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Match Heads
#1
Elijah woke up with the faint taste of pennies lingering on his senses and the distinct feeling of indistinctness in his limbs. He couldn’t feel his fingertips; his nose was cold. The young man opened his eyes, slowly expecting the light from the dirtied room to pour in but, luckily, he was not so unlucky as to have to deal with sunshine and unpleasantness. The young man’s days were built around a singular idea- avoidance. Since he’d gotten out of the hospital his only concerns revolved around keeping himself out of state care again. He had a rather impressive cocktail of medications lingering in his system that, when mixed with alcohol or illegal substances, did a very good job of making sure he woke up with a primarily blank slate. There is a distinct feeling that comes with having lost time, a feeling of liberation that wasn’t unlike the moment when you decide that you are going to jump out of a swing set and you launch yourself forward, hurdling through the air until you finally feel the sand under your feet. 
 
He’d always been the type to jump, you see. Always been the type to go and hurl himself into the whatever-the-fuck-is-out-here. That wasn’t what killed him two years ago, though. Yes, Elijah’s heart was still beating- though he could feel it hard yet irregular in his ears. The room was foggy, but then again every room was foggy these days. He liked it that way; being in a fog meant that he was given a reprieve from whatever might have lived in that haze. Elijah stayed anchored, in that moment, to what was real around him. The young man stood up from the dingy bed he’d been sleeping on and looked over to the woman with whom he had been sharing it with. Her hair was curled, but not curly. She had the kind of dark hair that came only from a blonde’s persistent insistence that she wanted to be taken seriously. She smelled like hairspray; Elijah couldn’t remember her name. He was, at that juncture, completely fine with this fact.
 
Her hips curved and the bedsheet- crisp and white- hung over her generous frame. The woman had pinned a tapestry over one of the windows; not a real tapestry, but the kind of thing one bought at a New Age fair and was rife with pseudo-Celtic symbolism. There were stags chasing hares in circles around a triskelion and the fabric looked heavy. It was heavy. It did a good job blocking out the sunlight. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, he took in a few other things. The woman’s room had floral wallpaper and smelled faintly of a two-pack-a-day habit. She had a Queen Anne chair in the corner and, if Elijah stood very still, he could see the faint outline of where a man should be. He wasn’t’ a creature that stood still, though, and when he turned to face the furniture he’d noticed that it was imagination alone that gave the clothing laid out substance. He was thankful that he didn’t have to look too hard to find his clothes this time. He knows that “this time” is an appropriate length of time. The young man climbed into yesterday’s jeans, stopping only when he slid his hands into his pockets and found a balled up piece of paper in one of the pockets.
 
It could have been anything. Elijah wasn’t in the habit of paying close attention to the contents of his pockets but the paper didn’t feel right for a receipt. It was thick and heavy, and when he pulled the oddity from his pocket he was greeted by a tidy, blank business card. Elijah had scrawled something across the center of the card- Cthula Junction. The young man frowned, brows knit together briefly as he grasped at the ghosts of the evening before. He rubbed the paper between his fingers, and like a scratch-and-sniff sticker he’d coveted in grade school, it yielded a scent. Burnt match heads mixed with bergamot and clary sage. His eyes traveled from the card back to the woman in bed again. He shook his head again, harsh, then shoved the card back into his pocket. Elijah finished getting dressed without any fanfare.
 
His phone rang; Elijah raced to answer it lest he wake up the nameless woman still sleeping in what he presumed was her bed.
 
“What?” he whispered.
“Where the Hell are you?” a female voice inquired.
“No idea,” he confessed to Jenn.
 
Jenna Laurent was the only person who called Elijah on any level of frequency. They were friends enough that, in this incarnation of his phone, he had not bothered to actually put her number in the address book because he had already memorized it. It was a skill that was rapidly fading among people in his age cohort- being able to remember phone numbers. They’d never really not been without a phone book, so the need to remember how to call someone was no more important than being able to identify all the strings on a violin; the task was not difficult, but completely lost on those who did not feel the need to invest the time to learn.
 
She’d been the sole witness to what people had started calling ‘the accident’. She had enough Catholic guilt and attempts to remedy the world’s sins that Elijah was convinced that over the next few years Jenn Laurent was going to be canonized as St. Jenna- patron of artists, addicts, and children who became parents long before they could decide to make that decision. She was the first of five children, first to go to college, and the first to actually make something out of herself. Jenn spent her time weighing herself down with her childhood friend and his escapades.
 
“You’re supposed to be in class,” she whispered, maternal venom creeping into her voice.
“I had a busy night last night,” Elijah replied, “what am I missing in sociology?”
“Strain theory.”
“Judging by the clipped responses, there is no way in Hell I’m going to be able to get your notes, am I?” he was making his way to the front door. He was finding out new things about the person whose house he was escaping. It was dirty, but not the kind of dirty that comes from one being a hoarder or a generally slovenly individual. No, the house was dirty in that the owner was content to let the standard household clutter gain dust and become part of the scenery. There were shoes littered throughout the hallway. A stray towel discarded and forgotten on the way from the bathroom. Dust sat thick on any flat surface that one could find. It was a house, he had concluded, and not an apartment. Apartments had thin walls, and they all seemed to have the same ugly thermostat hanging in their short hallways beside an equally short set of cabinets.
 
This place had no cabinets in its hallway, just offshoots to a coat closet, a bathroom, and what Elijah presumed were other bedrooms. The living room was the first room he had entered that actually bathed his surroundings in any kind of light. The coffee table was the only thing that was clean, save for the credit card laying out and some very telling short straws. He inhaled sharp through his nose, feeling the rather disgusting mixture of mucus and blood hit the back of his throat. He could guess what he’d been doing the night before, but hadn’t quite given much care to the thought otherwise. This was his normal now. It wasn’t uncommon to go places and wake up somewhere you hadn’t intended- this was merely a part of partying a little too hard on a Thursday.
 
Jenn just sighed on the other end of the line.
 
“I’ll call you after I get out of psychology,” she told him, the edges of defeat creeping into her voice.
“I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one.”
“Okay, I owe you… what, are we up to seven now?”
She laughed, “We can round down to seven.”
“Go be the responsible one, I’ll let you know about my daring fucked up adventure when I figure out how the Hell I got to where I am,” which seemed to be his equivalent of telling her goodbye. They didn’t end phone calls like normal people, didn’t end with ‘goodbye’ or ‘thanks’ or some exchange of affections. They were both young, and the finality of one’s place in the universe had yet to dawn on them. They still thought themselves quirky enough and individual enough to end phone calls like they were heroes in an action movie.
 
Elijah walked out the front door, locking it behind him and wandering off into what appeared to be a residential neighborhood next to a car dealership. Behind the small house, there were no fewer than five visible American flags. It was a dead giveaway, as far as he was concerned. He started walking to the car dealership, figuring that he would have an easier time calling a cab from there then he would from a nameless house with a woman whose name he couldn’t remember. He was not yet at the point in his life where losing an evening was a terrifying prospect.
 
His green eyes trailed down over his phone, checking the missed notifications there. He’d missed a doctor’s appointment; it had intended on being a follow up from last week’s visit. His life had become a series of doctor’s appointments and tweaked dosages since he got out. He’d had an accident two years ago; ice cracked and the young man nearly drowned in a frozen river. Everyone said he’d been really lucky that the water had been so cold, otherwise he might not have come back at all. Jenn said that it hadn’t been a close call, that his heart really had stopped beating. Whatever the case, he hadn’t been the same since then. It all culminated in a psychotic episode two years later. With enough therapy, patience, and medication, Elijah had been assured that he could lead a normal, happy life. He’d been waiting for the normal part to show up, though. It still hadn’t gotten there, and all the feelings and passions felt muted. His therapist said that this might just be a matter of time. Nobody said anything about post-traumatic stress.  It was all something shameful that nobody discussed openly, but everyone discussed privately with anyone but the person in question.  
 
He wasn’t looking forward to making that phone call to reschedule. He also wasn’t looking forward to explaining why he had missed said appointment. The young man went through a checklist to try and find some excuse that said he wasn’t snorting lines off a stranger’s coffee table. He somehow suspected his doctor wouldn’t be too keen on that. He thought briefly of Doctor Chastain. Her name was Laura. She was one of those older women who believed that blonde highlights would reclaim the years that medical school had stolen from her. Her limbs were long and graceful; she had a very specific look of distaste and disappointment that crossed her features when Elijah was upfront about missing some of his treatment goals.
 
The young man was certain she would not have given him the time of day in any other circumstance. Elijah presumed it was unprofessional to tell your psychiatrist that you occasionally fantasized about fucking her on the reception desk. She was a consummate professional, however, and as such there would be no consummating of any kind on any of the desks in her upscale Baton Rouge office. It didn’t stop him from being disappointed, though, and he wondered briefly if telling her about this would mark him as a developmentally appropriate man in his late teens. He presumed that the answer would be no, and whatever the case continued on to the car dealership to call a cab. The rest of the day went on with little fanfare.
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#2
All further departmental funds weren’t going to be disbursed until next semester, and Jenn was staring down the wrong half of the year. There was a point that every kid on financial knew; it was the time of year when your overpayment funds ran out and you still had six weeks left the get the job done. It’st he moment when you realize that your crappy part time job to pick up the slack wasn’t doing the best job to pick up the slack and you have a few options: get more hours tacked on to your work week or take out another loan.

Jenn didn’t have the option of tacking on extra time at work; she had a full load. She wanted to get in and out of this experience as quickly and painlessly as possible. She didn’t want to be one of those full-time students for the rest of her life, racking up years upon years of debt that she can’t get herself out of. She was already an art major, she was getting what one could consider a useless degree. Minored in psychology because she had reasons. Everyone had reasons for the educational choices, though it was funny to her how often finance played a role in educational security. Jenn was going to end up either short on money for housing, or she was going to have to skimp on food for the next few weeks. Deciding she liked neither of these options, the woman took her phone in hand and decided to call someone.

Megan Fontaine had not gone to college. It was a fact that Jenn not-so-silently judged her for, having never really cared for Megan save for respecting one fact about her: Megan knew how to make money. Fast. She was never really hurting for anything financial and while Jenn might not have liked the kind of company Megan Fontaine kept, she couldn’t help but respect the fact that the woman ran a tight ship in her business. Maybe it was that Jenn lied to herself, pretended that she could respect Megan because she was successful but in actuality Jenn would rather sell a kidney than work with Megan Fontaine.

She was lacking in crooked doctor friends, so the two girls decided to meet up over lunch. Megan was paying.

“So, you’re a studio art major?” Megan asked. She’d filled out a little since high school. She was taller than Jenn, closer to five and a half feet tall. Her eyes were warm and brown, her cheeks full and her hair a natural blonde. She could have been the picture of what thought a southern belle looked like, but instead was unabashedly the queen of her trailer park. She brought something genteel with her that was undeniable. She went through all the motions of proper southern woman. She and Jenn had been through cotillion together- teaching disadvantaged girls social graces and propriety.

“Yeah,” Jenn said with her iced tea in hand. It was a little outdoor café they’d decided to stay at. Megan said they had a fantastic brunch and Jenn was never one to turn down free brunch, “I was thinking about getting a psychology degree but you can’t really do anything with it until you have a masters.”
“Sounds like a headache,” Megan laughed, “if I ever get time I feel like I should get an MBA. Give some legitimacy to the business.”
“Don’t you think that’s ironic?” Jenn asked.
“Says the woman who is making a request of a business woman in the alternate economy. You’re just the poster child for strain theory, aren’t you?”
“Things aren’t that bad,” Jenn said with an awkward smile.
“Then why you callin’ me, sugar? Normally when you call it’s because your boyfriend’s jonesing and he can’t be fucked to come out with you otherwise.”
“Elijah’s not my boyfriend.”
“I guess the grape vine was mistaken. I figured the only way you’d be interested in a job with me if you weren’t desperate was because you wanted to get him a discount,” Megan took a sip of her iced tea. There is a long time before she lets out that sound of quenched satisfaction, “I don’t’ do discounts, cherie.”
“Look, it’s just… there’s a whole side of things that I don’t get and I figured if I was going to learn them…. I’d rather learn them from a friend.”

This was enough to make Megan regard the girl in front of her before laughing. The sound was derisive. She looked over Jenn, at her small build and her dark hair. The entirety of the young woman seemed rather like a prey animal. Something that was built to run and hide instead of facing its problems head on.

“Jenna,” she said slowly, “if you’re going to get an ear for this world, I’m throwing you in head first. I have a package for you to pick up. Fourteenth Street and Kelly- you’re smart, you’ll be able to tell where the drop point is. I have a client that I want you to take it to. I’ll text you the address when you confirm you have the package, yeah?”
“What’s so special about this package?”
“None of my other delivery girls want to make the drop,” Megan told Jenn her tone droll.
“Because...?”
“Well, the nature of the deliveries this client requires are… unique. It’s really better that you don’t ask,” Megan said. She looked at the young woman at the table with her. Their mutual contact kept the girls in pretty constant contact with one another. Something about this exchange evened the playing field.

Megan extended her hand to the other woman, eyes steady as she went to meet the smaller woman’s gaze. It was a matter of will, control. Megan sat straight and tall, with the smile that said that she knew that Jenn would say yes, that she knew what the situation was that had her in need of a job that would pay cash and pay it quickly. Megan Fontaine always delivered, provided that deliveries were made. The two women shook hands; the blonde woman smiled.

“Grand, sugar, I need you to make the pickup at eight. Delivery at nine, and for heaven’s sake, try not to stare,” Megan chided.
“Stare?” Jenn asked with confusion.
“You’ll understand,” Megan assured her. The rest of brunch was met in relative silence. They didn’t have much to say with one another in the form of small talk.
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#3
When Elijah got back to town courtesy of a cab, the first person he called wasn’t Jenna Laurent, but rather, Megan Fontaine. He suspected that, of all the people who knew what he’d been doing the night before, it would be Megan. He’d started the evening with her, as a few evening often start. She was fun to party with, if only because she knew how to get to most parties and knew the kinds of places that he’d find interesting. She knew her clients, knew how to get people what they needed, or what they thought they needed, and she knew how to play within her social circles. Maybe she’d know the name of the brunette he’d gone home with. More importantly, she could probably hook him up with whatever he was going to be doing tonight.
 
After all, it was a Friday.
 
The young man dialed her number, eagerly awaiting the sound of his dealer’s voice. They briefly talked, exchanged information and she gave him a location that they could meet. Her place.
 
It wasn’t uncommon for Elijah and Megan to meet at her place; nobody bothered to wander that far out into the swamp without an invitation, and they were friends. He was one of her first clients, and the only one who seemed more than happy to show up whenever she needed something. He didn’t mind being the occasional booty call because, well, Elijah was a creature of sentiment. He was a creature of sentiment with a sex drive and Megan didn’t ever fail to deliver. It was always her call, though. Not his.
 
“I’m a drug dealer, dearest, not a whore. Get the two mixed up and you won’t see the perks of either profession,” she’d told him. Only once, never crossed his mind but the warning was clear enough.
 
He’d dragged himself to her doorstep. It was a trailer out in the bayou, fireflies lingered in the fog and the smell of a persistent rain that would never come hung in the air. The sides of the doublewide were starting to grow algae, but nothing a power washer wouldn’t fix. She had understated lawn furniture, and he only had to knock twice before she answered the door. Lips turned upward, canines seemed a little sharper than Elijah had remembered.
 
“Hey there, sugar,” she told him, opened her door wide and dragged him in. She was no spider, and he was no fly. Spiders had more guile than Megan had and flies had more sense to save themselves than Elijah ever possessed in his blessed little life.
 
He was pretty, Megan had decided. It was the best way to describe him. Tall, lean, almost willowy in a way, his limbs didn’t hold some hidden reserve of strength and his features weren’t soft nor was he a creature of jutting angles. No, he sat towards the masculine side of androgynous some days, and for that Megan was completely content. She remembered that he kissed like a freshman but had been all but eager to take instructions over the years. She’d always had a fascination with pet projects. Elijah was a little like a weekend painting class- fun, when you had the time to put the work in.
 
“So,” he starts, playful smile on his features, had yet to get into anything hard enough to ruin the fact that he was pretty, “I wake up this morning with a brunette in a house out in Jackson, and apparently at some point in the evening my ass got curious about blues legends.”
“Eh?” she said, expected him to follow along inside (he did) and settle off to sit somewhere (which he also did). She peered back from her liquor cabinet, “never pinned you as a blues man.”
“Apparently I decided Tchula Junction was worth writing down,” he said, procured the card from his pocket and held it out for Megan to see, as if she would doubt his hand writing. As if she cared about whatever it was he was saying. She poured two drinks- mostly bourbon with muddled mint leaves because what southern woman couldn’t’ make a mint julep? She settled in beside him on the couch, lets her hand linger in his for a second while he takes the drink.
 
She smiled, lips turned upward and her eyes stayed with his. Megan was never the first to look away when their eyes met.
 
“Do you want to sell your soul, Elijah?”
Elijah’s brows knit together, eyes meeting hers with a confused stare, “beg your pardon?”
 
She nudged his arm, looking down at his drink and then back at his eyes. Brows raise for a second before he gets the hint. They both take a drink, though his is decidedly longer than hers.
 
“The only reason a man goes to Tchula, Mississippi is because he wants to walk the crossroads. Robert Johnson did it,” she purred, leaned in and let herself get comfortable on the couch as she had numerous times before, “twenty seven, sold his soul for blues fame… man couldn’t read a note on the music but he could play anything anyone put in front of him. Damned uncanny.”
“DIdn’t know you were a history nut, Megs,” he replied, leaning into her presence before taking another drink of what she’d given him. Never one to turn it down, “were we talking about this last night?”
“First time you ever brought up Tchula to me,” she said.
 
He looked at her, tried to offer her the card with his handwriting, curious, “it smells like-“
“I didn’t say you could come here so I could smell a damn business card, Elijah,” Megan laughed, tossing the card to the side. She snuggled in closer, free hand trailing idly down the inside of his thigh.
He laughed along with her, “I’m a client, Megs, not a whore. Thought you knew the difference.”
“Aw, sugar, why can’t you be both?” she retorted. He seemed to hang in the air for a second, “but I guess you’re more here for business…”
“Never said business couldn’t be fun,” he backtracked, content to coax the curvaceous blonde woman find her way into his lap. It didn’t take much coaxing, just relenting on a point she was making earlier.
“Drink up,” she said, nudged the arm holding a drink, “we got business to take care of.”
 
Elijah was never one to argue with Megan Fontaine when she said they had business to take care of. Though, something nagged at the back of his mind, something that would no doubt be relegated back to haze and fog a few more drinks in (and with whatever Megs had to offer, if he was lucky and she was feeling generous.) The whole day would just be another Friday that faded into a Monday.
 
Something stuck with him, felt cold against the base of his spine and lingered in his imagination. It was the ease of the way Megan had asked him some over the top question- did he want to sell his soul? And in those moments leading up to acts that Elijah and Megan had engaged in numerous times, he couldn’t help but wonder if that faint smell of matches had always been there, or if it was his imagination acting up.
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#4
It was years after this that Elijah and Jenn moved to Denver. They’d come together, both packed their bags because he’d said that he needed a change of scenery and there they were- all settled in comfortable to a one bedroom apartment over a floral shop. It had the kind of feeling of a New York styled loft. It felt like the kind of place that you would see in movies about a glamorous city life and the two had embraced it, something new and exciting over the charms that Baton Rouge had offered so many years before.
 
Even then, though, as the time they spent in the apartment went on, the place started to feel smaller. More cramped. Elijah had people over, spent time filtering in and out while the two of them carried on parallel lives. Not lives that lived together, but ones that came so very close yet they did not touch. When Elijah and Jenn first came to Denver, they had clung to one another. Then, as he was want to do, Elijah found people. Spread out. Clung to the first thing that was new and interesting whether or not it was good for him and left Jenn standing there with an apartment that was empty and half decorated. He left her waiting for someone who would never show up, told her stories that only had half the story in it, insisted he didn’t need his medication. Missed appointments. Woke up places that she still had to go find him and take him home only so he could disappear again.  
 
It was almost a year before he’d come clean, that he had friends who led double lives and that his delusions weren’t delusions but, rather, alternate truths to what they had all deigned to be real. Jenn didn’t much care for his friends, to be honest. She didn’t much care for the lives they led, the risks they took. She didn’t much care about how they treated everything like it was a giant secret, how she was stuck on the outside until she’d found herself pulled it and then, only then, did someone deign to tell her how their little pocket of reality worked. Which was to say- just like hers did. There were monsters in the world, and they preyed upon people. It did not matter if those monsters were gryphons or gang members, at the end of it all there were still loads of innocent people being hurt. She’d told Elijah once that there was suffering in Bangladesh and Bangor, Maine and you couldn’t’ turn a blind eye to all of it but you couldn’t keep yourself open to the entirety of things, either. You had to save part of yourself from the whole of creation. He bit off more than he could chew; she may have been in the middle of it but, for now, things seemed quiet. Things felt normal.
 
 They had different lives now, as people often do, united in proximity and the occasional day where they sat down for dinner and discussed what all had been going on. They had hit the point of an old married couple before they’d even decided they were something resembling a couple. No, Elijah and Jenn had (despite all indications and inquiries to the contrary) held firm that they were just friends. They’d always just been friends. Friends that lived in the same apartment. Friends that moved across the country for one another. Friends who occasionally fucked and went to each other’s family holidays. Just friends, you see, just friends who took the presence of one another for granted.
 
Jenn was making it as an artist, but not without a price. People were noticing her work; she’d rather be forgotten. Elijah was going on a business trip; he’d be gone for a week tops.
 
“When you’re in Boston,” Jenn started as she picked at the bowl of noodles she was calling dinner, “I want you to go on a pub crawl.”
“You’re actually indulging my desire to get shitfaced?”
“It’s Boston, they have actual Irish pubs. It’s the closest to a real pub crawl either of us are going to go to without actually making our way to the British Isles.”
“I’d rather get shitfaced with you, thank you. I don’t think I’m gonna have much down time,” he admitted.
“Well, tack it on at the end,” she laughed, “live vicariously for me. I’m a lightweight. You? You would be able to get to at least four establishments before blacking out and that’s what I love about you.”
“You only love me for my wooden leg and abused liver, I feel so special.”
 
The two of them laughed, and he looked back at her for a second. There was silence before she decided to hop back into conversation. He could have been happy just sitting there, quietly, for hours.
 
“What’s going to happen while you’re there?”
“It’s just an initiation, nothing big. You know, kinda like when you rushed that sorority and then dropped out after you decided you’d joined a cult,” he told her.
“I still think you joined a cult,” Jenn chided.
“It’s not a real cult. I haven’t had to sacrifice a goat or change my… well, I can’t say that, but I’ll explain later if I can.”
 
Jenn gave Elijah a flat look.
 
“That’s the whole secret society thing, you have to keep secrets,” he told her. It just made her look grow flatter. He shrugged, “why don’t you come with me to Boston?”
“Why?”
“Because you would like Boston a lot more than I would and it’s going to be awkward and I’d rather spend time with someone who doesn’t suck than go for what is the equivalent of a business trip.”
“’Most important thing you’re going to do this year’ and you’re saying it’s boring?” she asked.
“Most important things are boring. C’mon, you were in cotillion for Christ’s sake, that was, by far, the most boring thing I’ve ever seen.”
 
It made Jenn laugh, that little bit of throwback made her face light up and he could just bathe in that moment. Elijah looked at Jenn, and there are moments that it doesn’t dawn on him how he’s taken her for granted. It is in those few moments, though, that he can see that she’s some treasure. Rarer still that he can see that she’s all potential and it’s wasted on the fact that she’s been following him around for gods-know-how-long.
 
“The art scene in Boston might not be bad, maybe we could meet some people?” he asks, almost hopeful.
“I kinda… I don’t know,” she says, looks down and draws a shaky breath.
“C’mon, it’s… you get to live your life. It isn’t defined by the fact that-”
“That’s really easy for you to say because you’re going to fucking Boston in the next couple of days and you’re leaving me here and nobody’s going to notice and-”
 
There’s an awkward silence, Jenn looked away and slowly gathered up the things that she had on the table. Her eyes flickered to a painting on the wall. She clenched her jaw as her eyes started to feel warm, her heart started to beat a little harder and there it was. The apartment, at that juncture, felt small. Felt stifling. It was just the two of them and it didn’t matter if it was two of them or twenty of them or if Elijah never showed up to the apartment again the place felt lonely. The place felt too small and too large all at once and Denver felt like a fucking fish bowl as far as she was concerned.
 
Elijah reached toward to place himself into Jenn’s space.
 
“Nobody’s going to notice what?” he asked, looked for her eyes and she wouldn’t look at him.
“Nobody’s going to notice when I’m gone and all this blows over.”
“Don’t say that,” he quickly replied, “you’re important, you’re a fucking muse, you’re-”
“Everybody says that, Elijah,” she told him, “everybody says that you’re an individual and you’re important but that art student that went missing? Those two high school girls? They were important, too. They were someone’s everything and what are they now?”
 
He didn’t have an answer for that, only looked at his roommate, his best friend, the lover neither of them admit to having, and doesn’t have an answer.
 
“Horrible things happen every day,” Jenn said, “and let’s be really honest here, Elijah. The only reason that people care- that your friends care- that anybody cares about what happens to me is because people care about you. I’m not the main character in this story, and when I die it’ll be your tragedy. And after awhile? Nobody is going to give a shit. I’m just going to be another missing person so… so it doesn’t matter if I go with you to Boston, or if I stay here, or… or if I just leave… it doesn’t matter.”
 
She pushed back, looking down at the ground and pulling her arms low across her chest. Her breathing was shallow and labored and Elijah, dumb and young and invested, stepped in to wrap his arms around her. It was too much, she’d decided. This was all too much and like a wall of sand, the surf started to seep in and all Jenna Laurent could do was cry. Cry because it felt pointless. Cry because her life was on hold, cry because she’d given up so many things and changed so many things for that man and all Elijah could do was hold her and it wasn’t enough. She wanted to resent him; she wanted to resent what her life looked like now that he’d let her in on some great cosmic secret and she had only done what he’d asked of her. She’d only trusted him when he said that whatever terrible things had happened before were over and taken care of.
 
But, Jenn didn’t resent him. She didn’t hate him, she didn’t feel anything except that wedge that had been growing since they’d moved here- that they were going two different places and she worried, briefly, if he’d be able to stand without her. If he wouldn’t drift out too far and be lost to whatever whims and fantasies were alive in this city.
 
“If you died,” he told her, “the world would end.”
She let out a bitter chuff, “you’re being dramatic.”
“I know my price,” Elijah whispered, “I want you to be happy, and I want you to be safe. Just… if you do anything… please wait until I come home.”
“I can wait,” she told him.
 
She lied. Jenna Laurent would not be waiting for him when he came back from Boston.
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