Figment of Dreams
Chapter six: 4 years ago

I was flipping through his collection of Marvel comics, lying diagonally on his double bed. Not that I hadn’t seen or read them all many times, but I was recalling that one number he was missing and I needed to make sure. It was his birthday next week and I wanted to replace that missing one and give it to him.

He was on the floor, playing on the new Xbox he had installed in his room. Cursing and yelling at the screen. The game wasn’t going his way.

‘Jaxie, relax dude. It’s not that serious.’ I could touch his head from where I was lounging and ruffled his hair a bit. He was in a short hair phase and I sometimes missed that long mane of his. I’ve had some good times with that look. Especially that one time I made him look like a Cinderella because he had lost that bet with me at playing pool.

I kept those pictures for blackmail purposes.

He threw the console away with a loud bang.

‘Don’t!’ I yelled. ‘You broke it!’ I hated it when he was careless with stuff.

My dad and I didn’t agree on many things, but on the money front, we did. Since mom died we hadn’t had much luck with finances and we both worked really hard to make ends meet. I had to work at that donut shop every Saturday and Sunday just to be able to pay our monthly bills.

Jax had lots of money, Maddox Skylar was an influential Rainer and had made a lot of it in his time on earth as well. They never understood the struggle we had with money and they probably never could.

Jax snapped his head back and angrily stared at me. He was being a lot more broody and angsty lately, I called it his Rainer Puberty phase. Which he hated.

I quickly closed the map with all of his comics. Suddenly fearing he was going to rip them up in a fury-filled rage session. Two weeks ago he had torn down all of his posters. His room was now an off-white, spot ridden where the posters used to be, canvas.

‘Freckles, I swear to god. If you don’t stop nagging I’m kicking your butt out of here!’ He was dead serious. I sat up on my heels. ‘As if you could.’ I defiantly raised one brow.

I knew I was testing the waters but I just couldn’t help myself. For all of his big talk, I was still his biggest weakness and he knew it. Jax threw the map with all of his comics straight from the bed in one swoop of his lanky tattooed arm.

I yelped at the sound and scooted back towards the headboard of his bed. He grabbed my ankle and pulled. I screamed but I also knew he would never hurt me, so it was all in good fun. He slammed his body on top of me and grabbed my arms. He held them over my head with just one of his hands to incapacitate me.

I wriggled to get away. ‘Get off of me you sicko!’ I tried to sound angry but I was secretly loving it. He growled. ‘I’m telling you freckles. You’re no-’ I surprised him by hooking my legs over his and carrying out the flip I had learned in our Krav Maga class. I smacked him on his back and I was on top now. Pinning him down.

The surprise on his face was worth gold. I flipped my hair back and laughed so loud. Laughing sobs racked through my body. He was so shocked. ‘What the fuck Lulu, how.. how…?’ his voice pitched up. ‘I got some secrets.’ I winked at him.

‘No, you don’t, we don’t have secrets.’ He said all of a sudden back to being angry with me. He was a real-life Jekyll and Hyde these days and he didn’t even bother denying it.

I’d had enough of his flip-flopping attitude so I tried to get up. He wasn’t having it. He grabbed both my thighs and pinned me down on top of him.

’Nope…. We don’t have secrets. Don’t we?’ he added, more firmly.

‘Stop it. What’s gotten into you?’ I was also not feeling it anymore. The temperature had dropped some degrees.

‘Let me go Jax.’

He shook his head. ’Not before you tell me what secret you have been keeping. Trust me, Lulu, I can read you like a book. What is it? Spill it… now.’

I slapped his chest. ’You are not the boss of me. Secrets can be healthy and of course, I can keep them to myself, Jax. I don’t tell you everything!’

Now he was truly angry. He grabbed me under my armpits and threw me off him. I hit the wall a little bit more roughly than I was used to with him. ‘Then get out!’

I was staring up at him in shock. ‘What?’

‘You heard me! Get out!’ he was pacing around the room now. I was really not feeling Puberty Rainer Jax. I grabbed my purse and stormed out of there without even looking back at him.

This was our first really big fight in all the years we had been best friends. I was crying by the time I made it downstairs. We didn’t speak to each other for that entire week and it was sickening to me. Just one week had made me physically ill.

One evening I heard a tapping motion at my window and I already knew it was him. I missed him so much that I didn’t care anymore. So I let him in. That night he slept next to me in bed, what we used to do often back in the days we were kids and the next day everything was back to normal.

Little did I know we had only five months left before that defining kiss in the tree house that had literally changed my life. If I had known back then that all of it would go away and I would be going through four years of so much heartbreak I couldn’t even phantom the pain.

I could even say that the end of that friendship, losing Jax Skylar, had hit me harder than the death of my own mother. I hated that it had… but it was the truth.

If I had known that day what was about to come.

I would have never let him kiss me.