“But—”
“The rules never said I couldn’t take someone else’s gun. They just said we had to have an equal amount of weapons.”
“Now, Val.” I held out my hand, the one containing the flag, just as she fired rapid shots at my chest. Seven.
Not that I was counting.
And when she was done.
And pain seared me from the inside out.
She fired one last shot.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled, falling to my knees. “I don’t have gear on!”
“Sorry.” She shrugged. “It’s really dark in here.”
“Yeah, amazing how that works, you hit me square in the chest, in nearly…” I exhaled shakily. “…the same damn spot, and you did it blind. Impressive. I thought you couldn’t shoot.”
“I’ve had some free time.”
“Remind me to send you to boarding school.” With great effort, I rose to my knees just as she shot me again in the leg. “What the hell, Val! Fuck!”
“Boarding school? I’m not your damn child!”
“Then stop acting like one and shooting me just because you’re pissed!”
“Of course I’m pissed!” Val yelled. “You’re an asshole! I don’t deserve to be talked down to or ignored or just—” Her face twisted with hurt. “You could say hi. You could at least say hi once. Just once a day Sergio, what’s so horrible about hi?”
I stood for the second time and hung my head. “What’s so hard about hi?” I rubbed the back of my neck. “It’s the start of something. You say hi when you open a conversation, it’s a simple greeting with thousands of meanings behind it. Hi… always leads to how are you, how are you leads to what are you doing today, and that leads to do you want to hang out? Do you have plans? And honestly Val, if I say hi, I’m going to follow through on the rest, I’m going to ask how you are, I’m going to want to die inside when you say you’re sad. And when I ask if you want to hang out, you’re going to say yes, and when I ask about plans, we’ll make them. And if we make plans—” My voice hitched. “If we make plans. I won’t have the energy to keep myself from taking you. From stripping you bare. From demanding every part of your body, your soul. I won’t stop. I’ll keep going, and I’ll lose myself, and if I lose the only part of myself that contains her — I lose her too. All because of hi.”
Val slowly lowered her gun to her side. “So this is it.” Her lower lip wobbled. “It’s a little ironic, right?”
“What?” I stood and took a cautious step toward her. Damn it, I was drawn to her even though I didn’t want to be.
She backed up, away from my touch. “You said goodbye to one wife, the hardest word in the human language to utter. Because of that ending, you’ve refused a beginning. You’ve done that. Goodbye was hard, but why is it, do you think, that Hi is harder?”
I opened my mouth to answer her, but nothing came out.
“Sergio.” This time Val walked slowly toward me, her paintball gun fell to the ground out of trembling fingers. “When you move on with your life, when you find that person, whoever she may be, she isn’t going to remove every last remnant of Andi from your heart. She isn’t going to take over and squeeze out memories. She’s going to fit with them. Live with them. Laugh with them. It’s not a matter of replacing, it’s a matter of joining.”
It looked like she was going to hug me.
But she must have thought better of it, because she stepped backward again, picked up her gun, and ran out of the fort.
Five minutes later I heard cheering.
The girls won.
And I was still frozen in place.
Because my young, innocent wife. Was absolutely startlingly.
Right.
….and maidens call it love-in-idleness. –A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Frank
I DIDN’T WANT to meet Xavier any more than I wanted to cut out my own heart and slam it onto the table, but he needed to be contained.
And I needed to be the one to do it.
Not Dante.
Not Sergio.
Not Tex.
Wisdom told me that if I were to die, they would be just fine, but if they were to pass on? It would be tragic. They had so much life yet to live, and I knew that my time was slowly coming to an end, not that I wanted it to. I wanted to see great grandchildren; I wanted to see my family back on the right path.
There were many things I wanted to see.
But that didn’t mean I deserved to see them.
I knew that more than anyone.
Mistakes have a way of jarring your sense of reality, of right and wrong, because in making mistakes, or choices, your constant companion is the need to justify the rocky path you’re on in hopes that at the end of the day you’ll be able to close your eyes against your soft pillow and sleep.
I have not truly slept in over thirty years.
I wasn’t about to any time soon.
Sal fidgeted next to me. “This… this will not work.”
“It will work.” It might not work, but we could try.