J. Redmerski - The Edge of Always

“What the fuck is your problem, man?!” Blake says, stumbling to his feet. One hand never leaves his jaw where he continuously rubs it as if trying to pop it back into place. His nose is bleeding from both nostrils and his upper lip is busted and swollen. All of the blood looks black in the darkness.

“You know what the fuck!” Damon roars and goes to attack him again, but I rush over and do what I can to hold him back. I step around in front of him and shove the palms of my hands against his rock-hard chest.

“Just stop it, Damon! We were just talking! What the hell is wrong with you?” I’m yelling so loud already my voice feels strained.

I turn at the waist, keeping my hands firmly on Damon’s chest and I look right at Blake. “I’m so sorry, Blake, I-I—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says with a hard, rebuffed expression. “I’m outta here.”

He turns and walks away through the metal door. A vociferous bang! resounds through the air as it slams behind him. I whirl back around at Damon with fire in my eyes and I push him as hard as I can in the chest. “You asshole! I can’t believe you did that!” I’m literally screaming three inches from his face.

Damon’s lip furrows and he’s still breathing hard from the fight. His dark eyes are wide and unfettered and sort of feral. A part of me feels suspicious of him, but the part of me that has known him for twelve years cancels the suspicion out.

“What are you doing leaving with some guy you just fucking met? I thought you were smarter than that, Cam, even buzzed out of your mind!”

I step back from him and cross my arms angrily over my stomach. “Are you calling me stupid? We were just talking!” I shriek and my blonde hair falls down around my eyes. “I’m perfectly capable of recognizing the assholes from the nice guys, and right about now I’m seeing a total fucking asshole!”

He appears to grit his teeth behind his tightly closed lips. “Call me what you want, but I was just protecting you.” He says it surprisingly calm.

“From what?” I shout. “Bad conversation? A guy who genuinely just wanted to talk?”

Damon smirks. “No guy just wants to talk,” he says as if he’s an expert. “No guy is going to lead a girl that looks like you out alone on the top of a goddamned warehouse building just to talk. Ten more minutes and he would’ve thrown your little ass on top of that table and had his way with you. No one can hear you scream out here, Cam.”

I swallow down a lump in my throat, but another one forms in its place. Maybe Damon’s right. Maybe I was so blinded by Blake’s sincere and privately wounded personality that I completely fell for a tactic I never contemplated. Sure, I’ve envisioned these kinds of situations before and have seen the typical ones on television, but maybe Blake was trying something else on me… No, I don’t believe it. He would’ve thrown me on the picnic table if I asked him to, but my heart tells me he wouldn’t have otherwise.

I turn my back on Damon, not wanting him to see anything left in my face that might give away that for a second I actually believed him. I’m pissed as hell for the way he handled it, but I can’t hate him forever because he really was just looking out for me. Overloaded on alpha male testosterone, no doubt, but looking out for me, nonetheless.

“Cam, look at me please.”

I wait a few defiant seconds before turning around with my arms still crossed.

Damon peers in at me with a softer gaze than before. “I’m sorry, I just…,” he sighs and looks off to the side now as though what he’s about to say he can’t while looking right at me, “… Camryn, I can’t stand the thought of you with some other guy.”

I feel like someone just punched me in the gut. I even let out a weird yelping sound from my throat and my eyes grow wide.

I glance nervously toward the metal door and then back at him. “Where’s Natalie?” I have to drive this topic completely off this roof. What the hell did he just say? No, he can’t mean what it sounded like. I must’ve heard him wrong. Yeah, my buzz is back and I’m not thinking straight.

He steps up closer to me and cups my elbows in his hands. Instantly, I feel the need to back away from him, but I’m frozen in the same spot, barely able to move anything other than my eyes.

“I mean it,” he says, lowering his voice to a desperate whisper. “I’ve wanted you since seventh grade.”

There’s that punch to the gut again.

Finally, I manage to back away from him. “No. No.” I shake my head back and forth, trying to make sense of this. “Are you drunk, Damon? Or strung out? Something’s wrong with you.” My arms come uncrossed and I put up my hands. “We need to go find Natalie. I won’t say anything to her about what you said because you won’t remember it in the morning, but we really do need to go. Now.”

I start to walk toward the now closed metal door, but feel Damon’s hand collapse around my bicep and he turns me around. My breath catches and that suspicious feeling I had about him earlier comes back full-force, completely reversing the years I’ve known him and have trusted him. He glares at me with eyes more feral than before, but manages to retain a sort of eerie softness in them, too.

“I’m not drunk and I haven’t done any coke since last week.”

The fact that he does coke at all is more than enough to make it impossible to ever be attracted to him, but he’s always been one of my closest friends and so I’ve always overlooked his drug use. But he’s telling the truth right now and being such a close friend for so long is what allows me to know this.

For the first time, I wish he was strung out because then we really could forget this ever happened.

I look down at his fingers clamped around my arm and finally notice how much pressure he’s applying and it scares me.

“Let go of my arm, Damon, please.”

Instead of loosening, I feel his fingers tighten and I try to pull away. He jerks me towards him and before I can react, he crushes his mouth over mine, his free hand wraps around the back of my neck forcing my head still. He tries to stick his tongue in my mouth, but I manage to rear my head back just enough to butt my forehead into his. It stuns him—and me—and instinctively he lets go of my body.

“Cam! Wait!” I hear him yelling out to me as I run away and throw open the metal door.

I hear his fierce footsteps moving after mine as he races down the loud metal stairs behind me, but I lose him once I make it back into the cage elevator, slam the fence gate closed and pound hard once on the Main button. The same ogre who let us in the club is standing at the door when I rush past him, having to partially shove him out of my way to get outside.

“Take it easy, babe!” he shouts as I run down the sidewalk and away from the warehouse.

I walk as far as the Shell station and call a cab to pick me up.

Elias

They say you never forget your first love, and I have to say that they were right. I met the girl of my dreams when we were both still fans of treehouses and dirt cakes—she made the best dirt cakes in Georgia—and today, seventeen years later, I still see her smile in everything good

We tried it once, being together, but it didn’t quite work out how I had hoped. Bray’s life has always been… complicated. Mine, well, I guess the same can be said for me, but as much as she and I are alike, there are just as many things that makes us so very different.

I never thought a relationship with her, other than being the best of friends—sometimes with benefits—could ever work. Neither did she. I guess in the beginning, we were both right. But by the end—and damn, the end sure as hell blindsided us—we were proven wrong. Our love for each other, and I admit a few dozen mistakes along the way are what led us here to this moment, holed up in the back of a convenience store with cops surrounding the building

But… wait let me start from the beginning

Fourth of July—Seventeen Years Ago…

The kind of crush a nine-year-old boy has on an eight-year-old girl is almost always innocent. And cruel. The first time I saw Brayelle Bates flitting toward me through the wide-open field by Mr. Paron’s pond, she was marked my victim. She wore a white sun dress and a pair of flip-flops with little purple flowers made of fabric sewn to the tops. Her long, dark hair had been pulled neatly into ponytails on each side of her head and tied with purple ribbons. I loved her. OK, so I didn’t really ‘love’ her, but she sure was pretty

So, naturally I gave her a hard time.

“What’s that on your face?” I asked as she started to walk by.

She stopped and crossed her arms and looked down at me sitting on my blanket beside my mother, pursing her lips at me disapprovingly

“There’s nothing on my face,” she said with a smirk

“Yes there is.” I pointed up at her. “Right there. It’s really gross.”

Instinctively, she reached up and began touching her face all over with her fingertips

“Well, what is it? What does it look like?”

“It’s everywhere. And I told you it’s gross, that’s what it looks like.”

She propped both hands on her hips and chewed on the inside of her mouth