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When he was with Dolly, everything was beautiful, and when he was with Dolly, everything was terrible.
It was like his senses were turned up to eleven. It was like he was on drugs.
When he was with Dolly, the world was so much brighter. The sun was warmer, flowers bloomed in abundance, people laughed more. Everything was beautiful.
When he was with Dolly, the world was so much harsher. People’s frowns were deeper, the dorms were noisier, his friends were few. Everything was terrible.
Love did that to him. It amplified the highest highs and the lowest lows. Everything seemed highlighter bright or pitch black without any in between.
The liquid that slid down his throat tasted like sweet honey. It helped counteract the sharp scratch of glass digging into his body.
Dolly’s trial was over four months ago, and he was still searching for the high she gave him.
To know that she never truly loved him cut him deeply.
From that wound, his happiness flowed out.
Changing majors was a bandaid.
Mia was a bandaid.
Everything was a bandaid for the injury Dolly left him.
Bandaids aren’t invincible and the blood and his happiness slid through eventually, but they were enough to get him through the days.
The wound was barely healing.
The bandaids got bigger. Larry’s trial was a strip of medical tape. Defending Maya was gauze wrapped around his heart.
The trials. The trials were his spikes, when he would feel again like with Dolly.
He kept defending, and with each trial his wound was piled higher with bandages. With Maya, the highs weren’t quite as high and the lows not quite as low, but there was at least more movement than the steady, dissatisfying pulse that he had been living with in college.
It became steady. Mild melancholy to sharp bursts of excitement and terror in the court. He could get on like this for a while. He was happy with it. The consistent inconsistency was what he’d been longing for ever since Dolly.
He started looking at Miles differently.
The earthquake left him shaky on his feet and it left Miles on the ground, croaking for it to stop.
Phoenix felt it, and he was afraid.
He was finally being accustomed to life without the highs and lows of harsh slaps and soft smiles. If he loved again he would lose himself again.
The wound would open again and his happiness would spill out again.
He watched Miles leave the hospital room with a slight frown. There was no going back with a man who flew thousands of miles on a private jet.
He could already feel the years of bandages being ripped off.
There was no wound. A shadowy line of scar tissue was all that remained of Dolly on his heart.
He sighed in relief and folded open the hospital newspaper.
His eyes widened and he hissed; the paper left a red line on his thumb. On the page was a picture of Iris.
A smear of his blood was brushed across the girl’s face on the paper.
He washed the cut and let it be. It would heal on its own.