𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐁𝐄𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐘 • Neil Perry

Chapter 11

EVERY Sunday afternoon Evelyn sat in a music store far into town. It didn't get many customers, but she supposed she preferred it that way. It felt like Vermont's best kept secret even though it was on the middle of an extremely public and frequented high street.

She would sit on a chair in the back and place the same acoustic guitar on her lap. It was a pale brown, almost orange, with a dark vignette silhouette that followed the outer rim. She played the tunes of folk songs that she knew, country songs, too—Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry.

It was a new way to spend sheltered time alone. It was away from Henley Hall but so close to the creativity she buried away in the past. In its newness, however, she herself hadn't felt new. In fact, she had never felt more like herself.

"You play well."

Evelyn stopped strumming, only to find a blonde standing before her. She hadn't seen her face before, but she recognised her perfectly well.

"Because of course you do," Chris scoffed.

"I didn't hear you come in," Evelyn said. "I'll be out of your hair."

She stood up and began to prepare putting away the guitar.

"You don't have to do that," Chris said, recapturing her attention. "I saw you through the window."

Evelyn couldn't understand why Chris wanted to approach her. She imagined she would've wanted to keep as far away from her as possible, but there was something amicable in the way Chris spoke that made her second guess her immediate assumptions—tender, too.

"Will you go for a walk with me?" she asked softly.

Evelyn's eyebrows rose. "Right now?"

"Yeah," Chris smiled. "My car's parked across the street so it'll just have to be around the block."

Evelyn didn't experience terror or nervousness around people. Not around her parents when they tried to discipline her. Not her professors or academic superiors. Not even Neil in spite of how her heart leapt from her chest in his presence.

But Chris' kindness had inflicted more nerves in Evelyn than a jump scare in a horror movie. This had to be a trap. Though, in the off-chance Chris truly was this lovely, that unnerved Evelyn even more.

Nevertheless, Evelyn replied, "Okay."

And they walked in a long, agonising silence around the block. The streets were decorated with strikingly white snow where steps and tires hadn't melted it.

The girls visibly looked like the antitheses of each other with nothing but their hair. Evelyn walked with her hands in the pockets of her coat, whilst Chris walked with both her hands clutching her small purse in front of her.

The silence was overbearing, to Evelyn at least. For all she knew, Chris wanted Evelyn to suffer. But Evelyn couldn't imagine Chris was suffering any less.

"It's really cool that you drive," Evelyn said, smiling, in the efforts to make conversation.

"You don't?" Chris replied.

"That depends. Do bikes count?"

"No." Chris wasn't remotely entertained, and Evelyn felt embarrassment seeping into every inch of her skin.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I don't know why I'm trying to be funny."

"Me neither," Chris uttered. "What you did to me was really hurtful. Do you know that?"

"Yes. There are no words to explain what I did or why I did it and there are certainly none I can say to take it back. But I am sorry."

Chris cut her eyes away from Evelyn. "I know. It's why I can't bring myself to hate you." Then swiftly focusing on the brunette again, she added, "But that doesn't mean I like you."

"I know."

"But I hate him," Chris seethed with an anger Evelyn had yet to see from her. "I can't even say his name I hate him that much, because unlike you, he owed me something. That's the difference between why I'm standing next you right now and not him."

"But I did owe you something," Evelyn disputed sincerely. "I mean, we're both women. He didn't just disrespect me, but he disrespected you constantly and I allowed that to happen."

"I don't think it's the way I've been disrespected that you should be so worried about," Chris said sincerely. "All those times you went to him whilst knowing he's with me, you disrespected yourself and for that, I feel sorry for you."

Evelyn hadn't heard it that way. It wasn't the frankness of something she already knew was true, but perhaps in the haze of Neil's rose coloured glasses and the silence of Ginny's aloofness, Evelyn had disillusioned herself.

"Why did you do it?" asked Chris.

"I don't know," Evelyn replied honestly. "I don't entirely understand it."

"Then try," Chris demanded as she stopped walking in front of a short flight of stone steps with an abruptness that forced Evelyn to stop too. "What was going through your head?"

"Nothing," Evelyn deadpanned without thought. "When I confronted him I felt nothing so I thought it meant nothing. But it didn't register in my head at the time that it wouldn't have meant nothing to you and I don't know why. I don't—"

Evelyn stopped herself from a ramble that she knew would only sound like lines and lines of self-pity.

"But I know now," she said instead, "and I know that's not good enough."

Chris searched Evelyn's eyes for a long moment, and it was impossible for Evelyn to decide what she was thinking.

But before she could remotely allow herself to try, Chris turned around and set herself down on the landing five steps up from the ground in front of an apartment door.

Chris gestured to the space by her side. "Sit."

And Evelyn did.

She focused on the snow before her settled on the leaves of trees and on the tops of cars, the roofs of buildings and the edges of sidewalks. As cold as it was outside, the cold she felt she was certain didn't come from the weather. It came from the temperament that weathered Chris.

And Chris wasn't angry. Evelyn wasn't sure someone as kind and as true had the capacity for such a dark feeling. Instead Chris felt a cold sadness that came close to the heaviness of grief. It radiated through her words and body right into the air that kissed Evelyn's skin.

Then, in a similar away, Evelyn felt Chris' eyes bore into the side of her face.

"You're right about one thing," Chris said.

Evelyn met her gaze.

"We are both women. So, I'm going to speak to you woman to woman.

"If you feel nothing with someone, take that as your sign to walk away, because when you love someone and care about them—and I mean really and truly—you feel everything. Happiness, sadness, anger, joy all at once. It's this weird, intangible fusion and it is so wonderful. At the very least in life everyone deserves that. Even you."

And Chris smiled the same way she had in the music store, but this time, Evelyn read it for what it was—a genuine, warm and well-intentioned smile. And once she stood up and continued her walk around the block, Evelyn knew not to follow. But she was also so immersed within her own thoughts, that she wouldn't have been able to.

She took the poem she kept folded in her coat pocket out and read it again.

Every word of what Chris understood love to be was exactly what love was. And in a similar fashion, every word of what Keats understood melancholy to be was exactly what love was.

It wasn't any one feeling. It was the sensation of a multitude of feelings at once.