Ten Months

Chapter Four

May, 2004
Detroit, Michigan

I know the sunlight is coming through the window, but I don’t open my eyes. Maybe that will make it go away, and morning will never come if my eyes never open to see it.

The sensation I am experiencing is so powerfully moving in the most positively beautiful way that my chest feels as though it’s collapsing, breaking from the inside with the weight of this happiness that is overcoming me. Never, in my entire life, has it felt so good to wake up in someone’s arms, and I don’t want to let go.

Faith is halfway on top of me, her thigh around my waist, her face nuzzled warmly into my neck in such a way that she has been permanently and inactively kissing just above my collarbone for the past six hours. I made her take off her shirt, and her boots, but she insisted on keeping her pants and bra, saying that if she wore any less I wouldn’t be able to control myself and then we’d be right back at square one with emotionless-sex. She was right, about me not being able to control myself, but once she laid down at my side and wrapped her arms around me I was out like a light, bathing in the peace and security that I find only when I’m so close to her it feels like we are one person, and every ounce of my soul is deep inside of hers. Yes, she is inside of me, her pulse beating in time with mine and each breath a masterful expression of what we share, complimenting – no, completing each other.

I wonder if she will see this from my point of view when she wakes up, or if she will only remember that I was promised the night before and the night before only, then continue on her original destination out of my life. Somehow I feel that I already know the answer, maybe it’s because I can feel what she feels sometimes, when we are close enough to one another.

And in the worst possible kind of coincidence I am suddenly faced with finding out the answer to these questions bouncing round my head when the sound of a jackhammer starting up on the pavement outside our apartment building makes Faith jump, alarmed… and very awake.

“What the fuck?” She mumbles, supporting herself to look out the window and separating her body from mine. There’s nothing I can do but lay there under her and look up now as she cranes her neck, and I remember how I used to love the way her eyes were darker in the morning, and stayed half-closed when she was still tired. She is adorable and beyond beautiful all at once… even when she turns her head to look down at me and I see her expression of surprise fading into something else, something darker, something numb.

“Expecting someone else?” I say, my voice audibly cracking just slightly. It’s a poor joke but it’s all I can think of in reaction to her look of shock and confusion. Then I realize that, oh god, maybe she really WAS expecting someone else, and it feels as though I’ve been kicked in the stomach. I’m unable to disguise the fact that I cringe in anguish from the very idea of it.

Faith rolls herself to the side and her bare feet hit the floor with a firm smacking sound before she runs her fingers through tousled black curls.

I feel my stomach, it’s in my throat, because I know that this isn’t a good sign. If she felt the same way I did about holding me all night then she wouldn’t have her back turned to me now, she would have given me a sweet ‘good morning, lover’ kiss and returned to the warmth we created until one of us got too hungry to stay in bed listening to the other breathe.

She stares at the empty wall in front of her, and I stare at her back, naked except for the simple black straps of her bra and her hair hanging down over her shoulders. It’s hardly the setting for a conversation, even a decent goodbye if that’s what is coming. But no, I tell myself that it isn’t, because I want to believe that she’s about to change her mind.

Faith reaches down to grab her pack of Lucky Strikes off the floor, and in a few seconds she has one lit and between her lips, as her hands shake noticeably. I wish I could see her eyes.

She takes another drag and then tosses bitter words over her shoulder like trash at me. “Are we going to do this again?”

I know exactly what she means, but I just have to go on being an idiot now, it’s a brilliant pattern I’ve fallen into and no sense stopping now, is there? “Do what again?”

“The goodbye thing, Buffy. It’s becoming a little redundant, don’t you think? You can go on begging me to stay and I can continue telling myself that it’s worth it, and that my feelings for you will change back to what they once were, but they truly won’t, and we’re kidding ourselves. Prolonging the situation will only make it worse.”

She sighs for a long moment and there is nothing that I can say, I simply don’t know how. Millions of thoughts seem to race through my head but I can’t make sense of a single one enough to grasp onto it and verbalize to her justifiably what my reaction is at this exact moment.

Faith reaches for her boots and begins pulling them on while she continues, still turned away from me. “I know you think that you're in love with me, and maybe you are. But I’m not in love with you, Buffy. And it would be a lie for me to stay.”

“What do you mean? After everything, after all we’ve been through… I know you love me.”

“You don’t know that, and you can’t, because I don’t even know it.”

Finally she turns to look at me and her face looks softer than I’ve seen it in weeks, but doesn’t reflect the same tears as mine.

“I wanted you,” she whispers, “because I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else having you. I couldn’t stand the thought of you loving anyone else… not Spike, not Angel… not that self-righteous soldier motherfucker who treated you like shit and never cared about you. I thought that I could do better than that, but all I cared about was making you love me and knowing that I had you. I just didn’t realize it. So now I do, and you’d be crazy to ask me continue on with this, to ask me to go on pretending that I’m in love with you when all I want is to make you belong to me. It’s fucked up, B, really it is.”

Once again I can’t say anything, and she looks in my eyes for a second. Whatever she sees in them scares or hurts her enough to turn her attention back to the laces of her steel toe boots, and once they are satisfactorily on, she reaches for her shirt.

“Are you going to stay in Detroit?” I ask. I can’t believe I’m saying such a thing… already talking as though I’ve accepted the idea of living without her, when everything inside of me is screaming at me to beg her to stay.

“Nah, some of the guys from the garage are starting something up in Boston, and I figure it would be good. Go back to my shitty roots ya know?”

Wow, a real conversation. Is this what we’re having? Is this one of those peaceful moments of relaxation after a hard break-up, just before you realize that you’ve just lost everything and the true panic sets in? The moment where we smile and pretend like we’re both happy with this “mutual decision” before saying permanent goodbyes and left with only the constant nagging thought of what could have been said or done differently to make it last. Yeah. It’s that moment. And she’s putting on her coat, and taking the key to the apartment off her keyring, and I’m lying here in this bed that will no longer be ours, completely speechless.

I can’t feel anything, I am so fucking numb. Her movements are a blur of grays and it seems her body is paint poured across the canvas of our apartment, through the watery haze of my tears that come at will, and I don’t see anything clearly.

The same realization rolls around my head and doesn’t stop as I feel her soft lips brush over my forehead, her trembling fingers quickly touching my cheek before recoiling as she closes the distance between herself and the door. I believe that I hear her say goodbye, and whether or not she does isn’t the issue.

It’s over.

It’s over.

Faith is gone.



February, 2005
Gerald Ford Middle School, Detroit, Michigan

“Happy valentine’s day, Ms. Summers.”

“Happy valentine’s, Jason. Try not to break too many hearts, right?”

The smile he flashes back at me seems awfully cocky for a thirteen year old, but it gives me a good chuckle as he leaves my office and makes his way on to the next class period. I watch him go, his bright red sweatshirt a welcome contrast to the depressing school colors, reminding me as always that if it weren’t for the students, school would be a pointless endeavor; and much more boring.

I pull open the top drawer of my desk and slide my “Jason notes” into a file, pausing briefly to slide the papers out of the way and glance at a photo I keep on the bottom of the drawer. It’s a photo of Faith and I, taken at a Mexican restaurant just outside of Michigan called “Little Cancun”. I wonder if it would be easier for me to move on with my life if I didn’t keep these little mementoes of her near and present to me throughout my everyday routine, the then I remember that I have moved on, and when I see reminders of her it only brings to mind the good times that we shared. That time in the photo is definitely one of the better memories. It was a weekend where for one reason or another we had some cash to blow, so we took a road trip and ended up lost for the majority of three incredible days. We stopped to ask directions at Little Cancun and it carried over into a delicious lunch, until Faith had drank more than her share of Coronas and tried
to convince me to go down on her underneath the table like in the beginning of American Wedding. Only trouble was, she could barely even form an intelligible sentence to ask me that much, and the more I laughed and teased her for slurring, the more irritated she got with me. At some point she slammed her fist down on the table and started yelling “Tongue-fuck me, dammmnit!” and I was trying to tell her to quiet down, but laughing much too hard to manage that.

As we were leaving approximately four minutes later, we passed a waiter who was grinning like a fucking baby hyena and he asked us to “pleeease” come back and eat there again sometime.

Needless to say, we went straight to the backseat of the car and I helped her to get some of the drunken horniness right out of her system.

And the picture… well that’s the best part of the whole story. Because not only was Faith cursing and screaming for me to perform orally on her under the table, but she was also wearing this ridiculous black and gold sombrero to boot. Wouldn’t you know that I, her loving girlfriend, had somehow dropped into casual conversation with the manager that it just so happened to be my date’s birthday? So they sang happy birthday to her, put the sombrero on, and snapped a Polaroid… leaving me with a beautiful image forever of my drunk, angry, gorgeous slayer under an enormous hat and then my cheesiest of all grins as I sit beside her, pointing at the 13 empty bottles of Corona.

With a smile I slip it back underneath a thick pile of papers and file folders, then shut the drawer.

It’s been ten months since she left me.

I cried for days after she did, and the pain got so difficult to bear that I thought I would never make it through to the other side alive. I started going out slaying just for the hell of it, hoping that I would slip up and some vamp would put me out of my misery, or maybe one of the hundreds of other slayers in the city would mistake me for a big bad as I wandered in the shadows and she would do the favor. It was so destructive of me, and so very wrong to long for that responsibility on someone else’s hands, but I couldn’t see past my own selfishness and suffering. It was either have Faith back, or die. I didn’t want to live without her.

But no vamp slipped up, in fact they never even came close. Once I began to slay again I could feel something in my blood that had been absent for so long it was hard for me to recognize at first. The thrill.

Never mind the fact that hundreds upon thousands of other girls had now become slayers as well, and were on the verge of eliminating vampires from the earth once and for all. Never mind that I had to track some of the bastards down for nights, maybe even weeks, just to find that a self-assured highschool cheerleading slayer not unlike myself six years in the past had already beat me to the punch. Never mind any of it, because once I felt the pressure of pushing my stake into their cold lifeless hearts, and the explosion of dust around my fist, it was all worth it. Everything was normal, everything seemed right. Yeah, there were countless other slayers, but only one of me, and I was staking vamps when they were still wearing footsie pajamas and reading Anne Rice novels under the blankets with a flashlight thinking it was simply an entertaining story, and of course it wasn’t true, right?

I don’t think I got over Faith, and I can’t say that I ever will. It’s not that hard to believe that she could have been the passionate love of my life. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t move on. That doesn’t mean that I can’t exist and be content without her, and it’s something that I’m learning how to do as each day goes by and I find happiness in the optimism of students at the middle school or the sound of Dawn’s voice on the phone when she tells me about her day.

It hasn’t been easy. I eventually had to move out of the apartment because it hurt so much being there and feeling like I was continuously waiting for her to come home from work, then crawling into bed and turning out the light, feeling so much more alone. Sometimes it smelled like her. Sometimes I’d be eating breakfast and burst into tears because it was cereal that she liked. It was kind of pathetic. But the end result was good when it landed me a new, better apartment, so I suppose I would have to thank her for that aspect at least.

Now Valentine’s day comes along, and I’ve been dreading it since February 1st. But at the end of the day just like any other, I clean up around my counseling office and say goodbye to the students and teachers I pass on the way out. I get in my car (came complete with payments, whoohoo), and drive out to my friend Mandy’s townhouse to enjoy a casual, non-coupled get-together for this loneliest of holidays.

Do I still miss her? Of course, I probably always will. No matter what the future holds, we always were the chosen two, and those ten months with her may have been
trying but they brought me closer to her than I had ever been with anyone before. Being with Faith was the best thing that ever happened to me, and now it’s over. But life goes on, doesn’t it?

Obla-di, obla-fucking-da.