Page 15 of Love Scenes

Never stopping

Showtime sex appeal

Shining daisy girl

Give them all a twirl

Lips in crimson

Pressed atop mine

Promising the world

You’re just smoke in the mirror

So afraid to clear the air

Hold my heart then break it clean

Telling me that all is fair

Tyler kicks off her boots and gets underneath my covers with me.

We lean back against a stack of pillows, angled enough to see ourselves in the mirror above my dresser. This is how we spent so many nights post-divorce, side by side in my bed sharing a comfortable silence. We’re much older now, and my bedroom’s more sophisticated these days, done up in tasteful neutrals with pops of green instead of that lavender-and-zebra-print theme I insisted on as a kid. But the feeling is almost the same, a heaviness between us that we aren’t ready to discuss. We just know we can’t face it alone.

Back then, all the words we couldn’t say aloud were never about each other.

The song fades out with Kearns singing, “Light a match, burn the proof,” over and over, like a hex to keep me away.

It’s astonishing how easily he can lie. Because he’s the one who broke up with me. Who told me he was tired of the monotony of our life. You’d never know it, listening to this. You’d think I tossed him to the curb and laughed while I drove over his belongings.

I wish I had. Maybe then I’d feel better.

“For the rest of my life, I will bethisperson to a million strangers I’ve never met, no matter what I say,” I admit to Tyler, too tired to hold it inside.

It would hurt less if I thought she was someone I could actually be, but she’s yet another role in which I’ve been miscast, and it’s all I can do not to be buried under the weight of the persona.

“It’s very clear that Kearns is being petty,” Tyler assures me. “No one’s listening to this thinking it’s true.”

“I know.” But I don’t believe it. Not even a little.

My head is heavy with small memories. Kearns’s hand brushinghis long brown hair out of his eyes. The feel of his palm on the small of my back as we’d walk out of a restaurant. All the times I came home to find him sitting beside Tyler, the two of them watching TV together.

Who was the fucking liar between us?

His name isn’t even Kearns Adam. It’s Adam Kearns. He flipped it, and suddenly he became the next Ben Gibbard. He flipped our relationship. And he’s coming out the hero for that too.

“I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about the movie before Mom offered you the part,” Tyler whispers, barely audible over the blaring music.

“Fear of the Canyon,” the album’s title track, has started.

I live in fear of the canyon

As dark and deep as lovely woods

With a daisy girl who never could

Wipe the shadows from her eyes