Song of the Fireflies

This was serious. I had only seen that thoughtful, intent look on her face a few times before, and it was always about something that would later prove to define our strange relationship even more, like adding colors to a black-and-white painting. So far only a quarter of that painting had been filled in. Once with her confession to me that she lost her virginity to Michael Pearson—that about fucking killed me. Once when I admitted I lost mine to Abigail Rutherford—I thought Bray was going to hate me forever after that. Apparently, Abigail Rutherford was Bray’s worst enemy, though I never got that impression until after I slept with her. Then once when she gave me her first blowjob because she “needed the practice”—for days after that, I was in a haze. I couldn’t get the image out of my head, not necessarily because of the act itself but because of the trust she had in me to want me to be the one. And once when I ate her out in my car underneath a bridge overpass, because she dared me to do it. Bray never ceased to shock the hell out of me. Always in a good way. Yeah, those were some colorful fucking brushstrokes.

As I stood at the dresser, new boxers in my hand, I could only wonder what color we would be adding to that painting today.

She sat down on the end of my bed. Her silky dark hair framed her peach-colored face and fell down over both of her bare shoulders.

“What’s up?” I asked, concealing my impatience.

She glanced toward the closet and then looked back at me. “Madelyn will be at this party.”

I thought I knew where this was going, but I couldn’t be sure. I was having a hard time reading Bray, which in itself was foreign to me.

“So?”

“So, I know you have a thing for her. I don’t like her.” Bray struggled with those words; I could see it in her face that she really wanted to say something else. She was hiding something. I was pretty sure I knew what it was, but I needed a bit more proof.

Giving up on changing clothes, I shut the top drawer and leaned against the edge of the dresser, crossing my arms over my chest.

“I don’t have a thing for her,” I said. I wouldn’t mind sleeping with her once, but that’s not a “thing.” “Why don’t you like her?”

“She’s… well, she’s just not right for you. She’s a nice girl, but I get bad vibes from her.” The more she tried to explain, the more uncomfortable she looked. “Just trust me on this, OK?” She swallowed nervously.

Bray never gets nervous around me.

I crouched down in front of her, forcing her blue-eyed gaze to connect with mine.

“Why don’t you just say what you’re really thinking?”

She looked stunned. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, really I don’t.” Trying to avoid it, she stood up and moved to the other side of the bed, crossing her arms and putting her back to me.

“Don’t do this,” I said, rising to my feet, too. “We’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember. We have to stop.”

I stepped up behind her. “Why don’t we just try it, Bray?”

She swung her head around to face me, her eyes harboring confusion and shock and worry all at the same time. Only her confusion wasn’t convincing. She knew exactly what I was talking about, but she wasn’t masking it very well.

“Try what?”

I placed my hands on her upper arms. “Being together.”

It was as if my words sucked all of the air and sound out of the room. For a long time she just stared at me, unblinking.

“I’ve wanted to be with you since we were kids in that pasture, Bray. You know this—you’ve known this. But anytime I ever tried to get closer to you, you pushed me away. Why don’t we stop this, quit playing these games with each other, and just… be together.”

Her big blue eyes fell away from mine. She took a step backward and sat down on the edge of the bed, letting her hands fall in between her thighs. She wouldn’t look at me, and I was getting frustrated. I wanted her to say something, anything.

I crouched in front of her again and rested my hands on the tops of her bare knees. “Please look at me,” I said softly. “Say something.”

It seemed a struggle, but finally she met my gaze. I saw nothing but conflict in her eyes.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not? Are you not into me? If that’s it, just say so. I can take it. I’ll hate it, but at least I’ll know—”

“That’s not it at all,” she said, shaking her head gently.

“Is it because of your dad?” I asked. “I know he’s never really liked me much.”

“No, Elias. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. You should know that by now.”

“Then what the hell is it?” The frustration began to show in my voice, probably in my face, too. “I don’t get it. We’ve been close since we were kids. It’s always been you and me, Bray and Elias, best friends forever, just like you used to scribble on your tablets. Shit, we’ve done everything together short of outright sex. You get pissed at me when I start to get too close to another girl.”

“Are you saying I’m jealous?” she asked quickly.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I answered truthfully, despite wanting to avoid offending her. She knew it was true as much as I did. “The only person you’re fooling here is yourself.”

Too much truth, I realized too late, would only shut her off.

She pushed me away from her and started to head for the door, but I caught her by the elbow and forced her back around to face me.

“It scares me!” she shouted, taking me by surprise. “You’ve been the only consistent thing in my life, Elias! I’m incapable of holding a relationship together. I always fuck it up!” She waved her hands out in front of her angrily. “What was my longest relationship?”

I didn’t answer. I knew the answer, but I got the feeling it wasn’t that kind of question.

“Two months,” she said, holding up two fingers. “I get with a guy and two months is my record. Michael. Three weeks. Austin. Two weeks. Jack. One month. Hell, I went out with Avery for two days before I bailed on him! Two days. It’s pathetic!”

“But what does that have to do with us?” I asked with almost as much intensity in my voice as hers. “We’re not like everyone else. I’m not any of those guys. If anyone could hold a relationship together it’s you and me.”

“That’s just it!” She was almost crying. “You’re not like any of them! You’re the only guy in this world that I care about!”

Tears streamed down her soft cheeks.

It was in this moment that I finally knew the truth. Bray was afraid of losing me, and taking our relationship any further than it had been was a risk that she wasn’t willing to take.

“It’s my worst fear,” she confirmed it and her gaze dropped toward the floor. “Things between us changing. I know, Elias… I feel it… if we change the way things are, the way they have been, nothing will ever be the same again. We’ll break up and grow apart and just thinking about not having you in my life hurts my heart.” Tears shuddered through her chest.

I sat down fully on the floor and pulled her into my arms, wrapping them tightly around her body. I pressed my lips against her hair and did my best to hold back my own tears. Because I understood. Having known Bray practically all my life, I understood her more than anyone ever would or could.

Like I said, Bray was complicated.

She had always been a confident girl, the type that other girls in school looked up to and followed. She was wild and brazen and often too bold for her own good. When we were growing up, she got into more trouble than I thought one innocent, sweet girl could get into. She wasn’t afraid of anything, even the occasional illegal stunt, which landed her in juvy once for a week when she was sixteen. Destruction of property—she got caught spray-painting the back of a grocery store building. But she wasn’t a bad girl, just a little rebellious and reckless.

But her biggest flaw was her inability to form bonds with other people. Friend. Boyfriend. Even family. She had never really been close to anyone. The first time I saw her interact with her parents, I thought that her family was very different from ours. My mom and dad always told me they loved me before I went anywhere or before we hung up the phone. Bray and her parents never said that to each other, at least not that I had ever heard. Bray’s parents didn’t seem to mind that she went where she wanted whenever she wanted. My parents were strict, and I had a crazy eight o’clock curfew up until I was fifteen years old. It took me a long time to truly understand why her parents treated her the way they did. And it wasn’t until many years later that all of the pieces of the puzzle that was Brayelle Bates would fall into place and explain everything.

I was all that Bray ever really had.

Her attachment to me, her closeness to me, I knew all along was love. But she didn’t know, because she had never really experienced love like that before. She grew up pushing people away from her, because it was all she had ever known. When someone started getting too close, she turned on them in an instant, as if a warning siren was going off inside her brain.

She wasn’t a broken girl. She had never experienced abuse or had much of a hard life growing up. She was just cursed with the inability to recognize and filter and react to certain significant emotions.

Despite all of her flaws, all of her crazy antics and sometimes over-the-top personality, I loved her more than anything in this world.

And I knew that I always would.

But it was time I put my foot down.

“It won’t be like this forever,” I said, looking down into her glazed-over eyes. “We can’t spend the rest of our lives being just friends and neither of us getting involved with other people.”

Her tears shut off immediately and she froze. “What are you saying?” she asked.

I softened the look in my eyes, trying to be as delicate as possible with what I was about to say. My hands moved up her arms and rested against her cheeks. I brushed the bone under her eye with the pad of my thumb.

And then I lied to her.

“I can’t do this with you forever,” I said. “I want to be in love, to be loved back. I want to get married one day and maybe have a couple kids—call me old fashioned, but whatever.” She wanted to tear her eyes away from mine, but she couldn’t; she was still frozen in place, her body rigid. “I’ve imagined that person being you. It’s always been about you. But if you don’t want to at least try to be her, then maybe we should stop being friends. This… thing we have, this… relationship, it’s unhealthy.”

She stepped back and away from me, still holding her unblinking gaze.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, her soft features appeared vacant, but her eyes held a profound amount of suppressed pain.

“What I want is to be with you. That’s what I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” My hands collapsed into half fists out in front of me. My whole body was consumed by emotion, a desperate need to make her understand how much I loved her without having to say the words. In the moment, they didn’t seem right to speak aloud. I was afraid she’d run the other way.

I thought this was going to be the end. The end of us, the end of everything that we stood for. The last thing in the world that I wanted was for her to turn and walk out that door so I would never see her again. But that was what I expected. The truth is, I would’ve waited forever for her. I couldn’t imagine myself in a serious relationship with any other girl. Sex? Sure. I’m a guy and I like sex. But to love someone other than Bray seemed eternally impossible. So yes, I lied when I told her that it couldn’t be the way it had been any longer. Because I would’ve waited for her forever. I would’ve stayed just like we were, unconventional best friends who shared a lot more than secrets and sleepovers. But with Bray, I knew I had to be harsh. I felt like I had to be the one to make her understand that our relationship might not be what she wanted. As much as it hurt me to do it, I had to let her know that it was OK to go our separate ways. I didn’t want her to cling to the thought of us for the rest of her life and continue pushing people away because of me.

I just wanted her to be happy.

With her back to me, Bray’s arms uncrossed and fell to her sides.

She turned around.

I waited, subconsciously holding my breath.

And just when I thought it was all going to be over, she said, “OK. I do want to be with you. I want to try with you.”

That night after the party, we had sex for the first time since we’d known each other. But it wasn’t what I had always hoped it would be. Bray changed. I noticed her change as I lay on top of her, peering down into her beautiful, blue eyes. It was as if she knew before it actually happened that if we had sex it would alter everything between us forever. And then as the days wore on, we grew further apart. We broke up after four months. Two months later, she moved away to South Carolina.

I was never the same.

Chapter Four

Bray

I know what you must be thinking: What a bitch. And you’ll get no argument from me on that one. I was pretty messed up back then. I loved Elias with all my heart, and that scared the hell out of me.

But I should get something out of the way before I dive into the excuses of why I was the way I was. I’m sure Elias sugarcoated me with his bias and all, but if this story is going to be told, then it needs to be told in its truth and entirety, without Band-Aids and training wheels.

I was fucked up.

No, no one raped me or beat me or bullied me as a kid. My parents loved me. Maybe not as much as my sister, Rian, but I believed they loved me. They just showed it in different ways than Elias’s parents did, usually with the best toys for Christmas and birthdays, a steady allowance, and the occasional pat on the back for doing a good deed. Sometimes. But every pat on the back I ever did get felt like an obligation, like they were being forced. I had issues. There’s no doubt about that. And for much of my young life my parents did whatever they could to help me. They just gave up trying to fix me somewhere along the way. But I don’t blame anyone for the way I was. A psychologist appointed by the State to evaluate me when I had my little run-in with the police and a stint in juvy called it bipolar disorder. I, on the other hand, called it just one of those things. We’re all different. We all have our own quirks and flaws and dark secrets. All of us are fucked up on some level, whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves. And I like to believe that not every problem or issue that we deal with in our daily lives must be labeled with a fancy title.

I’ll say it again: I was fucked up. It was as simple as that.

Well, just so you know, I didn’t leave Elias and Georgia because I lost interest or fell out of love with him. Quite the opposite. I left because I fell even harder for him, which I didn’t even know was possible. I’ve never really been scared of anything, except of Elias. I think that in the back of my mind I figured if I left him first, if I was the one who put a stop to any kind of relationship that we had, it might not hurt as much as it would have if he had ended it. It gave me a sense of control. At least, I fooled myself into believing that all the way to South Carolina. But once I got there—I moved with my friend, Lissa, who wanted to be closer to her brother—it didn’t take long for me to see that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.

But instead of doing the right thing and following my heart by going back and hoping Elias would take me back, I did the opposite and pushed myself further away from him. Maybe it was my way of punishing myself for being the biggest idiot on the face of the Earth, I don’t know, but whatever it was, it landed me in a year-long relationship with a guy I didn’t love and never would.

I tried to go on with my life, but as time wore on I realized more every day that I really had no life without Elias. He was my life. He had been since that day we met by the pond.

I just wished I would’ve allowed myself to give in to that truth fully long before I finally did.

Because by then, it was too late.

Elias had a girlfriend, and according to our childhood friend Mitchell, Elias was serious about her and very much in love.

That was the time in my life when I didn’t care about anything anymore. I pretty much gave up on life without actually committing suicide. That’s the best way to describe it. I was completely dead inside. But no one else knew. Only Elias would ever have known that something was wrong with me deep down, that what I projected to the world was just a mask covering up the ugliness slowly eating away at my soul. But I never contacted him. I never tried to tell him how I felt, how much I was hurting, how much I missed and needed him. Because I wanted him to be happy. Even if it meant I wasn’t part of that happiness. I ruined my happiness for myself. I wasn’t about to waltz back into his life and ruin his, too.

Inevitably, I broke it off with my boyfriend and I told myself that I’d go back to being relationshipless, the way I had always been. Because relationships just weren’t my thing. But—and here’s some of where that “no Band-Aid” policy I was talking about comes into play—I went from a long-term relationship with one person to having sex with several different people. Call me a slut; say whatever you want. I never slept with anyone for the sheer pleasure of it—not in the beginning, anyway. I did it because I was trying to fill a void and I knew no other way. I was confused and I longed to feel loved the way I felt loved every moment I spent with Elias. I looked for that feeling in everything and everyone.

But I never found it.

And that’s when I… no, I’m not ready to talk about that yet.

For now, let’s just say when the dark secret I carried around behind that mask was out for the world to see, I had no other choice but to go back home.

Home to Elias. If he would have me. If he could have me…

I just never imagined that my homecoming would be met with more than I had ever hoped for… and, well, a lot more that I never could have possibly anticipated.

Elias

Two months ago…

I hadn’t seen nor heard from Bray in four years. As anyone would do, I went on with my life. I met a girl, Aline, at community college. She was beautiful. Dark hair. Bright blue eyes. Peach-colored skin. I loved her. But I wasn’t in love with her, even though I tried really hard to be. I tried so hard that for a while I actually believed it. But after two years of dating, I realized it wasn’t the kind of love I felt for Bray. And it never would be.

I heard from my friend Mitchell that Bray was engaged and in love with some guy in South Carolina. I felt like punching Mitchell for telling me this. I would have much rather gone on wondering about her, left clueless as to how she was carrying on with her life, instead of knowing the painful details.

I saw Bray in everything and everyone. Even in Aline—it wasn’t until much later that I realized how they favored each other. Pathetic, I know, but love isn’t always roses and rainbows and butterflies in your stomach. It’s equally cruel and painful and the world’s worst villain.

Aline dumped me. She knew I was in love with Bray. Not because I told her, but because women are smart like that. They have this weird fucking superpower that allows them to read a man’s emotions and see straight through his lies. I had told Aline about Bray, my “best friend” since childhood, and apparently that was all the backstory Aline needed to know more about me than I knew about myself. It wasn’t that I had tried to hide from Aline the fact that I was still in love with Bray, but that I had been trying to hide it from myself.

Aline was a great girl. She just wasn’t my girl….

It was one day in April nearly two months ago when the landscape of my life changed forever. The colors on that black-and-white painting were finally starting to fill in.

I woke up Saturday morning to Mitchell rummaging through the cabinets in my kitchen. He had been my roommate since last year. A lot about both of us had changed since we were kids. Thankfully, his mullet was one thing. Somewhere along the years he traded that hairstyle for a short, stylish cut with longer bangs that framed his face.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” I asked as I entered the kitchen wearing only my boxers. My current one-night stand, Jana, was still asleep in my bed, tangled in the sheets.

I opened the fridge and drank down half a bottle of water.

Mitchell was standing on a chair pushed against the front of the oven and reaching into the cabinet high above the stove light. “Looking for my weed.”

“Mitchell, man, seriously, you need to come down off that shit. Why would your weed be in the cabinet?”

“Come down off what shit? Weed?” His voice was muffled by the cabinet door.

“The meth.”

“Fucking A, bro, I’m not on meth. What the hell is your problem?”

I sat down at the kitchen table, stretched my arms above me and yawned. “You haven’t slept in three days,” I said. “Last night I heard you going through boxes in your room. For three hours.” I looked around the kitchen. “I haven’t seen this place this clean since I moved in, and I sure as hell didn’t clean it.”

Mitchell’s head finally came out of the cabinet, his bangs partially covering his dark brown eyes. He stepped down from the chair. His eyes were wide and feral and bloodshot, his pupils dilated. The corner of the left side of his mouth constantly twitched.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he said. He started to sit down but began pacing instead.

“I’m not going to tell anyone, but you’re starting to worry me. That’s some bad shit, bro. A month more and you’ll be sucking guys off for a fix. It’s no better than crack.”

Mitchell’s face went slack. “Dude, that’s goin’ too far.”

I sipped my water. “Is it?” I asked and shook my head. “You know I’m far from Mr. Sober and Perfect, but I wouldn’t touch that stuff if you paid me. You remember what it did to Paul Matthews.”

Mitchell pushed air through his lips and rolled his eyes. “Paul got addicted. He was cooking the shit in his bathroom. You don’t see me doing that.”

“Not yet,” I said.

I heard footsteps behind me, and Mitchell looked up.

“Do I get to fuck her next?” he asked.

I shut my eyes briefly and sighed. “Don’t say stuff like that, Mitch.”

“Fuck you,” Jana said to him from behind me.

Her shoulder-length blonde hair was pulled into a sloppy ponytail that hung disheveled against her back. She had sun-kissed brown skin and she was skinny, with delicate wrists I could easily lock my fingers around. But her wrists and her frame were the only delicate things about her, really.

She leaned around the back of my chair and kissed me on the mouth. I noticed right away she was dressed only in a T-shirt and her panties. Mitchell may have been out of line with that comment, but she wasn’t helping her case any, dressed like that in front of another guy.

Jana went to the fridge and opened it. I glimpsed her naked, tanned legs for only a moment. She was hot, but I was already regretting having slept with her.

“Whatever, man,” Mitchell said and went back to the cabinet.

I got up and left the kitchen. I hopped in the shower and Jana joined me. I wasn’t used to girls staying this late with me in the morning, certainly not inviting themselves into my shower. But I wasn’t about to kick her out, especially when the first thing she did was get on her knees and give me a blowjob. But for some reason, I couldn’t get off. I shut my eyes and gripped her head in both hands while she took the entire length of me into the back of her throat, but I couldn’t get off no matter how hard either of us tried.