Author's Chapter Notes:
Title/inspiration from the song Hearts and Minds by matt pond PA.
I own nothing.
Built to love, he laughs wildly into the echoing dark of a parking lot as her low heels click against the pavement and their hearts beat and beat and beat, finally, for once. Laughter, not from amusement or simple happiness, but from the complete release of everything, an unraveling spool of thread, a rubber band snapping back. It is joy. It is purpose after all.
Their mouths meet somewhere by a car that isn’t his and the world either slows down to a crawl or speeds up so fast it feels like it’s standing still. Whichever it is, he is horribly off balance under her hands and her lips. He tilts and totters and steadies himself on her hips. Those hips like rolling hills, dangerous rolling hills he is sure to slip down, grass stains on his knees and his hands.
One of these is true: he is not himself or he has never been himself until this moment. Because hee doesn’t know this stranger. This buoyant yet burning man. A flame once and now a fire, all his strength goes to his hands and his mouth as they pull a wondrous sound from the depths of her throat.
A sound that seems to alarm her, she disentangles herself and the absence is felt wholly and violently by him. The ache of it worse almost than the ache of all those years before. His lungs are heaving and his heart is bound for combustion. He takes a fevered step forward, but she backs away. A soft apologetic smile.
“There are a lot of things we haven’t talked about,” her timorous voice says as her eyes cast down on their shadows stretching out along the pavement. They go on forever it seems. They go on until they don’t exist anymore. Until it’s all just darkness. “And we should. Talk about them, that is. I think,” she finishes, her mouth fidgets nervously and she looks at her hands.
There is strength in words, power in language. He was young when he learned that. It was a heavy realization: words were everything. Words are destructive but they are capable of rebuilding. He was older when he learned that.
“You’re right,” he says, his misbehaving hands burying themselves deep in his pockets.
He starts choosing words as her lips curl slightly into a relieved smile, her hands clasping and unclasping in front of her. Love is too soon of a word, yet it is also the only one that comes to his mind now. He chooses apologetic words instead, the sort with soft consonants that might erase all the damage done when he came home bitter. He chooses words that could lay a foundation, plural pronouns and the future tense. He puts these words aside, saving them.
There is a brightly lit baseball diamond on the other side of the thin manmade forest that borders the restaurant’s parking lot. Leaves and mulch crunch loudly beneath their feet as they cross over, his hand holding tightly onto hers already afraid of losing her. In the wide expanse of the field, the cool air makes her shiver. And how easy it is for his arm to go around her, how small she is and how perfectly she fits into him, his hands moving up and down to warm her. They walk slowly across the field, wobbling, all wrapped up in each other.
The light is harsh and turns their skin pale and a strange purplish yellow. They sit on the wooden bench inside the dugout. She puts her feet up, heels hooked into the links of the fence. She looks wonderfully and beautifully out of place there in her cream colored dress, everything about her soft and delicate while the wood is splintered and dust covered and that bright white light is trying its best to pick up on flaws that surely don’t exist.
She leans into him in a gesture so remarkably intimate and comfortable that his usually reliable instincts fail him and he is frozen for a moment. She sights softly and her eyes flutter closed and he remembers, his arm going around her waist, palm resting flat on her hip. Her hand comes up and she wraps her fingers around his.
The silence stretches and he is conscious that this moment is a beginning and the first sentence is always important. He reaches back into his mind for those careful words he had chosen, but they’ve all vanished. He has dropped them in the woods among the twigs and the leaves. There must have been a hole in the pocket he put them in. They dropped out one by one while he was caught up in the way she looked in the shadows of the trees, that light slowly spilling onto her. There is one word leftover, though he hadn’t meant to keep it in the first place. He says it to himself, trying it out: love love love love love. It’s the only right word, but it isn’t right at all. He scrambles desperately to find new words.
But she speaks first, having found her own words, and she says, “I feel- I don’t know. Lighter. Like I’ve wanted this for so, so long and it’s been so hard not having it, you know? All those days seeing you and talking to you but not being able to make that final step and actually be with you. I felt like a part of my life was just not there, some vital chunk of who I am was just not there and now it is there and I have you and this and now I can do anything.”
Anything. The word makes him feel invincible and infinite or maybe that’s her, the permeating warmth of her weight against him, her fingers braided with his. He gathers her up closer to him, his other arm coming around her. He kisses her temple and her cheekbone and just behind her ear. She laughs softly at the tickle of his breath on her skin and of all the words there in his mind, there isn’t one for this.
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