needed a hug," I finally say lamely.
"A hug?" he deadpans.
"What are friends for, right?"
"We're friends?"
I dart my eyes up to his again, pools of melted emeralds and summer grass, completely unreadable. "I thought....you might need some for a change."
He doesn't smile. His face barely moves. It's as if he can't now, or that every other smile and every other grin were just masks to hide something much deeper and broken. "What good could you do now? Did you like your fifteen minutes on the tabloids?"
I squat down beside him and reach my hand out to his. He doesn't pull away; he just stares at my hand atop of his on his knee. "I know how you feel," I say softly, and my voice cracks a little as I gather up the courage to say to him what I haven't been able to admit in a very long time. "My dad took the midnight train too early, too."
But he just shakes his head. "He owns that bar of yours, doesn't he?"
"He did, but he died in November. I don't talk much about him...I'm scared that if I do, then it'll...I don't know. I'm scared that if I say it too often, then people will forget about him. So...I know how you feel. It's hard to visit someone who doesn't exist anymore."
"I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry too. But it's going to be okay."
He bites his bottom lip and lowers his head, and it's almost instinctive when I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him into a hug. He dips his face into my shoulder and cries. I hold him, fingering through his orange hair soothingly, letting his tears dampen my shirt. There is nothing to say. There are no words I could say to make him feel any better, or any fuller, with that sort of emptiness aching inside of him. I have that hole, too. I can pinpoint it, mark it with a arrow, draw dashes to it on a treasure map because it is so familiar to me like a old, deep scar.
"Thank you," he says into my hair, even though I did nothing to deserve it.
I wish I could peel the melancholy from his voice, cut it away from his heart, but I'm afraid there would be nothing left. Does he think Holly's death is his fault?
It's not your fault, I want to say, just as Dad's death wasn't mine.
I could show him the pictures; I could tell him it was John's fault for not calling 911. But then, I'm sure his mind would begin to wander along the what-ifs and maybes. It would begin to weasel doubt into his blood, burrow it into his bones, until he was nothing more than a body bag of guilt and heartache. Not even the memory card can cure that.
"Come on now," I say finally, pulling away. I thumb away the tears from his eyes, pressing my forehead against his. He sniffles, chewing on his lip. He's such an ugly crier, but it only makes me love him more than I already do. "It'll be okay. Stuff like this? It'll happen. She's still in your heart and in your head, where you can visit her in your dreams."
"It was my fault." He gathers my hands in his and puts them back into my lap. "We had a fight earlier that night...about another girl. Did you know she loved me? Holly. That she honest-to-God did?" He shakes his head. "A few weeks before, she fell and sprained her ankle. She was a complete pansy about it.” Unconsciously, he rubs his tattooed arm, the tiger and the phoenix. “It’s funny, but no matter how hard I tried to be the limelight, it was her everyone loved. She’ll always be the comet, and I her fucking tail. I should've died. I made all the piss-poor decisions. I drank, I screwed around, I fucked myself a thousand times over. I wish I would've died instead.”
“Roman…” I mutter helplessly, glad in my own selfish way that he hadn't died because then I would've never met him. But I feel dirty for thinking that, and despicable for being glad that he is the one alive, because without him...
Without him, I wouldn't have hated him. Without him, I wouldn't have loved him.
Without him, I would be infinitely different, and I am thankful beyond words that I am not.
"Roman, I—"
He shakes his head, as if dismissing the entire thing, and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. They're