The Gravity of Us (Elements #4)(15)

“Lucille,” I called, straightening my tie. “A bit of advice.”

“Yes?” She wrapped her arms around her body and when she looked at me, her smile was gone, replaced by a heavy frown.

“Feel less.” I breathed out. “Don’t allow others to drive your emotions in such a way. Shut it off.”

“Shut off my feelings?”

I nodded.

“I can’t,” she argued, still crying. Her hands fell over her heart, and she shook her head back and forth. “This is who I am. I am the girl who feels everything.”

I could tell that was true.

She was the girl who felt everything, and I was the man who felt nothing at all.

“Then the world will do its best to make you nothing,” I told her. “The more feelings you give, the more they’ll take from you. Trust me. Pull yourself together.”

“But…she’s my sister, and—”

“She’s not your sister.”

“What?”

I brushed my hand against the back of my neck before placing my hands into my pockets. “She just said you’re not her family, which means she doesn’t give a damn about you.”

“No.” She shook her head, holding the heart-shaped necklace in her hand. “You don’t understand. My relationship with my sister is—”

“Nonexistent. If you loved someone, wouldn’t you speak their name? I’ve never once heard of you.”

She remained silent, but her emotions slowed down a tad as she wiped away her tears. She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and began to softly speak to herself. “Air above me, earth below me, fire within me, water surround me, spirit becomes me.”

She kept repeating the words, and I narrowed my eyes, confused about who Lucy truly was as a person. She was all over the place: flighty, random, passionate, and emotionally overcharged. It was as if she was fully aware of her faults, and she allowed them to exist regardless. Somehow those faults made her whole.

“Doesn’t it tire you?” I asked. “To feel so much?”

“Doesn’t it tire you to not feel at all?”

In that moment, I realized I’d come face to face with my polar opposite, and I didn’t have a clue what else to say to a stranger as strange as her.

“Goodbye, Lucille,” I said.

“Goodbye, Graham Cracker,” she replied.





“I didn’t lie,” Jane swore as we drove back to our home. I hadn’t called her a liar, hadn’t asked her any questions whatsoever about Lucy or the fact that I hadn’t known she existed up until that evening. I hadn’t even shown Jane any kind of anger regarding the issue, and still, she kept telling me how she hadn’t lied.

Jane.

Lyric?

I didn’t have a clue who the woman sitting beside me was, but in reality, had I really known who she was before the sister revelation that evening?

“Your name is Jane,” I said, my hands gripped the steering wheel. She nodded. “And your name is Lyric?”

“Yes…” She shook her head. “No, well, it was, but I changed it years ago, before I even met you. When I started applying to colleges, I knew no place would take me seriously with a name like Lyric. What kind of law firm would hire someone named Lyric Daisy Palmer?”

“Daisy,” I huffed out. “You’ve never told me your middle name before.”

“You never asked.”

“Oh.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re not mad?”

“No.”

“Wow.” She took a deep breath. “Okay then. If it were the other way around, I would be so—”

“It’s not the other way around,” I cut in, not feeling like speaking after the longest day of my life.

She shifted around in her seat, but remained quiet.

The rest of the way home, we sat in silence, my head swirling with questions, a big part of me not wanting to know the answers. Jane had a past she didn’t speak about, and I had a past of the same kind. There were parts of all lives that were better left in the shadows, and I figured Jane’s family was a prime example. There was no reason to go over the details. Yesterday she hadn’t had a sister, and today she did.

Though I doubted Lucy would be coming over for Thanksgiving any time soon.

I headed straight into our bedroom and started unbuttoning my shirt. It only took her a couple seconds to follow me into the room with a look of nerves plastered on her face, but she didn’t speak a word. We both started undressing, and she moved over to me, quiet, and turned her back to me, silently asking for me to unzip her black gown.

I did as she requested, and she slid the dress off her body before tossing on one of my T-shirts, which she always used as her nightgowns. Her growing stomach stretched them out, but I didn’t mind.

Minutes later, we stood in the bathroom, both brushing our teeth, no words exchanged. We brushed, we spat, we rinsed. It was our normal routine; silence was always our friend, and that night hadn’t changed anything.

When we climbed into bed, we both shut off the lamps sitting on our nightstands, and we didn’t mutter a word, not even to say good night.

As my eyes closed, I tried my best to shut my brain off, but something from that day split my memories open. So, instead of asking Jane about her past, I crawled out of bed and went to my office to lose myself in my novel. I still needed about ninety-five thousand words, so I decided to fall into fiction in order to forget about reality for a while. When my fingers were working, my brain wasn’t focused on anything but the words. Words freed me from the confusion my wife had dumped in my lap. Words freed me from remembering my father. Words freed me from falling too deep into my mind where I stored all the pain from my past.