Thursdays to Jahseh have a newer merit now.
He'd mastered the taxing groove of an early rise, up and on his feet at the morning's first blush. Circuits of cardio to get his heart right, or perhaps to secure that pump sleek through whatever he chooses to tog up for those 10 AM trysts with Eve. Every Tuesday and every Thursday, like clockwork. It was fun until it wasn't, and now his early rises give way to stag breakfasts, he and Eve's back and forths ousted by the sobering consequences of his own actions.
Today's Thursday stung a little graver than the two or so prior, because the last he'd seen of Eve her one cheek had gilded several shades redder than the other. Yet the floored mess he'd made of Parker didn't make him feel at all better about it. Only roused him ragged with the impossibly of it ever happening, if not for the state of he and Eve.
He misses her loss for words, but would fill his entire home with the sound of it if he could. Just to dam the hollows she'd left in her absence. Eve won't linger in the same room as him longer than a jiff, she dances around his name and blenches beneath his stare. How funny he's cursed to find itâthe horizon and a half she stakes between them, the gaping scope if it. Because once upon a time he'd fooled himself into believing he wanted it, too.
Now their Thursdays are his penance, and he serves it in the dreary walls of his own home.
Sullivan quickly gathered he'd rather the day to himself, but tonight, upon the incessant ringing of his doorbell, Jahseh can only assume he'd forgotten. By its fifth toll, he can no longer deafen his ear to nor make sense of it. He takes two steps at a time up from his basement, but if he'd known what really waited for him outside, perhaps he might've taken three. Perhaps none at all.
By the time he's pulled his door unlocked and fully open, Eve is matted rigid by the rain. Her hair lards against her face and upon her shoulders, her clothes swollen, her shoes fraught. She's altogether heavier, but Eve doesn't know whether it's by the minutes the rain had taken to seep through her layers, or the sadness that lines her stomach like bile.
Jahseh lessens at the sight of her.
"I..."
She's at the mercy of a whisper, rattled by the cold and the spew fighting through her restraint.
Jahseh has half a mind to run his hand right through her. The weather does her no justice, and yet, even against it she glitters like a garnet in light. When her perfume perfuses the wets and swaddles his neck like a noose, he grasps it's not his eyes that deceive him at all.
"What you doing here? It's fuâit's late and it's flippin' cold, man." He steps outside, perfectly stoic to the torrents that douse his shirt and the puddle beneath his slides. "Where's your car? How'd you get here?"
"It's... I..."
Jahseh takes a proper look at her now, at the droplets that splatter on her forehead, that bleed from her hair and the corners of her eyes. And she might as well've sucker-punched him in the gut with that. It'd probably hurt him less.
"What's wrong? What happened?"
He can see it somewhere within her, that something isn't right. But between the two of them, what is? He takes a step towards her, she takes a harrowing one back. Her stare lowers to the growing mere about her feet, shaking her head ever so slightly.
"I thought..." Eve scoffs, raking a wet hand across her face. "I can't believe I'm crying over a boy. I'm... This is so stupid, I can't."
Jahseh's stomach knots. "Come inside the house, Eve."
"No, thank you. I just..." Eve sniffs. Suddenly, he finds it a lot easier to tell her tears from the rain, to trail their tracks down her sodden cheeks. "I had so many things to say to you, but what's the point, you know?"
"What you talking about? Can youâlook, you're all shaking, just come inside the house."
But despite the drizzle heavy upon her lashes and the sear beneath the skin of her lids, Eve only blinks back at him.
"I lost everything, Jahseh. My dad, my brother, m-my..." Eve breathes a cracked sigh. "My mum. How can I lose everything that I've lost and still be stood here crying over a boy? Why've I let you do this to me? Why would you do this? To me, Jahseh?"
His mouth falls open and then shut just as quickly.
"I thought, I actually thought it was Ana, you know. I thought you and her..."
Jahseh's entire face grimaces, "Ana? What about Anaâ"
"But it's not even her, is it? God, you let me think there was something wrong with me, you wouldn't just tell me the truth. Why?" Her rambles quell at the sneeze that rattles through her. Jahseh again steps forward and Eve steps back, there's something about their waltz that ploughs his heart deeper into his chest.
"Come inside the house."
"You're in a gang. That's it, right?"
Now it's Jahseh that treads back. Her words strike him like a bullet, and in that moment, beneath the aghast heft of her gaze, like a deer fand in headlights, Jahseh has never felt so naked.
Funny, he'd already lost her, yet felt hamstrung to watch now as she finally throws him away.
He can feel the walls come down around him, the floor beneath him mulls to quicksand and the sinking subtlety is no longer in his stomach, but swallowing him whole. He recalls every instance he'd sworn to Sullivan that Eve doesn't know him, that she can't know him, but he'd give anything to face that Eve rather than the one before him now, who meets him with the same prudence you would a stranger. "I ain't... I'm notâit ain't even like that. That's why I'm telling you, come in the house. Let me talk to you."
"Now you want to talk to me. You haven't talked to me in weeks! I told you I have feelings for you, and you left me! You left me!" Her tone inclines and the thunder does with it, distant but the perfect chord for their blues.
"Eveâ"
Eve palms her temple, and she laughs through her disbelief, although her tears are free and flowing. "I don't get it. I... There isn't... It doesn't make sense. Because I'm here, aren't I? I'm right in front of you and it's like, you don't even see me, do you?"
Jahseh can only blink.
"I've lost everything, and I'm still... I know I'm good, Jahseh. I am a good person. K-Kamale wronged me and I'd still face Parker for him. He robbed me and I fed him. I am good. Abbey Wood is... They took my whole life from me, everything, and I'm there everyday, killing myself to help those kids. Those thieves and liars and gang members, all of them. I am good, I am a good person, and you of all people should know that." There's a strident desperation to her words as she says them, as she combs through her soused tresses with trembling fingers, strummed by the cold and her aching heart. Her declarations stagger like pleas. As he watches her all but come undone before him, he's slow to realise that's it's not only he that she is trying to convince. "I am good and I am lovingâI am love, Jahseh. I-I know I am."
What has he done?
"I know you are."
"So why are you punishing me for it? I'm supposed to believe that you're what, too scared to tell me about your past? About your wrongdoings? They killed my family and I am there!" Eve yells.
Beneath the repose of his surface, he wonders if there's any coming back from this. "Please, Eve."
"This is what you wanted. So be it." Eve nods, sniffs, and takes a wet sleeve to the reddening ridge between her nose and her mouth. "You don't know me, Jahseh. You don't know me."
Something wilts in Jahseh as he watches her retreat. This is his penance.
I wrote this whole thing half asleep and I don't even know why, 'cause there was really no rush lol. If you see any gibberish, you know why.
Made me a little emosh' writing all the dialogue first, the poor babe. What are we thinking?
Furthermore, how the heck am I meant to write them back together? LMAO.
I got soooooooo lazy towards the end, you can tell there are gaps dfkm
Goodnight soz, I am t for tired.