Relative Fiction | ✓

06

Sometimes, things between Sage and I were good. The kind of good where we'd blast Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and dance around on the expensive red leather couches in her living room, laugh until our ribs hurt, and kiss every inch of skin on each other's bodies. We'd fuck in her master bathroom jacuzzi tub and do coke on the deep emerald marble countertops. Her parents, who were both surgeons, were away at some conference, leaving us to fill their beach mansion with the smell of weed and pizza and the sounds of our twisted love.

And sometimes when the sunlight hit her golden eyes the right way, I wondered if I truly loved her - the kind made you ache all over. I had never been in love, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about it. It was just a matter of someone actually loving me back.

Sage and I had been entangled in each other in some way since we were 13, when we were freshmen at the homecoming dance. Colored lights danced on the scuffed up wooden floor of the high school gym, and Hunter stood with me against the plastic bleachers with his blue slushee. I was in awe that pretty, rich, popular Sage strutted over to me - who was stumbling through puberty with gangly limbs and acne - and asked me to dance.

That was almost eight years ago. We were inseparable in high school, back when the only trouble we got into was smoking a joint in the parking lot of the grocery store. Over the years, a lot of shit had changed, but the one thing that never did was the inevitably of us crawling our way back to one another. College was harder, and a two hour drive apart seemed like light years away when it was a constant battle of who slept with who and what being on a "break" really meant. When Sage went back to USC after winter break back in December, it was an aggressive, committed break. But now that she was back, so was the storm that came with her, and I craved the rain.

As good as things were some of the time...there were times when things were as bad as they could possibly get. I'd call her names, she'd call me names. We'd fight and kick and scream until we couldn't even remember what we were fighting about to begin with.

That was the way everything in my life worked. With every soaring high came a crushing, cataclysmic low.

I stood in the cavernous bathroom attached to Sage's bedroom, my hands trembling as I reached for the shiny chrome handles on the sink and splashed water on my face. My forehead throbbed, but there was no physical evidence of where I thumped it on the corner of her bedside table. When I had stood up from her bed after our bout of angry make-up sex, a rush of blood ripped through me, and the next thing I knew I was on the floor of her room, head pounding and world spinning. As I rubbed my hand across my forehead again, slick with sweat, I wondered if that was what being in love really meant - that no matter how much pain someone caused you, indirect or not, you couldn't stay away.

I felt her wrap her arms around my waist from behind and the warmth of her breath through my t-shirt.

"You okay baby?" she mumbled into the fabric.

"I'm not your baby," I breathed out, feeling the sting of my own words on my tongue. My hands kept shaking.

"Whatever," she sighed. "Just come back to bed. I have something that might make you feel a little better."

I felt the warmth of her body rush out of me when she let go, leaving a chill on my skin. Still standing at the sink, I watched her from the corner of my eye walk over to that same bedside table I hit my head on. I made my way back to her bed, feeling my knees go weak with every step I took.

Sage pulled a small, intricately carved cigar box out of the bottom drawer and produced from it a small plastic bag, filled halfway with fine white powder, like freshly fallen snow before it got mucked up with dirt and grime from cars and people.