Chapter 1: June
The sliver of moonlight illuminated the tear rolling down her cheek like a jewel. It felt warm rolling down her face and salty when it reached her lips, taught with mixed emotions. As the cloud cover rolled away from the moon, she was bathed in its surreal beauty. She appeared to be in the purgatorial space that so many thoughts and emotions and feelings linger, waiting to decide if they should pass on or return to their birthplace. Another tear fell, this time quickly leaving her face, seeking to run into the earth to escape this moment in time.
He reached for her hand, but she was not yet ready to accept it and turned away. It had all been so easy in the beginning and he would never have believed that they could have traveled to this place. Here now, nearly strangers. Trysting under cover of night in an attempt to determine why. Why had they begun? Why had the ended so abruptly? Why hadn’t either one of them tried harder? Why, now, so many years later, was it so important to find out why?
They lived lifetimes apart and were each happy with the paths that life had offered them. They had no true desire to leave any of that behind, yet here they were. Together, under the glow of a moonlit night, trying to explain it all. Some would say that it was closure. A long, drawn-out completion that would allow them both to get the other out of their heads.
He softly laughed as he recalled another moonlit night. In another place and in another time, when they were young and brave and had the world before them. Young lovers, far from home, who had been drawn to each other as kindred souls. It was so easy to fall in step with one another then. To learn and see new things through each others eyes. To drink in one another's spirit and always be wanting for more. As if that connection still had a tenuous hold on her, she turned slightly his way and reached for his hand, which he hungrily took. It was hard to believe how much time had passed, as her touch felt the same as it always had, complete and warm and inviting.
September
The pull at his heart to begin again, with her, here and now, was intense, but so was his desire for self-preservation. The die had been cast and there was nothing he could do to change what he had to do now. He dropped her hand and turned away. He didn’t want her to see the pain in his eyes and the single tear that it had extracted and sent down his cheek. If he was going to move forward and work towards putting his horrifying past actions behind him, he would have to distance himself from these tender emotions of what was here now, and concentrate on the future. His future. Without her. Again, he would turn her away, this time of his own volition. There would not be another chance with her. He felt her touch his shoulder tenderly, silently asking him what was wrong. As he began to turn to face her, perhaps for the last time, his world went black, like a candle extinguished, quick and sudden but not before he felt the left side of his face explode into fireworks of pain.
Now that Megan had David’s full and rapt and ensnared attention, she slapped his face. He flinched in extreme agony as the slap brought his entire foggy focus to the fact that his left eye was swollen to a thin slit and that the whole left side of his head was pulsing in a continuous silent scream. He was tied to a chair and staring at her with an angry, frightened right eye. Through the tape on his mouth, she was sure that he was swearing like a sailor as well as asking her what the hell was going on. He would know soon enough and most likely would not be pleased with the answers she was about to give him nor the final act of her play.
