One more to go after this. Thanks for the reviews, I appreciate it!
Nope, not mine.
VII.
"Mark, I know."
Mark walked rapidly despite the fact the fact that he had no destination in mind to hurry toward. All of his normal haunts had been closed for hours, and he wasn't yet prepared to go back to the loft where he would have to face his friend and his empty room. He just wanted to put as much space as possible between himself, Maureen, and the conversation they had just had as quickly as possible. Every time his feet hit the frozen sidewalk and the distance between what he didn't want to remember increased, he expected some sense of relief to begin creeping up on him, but he was disappointed with each step. The memories remained mockingly clear. Her words were a litany in his unwilling ears, effectively warding off any numbness that the cold or his own mind might have produced. He heard those words so many times, in rhythm with the sound of his shoes hitting the pavement, that he wasn't even sure whose voice they were said in anymore.
"Mark, I know."
Mark froze.
"What?" he whispered. He was standing with his back to her. He had been walking toward his bedroom to escape her deep and knowing eyes when she had spoken up softly. He could feel those felty brown eyes on him now, not hard but evaluating, and he felt terror rip through him, roaring through his veins and ears. He tried to relax, to breathe deeply, but he knew it was no use. He couldn't fool her.
"I know," she repeated gently. "Mark... please look at me."
He did, turning slightly, and somehow she was more beautiful than she ever had been before.
"I've known for a long time," she said with a slight, forced smile, as though that made it easier. She looked back down at the book lying open in her lap which she had been reading when Roger left just minutes ago. "I just..."
Her voice trailed off, and she bit her lip, looking up hesitantly into his terrified eyes.
"I just need you to talk to me Mark," she finally said. "I can't stand this feeling of secretiveness with you, like I can't say anything for fear that it might be wrong. I don't like this being between us."
Every muscle in his body cried out in protest against his immobility, his inability to run away from her. But he felt as if his feet had been nailed to the floor, and the most resistance he could manage was to look away from her.
"April, I don't know what..." he began to protest weakly.
"Oh Mark!" she said, more in grief than in anger, though her tone was less gentle than before. "Please, don't lie to me. I've seen the way you look at him. I've seen the way you are with him, and don't tell me it's just because he's your best friend, because I know it's more than that."
Unable to bring himself to lie to her when she was being so honest, he said nothing, just stared down at his feet. He was trying desperately to think of something to say, but all he could do was focus on all of the times when he had stared at Roger when his back was turned or had gone out of his way to touch him and wish that he had been more careful.
"I love you as much as I love him, Mark," April continued, looking as though she were going to stand but deciding against it. "I know we've always been close, but..." she hesitated, "but sometimes you've got to wish that I would just get the hell out of your lives, don't you? I can't stand the idea of being the reason that you're unhappy, I just... I need him too."
Mark's eyes snapped up to hers, and for a long moment he could only stare at her, feeling numb and crushed and saved all at the same time.
"April..." he finally murmured, giving in to it for the first time, and she immediately stood, stepping forward to wrap her arms around him. He buried his face into her neck, nearly sobbing with remorse, relief, and love as her hands ran over his back soothingly.
"Oh God, April..." he choked into her hair, feeling his throat constrict. "I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry..."
"Shh," she said. "You have nothing to be sorry about."
"I do," he insisted, pulling back from her slightly, feeling an almost overwhelming paradox of emotion surge through him as he looked into her big, clear eyes. "I have so much to be sorry about. I swear, I never meant for this to happen, and I never resented you. Ever. I know that... the way he looks at you, he could never... He loves you so much, and so do I. I can't imagine my life - our lives - without you. We'd be a total mess. God, I'm so sorry."
"So it is true?" she asked softly when he found himself unable to articulate the dull, constant ache in his chest anymore. "You do love him?"
He smiled slightly. "I thought you said you knew."
The corners of her lips turned up. "Just making sure."
"Yeah, something like that."
The tears that had been glistening in her eyes during this entire exchange finally fell, rolling slowly down her cheeks. "Oh Mark," she said. "I'm so sorry."
"No," he said, reaching up to tenderly wipe her tears away, no longer able to stop his own at the sight of hers. "No, I'm sorry."
His arms came back around her, and she curled up against him. He held her more tightly than he had ever held anyone in his life, embracing her with his heart and his soul as much as with his arms, something he couldn't remember having been able to do before. They stayed like that, talking and crying, for a long time, until the only thing left for them to do was laugh.
Mark continued to walk aimlessly, not really aware of anything that was going on around him, the memories of the dead days with her on a loop in his head. Those worn tracks in his mind, though painful, were more comfortable than the fresh images of Maureen screaming, crying that he should just admit that he was in love with Roger and always had been.
But Maureen didn't understand. She didn't know that it wasn't love in the normal sense of the word. It was just Roger. He realized that this sounded like he was being deliberately vague and esoteric, but it was the only way he knew how to articulate the truth that he understood but couldn't word. It was Roger. It was knowing that it had to be Roger, because it was. Only April had understood that, because it had been the same way for her.
After that moment when they had cried in each other's arms everything was different. It defied all logic that April would become his comfort and support, but she was. She was his angel. No matter how busy she was she would always abandon her books or her papers to talk to him on those occasional dark days when the sadness and rejection pulsing off of him was nearly palpable. Sometimes when Roger left for rehearsal, they would giggle together about how good he looked in his tight shirt and ripped jeans. He would find little notes from her hidden all throughout his things - beneath his pillow, tucked into a sweater, stuck in the pages of his favorite book - whenever she had to go out of town to visit her father. He continued to find those after she died, and each one was like a white-hot poker through his chest, crippling him for days. She often slipped into his bed at night to touch him and talk to him, knowing that there were days when he felt like no one had ever touched him at all. She tried to smooth away his loneliness with her own unflinching love, and she was the only one he could talk to.
For a long time he wondered how much of it she did out of guilt. Mark knew she loved him, but how much of her kindness was to help repair the fact that Roger loved her the way he would never love him? After a while, however, it stopped mattering to him. They worked so well as a group, a unit, that he wouldn't have changed it for the world. He was happy; they all were. But that damned note was always in his head now: take care of each other. He analyzed those words ceaselessly. When he read them for the first time and then looked up into Roger destroyed eyes, he could have sworn that he actually felt his heart collapse in his chest. It felt wrong to touch the musician, to look at him, because he knew that every moment with Roger had been bought with her blood, a transaction he never would have chosen. He could still see that blood when he closed his eyes, staining the floor of the second bathroom they never used anymore, despite the fact that it had been scrubbed away months ago. Roger might silently blame himself, but Mark knew that this was a chance that she had given him, because she didn't think she had one anymore. It was her last present, her last hidden little note, and the last time she tried to make him happy. That knowledge, which he couldn't even share with anyone, nearly killed him.
He felt more deeply alone without her than he ever had before in his life. He had had a glimpse at a soul mate, and every relationship paled now in comparison. He didn't feel it when Maureen touched him, didn't hear her words, in the same way that he had felt and heard April. He and Roger together might have been able to repair the loss they had both been dealt, but Roger was drowning. He was just a shell of the man he used to be, a new person who drank and partied and made all sorts of noise to try to drown out those words scribble on the bathroom mirror. Mark was losing him. Every day that Roger came home fucked up or refused to take his medication, he was a little closer to joining her, and despite all of his desperate efforts, Mark couldn't bring the musician back from that precipice. It was April who Roger needed. Mark just wasn't enough, and he had never felt more helpless in all of his life.
It wasn't love exactly. It was something stronger but less defined. April had felt it too, and for a short time it had bound them all together. They were each the most important person to the other two, and together they had made a kind of triangle where they were all happy and safe and protected from every angle. But she had been the apex, and now that she was gone the whole structure was crumbling.
And it wasn't enough to just miss her. He needed her; they both needed her. She knew that, but she had left anyway. And Mark was angry about it. He was angry that he would never have the answers he so badly needed to hear. He was angry that Roger was dying and that she had valued her own life so little. He had lost the two people he loved most in the world, and that made him angry with her and with him and with God and with everyone who had someone to hold at night. He didn't know if he could ever fully recover from it.
Mark was jerked from his thoughts by the sound of a car horn up the block. It was late and, Mark suddenly realized, heart-numbingly cold. The effects of his exhaustion were beginning to creep up on him, pulling at his eyelids and making each step heavier than the last. Reluctantly accepting that he had nowhere else to go, Mark turned and began walking in the direction of the loft.