Antagonym

Chapter 46

"Let me see it," Beck nodded his head at me from one of the couches in the girls locker room where he was laid out on his back, scrolling through his phone. Axel was sitting up a little more on the other couch, but it was definitely an 'about to fall over' position.

"Hope you like it because you're going to be stuck seeing it for the foreseeable future," I told him while peeling the tapped edged off a pad of gauze on my right forearm near my wrist. Under it was my pale skin and slightly raised black lines, still slightly swollen from when I got the tattoo this morning.

It was a sideways semicolon with the black line outline of flames and the words 'And we'll leave' arched above it and 'with matching burns' below it. I tilted my wrist in Beck's direction as I took a few steps towards him, his hand holding my turned over palm to see the simplistically styled tattoo.

I had been thinking about the semicolon for a while, actually it had been on my mind since I saw Axel's freshman year. He had it on his right wrist too; a reminder that he could have ended it but he survived and now he had to live his second chance. When Axel came out to his parents senior year they disapproved. He had tried to overdose on OxyContin when Beck was the one that found him and called 911. I had never known Beck had been the one to save Axel that day until recently when Beck brought it up to me while we were in the topic of the tattoo I wanted to get.

I couldn't imagine the fear in Beck's mind when he was Axel's body in the ground at just seventeen. It was probably something similar to how Sylvia and Finn reacted when they got the call from the police that I was going to jump. I would say I couldn't imagine what Axel was thinking, but I could and that's why I needed this reminder. This sign of strength and choice. Power over something that consumed me. A symbol of my family and friends and the support they gave me.

I knew as soon as I had that conversation with Beck in Sylvia's bathroom that I wanted to get this tattoo. Not only for myself, but to commemorate the friends I had in college; the roommate that was always there for me through my darkest times.

Seb had gotten the words tattooed on his own dark wrist, the outline of flames around the two tear phrase instead of a semicolon.

"I love it; it's beautiful," Beck told me with a warm smile. I leaned down and gave him a kiss, slowly moving my lips against his own. Beck's hand cupped my jaw as he kissed me back.

"Do you guys want me to leave or..." Axel trailed off only half jokingly from the other couch. It caused me to pull apart from Beck and turned to face Axel. Beck wrapped his arms around my hips, gently pulling me down into his lap. "You guys are disgustingly couply and it's weird. I never thought either of you were the PDA type."

"It's not PDA if I'm in my locker room," I reasoned, leaning my head against Beck's firm chest while his arm snaked around my body to hold me at the hip.

"No," Axel fired back. "It's PDA if there are other people around and I've seen you two make out with each other more times than I've heard my own name."

Beck rolled his eyes and pressed his lips to my temple. I was going to retort back to Axel when there was a knock at the door. Assuming it was Seb, I yelled out, "It's open!" You see where I was expecting to see a six foot African American man making a joke about having to knock to make sure we were all clothed and platonic, I was faced with a five eight fifty year old coach. Lovely.

That prompted me to get off of Beck's lap decently quickly and repress the gauze onto my tattoo firmly so I looked like I had my shit together. "Figured you'd be here," his chestnut eyes landed on Beck and then Axel. "Where's Williams?"

"Ice bath," Axel answered lamely, looking up from his phone.

"Don't you have somewhere to be, Hernandez?"