"I get to choose what we watch?" I say, restraining myself as much as possible from clapping my hands, because that would be even more childish than swooning at the sight of The Lion King.
"Of course you get to choose. I guess the bedroom lost the battle already," he says, wrapping his arms around me.
"Umm, just for a little while, I promise." I struggle to keep my voice even as he bites my earlobe softly. "I love your penthouse," I murmur.
"You can come here anytime," he whispers in a raspy voice.
His invitation has the unexpected effect of turning my stomach to ice. With a pang, I realize why. There can be only one reason why he made the invitation so easily. It's one he often extends. To old lovers, like Natalie, and to almost strangers, like me. What a bitter thought… Natalie in his arms.
"Let's see if I find a movie I've never heard of," I say, scrolling down the endless list of movies. I have heard of all of them. I've seen most of them once. Some even twice.
And then I stumble upon one I haven't watched in years. Nine, to be exact. I was in a far less fancy room than this one when I watched it, with my favorite person in the world. Kate.
A tear trickles down my cheek and I wipe it away as quickly as I can, but James sees it.
"Serena, what’s the…?"
"Nothing," I answer and turn away, because I can feel more tears forming behind my eyelids.
James wraps
his arms around me, and for once, I wish he wouldn't, because it makes withholding the tears so much harder.
"You can tell me anything," he says in a low, warm voice.
His words shatter all my defenses. Before I know it, sobs choke me and words start pouring out of my mouth. Words I have never uttered before, not even to myself, let alone to another living soul. They speak of pain and guilt. And of the agony of missing her every single day.
It's a while before I notice we're sitting on the floor, James leaning against the wall and me, curled up in his arms, resting my head on his chest. There's something calming about listening to his heartbeats, echoing so clearly in the silence between us. Then the realization of what really happened hits me and it occurs to me that the silence might be because I completely freaked him out with my meltdown.
"I'm so sorry," I gasp, cold dread starting to creep in. "That was so silly of me."
"Don't apologize," he says, planting a soft kiss on my head.
"It happened so long ago, and I never talk about it…"
"Doesn't matter when it happened," he says softly. "The pain never really goes away. You just learn to survive with it."
My heart skips a beat. He's the first person to tell me what I knew all along. What Jess, Michael, even my mother have vehemently denied. They always said I should give it time, because time heals everything. What a lie. It's a lie we tell others when we can't find the right words to say. It's a lie we tell ourselves in the darkest of times, in the hope that it'll help us crawl out of the giant abyss of despair.
It didn't help me, so I stopped repeating that to myself after a while. I put on the widest smile I could muster so others would cease chanting the blasphemy as well.
I'm grateful for James's honesty. It's liberating. And maybe it's his honesty, or the fact that I've never felt safer or more deeply understood than at this moment, that causes the thought plaguing my nightmares, the root of my guilt, to slip out.
"If I'd looked more closely after her," I whisper, my voice trembling so hard with the effort of withholding tears that I nearly can't understand myself.
He does, though. And he pulls me closer to him, caressing my cheeks with the back of his fingers.
"Then maybe she would have lived a day, a month, a year longer. But how much longer, Serena? You can't be someone's guardian angel forever," he says firmly.
Guardian angel… The words bring back a very old memory. I was ten when Kate's problems began. I didn't understand what was going on, I just knew that my sister wasn't behaving like my sister anymore. So I used to pray every night after my mother tucked me in bed, asking my guardian angel to leave me and go at Kate's side, because her angel seemed to be a tad overwhelmed. When it became clear to me that either my guardian angel wasn't listening to me, or she had listened to me but she too was overwhelmed, I decided to take the matter in my own hands. Some help I turned out to be.
"Don't blame yourself for something that was out of your control. There was no other end to the path she'd taken."
"Maybe," I say, "but it didn't have to end that day."
"Any other day would've hurt you just as much. Do you have nightmares?"
I shudder in his arms. How can he know?