❝calm me and let me taste
the salt you breathed,
while you were underneath;
i am the one who haunts your dreams
of mountains sunk below the sea.
i spoke the words but never
gave a thought to what they all could mean.
i know that this is what you want.
a funeral keeps both of us apart.
you know that you are not alone.
i need you like water in my lungs.❞
☽
"MELO?"
It's cold, and I can hear him, a billowing breath, a layer of frost, a dry cough, details of a Saturday morning in the Back Cove.
"Hey, Melo, you need to get the fuck up," he's saying, jostling my shoulder, and it's harsh, gravelly, annoyed, but I'm stiff and sick, sleep-crusted lashes, trying to blink, blink, blink... "Melo?"
Everything is spinning. Everything is dark.
"Luz?"
His voice, softening in a single syllable.
"Oh, fuck, Luz."
It's 2015 again, and Drake is hauling my hungover ass off a park bench at dawn in March. Frostbite. Moderate.
Melo. It was firm. Okay, get up, I'll take you home, Melo, he'd said, and I knew I'd called him. Luz? Everything slowed. Oh, fuck, Luz.
"Okay, dry clothes, heat," he's saying to himself, and I know I forced him to learn to treat cold injuries years ago. I know. For half a heartbeat, when I didn't respond, I knew it. "I don't fucking know... I..."
His door swings open. Hanover, a brick-lined sidewalk, flickering. His keys, a blue-red flash, a Dominican flag. His engine... dies.
Medina, I'm...
Panic screeching quietly through my tendons.
"Luz," he rasps, popping open a door, leaning down, "Luz, I—"
I go fumbling out of his Volvo, collapsing, and I can't see anything. Knees, burning beneath denim, scraped pulpy raw. I'm being lifted, steadied, cradled, compact against his chest, lolling weightlessly. No sabes cuándo dejar de pelear. His raspy annoyance, between shallow, shadow-struck breathing.
It's shutter speed, one one-thousandth of a second, sprinting, sealing it, less light let in, less exposure, less details of a sentient darkness. Slam. The blanket, caught on my foot, half-dragged from his backseat, pinched in a door. The curb skews. Flash. Stairs. His Volvo, sitting on Hanover, double-parked illegally.
"Okay, un momento, I..." Our hallway. Our door. Our lock.
Everything is dark, violent, fleeting, and I sway in and out of it, desperate to feel my footsteps on the floor of our apartment. Home.
Drake Medina, crunching through snow beside me, after I'd skidded off Payne Road. Drake took care of me. Siempre.
"Go. Mi cuarto."
He really, really, really loves me, I think.
My head is hazy. Light floods my pores. His pallid complexion, soaking clothes, fumbling fingertips. It's cold. His bedroom is dense and deep, and I'm wading into it, slow-motion, further from the shore of consciousness.
It's compressed darkness. I can't breathe.
"Melo, hey, hey." His fingers on my jaw, my cheeks, my throat, a frenzy of fiery butterfly touches. "Hey, don't fuck with me. No."
YOU ARE READING
Dark Places
Mystery / Thriller[UPDATES ON FRIDAYS] It's been three years since Luz Melo left Portland, Maine... and Drake Medina. ☽ When her "borderline" alcoholic lifestyle in NYC falls apart, leaving her girlfriend in rehab, her grades trashed, and her scholarship revoked, th...
