Falling into You (Falling #1)(56)
“I’m sorry.”
“Then another brother got shot. Lil Shady. We weren’t friends at first. His girl had a thing for me, which he didn’t like. I never did nothing with her, but…he didn’t like me for it. Eventually we got past that shit, and had each other’s backs when things got ugly. Shady took a slug to the head. Didn’t see that shit, thank god. But he was gone, and it sucked. Just…gone. I’d smoked a blunt with him an hour before he died, you know? And then Split and Mo were banging in my door, carrying Shady, yelling about some other gang doing a driveby.” He’s gone, his eyes vacant, seeing the past. “Couple others through the years, same shit different day. None as close as Shady and T, though.” He trails off and I realize he’s lost in the memory.
I tangle my fingers with his. “You said a girl, too? Someone you loved?”
“That was the worst day of my life. The reason I decided to quit the gang and live straight, buy the shop and try to get away from all that shit.” He ducks his head, buries his face into my curls, takes a deep breath. “Her name was India. So fucking beautiful. Her mom was black, her dad was Korean. Almond shaped eyes, long straight black hair down to her waist, body like—well, a damn fine one. Such a sweet girl. Too sweet to be living in the ghetto, to be caught up in the shit she was caught up in. She was friends with Split’s girlfriend. She was around a lot, and I’d noticed her. Seen her, liked her. Seen her looking at me. We finally ended up the last two awake after a party one night, hung out on the fire escape talking till dawn. She wanted to go to beauty school, or maybe be a model, she wasn’t sure which. Coulda been great at either.”
A long pause, then. Too long. I can’t fill it though. I wait for him.
“We dated for a year. Dated isn’t really the right word, ‘cause it wasn’t like I was taking her to Broadway and Little Italy or some shit, you know? We were together for a year, is what I meant. Fuck. I can’t talk about this.” His voice cracks, he takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues. “Had some shit go down with a rival gang, a couple rumbles, whatever. Routine shit. It went bad. Got separated from Split and them, chased on foot for fucking miles by more guys than I could take alone. Didn’t mean to, but I led them to India. She was hanging with her girlfriends, couple of their guys. Sees me coming down the street, knew I was in trouble. Called the guys out to help. So the guys and I take care of things and I got hit in the shoulder, but whatever, wasn’t too bad. Last one was talking shit, but I could see he was ready to run. We let him. Fucking…he ran off, then stopped about a hundred feet away and blasted a shot, like a last ‘fuck you.’ India was on the porch, took it straight between the fucking eyes. Total freak accident. I could see the guy’s face. He was like ‘oh shit’, because everybody knew India. Didn’t matter who you belonged to, you knew India, you had to love her, respect her ass. She was that sweet. He got capped the next day, not me, but it happened. Didn’t matter though. She was gone. All that beauty, all that sweetness, all that love for everyone, no matter who you were…just gone.”
I feel wetness in my hair, hear tears in his voice. I shift, swivel, pull him to me. I hold his face to my chest and finally understand what he meant by letting yourself just be shredded. Colton is a hardass, tough and strong and stoic. But he’s just…broken by the memories. And this is years later.
“She was the first girl I ever loved. I mean, I had girlfriends before that, you know? I even thought I was in love with a couple of ‘em, but it wasn’t love. It was like love, almost love. But when you feel that kind of all-consuming need for someone, a person you’d do fucking anything for, no matter what? They’re in your fucking skin, in your soul, like the essence of who they are is imprinted on you so completely that the very air you breathe and each molecule of who you are is tangled together. That’s love. I loved her like that.” Colton’s voice is…shattered. “And she’s gone. That’s why I have this shit on my chest, the scars. I couldn’t deal. I couldn’t accept that she was dead for the longest time. It hurt so bad, so deep that I just had to stop it somehow, I had to feel something besides the emotional agony. It was Split who saved me. Made me face what happened and how I felt and let it go.” He laughs, a rough bark. “You don’t ever really let go, though. You don’t stop. You don’t stop hurting, you don’t stop loving. It doesn’t go away, you just keep living and eventually shit gets pushed into the background of your life so it’s not consuming you every day. And then one day, you know you’re okay. It still hurts, you still miss that person. And yeah, you forget the details. The way she smelled, the way her mouth tasted, how her skin felt, the sound of her voice. It’s almost like a different life, a different person that loved her, was with her. But on a day-to-day level, you know you’re okay. Sort of.”
“And you learn to love someone else?” I ask, because I have to know.
He sits up and now we’re facing each other, cross-legged. “I don’t know about that.” His eyes are vulnerable, letting me in. “I’m working on it, though. I’ll let you know.”
He means me.
“How do you compete with a ghost, Colton?” I whisper the question into a long silence.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. You don’t. You just understand that there’s a part of you that you can’t give away, because it belongs to a dead person. I don’t know.”