Author's Note:
Some of this might seem familiar if you've read my first post-Trial And Error piece, called "After The Fall" (also posted here on FFN). For a while I wasn't sure if I should incorporate it into this story or if I should head in another direction with this one, but if I hadn't used the scene the way I first wrote it, I would have felt like I wasn't true to myself. So I decided to actually put it in here with a few minor modifications and additions. You'll see what I mean in the next two chapters.

--...----...----...--

Always Jane...

.:. insert picture of Adam, walking along Alexander Drive
with his hood over his head, looking down .:.

Adam:

I walk home the last few yards from the bus stop. It's as if I'm working on auto-pilot. I don't realize where I'm going, but yet my feet seem to know where to step, as if steered by an invisible force. I don't consciously notice Mrs. Halloway greeting me with her usually cheerful wave from across the picket fence as I walk by her house with the immaculately maintained lawn and flower beds.

My thoughts are still floating, ever floating in a place that seems oddly detached from reality. I think of nothing specific and let the fragments of stray, ghostlike strings of thought trail around my brain. Bits and pieces come and go, pictures of Jane mostly. Jane in a flowered skirt and beige top, chasing after a sheet of homework that is being blown away by a gust of wind in the school yard. Jane chewing on the top of her pencil in chemistry class. Jane sitting next to me on the roof of the school, babbling on about something or other. Always Jane.

I walk faster, as if that could make me escape my mental torture chamber. I arrive at the door to my shed. I hesitate for a second before opening it, as if I'm afraid of what's inside. Familiar surroundings greet me, accompanied by an oh-so familiar smell of sawdust mixing with freshly welded metal. I have spent more hours in this shed than I have in my own bedroom, I know every nook and corner of it. I half-heartedly throw my bag to the floor and sit down on the stool at the work bench. Everything seems to remind me of her, seems to scream her name at me. I remember seeing her hesitatingly opening the door into the shed as she enters it for the first time, stepping inside carefully, surveying the crammed shelves with a mixture of curiosity and admiration.

I can't take this any longer and look for something, anything to occupy my mind with. Anything to push away the pictures and memories of Jane chasing each other around my brain. I pick up a board of hardwood and the electric padsaw. Almost automatically, I don the goggles and suede work gloves before I hit the on-switch of the saw. I had been wanting to use pieces of wood for a sculpture I was building. Pieces of a board that I would saw into smaller chunks, yet still big enough to paint pictures on. I adjust the board of wood and take the saw into my right hand. With a familiar sound, the blade begins to vibrate up and down, cutting into the wood as I apply pressure in the right places. I let my hands guide the board and the saw to produce smaller pieces of no particular shape.

The sound of the saw has an almost lulling quality, so my mind inevitably starts wandering again. Wandering down that path I don't want to walk but yet am compelled to, like I'm drawn there by something too powerful to resist.

I suddenly jump up as I feel a sharp pain in my left index finger, throwing over the stool that was behind me. I jerk my hand away, the board cluttering to the floor. I watch as the tear in the fabric of the glove slowly turns red. Instinctively, I pull the gloves and goggles off, sluggishly realizing that I must have cut my finger on the saw blade. I tentatively squeeze the cut with my right hand to assess the damage. It doesn't seem more than a moderately superficial cut. 'Guess you got lucky,' I think to myself. 'You could have sawn your finger off, Rove.'

I keep squeezing the cut, so that the blood oozes out, a perfectly oval shaped bubble forming on my skin, deeply crimson in color. I can slowly feel the first rush of adrenaline subsiding and feel the pain kicking in. A sort of bittersweet pain that bitterly hurts but sweetly surmounts any other kind of pain.

I watch a drop of blood falling to the floor, and yet I keep squeezing because the pain I feel through that makes any thoughts of Jane keep out of my head. But not for long, there she was again, sneaking her way in again. I let go of my finger, not caring about stopping the flow of blood.

Slowly, the events of this afternoon come rushing back to me. I hear her last words to me reverberating in my head. 'You gave her a part of yourself because I wouldn't sleep with you. You had my heart, Adam. That's what you took when you went to hook up with her. We're done. It's over.' Her words repeat in a loop like a stuck record, growing louder and more persistent every time I replay the scene in my mind. Tears inevitably spring into my eyes. Listlessly, I sag against the desk behind me, sliding to the floor into a sitting position. All the misery washes over me like a heat wave in summer, so intense that I barely have any air left to breathe.

Bonnie's huge, doll-eyes look at me, the two of us just having shared our bodily passion, two teenagers hungry for the same intimate physical contact. Her delicate hands seeking out the places of my hormone-raged body that make me want to sigh in delight. How exactly we had ended up in her bed together, I can't even remember. We had been going over one of Mrs. G's arts assignments one moment, and the next I felt her soft lips on mine, her fingers sliding up my naked back under my t-shirt. From that point on, there had been no stopping. It was as if my mind had been replaced with someone else's.

Now I realize with shocking lucidity that I should have put a stop to it right there, right then. I should not have let her guide me expertly into her bed, her hands never leaving my slender body. Somehow she had put a spell on me, one I had no counter curse for. The time afterwards had been anticlimactic. My mind switched from biochemically induced bliss to unequivocally vivid common sense when Bonnie settled herself my lap after we had gotten dressed. For her it was as if this was the most natural thing in the world. In her world maybe. My world, now galaxies away from hers, was just shattering into a thousand pieces. There was nothing I could do but just take my things and leave. Only when I felt the door to her apartment click into its lock behind me, I realized that I had just made the biggest mistake of my life.

And then there were Jane's hurt and betrayed eyes, tear-filled and so sad, accusing me with fierce anger and a world of disbelief and pain. I could read her question, the biggest one that she didn't actually ask, but didn't need to. 'Why?'

Yes, why? Why exactly had I done it? Why had I not been strong enough to resist? Why had I risked the biggest joy in my life and lost it? I vaguely remember a feeling of schadenfreude when I had slept with Bonnie. It was not a feeling you delve in and embrace, it was a feeling that you try to push away and forget as soon as you realize it's there. It had only lasted a split second, but it had undeniably been present, like a shadow from a darkly grey rain cloud overcasting an otherwise perfect sky, being blown in, lingering to shed its moisture and then blown away again. Now I wonder if sleeping with Bonnie had also been a small act of defiance. Of defiance against Jane not wanting to sleep with me in the camper, or any time after that. I had been trying so hard to persuade myself that our relationship wasn't about sex, that we had time, that I could wait until she was ready for it. Who had I been kidding?

Maybe I thought that finally doing it, with anybody who was willing and able, would free me in ways that I couldn't imagine. It didn't. If anything, it had trapped me, trapped me inside this hellhole of misery, guilt and shame. I am writhing in it, trying to find a way out of the trap, but the more I tug and move, the tighter it grips me. In all of that, I see her face before me again, the one that accuses me and looks at me with a lack of understanding of why her world had so suddenly been tumbling down. I don't even notice that tears are dropping from my face to the floor, mingling with the drops of blood in the stray wood shavings. I bury my head in my folded arms resting on my knees.