Invincible

eighty-six

     After that Saturday visit Isaac stopped giving him lifts and Jared had to make do with fleeting glimpses of him as they went in and out of exam halls. Isaac was always quick to leave at the end; often disappeared without talking to anyone like a silent ghost of himself.

     Jared wanted- he wanted- fuck if he knew exactly what, but he needed so badly to see Isaac ok again, needed him back in his life. Their conversations replayed over and over whenever his mind wasn’t determinedly fixed on something else; he’d lie awake for hours going over their argument, what he should’ve said. Sometimes he’d sit up and type out shaky messages on his phone, pleading, stupid things like,

    ‘I miss you’ and,

    ‘I’m sorry’ and,

    ‘please come back’.

     But maybe there was nothing he could’ve said- maybe he’d gone too far and the damage was irrevocable. Isaac had individual things going on and it wasn’t fair to keep shoving this tangle in his face when he’d made it pretty clear that he didn’t want to talk about it. So Jared would always end up deleting the messages before he sent them, letter by letter in jerky movements before lying back with Isaac’s tear-streaked face in his head again.

     Willa tried to see Isaac regularly, but he became more and more elusive, making less of an effort to appear fine and instead just ignoring texts and calls, just telling her outright that he couldn’t deal with another person around him right now, that he didn’t want to get out of bed let alone talk. He told her his first exams had gone okay (he’d done a lot of revision; sometimes the only way to get any sleep was to work until he was so exhausted he couldn’t think anymore to keep himself awake).

     Jared, on the other hand, would never say explicitly that anything was wrong. But hell, Willa wasn’t stupid. He didn’t need to tell her anything. She could see his unhappiness in his pale, dark-eyed face, read it in his curt texts and hear it in the ever-increasing brashness of his voice, like he thought loudness could scare away the thoughts that gathered when his mind was quiet. Whenever she tried to bring up Isaac he got this expression on his face like it physically hurt, like her remarks were fingers pressed hard into a bruised heart. His lips would compress into a white line and then invariably he’d try and cover the hurt up with some inane comment.

     But whatever else Willa might be- she was not fucking stupid. Soon enough it was falling into place, all the hints she’d missed before like massive, mocking beacons. Jared liked her, sure, but she’d never seen his feelings so amplified than when Isaac was involved. She’d never seen such a marked difference in him than now that Isaac wasn’t around. She tried her best to cheer him up but she was shit at it; nothing worked. It was like he had a keyhole to his clockwork and no other key could fit but Isaac, Isaac with the power to wind him up and propel him into wonderful things, Isaac whose absence left him empty and broken with all his cogs out of gear.

     She wasn’t even sure if Jared knew it yet but she knew, now. He was just as much in love with Isaac as Isaac was with him.

    “Sure know how to pick ’em, Willa,” she muttered to herself.