Follow the River

My hands shake and my body ripples with rage as I storm down the stairs of Rain’s apartment building, making a run for my car.

How fucking dare he?

Treating me like shit before, when we didn’t know each other the way we do now, I can get over it. But tossing me to the side, insinuating all I was to him was a convenient way to pass time? Just another hole to get off in? That what happened up in the cabin was anything less than fucking fate intervening and handing us the person we’re meant to be with...maybe even forever?

That’s unforgivable.

How can he think we don’t work, that we don’t fit? Jesus Christ, what does that even mean?

He can compare us to water and oil until his dying breath, but it’s not true.

He and I… hell, we’re fluid in motion. Moving together in waves, synchronized at the molecular level, rising and falling as a single entity. Just like any body of water does.

It doesn’t matter if it is from a mountain spring or the city gutters. Pure enough to drink or salty like the ocean. Clear and beautiful or dark and murky. A lake or a stream.

A river.

The rain.

When all’s said and done, water is just that…water. It will always mix.

After a devastating flood. After brutal hurricanes.

After rain falls.

Water will always fuse, and you would never have known it was anything but one.

So I don’t understand how he doesn’t realize…we’re one in the same.

Wrenching open the door to my Range Rover, I hop in and floor it back to campus and the parties on Sorority Row before classes resume tomorrow. I know full well I’m too pissed off to be driving right now, but it’s only a five minute drive, and I need to get somewhere with booze as fast as fucking possible.

Maybe find Abbi and see if she would be down for a quick…

Goddamn. I can’t even finish the thought without my stomach threatening to revolt.

What have you done to me, baby? What the fuck have you done?

Pulling up to the Tri Delt house, I throw my car into park and sprint to the entrance where a red haired girl I recognize from the cheer team is ma

“Well if it isn’t our very own QB one,” she smiles in a way of greeting before handing me a cup and ushering me with her hand to go inside. “Don’t have too much fun in there while Abbi isn’t around. You know how territorial she gets over you.”

Well, shit. Abbi isn’t even here.

I guess this is Jesus’s way of keeping my dick in my pants, even if I could stomach the idea of fucking someone other than Rain at this point.

“Thanks,” I tell the girl as I step through the threshold, popping my dimples with a smirk. It feels flat and wrong on my face.

Inside the house, I find a blur of bodies dancing and grinding to a cover of “Talking Body” by Five Hundredth Year as if they have no fucks to give about classes resuming tomorrow. I don’t blame them, because I’m most definitely in the same boat at the moment.

Spotting a couple linemen from the team near the keg, I head over and start up conversation, pouring myself a beer. Then another. And another, before I realize cheap ass beer isn’t going to give me what I need tonight.

Andrew notices me staring into the bottom of my third empty cup before pulling a handle of Jameson from a pantry cabinet. Uncapping it, he pours three fingers worth into my solo cup before discreetly returning the bottle to its rightful place.

“Bottom’s up, Len. You look like you need it,” he nods, motioning for me to take a swig of the amber liquid, a shade lighter than Rain’s eyes.

Fuck me. Everything always comes back to him.

Tossing back the whiskey, I down the contents of my cup in two gulps, relishing the smooth liquid coating my throat before sending a warm burn into my stomach.

I gesture to Drew for a refill, to which he simply laughs and refills me yet again.

And soon, I’m surrounded by bodies on the couch, finally buzzed enough for my liking…or maybe I’m just drunk? I don’t know anymore, nor do I care. I’m reveling in the freedom intoxication brings to my senses, loving that I can’t see straight, let alone find it in me to give a flying fuck about Ciaráin motherfucking Grady and the vile shit he spews from his mouth.

No, no, no. Don’t think about him, I chant internally, but it’s too damn late. I should have known I’d never be able to escape him, even when I’m drunk.

My brain fixates on thoughts of him, especially his damn mouth. His mouth I can’t seem to get enough of, no matter how fucking shitty he seems to make me feel every time he opens it.

I’m finally starting to realize everything about him is that way.

He tastes immaculate, like he came straight from heaven, yet all he ever does is try to send me to the deepest pits of hell. Like an addictive poison, he’s in my blood and I’m hooked. I can’t seem to quit, even though I know it will send me to an early grave.

Groaning, I rise from the sofa and amble my way to the bathroom, where I lock the door and lean against the wall in a drunken stupor. Loathing engulfs my senses as the room spins around me, and I find myself stewing in its toxicity—in hate. Hating Rain, hating myself, the entire goddamn world.

But the one thing I despise most of all?

Love.

Who the fuck needs that shit anyways? Apparently not Rain, because that’s what I was ready to offer up to him. I was willing to put everything, my heart and fucking soul, on the line for him. To give us a chance and be with him though all the bad shit that’s about to come hurling at him faster than a freight train.

Hell, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t already give him those pieces of me. We both know I did. It was obvious, from the very begi

And my soul? Our souls?

When they touched, it was nothing short of divine, and for a moment, I thought this is it. This is what it feels like to find your other half.

Your soulmate.

The person you’re meant to belong to for as long as you walk this earth. The person who can mend the fractured portions of yourself with one look, one touch, one kiss. The being who holds the key to the parts of you that you never knew were missing.

But with us, that isn’t what happened.

Our souls tore each other apart rather than healed the broken and battered pieces. But oh, how they loved the chance to dance together in a tangle of passion and destruction.

For the first time in the history of my academic career, I skipped class due to overindulging in alcohol. My body aches from sleeping on the bathroom floor, I’m hungover as fuck, sick to my stomach, and wishing, more than anything in the world, I could punch something.

Unfortunately for me, the University pays for my education on the contingency that my left hand be viable for four years of football.

Asshole higher ups and their fucking semantics.

I can’t wait until after next season when I actually have the ability to toss a few punches into a bag. Or someone’s face. Whichever at this point. But I suppose a workout in general is the next best thing, even if I’m literally sweating out Irish whiskey as I do it.