hard to think about him, every attempt a struggle as she battled against the pain. In the end the memories had swept to the back of her mind, always there, hovering like ghosts but never truly surfacing. Until now. Listening to the CD unlocked the gates into her mind, revealing with startling clarity the memories she had so desperately tried to keep hold of. She remembered him. She remembered Ray. Her roomie. Her best-friend. The one she loved and the one she had sabotaged any hope to connect with ever again.