Page 16 of All That We Are Together
“Jesus Christ, Axel!”
“That’s how it is.”
“Try and filter yourself!”
“I wanted to be sincere.”
“For fuck’s sake! She’s my sister.” He scratched his head and turned toward the door.
I thought he’d walk through the house and out the front door, but he didn’t. He turned around and took a deep breath and looked at me.
“I don’t want to lose your friendship. And you’re right, Ididn’t think you were serious about it, but goddamn, you’re never serious about anything. And you did fuck things up, Axel; you lied to me; you went about it the wrong way…”
I grabbed on to the wooden railing.
“I know.” My jaw was clenched.
Oliver lit another smoke, and so did I. I felt almost like we were doing it to keep our hands occupied because things were getting to be too much for us. A pause to light it, a pause to take a drag, a pause to blow the smoke out slowly…
“So now what?” Oliver asked.
“Now I want her to sign with me.”
“That’s a bad idea…”
“It’s a good idea, and you know it. No one could rep her better; no one will look out for her interests like me. And believe me, someone else will sign her soon, because she’s that good.”
“I thought you didn’t represent talent, that you were just a scout,” he said, repeating words I’d told him the month before on that very same porch.
“For her, I’m willing to change. I swear to you, I’ll take care of her, and I’ll…”
“Don’t fucking do this; don’t tell me you’ll take care of her,” he hissed.
And I remembered this wasn’t the first time I’d promised that.
“I’ll try and do the best I can. She’s got a future, Oliver. I know she can do great things if she has the tools to do so. And I can give them to her.”
Oliver rubbed his face. He looked weary.
“I think she’s going out with someone.”
“No one asked that,” I hissed.
He waited a moment, then asked, “You really think she can make it?”
“I don’t think it; I know it. She’s always had talent.”
“I’ll try and talk to her then, but no promises.”
A few minutes later, when he was gone, I went to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of something—I didn’t even look at the label—and went outside. I took a long sip on my way to the sea, and when I reached the shore, I lay down. I took a breath and closed my eyes, or at least I tried to take a breath. If only the murmur of the ocean could have quieted my thoughts.
I had made all that happened. Just me.
I remembered the kid who was with her at the gallery, the one who hauled her out the way I would have done three years before, getting her away from danger. Some fucking irony that the person who loved her most would turn around one night and tell her she needed to meet people, live, have fun, fuck. I thought that was it. That she was like me, that she could navigate that sea of strangers and still come back to me, even if I told her not to. That sooner or later, we would have to meet again. And that when we did, we would be in the same place in our lives.
The problem was, there was an infinite distance between imagining her in bed in someone else’s arms and knowing that she felt something for that someone else. A connection. A relation. Something like what we had.
The first thing stung. The second burned…