As Lovers Go

A Short story about two lovers who have their ups and don but really love each other, and then they have their last goodbye.

I knew it couldn’t last forever, nothing ever does. But somehow I had convinced my heart that I was wrong and somehow our love would defy reality and continue. Silly me. I should have known better. Really, I should have know that this would just be a summer romance. There and gone in the whirlwind that the season brings.

 

 

 

 

Somehow I manage to get out of bed that day. I got in my car and drove. The radio really didn’t help out the mood by playing “Does anybody hear her” by Counting Crows. Repeatedly.  I drove and drove barely seeing the road in front of me. Then there it was, our spot, just past the old stone wall, the little nook underneath that big old oak. And there he was. My heart just about leapt out of my chest and a smile spilt my face. Maybe he was staying, maybe this would work out, maybe him being here was a sign.

 

 

Before I had even taken three steps from the car he has me bundled up into his arms. I was the perfect size and we fit seamlessly just in the way that had caused our friends to joke about predestination and soul mates. That’s what I had thought we just might be.  I loved him so much and he didn’t care that I forgot to turn the dryer on and left dirty dishes in the sink. He didn’t care that I wasn’t functional without coffee in the mornings and that I didn’t come to bed until three or four in the morning. He was calm, loving, and understanding when I scatterbrainedly forgot we had a date. Here we were holding each other in our private place out in the middle of nowhere and I hoped that maybe, just maybe, this perfect man might be staying around for little old me. Then he pulled back looking down into my eyes, not an easy feat as I stand about six feet tall, and his eyes told me he loved me. But his lips, the traitors, began to say words I didn’t ever want to hear. Words about family, and obligations and how homosexuality wasn’t tolerated by his company. And with every solemn syllable I felt a piece of my heart shatter.

 

Tears welled up in my eyes but I wouldn’t cry, not here, not now, not as he stood there and lovingly stomped on my heart. He leaned in and we had our bittersweet last kiss, my eyes floated shut and I felt my knees weaken, and then it was over.  When I opened my eyes his mask, the business face he wore to keep the strangers out, had lowered and the man I had just spent the most wonderful months of my life with, was gone, even with me standing there with the taste of him in my mouth. In his place stood the dutiful son and fiancée of some, I’m sure, beautiful young heiress. This familiar stranger turned from me and I felt my resolve crumple just as quickly as my knees did. Tears poured down my face and I sobbed. I cried until my voice was hoarse and my eyes were red and stinging. I sat there and rocked on the ground alone while the man who was once upon a time mine was driven away from me and our life together. He had done it after all. He had given us up and locked away a part of himself, a part of him that helped him be happy, all to satisfy his parents and some girl he didn't even know. The unfairness of it all overwhelmed me and I found myself crying again when I had thought I had no more tears to shed. But this time they were not tears of pain. They were simply the tears of someone so numb, so horrifically stunned, that they're not even aware that they are crying.

 

Somehow I made it home and parked my car. I went inside my apartment, empty without him in it, and saw and envelope that hadn’t been there when I left. With shaking hands I reached for it, I knew that loopy handwriting. It was his. My heart made a feeble attempt at liveliness before returning to death as I read the contents. It was an invitation…to a wedding, his wedding, to a Miss. Cecilia FarthingWood the third. I had thought I couldn’t hurt any more than I already did. I was wrong. It would have hurt less if he had simply torn my heart out and burned it. Then at least the wound would have been cauterized not left like an open sore.  Now angry at myself for letting this happen I flew around the house finding all of our pictures and memorabilia that had somehow collected over the last few months. Then with a dead heart I burnt it all in my fireplace. All but one picture, it was the last one we ever took together. We looked so happy so oblivious and I wished I could go back in time to that day and remember what it felt like to be whole again. Shaking my head at the idea I went to my room.

 

After that night I went about my business for all the world a normal person but in truth I was running on auto pilot and like a machine was dead inside. I didn’t go out drinking,, I didn’t dance and I didn’t sing, much to my closer friends' chagrin. And any attempt made to force me out of my shell was deftly (or not so deftly I learned later) rebuffed. I simply didn't want to see people again, I couldn't handle seeing people, not anyone. I made it a good month or so before the depression really caught up with me. I skipped the wedding with mixed feelings of regret at not seeing him again and hurt that he would expect me to come. Thinking about that a few days later, I went up to bed supposing that I might take a quick nap before I went to work. My body had other plans and I slept for a good eleven hours. I only woke to the sound of my phones ringing madly, trying to gain my attention. Still groggy from the sleep, I answered. The first words out of the handset were enough to chill my blood.

 

“Eric Southelbey Jr. is critically injured” they said with a calmness I now recognize as shock “and you are registered as next of kin on his records.”

 

Now not only was I awake, but I was in shock. He had put me as next of kin? Why? He had known we would never stay together to the end from the beginning so, why?

 

 “Sir?.. Sir, we need you to come down and sign some papers. Sir, are you still there? Sir?”

“Yes” I answered hurriedly “I’ll be there as soon as I can…Um…Where are you exactly?”

 “We are just off of route 20, exit 15 to be exact-”

 “I’ll be there” I interrupted hanging up immediately after.

 

  In a rush I grabbed my wallet and keys and tore out of my driveway. I later realized that I was extremely lucky not to get into an accident that night the way I was driving. I rushed into the ER, probably looking like an insane man, but luckily the woman I had spoken to on the phone was there, waiting  to lead me to him. And there he lay in that antiseptic hell, perforated with tubes, with thousands of beeping machines dictating his every move. 

 

“What happened to him...” I half whimpered as the reality finally struck me. He looked dead, but they wouldn’t have called me if he was... right?

 

“He was in a car accident, a drink driver was in the wrong lane and hit him head on, and there were two fatalities, the drunk and his passenger, only Mr.Southelby survi--”

 

“Eric” I interrupted

 “Excuse me?” she said looking confused.

I gave her a bitter smile and said “His name is Eric”

 

She looked flustered for a few moments before she let me know what I was waiting for, the diagnosis. “Mr. South-I mean Eric is in a chemically induced coma, this was done to keep the pain to minimum while we tried to repair his organs.” She paused here and that worried me

“ What? Can you repair him, can he be healed or not?” 

 

She looked ashamed “I’m afraid not sir, we can give him another day at best then…” she shrugged “Then there is nothing we can do for him. We need a descion on whether or not to terminate life support with in the next twelve hours”

 

Then she left me standing there in shock with her words echoing in my head. The man I had loved so passionately, the one I had never thought I would lose completely, was there lying on a hospital bed and would be dead by the end of the day. And they wanted me to decide whether or not I wanted to keep his body alive? I could just barely decide if I wanted cream in my coffee some mornings. So I sat beside his bed and let myself be lulled by the rhythmic beeping until it came to me. I would ask him what he wanted, only this time the answer would not involve a warm cup of coffee with or without foam, this time it would be his life.

 

I called in a nurse and asked her to wake him up. She seemed doubtful of my authority and when I burst into frustrated tears she called for a doctor. You could ask me now to say what the doctor looked like and I couldn’t tell you. He could have been a she for all I remember, I was so focused on him as they slowly brought him into consciousness.  He couldn’t speak around the tube in his throat but his eyes said it all. Careful of the wires and tubes connected to him, I crawled into bed and cuddled him, speaking loving words and pushing on the morphine button when his eyes tightened in pain. They let us have about an hour, I suppose, before the doctor demanded a decision. I looked at Eric to ask the question, but before I even opened my mouth he had begum miming a complicated series of gestures that boiled down to, let him die. My heart clenched in pain and my horror at being the one to kill him must have shone in my eyes because he gave me a smile I’ll never forget and pulled down to kiss me. That kiss was so full of all of the things we forgot to say and our love for each other overriding the world around us, for a moment I could have thought everything was okay, there in his arms, there where he had broken my heart, he gently put it back together for another try.

 

Three hours later he was dead. Less than ten minutes after they pulled the plug I was assaulted by a so-called grieving widow. She came stalking down the hallway in enough designer clothing and jewelry to sink a ship and choke a horse simultaneously. Then she slapped me and began ranting about the unfairness of the situation and telling me "how dare" I make the decision with out asking her, as if it would have changed matters. Eventually she just collapsed sobbing to the floor. I would have liked to feel sorry for her, but it was her selfish request that had stolen him from me, so some how that sorrow got lost in transit. Unfortunately his parents’ didn’t. They arrived just in time to see her sobbing and me doing nothing. That coupled with the fact that they knew exactly who I was, and I quote, “What I did to pervert” their son. As if he hadn’t done just fine on his own. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that he had called for me, not them. Me, I knew he loved. His parent he…respected and I suspected that he had never really knew his parents as anything other than the “sir” and “ma’am” who picked him up from boarding school in the summer. And somewhere deep in their gold plated and monogrammed hearts, they knew that he had been happier in his few months with me than all of his life with them. So they hated me, and I couldn’t really blame them. But that little excuse for a human being who called herself his wife, her I could blame. And I did.

 

 

 

She was the reason he was called home. She was the reason he had been driving on his own that night, she had commandeered the limo. She was the reason I had felt the pulse fade from my soul mate’s body, and for that I would not forgive her. She on the other hand saw me as a husband corrupter and someone who had, to all of our surprises, stolen what she saw as rightfully hers, his inheritance.

 

Mere hours after his death, the hussy had tried to contact his lawyer about the inheritence only to be politly, if a little coldly, informed that she was not a party listed in the will. I was the person he left it all to.He had left it to me of all people. “I have made plenty of money for myself” the letter said as the lawyer read it aloud for us in some high up official's commandeered office, “and I don’t need money from my parents so why not give the money to the only family I’d ever had.” I cried more in that moment than I had since the day he left me. Of course, she did threaten to take me to court for the money but I really didn't care. The world could have stopped and I wouldn't have notcied. He had left it to me because he thought of me as his family. It hadn't mattered to him that we had been seperated and that as a gay couple we couln't have ever gotten married. At that moment I knew that we had been spouses far more truly than his forced arraingment with Celia. With that thought tucked away in my heart, I walked away, leaving his "family" sitting in that pretentious little office, mouths agape with shock.

 

About  a week later there we all sat at a huge service that memorialized, basically all the things about himself he hated, and while others stayed silent in reverence or cried,  I silently laughed to myself about the irony. Then after all of the official family and invited guests left the grave side, I made my last visit to my lover, to say our final goodbyes. I didn’t leave a dozen roses or lilies as it seemed quite a few others had. All I brought with me was a sunflower, his favorite, he’d told me as we sat on the oak tree’s branches one afternoon. He liked it because it reminded him of me and how I always tried to find the sun in a situation and ignored the rain. I stood there in the sun with my one sunflower and tried to finally let go of the man I had loved with all of my heart. I set the flower down, with the picture of us I had saved trapped beneath it and smiled though the tears rolled down my cheeks and I felt so achingly empty inside. “Guess what Eric? I finally see the rain, and it’s everywhere” I whispered desolate and hugged myself backing away from the grave. While I had stood there the clouds over head had darkened and now it began to pour down upon me. At first I simply thought it was tears then looking up I laughed. There in the middle of all the rain was a bright ball of light, the sun in the midst of rain, hope for the future. Eric always had loved to have the last word.

 

Author's Note

How did it make you feel?

Reviews

[Annalisa]

Angry, sad, like i was a piece of s**t, and hopeful all at the same time... This made me feel like a lot of things... This was heartbreaking but a wonderful write. There are some suggestions I have, a bunch of your paragraphs are WAY to long, especially the first one. Also the transition between the hospital scene and the will was too abrupt. You need to close the hospital scene cleanly, and start the inheritance scene with it's own paragraph instead of running the two events together. If you could put some kind of physical barrier between that would e good too, to help show a passage of time. Other than that there were a few awkward sentences which I have below with recommended fixes, but I really enjoyed this piece. In fact, I think this is one of your best. You should submit this next year to talisman, it would be a crime for it not to get in.

There and gone in the whirlwind that season brings.-------to------> There and gone in the whirlwind that the season (or change in seasons) bring (or brings if you choose second choice).

Before I had even take three steps from the car he had me bundled up into his arms.-----to----->Before I had even taken three steps from the car he has me bundled up in his arms.

I sat there and rocked on the ground alone while my man or the man who was once upon a time mine, got in his limousine and was driven to the airport.------This is just awkward, and I'm not sure what to change but take a look at it again and see if you see anything....

But this time they were not tears of pain, they were simply the tears of someone so numb they don't even feel them.-----to----> But this time they were not the tears of pain, they were simply the tears of someone so numb they couldn't feel the tears sliding down their face (This suggestion isn't quite right but something needs to happen here soooo)

I simply didn't want to see people again, any people.-----to-----> I simply didn't want to see people again, I couldn't handle seeing people, anyone.

But that wasn't the point was that he had called for me, not them.-----to----> But my supposed perversion of their son wasn't the point, wasn't what filled them with anger as they saw me standing there, it was that he had called for me, not them.

[Catastrophe]

That was just beautifully written, i had a bunch of mixed emotions while reading this story...
i loved reading it, and honestly the only thing i can say has been said...
its a great piece, just amazing...loved it *smiles*

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I loved this story. It was really good. It made me cry inside. I oloved the ending. with the rain and the sun and sunflowers. And how it said "Eric loved to have the last word" That was brilliant. Absolutely very good job on this story.

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I loved this story. It was really good. It made me cry inside. I oloved the ending. with the rain and the sun and sunflowers. And how it said "Eric loved to have the last word" That was brilliant. Absolutely very good job on this story.