Jeffery's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Jeffery walked back to the camper and shut the door. He told himself he did not care. He pulled out his phone and blocked Melody on everything. Her number. Her messages. Every way she could reach him. If she tried to come back, she would find a locked door. Let her think he had moved on. Let her think he felt nothing. He felt everything. That night he dreamed of her laughing with a stranger. In the dream a man touched her hand, and she did not pull away. Jeffery woke with his jaw tight and his fists sore. He grabbed his phone to check her last seen. The block had cut him off from that too. He had locked himself out of his own window. He sat among the broken panels and torn framing of the wrecked camper. Vines had crept through a gap in the wall and spread across the floor. He stared at the leaves and pictured where she might be. Who she sat beside now. Whether she slept soundly without him. The not knowing dug into him worse than losing her had. He decided to drown it. He drove into town and found a girl at a bar. He bought her drinks and told her stories. He said his ex had twisted him up for months. He said she lied to him, controlled him, made him crazy. The girl listened and touched his arm. He waited to feel the old pull. Nothing came. He tried again the next week. A different girl, the same stories. He watched her mouth move and thought about how Melody tilted her head when she listened. He had memorized forty-seven of Melody's expressions. This girl had one he did not care to learn. He left before she finished her drink. By the third girl he stopped pretending. She laughed at something he said, and the sound was wrong. It was not Melody's laugh, the one that had once made him forget to breathe. He stood up mid-sentence and walked out into the cold. Back at the camper he looked at his phone. His thumb hovered over Melody's blocked name. He wanted to unblock her. He wanted to see one dot, one word, any sign of where she was. But unblocking her meant she could see him too. She would know he had come crawling back. She would know he cared, and knowing it would hand her the only power he had left. So he did not. He set the phone face down on the junk pile and pressed his palms against his eyes. He had cut himself off to look strong. Now the wall he built kept him blind. He could not replace her. He could not reach her. He did not even know the name of the town she had walked to. For the first time, Jeffery had no model, no route, and no way to find her at all.