Markus shoves off the couch and disappears down the hall. I sit up a little straighter, wondering what he’s doing. A few moments later, he returns with a laptop in his hands. I stare at him, a bit puzzled.
He sits back down beside me and opens the laptop, placing it on the edge of the coffee table. My stomach twists, a knot forming there. I know what he’s doing. He’s going to make me watch the video, make me see him in a different light.
“Markus,” I whisper.
He turns to me, his eyes pleading, and shakes his head. His fingers move over the keys as he types his password into the computer and navigates to the files. Maybe it’s for the best that I see the video. Perhaps then I can be reminded of the sinister man he is. A couple more clicks and a video pops up. It’s grainy, not of the best quality, but you can make out Victoria perfectly.
Her face is bright and joyful. She seems to be calling out to someone, her lips moving. My heart skips a beat in my chest, knowing that something bad is about to happen. All the joy in her face disappears, and she looks down at the ground. In the next instant, a car pulls up.
You can see it in the corner of the video. A second later, shots are fired, and Victoria hits the ground. Markus rushes to her side, clutching her to his chest, but it’s too late. She’s gone. Nothing can bring her back, and it’s obvious from his anguished face that he knows this.
In the matter of one single second, he fractures, the despair in his eyes, the loss. I can tell that this single moment shaped him into the man he is today. He loved her. She wasn’t just a friend. She was something to him, and when he lost her, he lost a piece of himself.
The video ends, the screen going black.
My throat tightens, and I feel tears prick at my eyes. I’m in love with a man who is still holding onto the ghost of a woman that looks just like me.
Markus closes the laptop and turns toward me. There is a chip in his armor, and I can see right inside, see into the good parts of him, the person he hides from the rest of the world, that he covers up with pain, despair, and bloodshed.
“She was the only person I ever loved…” His voice is gravelly, broken, and I want to take him into my arms and tell him everything will be okay, but will it be? I suddenly can’t breathe when our gazes collide. I’m suffocating in his grief, drowning in it. “Losing her… it hurt so bad. It felt like someone ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped it into the ground.” He presses a fist against the organ thundering in his chest.
“It’s because of me that she died, and I’ve never allowed myself to forget it. Her memory haunts me, the words I spoke to her just seconds before she was viciously taken from me.” His liquid amber eyes shimmer. “She would still be here if she hadn’t gone out looking for me that day. If I’d been a better man, who didn’t get involved in crime.”
I can see him slipping into the past, filtering through his thoughts. Part of me feels that I should reason with him and tell him you never know what the future holds, but I know all too well about guilt. Wondering if you had made a different choice, would the outcome be the same or different.
Instead of giving him some mediocre bullshit sob-filled paragraph, I say to him what no one has probably ever said to him. Reaching for his hands, he lets me gently clasp them in mine. It’s almost like he too needs the comfort and touch of another human in this moment.
“I know you won’t believe me, but it wasn’t your fault. It really wasn’t. We all make choices, and she made a choice to come and find you that day. It was a wrong place, wrong time kind of thing. Neither of you could’ve expected it to end the way it did.”
I can visibly see his chest heaving, his mind swirling with a thousand thoughts. I understand why he chose me, why he never hurt me even though he could have. He was reliving a memory, but I turned out to be someone else entirely.
I’m not her, and he knows that.
Reality slowly seeps back into him, and after a second, he tugs his hands away from mine. I wince at the loss of his touch. He makes me feel secure and safe, and without him, I’m in a constant tailspin of fear.
His jaw clenches, and he looks like he wants to apologize, but that’s not Markus. He doesn’t say sorry. “I let myself love once before in my life, and I promised never to love another the day that I lost her. Love is fragile, and I don’t have it in me to endure another loss.”