Where Logic Ends, Faith Begins
They celebrated.
There were fireworks in her veins and glitter in her blood; there was Toby, with his mouth pressed against her throat and his hands feeling her up. She was violently happy and slightly more than drunk. He had baby pictures in his pocket. They made it work, somehow.
The skies were a shade of bloodshot gray after the fireworks, and she breathed into his mouth. His apartment was already baby proof, almost soft when she was up against the wall; almost. Her heartbeats were like explosions of fire, but he didn't hear.
She was this woman that he wanted, for a little while; she sank lower into his bed, underneath his weight, and he breathed love in her ears. She believed, for a little while, in oblivion and dissonance and all the words she used to think would impress him. His kisses were like party streamers, in red, white and blue on her skin.
They celebrated by biting off a condom wrapper, and it seemed tacky and pubescent. She wanted to tell him that she faced logic and turned it down for him, but she could've been imagining the whole thing. And maybe logic was really never there at all.
He promised her whole houses and lies upon lies and she sighed, mad with July and intense with the heat. She heard a repetition in his voice and a dull monotone in his movements for the fracture of a second.
She couldn't tell anymore when they started and when they stopped, when it was her voice or his, and there was no hurt and no regret for the first time in eleven months. A part of her missed his sorry excuses and the beat between his words, and things would never be like they were before. She moved freely in his arms and felt older and wiser, though she hadn't learned a thing.
It was never her intention to make him feel like there was something wrong with deceiving himself into loving her. It was just that everything about it was wrong. The lights in her veins and the colors in her blood clouded her thoughts and her better judgment, and she still called out his name with a tang of pain. He still held her close to him and moved his hands up and down the line formed by her spine.
He called her Claudia Jean and tried to settle his breath, as if he could make them become these people that they weren't, these people that were all right and perfectly comfortable with each other. The national anthem played, loud in her head, and she'd never felt less patriotic than she did in the moment she looked into his eyes and couldn't see anything past the darkness. Her tongue tasted of him and she felt like nothing at all.
She wanted to tell him something about another year of independence, but she kept her mouth shut.
(In a world with no June, she's like an autumn leaf out of place.)