SEBASTIAN
“It’s time.” I say to her, as we lay there, clothes and bed sheets twisted between our legs and sweaty, sex-ravaged bodies. Her head is on my chest and my fingers in her hair, my heart on my sleeve and hers in my trust.
“For what?” She mumbles, her lips moving against the dip in my sternum.
“For you to tell me what happened.”
“What happened when?”
“What happened that you, even you, have trouble trusting. You, who have faith in music and air and smiles and friendship. But not me, not men.”
She sighs and I run a finger down the length of her arm. Wanting the contact to give her strength. Strength to tell me, to trust me, to relive it.
“I came...really, really close to not wanting to live any more. Seriously close,” she says.
I freeze. I can’t imagine those words coming from her. From my Cadence.
“What did you say?” I eventually have to ask her to repeat herself, to clarify.
“I said,” she repeats, in a steady voice, “I almost killed myself.”
“When? Why?” I sit up, and she follows, pulling the sheet up around her and pushing the hair from her face.
“Why do people tend to commit suicide? They just don’t want to live any more. And there was a time...I just didn’t.”
“My god, what happened?”
“Long or short story?” She asks, as if there’s really a choice.
“I don’t think the short story exists.”
“No, and I guess it deserves a long story.” She shuffles around on the bed, leaning back on the headboard and I wait. I have no right to rush this.
“I’ll start by stating this. I’m fine now. I’ve been fine for a long time. But for a while there, I wasn’t. I was the furthest thing from fine. So, we were living in Melbourne at the time and I had just turned fourteen and my Dad had just passed away. My mum and I had moved to a different school because we couldn’t afford the house we were living in anymore. On the first day of school, in music class, of course, music class, I got paired up with this guy, his name was Brent. He was a drummer.”
“Why am I not surprised?” I give her a soft squeeze on the arm, and she smiles softly.
“You shouldn’t be. No one was. Let’s just say, I was a little less...well, pink cardigan-y, back then. Anyway, we dated for three years, all through high school, and we applied to the Sydney Music Conservatory together. We were destined, or so we thought. Turns out music talent wasn’t all they were looking for, some dedication to actual schoolwork was needed, something Brent didn’t have. Anyway, cliché of all clichés, I got in and he didn’t. “
“Ah, his ego must’ve liked that.” I cocked my head. I can only imagine how her boyfriend would’ve taken that, being of an ego-driven nature myself.
“Nothing about him liked that. But there wasn’t going to be anything that stopped me from going. As much as I loved him...I had my dad’s memory to keep alive.”
She takes a breath, to remember her father, I feel, and I can’t take my eyes off her. What had happened to this amazing woman? And yet here she still was, with a heart the size of that giant sunburnt rock out there.
She shifts and I know she’s ready to continue.
“So the closer the day came to me going to Sydney, the colder and more distant he became. He started drinking, something he’d never done before and I’m sure that drugs started coming into the picture as well. I just thought it was...I don’t know, I thought that once he realized it wasn’t going to be so bad, he still had his music, he was in an up and coming band, Uni wasn’t ever really his thing anyway, and we could visit every month, he’d calm down. Every day he still kept begging me to stay, saying he couldn’t live without me, and me, in my youth, thought that it was almost sweet, romantic even.”
“But he didn’t calm down?” God, what did this fuckhead do to her? I already want to bash him for trying to hold her back.
“No. No, he did not. Two days before I was supposed to go, my mother threw me a going away party, all my friends and family, pretty much everyone I’d ever met in my life. In hindsight, he was weird that night, more than he had been in the week leading up to it. Like, he was strangely calm and sweet even. I thought he’d finally come around. Then just as my mom brought out the cake, he asked to say a few words. I was so touched, he wasn’t really a man of words...”
She stops and I can see her eyes glaze over for a moment, as if she’s physically trying to brace herself for what’s to come. I want to reach out to touch her, but something stops me, like, she wants to get this over and done with, and to put it in the past.
“We’d had pictures projecting on the walls all night, and then, just as he goes up, the pictures stop. And the images change. But I hear it even before it focuses. I can hear the sounds. I can hear myself moaning and breathing. It’s dark and blurry, but there’s no mistaking it. It’s a video of him and me having sex. On the wall, for everyone to see.”
“Oh, Cadence.” Oh god.
“And everyone is just frozen. I was looking at him, and he had the biggest smirk on his face. And then someone, I don’t know who, covers the projector, but you can still hear the sounds. And then he just says into the microphone, ‘It’s OK. For those who want to know how it ends, it’s now on every popular porn site. And your email.’ Then he drops the mic and comes up to me and says, ‘no one leaves me. I leave them. And I’m leaving you. I can’t be tangled up with a two-bit porn slut.’”
She stops, her eyes are blurry from the tears falling and I have to grip my fingers into fists to stop from brushing them away. I know there’s more, and she had to get through it without me interfering.
“I didn’t even find out until a few days later that he’d somehow managed to send the link to the video to everyone at the University in Sydney as well. It didn’t take me more than one morning to know that I couldn’t be there. Not just because of the humiliation, but it wasn’t even safe. I was harassed everywhere I went. About two days in, a guidance counselor told me that they thought it’d be better if I took a semester off. To let things settle down.”
She reaches over to the side table for a tissue and locks her eyes with mine for a moment, then looks away.
“I went back to Melbourne with my tail between my legs. For three months, I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t talk to anyone except my mother. But...they still came. I don’t know where they came from, but they were everywhere?”
“Who?”
“All sorts. People who want to hire me for their porn sites, people who wanted to hurt me. People who just liked seeing my embarrassment, and people who got off on my pain. Strangers. Some acquaintances, I guess, but mostly strangers. Sick assholess who had nothing better to do in their lives than elongate my humiliation.”
I look down at her hands and they’ve shredded the damp tissue. And I feel like doing the same to the heads of the people who’d hurt her.
“I went deep and dark. I felt like I’d lost everything I’d worked for, and there was no going back. I could not see a light at the end of the tunnel, it just kept getting dark and darker. And one day, I just decided, I’d had enough. I thought it was a strong decision. For me. “
“So, what happened?” I gently encourage her after she goes quiet, lost in her own memories for a moment.
“Nothing. I came out for dinner, listened to my mum try to make conversation with me, trying so hard, just to make me smile. And I realized I couldn’t do it to her. That until I could live for myself again, I’d live for her. Just that realization, it made me smile. Really smile, for the first time in months. And the relief in her face in that moment, changed everything for me. I will never ever say it will work for everyone. But it did for me. Every person’s story is different, but that is mine.”
She leans forward from the headboard and reaches for my hands. I grab hers as fast as I can, squeezing them, and she almost chuckles.
“Hey, it wasn’t the last time I contemplated it. But things got better, in tiny increments, every day. And it got to the point where I could consider going back to school. And I did. I got all my things together, told myself I could turn back any time. That first day back, I walked into my dorm and a crazy hippie brunette was lying under the bed, her two mismatched socked feet sticking out while she rummaged around under their for something. She was my first and almost only friend for a long time.”
“Nutso?” I can only imagine it would be her.
“Ha, yes, the one and only. Sarah.”
“What happened with Brent?” I try to ask lightly, hoping the answer involves a firing squad or a pit of live alligators.
“Nothing. Through some lawyer friend’s help, we got the websites to take down the video, but we couldn’t get those emails back and they were either ignored or forgotten by then. Brent skipped town, no one could find him. And I...I just didn’t want to waste any more of my life on him.”
“And you? What happened with you?” I want to hear her claim her victory, her success, her achievement of having survived.
“I’m here.” She smiles. It’s small but incandescent.
I pull her into my lap and she kisses me and it’s sweet like burnt caramel.
“I’m here, too. With you. And there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
***
Her breath is slowing down and her body retracts into a relaxed, little ball, curled up against me. Her bare shoulder, still slightly glistening with sweat, presses up against my face and I turn just a little to drop my lips in a kiss on her warm skin. She’s sweet and salty all at once. I run my tongue over my mouth to lick up every little molecule of her scent. Even now, just moments after completely giving into her, I can feel my core inflamed at the thought of being inside her again. Feeling her engulf my hardness, milking me and coaxing me to give myself all to her.
“Cadence?”
“Hmmm?” She mumbles, probably barely a breath from sleep.
“You’re sexy.”
She giggles a little at my childish compliment.
“Thanks?”
“What? You are.”
“You’re pretty sexy too there, Mr. Musician.” She turns in my arms and I’m staring down at her face, stroking the bangs falling over her eyes to the side.
She is the sight of absolute perfection. I lean over and graze the tip of her nose with my lips.
“Yeah? Well, guess what?”
She just smiles, a dimple flashing for a moment on her left cheek.
“You’re my muse.” I confess to her.
Her eyes close, her eyelashes fluttering like little brown feathers against her pale cheek, before she opens them and stares up at me.
“You’re my music,” she confesses back.
And it’s in that moment, I know my heart is lost to her forever.