The damp rocky ground pressed a sharp, soothing cold to my legs as I sat down on it. I motioned for Chloe to come join me, to which she shook her head. “It’s fucking freezing out here! Can we go back?”
I laughed. She had a point, the temperature had dropped to 48 degrees since our arrival, and as evidenced by our attire we were not prepared. Still, though, in shorts and a t-shirt, I felt perfectly fine. “Come on,” I said. “You’ll be warm if you stay close to me.” Chloe sighed, and walked to my right side. After hesitating for a brief moment, she sat down, letting out a sharp facial expression of pain. She apparently did not find the cold as soothing as I did.
As Chloe finally adjusted, she scooted closer to me and rested her head on my shoulder. I finally was able to admire the beauty before us that I was trying to get her to appreciate. The beautiful landscape created by the other mountains in the distance, and the trees below us, was simply too valuable to allow something as silly as temperature ruin this amazingly romantic moment. After a quick glance at Chloe, I noticed she was finally giving out a smile.
“Do you think there is a god?” I asked.
Chloe took her head off of me and gave me a blank stare. “Where is this coming from?”
I returned her blank stare, and then gave a shy shrug. “I don’t know, honestly. It’s just really been on my mind recently.” With that, she returned her head onto my shoulder, and I wrapped my arm around her - I could tell she was feeling cold, and I almost agreed to go back, but concluded that we would if she asked again.
“I’ve never known what to believe, honestly,” Chloe said. “In a way, I just feel like my being here has a purpose. Like someone created me, and set my life to the path it is on today.” She paused, apparently considering her next words carefully. As I waited, I moved my right arm to caressing her hair. “However,” she returned, “at the same time, I feel like no kind being could have made some things in my life happen. When my mom died…” she trailed off, at a loss for words.
Her mother had only died a few months back in a vehicular collision where the colliding driver had been drunk. Chloe was in the diving seat, though had been blessed with only a few scratches, a broken bone, and being knocked unconscious. I had the unfortunate displeasure of explaining how her mother had bled to death when Chloe woke up the next day in the hospital.
Knowing it was still a sensitive subject, I moved my arm back around her and gave her a light embrace. “You ok? Wanna go back?”
Joy came to my heart as she let out a soft smile. “I’m fine, and I like the painful cold now. It’s fun with you.” I let out a soft chuckle. “Now, back to the question at hand. I’ve stated how I feel, what about you?”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Part of me feels like there are just too many amazing coincidences in my life for it to all be created by random - my acceptance to Northwestern with mediocre grades and test scores, my relationship with you-” Chloe gave my cheek a quick peck at this. “-and the fact that I have survived to this day without many very stupid, idiotic decisions I have made going horribly wrong.” Chloe turned her head to me, and I shrugged. “I really should be dead by now, I was too stupid when I was younger.”
“You've never spoken about this before,” she explained. “What happened?”
“To sum it up briefly, drugs and alcohol.”
Chloe burst out laughing. “Oh, come on, John. We’re 17, and I’ve known you for two years, not once have you done anything like that in the time I’ve known you. You have always been a responsible, respectable, young man.”
My smile turned to a frown - I didn’t want to have to tell her this. “Look,” I started. “I love you - you know that. From the moment I met you, I know you were someone special, someone that I wanted in my life. And I also knew you would never want some junkie in your life, nor did I want one to end up in your life, so… I never tried any of it after that. And, really, that’s all I had done, try the stuff. I was never addicted, I was too young to get that exposed, though I had tried plenty. All sorts of alcohol, weed, then some of the more serious stuff like methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and ecstasy… often I did not know what I was doing and had consumed more than I should have. My friends nearly got me hospitalized when I had passed out from a drinking game we had-”
I finally glanced over to Chloe, who was giving me the most shocked, astonished, disbelieving face I had ever seen from her. My voice stopped as I realized how much I was saying in so little time, and how much it had to be for her to take it all in. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I should have told you this sooner-” my thoughts were interrupted by Chloe’s cold hand slapping across my face.
After quickly realigning my eyes to hers, I was silent, and so was she. We stared at each other, neither of us speaking, for at least a full minute.
“You fucking lied to me,” she finally blurted out. “I asked you if you had done drugs that night. That night we met. And you said no, that you were not about that, that you were about progressing through life to enjoy it as much as you could, and that you believed drugs would ruin that.”
“Chloe…”
“No, no, I don’t want to hear it.” She stood up, and began walking away when I jumped to my feat to grab her hand.
“Please, no. Please don’t do this. Don’t punish me for something I did before I even met you. I cleaned up, I never took it after.”
She jerked her hand away from mine, but seemed to be more calmed down. She walked closer to the cliff’s edge, staring out again at the beauty before us. “It’s not that you did it that pisses me off,” she said. “It’s that you never told me about it until now.”
Stepping in her direction, I spoke: “Look, when we-” My foot slid on the wet ground, and I went down, knocking into Chloe. She too fell backwards, off of the cliff, and down she went. Her screams faded into silence.
My body and mind both froze immediately. Oh shit, oh fuck, holy fucking shit. What did I just do?
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