Finding the words in hidden places.

"Did you ever need me?"

Thick silence hung between us like a wall. My voice sounded muffled coming out of my mouth. I felt like a prisoner, speaking through a static-y speaker to a visitor on the other side of a scratched- up, foggy Plexiglas divider.

"Yes."

The answer came hesitantly. I could see whatever resolution he'd had quickly melting. His eyes were darting around the room. He lifted his hand, the fingertips barely grazing the roots of his hair before he caught my eye and jammed his hands into his pockets.

"Why are you nervous?"

The question slipped out between my lips before I could stop it. I'd meant it as a question but it'd come out like an accusation.

I saw his eyelashes flutter as his eyes darted across the room again. His hands formed fists inside his pockets.

"I-"

"Sorry. I didn't mean it like that. I just- "

"I know."

Wistfulness bloomed in the silence between us. The unique, totally incomprehensible pattern of speech embodied in the conversation that passed between us triggered a flood of memories rushing to the front of my mind.

We spoke in fragments of sentences, half- words. Our sentences were punctuated by the beginning of each other's. To anyone else, it was gibberish. To us, it made perfect sense. No matter how stoic he attempted to be, he was an open book and I could read him like one.

"You're right, I am."

His voice was even less resolute than before. I looked down.

"Why?"

I opened and closed the book in my lap.

Silence. Not a rustle of fabric, not a footstep. It was me, him and the whistle tone in my brain threatening to shatter the world.

"I love you."

My heart jolted in my chest. I couldn't tell if it was frustration or fury.

"Then why is this happening?" I looked up at him. My voice caught in my throat. It felt like Air had grown a fist made of iron and clutched my throat in its wicked grip.

We both knew but I asked anyway.

He knew it from the moment he rejected a job for me, the moment he lost friends for me. I knew it from the moment I missed my mother's birthdays and my father's dinners for him, from the moment I passed up friends for him. It wasn't the union of two people, it wasn't creation born out of the combination of two elements. It was destruction born out of the collision of deadly explosives. It was just me and him and everything else had become collateral damage.

I stood up and handed him the book as his eyes swept its cover. 

"Pride and Prejudice."

"Year One Literature."

"You kept it."

"It's yours. I never returned it."

I felt the varnished surface of the book slip out between my fingertips as the memory of the time he'd handed me the book nearly three years ago surfaced in my mind, bobbing up and down, replaying again and again. I remembered the moment fresh out of my eyes. I wished I didn't.

He gripped the book in his hands. A smile, almost pained, tugged at the edges of his lips, 

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope."

A laugh escaped my mouth in a quickly expelled breath of air. I breathed in and exhaled, a hot tear slid down my cheek, leaving fire in its wake.

"Wrong book."

"Right Author."

I laughed. Even more tears seeped from my eyes, racing down my cheeks.

The poetry burned into the back of my mind an eternity ago peeled itself up off my brain and formed audible words. They were drowning in tears, saturated with memories. It was as if they'd been waiting for this moment to leave my tongue.

"I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it"

The hint of a memory broke out into a smile on his face.

"I have loved none but you."

"Goodbye Joshua,"

His thumb brushed my cheek and the tears ran in rivulets down his fingers.

"Goodbye."