𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲𝐧 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 is far from perfect. Before starting her senior year of college, she's already guaranteed her position as the black sheep of her once prestigious family. To make matters worse, she took up bedding the rival family's eldest...
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𝑮𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒅 her every move, haunting her like a shadow without a sunset, Evelyn wasn't sure how she had survived the past few weeks alone with herself. Then she surmised that isolation felt like a suitable punishment for what she'd done, and perhaps that was why she settled into it so comfortably. Being alone granted her just enough room to be adjacent to absolute freedom while the agony of losing the one person she'd now give anything to belong to kept happiness just beyond reach.
She tried not to think about Michael. The task of moving into the small midtown apartment that he had leased for them made it a little easier for her not to. Between her climbing piles of schoolwork and slowly transferring her necessities from her childhood bedroom to the charming place she was to temporarily call home, she didn't have much time to truly ruminate over all that had happened between them. But even so, thinking about him was second-nature now.
It happened every time she was in the campus hallway where her mind would replay what it could remember of his fluttery laughter. Whenever she saw someone with a Walkman, she thought of his otherworldly level of musical talent. Even a simple sway of flowers in the wind was enough to bring images of his face to her head and a lump to her throat.
Her biggest obstacle was passing by the phone. Remembering how she'd laugh until her stomach was sore and how he'd talk in endless circles around one mundane topic that only he could make sound fascinating, it was all she could do to keep from calling him up just to beg him to come back to her. To give her a final chance to show him that, while she didn't deserve his love, she was now more than capable of returning it the way she hadn't before.
Love. Just the word—one that she now could only hear in his voice—made her chest clench like a fist. This was love turned into grief. And Evelyn was no stranger to grief. A great portion of her heart was still hollow from losing her brother. She'd simply learned to carry on in spite, forced to by the indisputable permanence of death. But this grief was different. Michael was still alive, and for every second he was, her feelings for him became much more of a burden. It was as if all the love she was aching to pour into him was a fluid filling her up to a fatal capacity, making her heart too distended to carry and threatening to drown her from the inside out.
Since their small tiff over the superlative awards, Evelyn avoided troubling Mariah with any more of her issues with Michael. She felt guilty as it stood that her friendship with the girl had devolved to the dramatic see-saw of emotions and music. And now not even occasionally pestered about her whereabouts by her mother thanks to the growing list of merger preparations for the church, Evelyn felt truly alone, just like she'd once been before she could remember becoming acquainted with any of the Jacksons.
And just like it had been back then, it was easy for her to slip into old habits.
The scars had since healed, but instinctively, Evelyn's fingertips traced the backs of her arms as she hugged herself, her stomach twisting and hardening at the memories of Jackie that she worked hard to physically remove from her body. It all seemed so silly now, especially since she was standing outside Jackie's home, waiting to be invited in.
