Beneath the Scars

I walked to the door. “Does Megan know I’m back?”

“No.”

“Will you tell her?”

“We’ll talk after you read the journals.”

I knew that was all I would get from her for now.

Without another word, I opened the door and headed across the beach, the journals feeling heavy in my hands.27ZacharyFour days. I waited four days—hoping, praying Megan would return. I wanted to see her again on the beach and go to her; hear her voice, and see her sweet face. I yearned for her more every day.

The days passed, though, with was no sign of her anywhere. Maybe she had decided not to return once she found out I was back in Cliff’s Edge. I had no doubt Karen told her I’d come back, since she promised me she would. For the first two days, I read Megan’s journals. I relived moments I hadn’t allowed myself to remember, smiled at the way she saw me through her eyes, frowned at how often I’d caused her tears. The tenderness, only she could trigger, raged again, as she described reading my moods when my eyes changed color—something I wasn’t even aware happened. I blinked away the moisture when she compared my smile to a morning sunrise—slow and warming the air around me. I rarely smiled before she entered my life, feeling the scars made that gesture look twisted and wrong. She saw only good and beauty.

Twice, I had begged Karen to tell me where Megan was, but she refused, saying the decision was up to Megan, not me. Despite my assurances of how much I loved her, Karen’s opinion of me still remained skeptical; her protectiveness was fierce. I had to respect her for that above all else. The morning she left, I found the last journal on my doorstep, but I had yet to finish reading it. The pain it contained was so raw and overwhelming I hadn’t read past the day I fled from Megan and Cliff’s Edge.

The morning of the fifth day, I was attacking the canvas in front of me, all the rage and bitterness toward myself splashing on the stretched material in angry, bold swipes of black, indigo, and gray. The storm on the painting was bleak, dark and massive; overtaking everything in its path—much like the burning pressure in my chest.

The pain hadn’t lessened; in fact, it had gotten worse since I returned. I hadn’t slept and barely eaten—Karen’s words and Megan’s writing playing repeatedly in my head. I had read and reread everything Karen gave me. The proof staring me in the face, the truth I knew all along, and refused to admit, ashamed at my actions. The things I’d done, the assumptions I’d made, the pain I’d inflicted. All done because once again, I believed in what I saw, not what I felt. I failed to trust the one person in the world I should have listened to.

I stepped back, feeling the great weariness from lack of sleep cover me like a thick blanket. I dropped my brush into the jar beside me and wiped my hands on the rag as I stared at the chaos on the canvas. The picture I looked at was void of anything but pain—much like my heart.

Elliott’s head snapped up, a low whimper happening in the back of his throat as he stood, his tail moving side to side in agitation while his huge eyes looked behind me toward the beach. Slowly, I approached the window, reaching out a hand to steady myself on the frame.

Megan.

Standing motionless on the packed sand, just out of reach of the shallow surf.

She was wearing a long, thick coat clutched loosely around her body. Her shoulders were hunched against the wind that blew strong and cold, while her glorious hair streamed out behind her, the sun catching the color, and turning it bright copper. She seemed so small amid the vastness that stretched out before her, yet it was only her that my eyes could see.

Dixie ran around on the sand, sniffing and exploring, her excited barks barely rising over the swell of the waves and the wind. Behind me, Elliott paced, knowing Dixie was there. He was as anxious to be reunited with her, as I was to see Megan.

Unlike the reunion they would share, though, I had no expectations of a joyous reception from Megan. Her journals were vast and rich—our story laid out in all its sweetness and horror. I saw us falling in love, and felt my walls crumble in those pages as I opened myself to her. I felt her elation and read her pain, the pages bearing the evidence of her emotion as she wrote about the last awful day, a few new ones added of my own as I read her words. All of the journals showed the tears that had fallen as she wrote, the watermarks appearing more often as the story grew to a close. I had no idea what the end part of the last journal contained. I still hadn’t read it; every time I picked it up, a wave of nausea would rush through me, knowing I could very well read Megan’s final farewell to me in it. I knew I would read and live her pain of the past few months she’d been alone. Her words would convey the same loneliness and longing I’d felt all this time, as well as the hurt I caused both of us by leaving. As much as I admired her strength before, now I dreaded reading how she used it to move past me.