Disclaimer:  Not my characters.  I’m not making any money from this and no infringement is intended.

‘cause love doesn’t hurt so I know I’m not falling in love

I’m just falling to pieces

and if this is giving up, then I’m giving up

if this is giving up, then I’m giving up, giving up

on love, on love 

-Anna Nalick, Wreck of the Day  

make up your mind (on giving up)  

There is a mirror across from him on his closet.  He’s watching Karen’s reflection sleep, looking at the way the dim light from the window reflects on her smooth skin and hair.  He loves her. 

Well, not loves.  That’s the wrong word:  they’ve only been together for a little over a month, and sometimes when he sees her and Pam together he feels a painful twinge of something deep in his belly, something indefinable and definitely not acceptable.  He’s not about to acknowledge that things like this linger, especially when he’s moved past it and she’s moved past it and they’re pretending it never happened (but if he can still feel it isn’t it still there?).  Jim and Pam.  It didn’t happen.  It probably won’t.  He accepts this. 

Or, not accepts.  More like resigns himself to it.  Fighting when it’s futile isn’t just disheartening, it’s heartbreaking.  He’s laying there with Karen’s long arm across his chest and he can nearly feel the hardened ridges of the crack down his heart, the gaping fracture he feels in his chest where his heart used to be whole.  He presses his fingertips to his chest, feels the steady thump of his heart, and can’t help but think that it’s running on something other than love, other than life, because what he’s got isn’t what he had and hearts don’t beat on nothing.  He’s surviving on an absence, a replacement; he plugged batteries into his chest but they’re leaking acid and he’s not sure how much more he can take.  He is eroding and he can’t, can’t stop. 

Well, not can’t.  He won’t.  It’s not right, this thing he has with Karen, with her pretty face and her skin and her smile.  She is a thunderstorm and he is a drizzle; she wants a rollercoaster and he’s stuck on the swings. She pulls him forward only for him to dig in his heels:  nothing here is fair.  He’s with her because he’s lonely and she’s interested and she reminds him of something (someone) that he misses.  He looks at himself in the mirror, in the gray-blue darkness, and thinks about what things used to be like, how he used to feel half full rather than more than a little empty.  She used to smile when he’d come over to (see her) steal her candy.  He knew it was the sweetness of her expression burning the back of his throat because even sugar’s not that strong. 

Or, maybe not sweetness.  It could have been the way he saw her eyes light up and felt himself respond, like she was the right end of a magnet, pulling him closer.  It could have been that he could nearly see the hope that hovered around her, like steam, like fog.  Rescue me from this, he thought she’d been saying.  He’d missed her belated, unspoken whisper, I’m too scared to change.  It would have been nice to know (it wouldn’t have changed anything). 

Well, not anything.  Maybe he would have been able to put up more walls, to grab some sort of life saver because he had been drowning, drowning, and he hadn’t even been trying to breathe.  Just thinking about it puts a panic into his chest:  he feels a gasp burning in his lungs, and he’s struggling to keep it in.  This is not the way she should have to find out.  Karen’s never known about what happened with Pam and he knows he has to end this, he knows he does, but he always ends up hurting the ones he loves (if he doesn’t love her, will it still hurt her?).  He knows that’s cliché but that’s his whole life and damn it if it’s not true (if it doesn’t hurt, if it’s not killing him).  The corners of his eyes burn and he feels a hot tear slide down the side of his face, pooling in the creases of his ear. 

Or maybe it didn’t pool in his ear:  he feels a coolness there but Karen’s stirring, pulling her arm toward herself, exhaling more loudly and erratically.  She takes a long breath through her nose and props herself up on a hand, looking down at Jim.  He hasn’t had time to wipe anything away and she furrows her eyebrows, presses her palm to his chest.  “Jim?” she says quietly.  “Are you okay?” 

Well, perhaps not so quietly because it almost startles him, the deepness of her sleepy voice, the harsh sound of air through her lips.  Her whisper is soft, like a blanket, but suddenly it’s suffocating him and he feels like he’s wrapped in a vice.  He wants to squirm, to get away.  He nods instead, his pillow crinkling.  He’s always loved the sound but right now it reminds him of fax machines and tissue paper in gift bags he’d never given; it reminds him of whispering in the dark and the curly hair that had never brushed against his neck in sleep.  “I’m fine,” he replies, his voice just a little husky from disuse and the thickness he feels in this throat.  “Just couldn’t sleep.”  She blinks slowly and says, “Oh.”  She nestles down next to him, fitting her side into the concave hollow of his shoulder.  She smoothes out the shirt on his chest for a few seconds but falls asleep again quickly.

Or maybe not.  “Do you want to talk?” she says a moment later, rubbing her cheek gently along his side.  He’s struggling, weighed down with the fear that if he says anything now she’ll climb out of the bed and leave; he’ll be left with a cold bed and an empty room.  She’s not the one he wants, but he doesn’t want to be cruel to her and he can’t stand the idea of more loneliness.  It’s even harder to lose things when you don’t have much to begin with (it’ll hurt more because it’s his fault, completely).  He wants to love her.  He does.

Well, he thinks he does.  It might be just as easy if she didn’t love him.  That way he wouldn’t have the thick taste of betrayal every time he holds Karen in his arms and thinks about how she doesn’t fit as well as someone else would, how she smells sounds is different than someone he gave up on a long time ago.  Pam might believe she’s ready, she might act like she’s ready, but old habits die hard and getting rid of fear takes conditioning.  It wouldn’t work and he knows (hates) it.

Or maybe he’s just afraid too.  Caution might be her defining feature but that doesn’t mean he lacks it:  he loved her for three years and never said anything.  He kept his mouth shut, kept all the words he wanted to say back behind his tongue, stuck in his throat.  He’s used to this thickness, then – it’s a symptom of his chronic inability to say things to the right person at the right time in the right way (it figures it would have to be so complicated).  He’s feeling irrational now because the tightness of his chest is twisting him like a napkin; he’s fraying at the edges, soft, white, wispy.  “No,” he tells Karen finally, stroking his fingers down the curve of her waist, her hip.  He likes the heat of her body.  “I’m okay.  Go back to sleep.”

She’s not ignorant and she’s not unobservant – it’s quite possible she knows what’s running through his head (though he doubts she knows the specifics), and if that’s the case, why is she just laying there, taking it?  He knows what that’s like, being in love with someone who won’t (can’t, doesn’t) love you back and he doesn’t want it for her, doesn’t want it for anyone.  He shifts a little and feels that irrationality rise:  he wants to shout at her to not take it, not from anyone, not for anything.  She doesn’t deserve the silent agony, the hopelessness, the bitterness for the good things that don’t come even to those who wait.  She wouldn’t be able to bear the unfairness of it all.  Then, unexpectedly, the burn in him is quelled like a quick breath to a flame:  I love you, he thinks he hears her whisper.  Neither of them makes a move to acknowledge it.  Maybe it was just a sigh or a branch on the window or something he imagined, but this is something he understands, something he knows down to the marrow in his bones.  Sometimes it’s just too hard to walk away:  he couldn’t do it and now it seems Karen can’t either.