“You’re beautiful, Alice, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise…not even me.” He adds the last bit as an afterthought, a clarification, just to make sure she completely understands what he’s saying. And she does, more than he knows. He’s telling her that she can make it, even without him and that when he leaves her, she’ll be okay. Except she won’t, and it’s just another example of how little he knows her, that he thinks she’ll be fine. He should know that she can’t live without him. He should know that he is her everything. He should know that she loves him more than life itself and if he’s not there, well then…was it really life?

Still, she pushes those thoughts away from her mind and lets herself revel in the warmth of his body, so close next to hers and the touch of his fingers, so light and soft against her silken skin. She lets herself pretend it’s love that’s emanating off him, not remorse.

She knows she shouldn’t be doing this, that it is wrong and it will just increase the hurt she will feel when he leaves. But she can’t help herself. It just feels so wonderful, so right, that she can’t make herself pull away from his loving touch. She knows that if slowly, she starts to distance herself from him, just like he is doing from her, then the pain of their separation will be so much less. Yet the lure of his crooked smile and the feeling of his skin against hers keeps her there, and she tries to hold him down too.

He opens his mouth as if to speak but he closes it before the words are released, again. He’s done this more than twice before in the past hour and he does it often. She knows there’s something he wants to tell her, something special and maybe something hurtful or it may be something beautiful. She doesn’t know but boy does she want to. She’s hesitant though, stopping herself before asking him what it is. What if he was planning to tell her he’s leaving? She doesn’t want to push him; she wants to keep him for as long as possible before the inevitable happens.

Still, what if he wants to tell her he loves her? What if that’s what he wants to say to her but he leaves before he does? As much as she wants to distance herself from him, she also wishes desperately he returns at least some semblance of the affection she holds for him. Because if he doesn’t, what really was the point of her futile life? All she’d ever lived for was him; all she still lives for is him. He’s been her everything for as long as she can remember and she can’t even imagine a life where he’s her nothing and she’s just some hitch in his long, winding road. But that’s what it will be, once he’s gone she won’t mean a thing to him, he’ll forget her, yet she will never forget him. Never.

Whatever he wants to say to her, she wishes he just will. It’s killing her not knowing. She lies awake at night while he sleeps soundly and she watches his back as his chest rises and falls peacefully and she wonders what it is. If anything, it keeps her tied to him more. Maybe if she keeps showing she cares so much about him, he’ll tell her, because if she turns away, he’ll think she doesn’t need to know. But she does, oh how she does. She would only ever turn her back to him to make some of the pain easier, nothing else would make her.

He doesn’t understand how much she loves him, he never has. He thinks everything is temporary, that nothing lasts, whereas she’s known it’d be forever since the day they met. Except now forever is coming crashing down around her because he can’t handle it. Forever is not a thing that processes well in his mind. And now she’s stuck between a rock and a hard place because she wants to stick to him, she wants to hold him and never let him go. She wants that when he leaves, she’ll follow him and she wants him to let her. But she knows she can’t, she knows it’s impossible.

So then, she has to let go of him. She has to sit there and watch him walk away from her, never once looking back to see how she’s faring. But she can’t shake the feeling that she’s doing the wrong thing by letting him leave. That in doing so, she’s ruining both their lives, not just her own. And now she’s so confused because she has no idea which way to turn or what the hell to do.

She’s scared – no, she’s terrified – of what’s going to happen to her after he’s gone. He has been her reason for living, the air she breaths for so long that she doesn’t know how she’ll survive when it’s snatched away. He’s like a drug and she’s the addict. Druggies can go crazy when they stop, they can kill themselves, they can do anything. Is that what will happen to her? Will she go insane, even more so than she already is? Or will she kill herself, or worse, someone else? And even in the midst of all this pain, she knows that she can’t kill herself, because it would hurt him too much.

He’ll take her heart with him when he walks out that door, whether he wants it or not, it will always be his, and all that he will leave for her will be the broken shell of the woman she used to be. She will no longer be Alice after he’s gone, she will be a non-entity, barely even a living thing anymore. When he goes, he'll leave a robot in the place of the girl whose heart he stole when they were only fourteen.

She remembers a time, they had been so young, when he would whisper ‘I love you’ in her ear every chance he got and take her hand and hold her body close to his, running his fingers up and down her arms as he told her how much she meant to him. She knows that he had never whispered in her ear anything about forever, but that’s what she had thought, even though he failed to say it. How naïve she had been. She knows she should have gotten out while she could, before it was too late. But then again, it had been too late since the first time she had laid eyes on him.

She remembers when they used to curl up on the sofa and he would tell her his worries and his fears and everything he was feeling and she would take his head in her lap, running her fingers through his long locks and she would reassure him that everything would be okay, that she would always be there for him no matter what and they could get through everything together. She realizes now that he had never said that back to her.

Now he will never tell her what’s wrong, even though she already knows. He will never confide in her again, and that hurts. Instead, he keeps his feelings locked away, like he used to do, before she came along and fixed him. And she worries that maybe when she’s gone, he will go back to how he used to be and it scares her, because she has worked so hard to fix that broken man, stuck in a boy’s body. If he goes back to that she doesn’t know what she’ll do. It’s scaring her and its making her hold on tighter. Because, even if he doesn’t love her as much as she loves him, she knows he still needs her, even if he can’t see it. He’s letting go of her and in turn, he’s letting go of the part of him that was hers, the part that she had fixed. And she’s almost certain that he needs that part of himself, even if he doesn’t think he does.

He sighs and pushes away from her and suddenly she knows; that he’s going now and it’s too late to do anything about it.

“Don’t,” she says, even though she knows it futile. “Don’t go.” And in that moment, as he stares so intently at her it seems almost as if he can see into her very soul, he knows that she knows he’s leaving her. But he can also see that the hope he could almost always see burning hotly in her light blue eyes is gone. He knows that she's aware that there is no hope of getting him to stay. That he’s leaving her no matter what. And he knows this is their last goodbye.

He stops and leans towards her again, because if she knows then he can do this one thing without hurting her more, or so he thinks. Slowly, almost painfully slowly, his lips swoop down to meet hers. Their last kiss starts out soft, quiet, full of remorse and pain and sorrow. Her tears fall steadily and mix with their lips. He won’t cry, because he’s not going to give into the emotion, but she can almost feel his regret, and she takes faint hope in that. That he doesn’t want to leave, not really, but he feels he has to. He’s stayed too long in one place. He can’t settle down and that’s what she wants. She wants him forever and he can’t give that to her. But still, there’s a part of him that wants forever with her too.

As their kiss deepens, it becomes harder, rougher, and they’re trying to release all the pent up sadness and loss and pain as well as the anger and fury she had no idea was building up inside her. He shoves her roughly against the back of the couch, wanting to cause her something more than just emotional pain. Her spine hits the frame roughly, shooting flashes of physical pain through her body that somehow erase the emotional for just one short moment. Well, at least she’s found something, a way to keep the torrents of emotional pain away: inflict her body with a different type of pain.

Her fingers rake down his back so hard they leave scratch marks. She’s branded him, if only for a little while. He’s tearing at her and her at him. His teeth bite into the tender flesh of her bottom lip and her blood flows softly into their joined mouths. Pleasure mixes with pain and it’s as if their whole relationship is summed up in this one kiss. They’d been happy but they’d always known the end was coming, that it would undoubtedly end in pain. They had been balancing on the tip of a knife, trying desperately to stay atop it, not to fall. But now they’re falling down with only the ground to meet them and nothing to soften the impact. It will hurt at the bottom of the cliff they're falling off, but there is no going back now, it was way too late for that.

She’s holding him to her with all her might but still he can pull her off him and straighten up. Her lips are red and swollen and the bottom one’s torn and bleeding from where he bit it. Her eyes are red and blood-shot and he only now notices the large black circles under them. She has such a small, angel face that these changes make him see the monster he has become, that he has done this to her. He pushes himself up and off her, revealing more of her body and he can see the rest of the damage he’s inflicted. This was the point of his leaving, if he stayed he would undoubtedly become the monster he loathed but knew was hiding deep in his soul. Someday it would emerge and it would hurt her. But it already had. So now he has to run.

Before he can escape though, her tiny hand wraps itself around his wrist in a vice-like grip and he can’t pry her off him.

“Don’t go,” she says again. Her voice is hard and clear. She’s not asking him to stay, she’s ordering him. But he shakes his head firmly. He made up his mind a long time ago and he vowed he wouldn’t let her sway him.

“I have to,” he tells her, but he knows by the hard resolution in her eyes that she doesn’t believe him.

“Why?”

She thought she had given up hope on him staying. She thought she was going to let him go without a fight. But now she knows that leaving is the wrong thing to do, that he needs to stay and that it is right. Somehow, she knows. He had kissed her like he needed her, he had kissed her like she had kissed him; like she was the reason he was living and without her he didn’t, couldn’t, live. So she is going to make him stay and she is going to make him live.

“I just do,” he says, because he can’t tell her the truth. She should know the truth. She is bruised and battered because of him, she should know that he is a monster and she should be running from him. Instead she’s trying her hardest to make him stay.

“I’m not buying it,” she says and he knows she’s telling him the truth. Her tears have stopped flowing now and the blood dripping from her lip has dried and she just looks…hard. He has made her hard. He is a monster. But he knows that if he leaves her now, she will follow him. And he can’t have that.

He sighs and prepares himself for the heartache.

“I don’t love you.”

But it doesn’t come.

“Yes, you do.”

She’s firm, she’s resolute. She knows he loves her, she’s certain of it now, more certain than she’s ever been about anything else and he knows that he’s not going to be able to tell her no, that she’s too strong and smart to believe his lies and for once he wonders if maybe it would just be better if he stayed. He doesn’t know what to do, how to proceed. His heart is screaming at him to sit back down on that couch, take her into his arms and hold her forever, but still there’s the firm belief in his mind that he’s leaving her for her own good, and almost always his brain wins over his heart.

As if she can see his hesitation, she seizes it.

“What is your heart telling you, Jazz?” The hardness has left her voice and it’s been replaced only by compassion and love and understanding. It’s soft and musical and beautiful. And he hesitates.

“I don’t know,” he tells her truthfully, and the tears he promised himself would not come, start to fall from his eyes. He squeezes them shut in defiance but still they fall, slowly and softly, as if even they are reminding him of her. He feels her fingers on his cheek and she’s brushing his tears away with her skin, trying to tell him she’s his without words.

“I love you, Alice,” he says, his eyes still closed, and her breath catches in her throat. After almost a year drought, he’s said it. “But I shouldn’t, I can’t. So I have to leave.”

“I love you too, Jasper and that’s all that matters. Love can conquer all, and it will.” But she’s said the wrong thing and the moment the words leave her lips she wishes she could take them back. He squeezes her hand tightly one last time and stands up, placing a quick kiss on her cheek.

“No. I’m sorry, Alice, but love cannot conquer all, not this time.” He drops her hand and she lets it flop lifelessly beside her. How can those few words turn the situation from working out, to falling even further off the metaphorical cliff? And how can they suddenly shrink her strong resolve and hope to nothing. She has lost, that is all she can think, and everything is bad again.

She watches as he walks to the door for the last time, the tears flowing freely and quickly down her face once more and the wound on her lip open again. But this time, he does look back, one last time.

“I’m sorry.” The words are a whisper, a last prayer and then he’s lost to the dark and the door swings shut behind him, a blast of freezing wind swirling through the warm room.

“Don’t go,” she whispers, but it is only to the air.

…………

Alternate ending:

“I’m sorry.” The words are a whisper, a last prayer and then he’s lost to the dark and the door swings shut behind him. But there was something she thinks she saw in his eyes, something that said ‘follow me’.

Before she even realizes what she’s doing, she’s on her feet, keys in hand and she’s running out the door, not even caring that she’s in just shorts and a singlet. She can just see him in the distance, glowing softly in the faint light from the streetlamps. The snow swirls around her bare toes as she runs, freezing them but she doesn’t care. The wind whips at her torn clothes and tangles her hair, as if it’s playing with it, but she pays it no notice. Her eyes are only for the man in front of her, getting closer and closer.

She sees him stick his hand out and watches in dismay as a cab pulls up, tauntingly slow, to the curb.

“Jasper!” she calls but his name is lost on the freezing wind and he doesn’t turn around. She trips and falls in her haste. As soon as her hands hit the ground they freeze, her knees and lower legs doing to same. She’s so cold it hurts to move but still she stands, if only to balance on one knee.

 “Jasper!” she screams, her voice so high and alien. It’s a scream for the dying, because that’s what she is. If he doesn’t turn around, she’ll lay down in the snow and she will die. She’s scared of the cold and the snow and ice and she’s the coldest she’s ever been in her life, inside and out, and all she wants is his warm arms around her, protecting her from the sleet… All of this is reflected in her scream and this time it’s not swallowed by the wind, it’s so loud it pierces the air, shattering the silence.

He turns slowly and their eyes lock. He hesitates between going to her rescue like he knows he should and battling the cold and the pain, not just now but always… and getting into the nice warm cab and living easily and emotionlessly.  He shouldn’t really have had to think about it at all, but when the knee she’s using to support herself gives way and she falls into the snow he knows there really was no choice from the beginning. He was always going to be there to save her.

He waves the cab driver away and then he runs, sprinting, as fast as he can and he hopes that for once in his life, he’s not too late for her. And then she’s there, in her soaked shorts and singlet and bare feet, covered from head to toe in snow, her skin turning blue from the cold and then he picks her up as if she weights nothing, which really, she does and he wonders briefly if she’s been eating enough because she feels so fragile in his arms. He banishes the thought for another time and cradles her in his arms and he holds her like his life depends on it, which, in fact, it does. He runs, as fast as he can but still not quite as fast as he’d like, with her held so tight to him it hurts. He reaches the house – their house – and fumbles with the key for only a minute before he opens the door and brings her into the warm house, brings her home.

And it’s then, as he watches her sleeping form, warming by the fire, that he knows he’s really not a monster after all. For her, he’s her savior and no matter how he acts or what he does, she could never see him any other way and he realizes that he doesn’t want her to.

“Don’t go,” she whispers sleepily from the cocoon of blankets he wrapped her in, her arms shooting from it to claw at his shirt, anything to keep him there. He pulls her tiny hands from the cold, wet shirt he’d forgotten to take off and instead holds them tightly in his own larger ones.

“I won’t.”