Dislclaimer: I do not own Degrassi. I do not own any of the quotes, songs, or real world references used in this story.
"I thought I understood it, that I could grasp it, but I didn't, not really. Only the smudgeness of it; the pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it...I didn't know, don't know, about the in-between bits; the gory bits of you, and the gory bits of me."
- Like Crazy
"Look, this obviously isn't going to work. We just don't work well together okay?" he sputtered as he got up to leave.
She couldn't help but laugh at his retreating figure. "Oh, okay. You're so amusing. Did you know that?"
He turned around slowly, his posture rigid.
"I don't see anything remotely amusing about this." he stated dryly.
"You and I aren't that different at all," she said, picking up a dandelion in her hands, and blowing the seeds to the wind.
He looked at her warily. "Care to explain how you came to that conclusion?"
"Well, you think you know me. I'm a bitch right?" She looked over at him, raising her eyebrows, mocking him.
He shifted awkwardly finally looking up at her, still not saying anything..
"Believe me, I'm not denying it. I am a bitch." she smirked.
"Tell me, what was the point of this again?" He inquired.
"I know you, or... I know enough. Look at you, you dress the way you do, and act how you act because you want people to think of you a certain way. You're not this morbid, fuck up like you pretend to be."
He narrowed his eyes at her angrily, "You don't know fucking anything."
She met his eyes and shrugged her shoulders. "You're right. I don't."
He looked at her pensively, surprised at the honesty in her voice.
They didn't speak for minutes. The space surrounding filled with their quiet breathing, and the steady voices of people walking in the surrounding areas.
The sudden honking of a car horn caused them both to look up, a blonde haired boy was seated in a blue Chevy.
He looked towards the girl who he still didn't understand and saw her nod towards the driver. "That's my ride," she told him.
He nodded his head.
She picked up her bag off the table and pushed it over her shoulder, exposing the soft skin of her shoulder. She walked towards him and rested her hand against his shoulder, and he took notice of her nimble fingers, the warmth of her hands passing through his thin shirt.
"I'm a lot like you, you know," she spoke suddenly, startling him. "I like to play pretend too."
She smiled sadly and walked towards the truck, and opened the door greeting the person driving.
He turned around swiftly, "Hey!" he called out.
She turned around and looked at him.
"I'll see you on Monday?"
"Yeah, sure... If I'm not dead by then." She smirked playfully and slammed the door shut behind her.
He couldn't help but stare as she rode off. The truck turned off into another street, and she was gone.
"I love this song." she says one day as they sat in his room listening to music.
"You do, huh?" he questions.
She only rolls her eyes at him before lying down and stretching her arms out, a sliver of skin on her stomach is exposed and he can't help but stare.
She's tapping her fingers to the beat of the song, and she suddenly opens her eyes meeting his gaze.
For a split second she stares straight into his eyes.
She then turns around to rest on her side, but he can hear her humming softly.
"One day I'll hold you like the sun holds the moon. And we will hear those planes overhead. We won't have to be scared." She sings.
As the music fades and the next song begins playing he says, "I just might love this song too."
"Don't love me," she said softly one evening.
He turned sideways so he could be facing her, not sure that he'd heard her right. "What?" he questioned.
"Don't love me." she repeated plainly, as though she were stating the color of her shirt.
"Aren't you supposed to care for your friends?" he asked.
"Supposedly."
He breathed in sharply. Sometimes she was so damn difficult. "Can you just tell me what you mean?" he asked exasperated.
"It's dangerous, the look you get in your eyes when you look at me sometimes.. I'm telling you not to fall in love with me."
He leaned away from her unconsciously, feeling a slight pang from her words. Leaning over towards her he took a cigarette from a pack on the ground and lit it.
"You don't smoke." she said.
"Seemed like a good time to start." he mumbled.
Breathing in the toxic fumes he started coughing uncontrollably. "Fuck," he said his throat and lungs burning. "Why do you smoke these things again?"
"I'm dying anyway," she says, taking the cigarette from him and inhaling deeply before leaning over and blowing smoke in his face watching as his pupils dilated.
Reaching up with his hands he traced her cheek with his fingers, taking in its soft texture.
She closed her eyes, and leaned into his touch breathing slowly. Opening her eyes slowly to find his steady gaze meeting hers, she glanced downwards for a moment before meeting his eyes once more.
"There are some things, that you just... You can't stop them." he said softly, taking her cigarette and dropping it into the ashtray.
They both watched as the smoke curled into the air.
"Don't"
"Look, I-"
"Don't." She interjected sharply. "Don't you dare."
"Well why not?" he asked.
"Why should you?" she countered angrily.
"You're such a bitch sometimes," he stated coldly.
"We've established this, Elijah." she says in a sing song voice.
"You're a scared little girl."
She looks up at him. "Fuck you."
He looked so young while he was sleeping. She couldn't help but stare, letting her eyes roam over the contours of his body. She traced patterns on his cheek, and wrote her name on the side of his arms, making him hers. She didn't need to. He was hers already, and she knew that, hell even he knew that.
Everyone knew it.
He knew that she wasn't his. He thought that at least. He believed a lie. She was his more and more every day. It scared the living hell out of her.
He shifted onto his back, and she turned to lie on top of him using the hard planes of his chest as a pillow. She drew circles on his chest listening to the sound of his soft breathing. She loved that he wasn't heavily muscled like so many of the other boys she knew. She felt safer in his arms, knowing that they would keep her locked in place.
Being with him like this, being so intimate with him felt different. The steadiness in his gaze as he looked down over her held something deep in it. The way he seemed to savor the taste of her neck, the feeling of her fingers clenching onto his hair made some unknown emotion stir deep within her.
Looking over at the clock she grimaced, it read five forty-five. On the other side of town her father would be waking up soon. She rolled off him gently, not wanting to wake the tired boy. He had a hard enough time falling asleep as it is, she didn't want to disrupt him.
Looking around she grabbed her clothing strewn across the room, she pulled on her underwear, and slid on her jeans. She hooked the clasp of her bra, and leaned down to pull one of his long sleeved t-shirts over her head.
She crawled over to him and pressed a soft kiss on his forehead. Leaning down she kissed his lips. "I love you." She whispered softly to his sleeping form, before exiting the room, and shutting the door behind her.
He would wake up to find her side of the bed empty... Again.
She's curled up in a ball on her bed. She's just staring at the wall, and something inside of him feels like breaking.
"Hey." he says walking towards her.
She gives no response.
He sits on the bed and brushes her hair out of her face. Leaning down he stretches out to lay behind her, resting one arm around her waist, the other supporting his head. He kisses the back of her neck and says, "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"I know." she whispers.
He holds on to her tighter.
"If you keep that up, you'll end up dying by the time you're thirty." he says one day as he watches her smoke yet another cigarette.
She merely rolls her eyes at him. "And for all we know I could be dead long before then."
"...Don't talk like that." he says gruffly.
She sighs, slightly aggravated. "Don't be like that Eli. The world is full of enough people who choose not to see things. Don't be one of them."
"What? Because I don't want you to talk about dying every five fucking minutes?" He sneers.
"For all you know I could drop dead in three seconds."
She only laughs as he storms out of the bedroom.
"God. I love you." he mutters into skin as they lay tangled on his bed one night, consumed in a heated kiss. He knows where this is going as he feels her body go rigid beneath him.
She pulls back, and wraps her arms around her knees before resting her head down between them.
She can feel the bed shift as he starts to move towards her.
"Don't."
She's smoking a cigarette, eyes closed, and head leaning back against the wall behind her.
She looks next to her and sees him pull a candy cigarette out of his pocket and places it in his mouth. And she starts to smile.
He can't help but look at her, because her smile doesn't come often, it's a rare thing. He widens his eyes when she starts laughing, and the next thing he knows her cigarette and his candy one are being thrown on the concrete and her lips are on his kissing him fiercely.
Pulling away the tiniest fraction of an inch she chuckles. "Elijah Goldsworthy, you are the fucking weirdest person I've ever met."
He pulls her back in and kisses her again, enjoying the warmth of her body pressed against his own, the taste of her mouth.
"Yeah, I love you too." He says.
She doesn't say it back, but this time she doesn't pull away from him.
It's a start.
He loves the way she looks after they've just had sex.
Something about her hair going off in a million separate directions, and love bites scattered throughout her body. Her lips bruised, her chest heaving.
He knows the scratches she left on his back, and the deep imprints where her sharp fingernails dug into his skin will hurt like hell tomorrow but he doesn't care.
He's pretty sure he'll have to pull out the red scarf she got him for his birthday tomorrow if he wants to escape embarrassing commentary from his parents.
He smirks thinking of the feeling of her lips on his skin, her body trembling beneath him, her warm breath against his ear.
He remembers the mischievous glint in her eyes as she loomed over him, her legs straddled over his, her hips meeting his in a deep syncopated rhythm.
Fuck he loves her.
He just wants to smooth his hands over her skin and feel her warmth. He wants to go to sleep and wake up with her still in his arms.
But he knows that she'll be long gone by the time he wakes up. The lingering smell of sweat and the tangled sheets around him will be the only reminder that she was in fact really here.
She's always leaving him. She doesn't know why she does this exactly. A certain amount of fear builds up in her, and her first instinct is to run. It's what she's good at.
He always lets her come back. She doesn't know why he does this.
She'll scream at him, and yell at him. She'll do everything in the world to fuck things up between them so badly that he'll have no choice but to leave her but he doesn't.
He always hopes that she'll come back.
She knows that she'll always be returning to Eli Goldsworthy.
He's her home.
They're driving around one day, and she hangs her head out of the window as they ride down a steep hill. She loves the feeling of the wind blowing through her hair.
She's just finished rolling up the window when he turns down an obscure road. She widens her eyes when she notices a gate.
He rolls his eyes at her as she begs, and begs to go let her explore but he finally gives in.
(How could he not with those deep brown eyes gazing at him?)
Despite her standoffish demeanor and the lack of color in her clothing she could be quite the nature freak at times. Preferring to sit and stare at trees in their long car rides.
"Eli! Come on!" she calls, and he goes up to follow her.
He goes in towards where she was calling him from and he looks around curiously.
"It's some abandoned building." She states, looking around at the decaying structure.
"A church, I think," he says.
He notices a box containing some pieces of chalk on the ground, and he kicks it to the side.
"What was that?" She asks him, and he points at the box on the ground.
She leans over and picks up the box, opening it and pulling out a piece of chalk. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and says, "Wait right here." before quickly making way to another part of the ruins.
After a minute or so she drags him over to read what she wrote on the wall.
There on chalk is something that he'll never forget.
Eli + Julia is written against part of the gray wall. It's surrounded by a heart.
His mind goes blank and he feels light headed.
She may not have said it in words, she may not have exclaimed it to the world, but he knew what it meant.
Later he'd laugh with her and agree that it was sweet in a cheesy eighties movie sort of way, but at the moment he just didn't give a damn.
He pulled her towards him and kissed her heatedly, his hands gripping onto her dark tresses that he loved running his fingers through so much.
His lips moved downwards before he finally stepped backwards and tugged at her shirt, and she lifted her arms helping him ease it off. He took a moment to appreciate her clad in onlu jeans and a bra.
He traced a finger down her collar bone, slowly cupping her breast before stopping and sliding his hands over the back of her jean pockets.
They found themselves on the ground soon after, hands tracing bare skin, and her soft moans spurring him on.
She pulls back from him and pushes his dark hair from his eyes.
"We're headed straight for hell you know," she teases him.
"Oh really?" He asks.
"This used to be a church, I'm not sure God would approve." She retorts.
"I don't know, I've heard the company's better in Hell," he says before kissing down her stomach.
"You may be right about that." she whispers seductively.
And they're quickly too lost in each other's bodies to continue their conversation.
She's been sitting on his bed for ten minutes, tears run down her cheeks, and try as he might he can't get her attention.
"Julia!" he says loudly, panic coloring his tone.
She looks over at him, and the look in her eyes makes him look down. He's never seen so much sadness.
"I just.. I can't stay there anymore Eli." she says hoarsely. "I can't."
And she looks so broken, and so fragile that he's scared he might break her.
He wraps his arms around her. "You can stay here." he says, and she looks at him before leaning into his embrace.
"I love you," he tells her.
"I know," she responds shakily. "Me too."
She hates having to wait around. She hates waiting to get rides. She hates sitting in the middle seat.
She needs to feel free.
When she finds a nice bicycle at a garage sale down the street she smiles so much her face hurts.
Because now there is no waiting, and she feels free while the wind is brushing against her face.
She can fly.
All she knows is that she's nauseous and the lights are too bright. Her mind is spinning and she feels like she's going to puke. She rushes towards to bathroom and heaves until her stomach settles, and damnit she feels like hell.
Swallowing loudly, she raises her head off the bathtub.
Throwing up first thing in the morning?
Fuck. Fuck.. No.
"Remember to always practice safe sex" a monotone voice says in her mind, and she she starts shaking.
"Condoms are only 75% effective.."
"Julia?" a soft voice startles her from her thoughts. She looks up and sees CeCe standing in the doorway.
"Are you...?" She trails off.
"I don't know." she says.
"Baby girl," CeCe starts but Julia interrupts her.
"I'll take care of it, everything will be fine."
CeCe nods her head in understanding, and extends her arms to hug the frantic teenaged girl standing beside her.
"You're okay," CeCe whispers to her as she rubs circles on her back. "You'll be okay."
She rides her bicycle over to her father's house to ask him for money. When he asks her what for, and she answers him she swears she can see a murderous look in his eyes.
She's never seen her father so angry in her life.
He yells and shouts obscenities at her, and then says, "That boy fucked my daughter up. I can't believe he doesn't have the decency to show his face."
For the first time in her life Julia tells her father to shut the hell up, and for the first time he slaps her across the face.
The pain is blinding, and she presses her hand to her cheek. She looks into her dad's eyes and sees a pool of regret looming.
"Jules, I-"
"Are you going to give me the damn money or not?" she asks.
He looks at her for a moment before pulling out money from his wallet. "This should cover it." he says.
He looks at her, and rage colors her vision.
It's a day of firsts she's realized, and she laughs to herself as she walks out to door, telling her father that she'll see him in hell.
She decides not to ride her bike to the clinic. Not wanting her good memories being tarnished with that particular day.
On the bus ride back home she realizes that she's never felt so disconnected from the world.
She cries for the life she just ended.. She knows that she is in no way possible ready to be a mom anytime soon, but Eli would make such a great dad..
Maybe the baby would have been the one to find the cure for cancer, or an Olympian. For all she knows the baby could have grown up and become a foot model. It still would be alive though.
She's a murderer.
Something's wrong, he knows this.
He's never seen her so close to rock bottom.
Sure, she's pulled away from him before, she's pulled away and she came back but this time it's different. Now it's like she doesn't have enough pieces of herself to bring back to him.
She's not here.
It's late. . . Or early considering your perspective.
It's 1:26 in the morning and she hasn't come back yet. She took off on her bike earlier saying she just wanted to clear her mind.
He's tried calling, and texting, but he's gotten no response.
He slips on some shoes, and grabs the keys to Morty before taking off into the night.
He's been driving around for about fifteen minutes when he finally drives to the abandoned church.
He grabs a flashlight out of the back, and treads towards the gates. He moves the flashlight around looking for his raven haired girlfriend.
"Boo." says a voice behind him, and he jumps startled.
"Fuck!" he exclaims laughing. "You scared me to death." he adds not noticing the obvious discomfort in her face.
He's about to ask her what she's doing here, and why she hasn't come back to house when she's all of a sudden pushing him against a wall kissing him.
She's not normally this aggressive. She's practically ripping his shirt off, kissing and biting down his neck to his stomach before reaching his belt buckle.
She's having trouble undoing it, and he stops her when he sees her shaking.
"Jules, what's going on?"
There's a stinging behind her eyes, heaviness in her throat and she just doesn't feel like talking.
She slowly stands up meeting his steady gaze before looking down towards the ground.
"Less talking, more kissing." she mumbles as she tries to pull his face towards hers, but he holds her at an arm's length away.
He opens his mouth to say something but she quickly interrupts him saying, "I'm losing it Eli.."
She bites her lip before continuing. "Can you just, just love me? Please?"
"What do you-" he starts before she interrupts him again.
"I don't feel like I'm here anymore, okay? Love me.. Make me remember.. Just... Please." she begs before drawing near him again, and pressing her lips against his.
He pulls back briefly to wipe the stray tears decorating her face. It's dark but he can still make out the outline of her.
He knows her birthmark on the back of her thigh, the tattoo on her left hip. He's played piano on her vertebrae, and kissed her lips countless times. He knows her so much, but in moments like these he realizes maybe there are parts of her that he'll never know.
"I do love you." he says softly before leaning forward and pressing his lips against her forehead.
He's holding her, their bodies covered with a slight sheen of sweat.
The moon shines a little bit of light into the back of the hearse.
Her hands are caressing his chest softly and she leans over to place her ear over his chest, listening to the beating of his heart.
She feels his hands run through her messy hair and she sighs softly.
Only he can do this for her. She feels whole when she's around him, less broken than normal.
He starts to whisper how he loves her, and guilt starts coursing through her.
She kisses him sweetly, once then twice before saying, "Let's go home," with a soft smile.
So they shift around trying to put on their clothes, and they get out of the back.
He goes and grabs her bike that leaned against the wall and puts it in the back of Morty.
They get into the hearse, and he puts on a song that he knows she loves. She smiles softly at him, and takes his hand in hers enjoying its warmth, the feel of being connected to him in such a sweet way.
They drive off into the dark, cold night, two lovers holding hands.
They've been driving for a couple of minutes when she asks him to pull over to the side of the road.
She notes the confusion in his eyes, but is thankful when he does so.
When he looks over at her expectantly she breathes in deeply knowing that she needs to do this.
"You know how I feel about you right?" she asks.
His head shoots up so fast she's surprised he doesn't get whiplash.
".. I love you, Eli."
His eyes go wide, and he looks so damn happy that it makes her want to pull her hair out in frustration.
He's grinning, something he rarely does and when he leans over to kiss her she holds her hand out to push him away, stopping him before he can come any closer.
"What's wrong?" he asks, hurt and confusion coloring his voice.
"We need to break up."
He's lying down in his bed an hour or so later, and everything makes him feel angry as hell.
He's hurt, and furious and so so..
He doesn't even know what he is anymore.
But the smell of her cigarettes and perfume on the other side of his bed makes him want to gag, and her belongings scattered around her room makes him close his eyes.
He leans over and takes a swig of vodka from a bottle she stole, and he tries to ignore the fact that he can still remember the smell of her hair when she's just gotten out of the rain, and the feeling of her smooth skin in the shower..
He falls asleep...
A short while later he is awoken suddenly from a nightmare he can't remember. The clock reads 4:15.
He looks around a bit, before sighing deeply and laying back down.
"So this is what it feels like to have a broken heart" she says out loud to the wind.
She's never hurt this badly in her life. All of these wretched emotions have broken loose from inside of her and she doesn't remember how to breathe.
She was crying so badly at one point that she fell off her bike and onto the hard paved road.
Cuts and scratches decorate her arms now. They look raw and painful, but she'd take these superficial flaws over her emotional ones any day.
She's damaged everything now..
She doesn't even want to think about the look on his face when she told him.. The look on his face when she got on her bike and rode of into the night.
She has nowhere to go she realizes, and so she lies on the side of road by a busy intersection. Cars of all different models and colors flash by her, too busy to be distracted by the distraught girl crying.
Her once beloved bike lays beside her and she wants to sleep and sleep.
Looking at the changing color signs she slowly looks up.
"If the light changes green within the next five seconds, then he still loves me." she chokes out.
"One Mississippi," she starts.
"Two Mississippi..."
"Three..-"
She counts each number slowly..
Her breath hitches.
"If the next car that passes is white, then someday he'll forgive me." she says.
Moments later a bright red Honda civic drives past her.
She just wants her mind to shut off.
So she takes off on her bicycle with a new round of angry, hot tears pouring down her face.
She rides aimlessly for a while, but then realizes that subconsciously she must have known she was headed towards the church that they shared so many moments at.
She's biking faster and faster now. She's not paying attention to which side of the road she's on, not paying attention to traffic lights.
And when she's going downhill she closes her eyes and screams at the top of her lungs, feeling the winds blowing roughly against her, chilling her to her core.
And in that second she feels everything.
She feels her pounding heart, the cold wind, Eli's love for her, and her heartbreak.
She feels more alive than she ever has and she starts to laugh hysterically.
She's free!
Drowning out the noise of her laughter is the sudden blaring noise of a truck honking its horn and it bright lights shining into her eyes.
Then she's gone.
He gets the phone call the next day.
For the first time ever, Eli realizes that Julia isn't coming back to him.
She never will.
She's gone.
Forever.
He's sitting in the abandoned lot. He's covered up their names to where it would be unrecognizable to anyone but him.
He slides down the wall and pretends that he can smell her sweet perfume drifting off her skin.
Opening his eyes slowly he takes in the scenery. The clouds are shifting, the wind is blowing softly.
He doesn't think about their fights, he doesn't think of the pile of stuff in his room that he can't manage to throw out. He doesn't think of the girl he's met whose smile makes something warm build up inside of him.
He thinks about Julia.
He thinks about kissing her, her dark eyes looking into his own. He thinks of her soft skin, and the way she'd wear way too much eyeliner.
He remembers laughing when he first discovered her talking in her sleep, and the way her hair looked like an absolute mess in the mornings.
He thinks about the first time she hugged him, her body shaking, her piano player fingers clutching onto him like he was a lifeline.
He thinks of the memories they shared at this very place.
He knows that she can't hear him, but he feels like he should say something.
"I don't regret loving you." he says, and looks around almost as if expecting some movie like effect to happen.
This wasn't a movie however, and the world kept on going without her.
He didn't want to. He wanted to always remember him.
The first girl he ever fell in love with.
He takes a pack of cigarettes, and a brand new lighter out of his pockets and sets it down on the ground.
He knows if she were here she'd make fun of his silly gesture but he doesn't mind. He do anything to have her come back and mock him one last time.
Standing up, he brushed his sweaty palms against his jeans.
He walks slowly towards the gates, listening to the crunch of leaves underneath him.
He goes to close the gates, but stops for a moment.
"I'm right here Jules." he murmurs. "I love you, and I'm not going anywhere.. I promise."
He gets into Morty and as he's driving off, he lights a cigarette with her old lighter. The taste of it still makes him want to gag, but he takes comfort in the fact that it feels like she's still sitting right next to him.
At the stop sign he reaches over and turns the radio on. The song that she loved so much is playing and he feels calm. He allows himself to get lost in the rhythm, to find comfort in the words.
As he drives down the road the song fades until you can hear nothing but the wind.
"... That you and I were made for this. I was made to taste your kiss. We were made to never fall away."