Cold Love

Doctor Froze and Marion let go of him after a couple of minutes. After a while, I walked up to Doctor Forrest and snapped my fingers at his face until he reacted. Then he slowly turned towards MJ.
“I’m sorry, I’m very positive I’m unable to love you in the way you love me, Jackson”
He gulped and rubbed his nose; I noticed his eyes were very red.
“I see… I’ll… I’m gonna go now… Don’t follow me, Fielder… I want some time alone”
I saw him after a week and he was perfectly composed and sharp as ever.

Marion Jackson. He’s handsome in a sharp kind of way and of course there’s a number of ladies who just love him and of course there are others who like to tease that angry side to him. But ever since he was rejected by Doctor Forrest he’s just his serious, mostly-violent self. Also, he hasn’t involved himself with anyone again. I haven’t seen him laugh, either.

I sigh. I envy his way to go straight ahead and get a clean cut. My end was far more dramatic and began with a love letter.
“What’s that, Doc?” I asked him
“Apparently, a girl in 8th grade is declaring her love to me”, he said dully
I froze. “Really now? How sweet. You’re going to say yes to her?”, I gambled
“Of course not. Not only is she a minor and a student of this school, which means it’s not only unethical but illegal, but I don’t know the first thing about her as well; I’ll have to respectfully reply that I can’t respond to her feelings and that I will have to decline”
I was relieved “Just be sure to use short words, I don’t think girls of that age are too confident when the man they love not only rejects them but also shows them they are dumb by using super long words”
“I see, I thank you for your advice, Nik”

And I felt sorry about the girl then but I had decided to deploy my strategy before someone else did. I invited him to come to my mom’s birthday, and he came; we went to the movies, to amusement parks and all other sorts of fun places and events; there were a lot of walks: through the park’s trees during fall, under the rain and throughout the city’s commercial districts; and then came the fated day.

It was a perfect picnic, the sun was high and he looked very happy. My palms were sweaty but I had already practiced and I was confident that all my years with him had made him realize that we were great together, that there was no one else we could confide more than one another. I decided to gauge how intimate we were with light jabs, stuff like †˜hey, we know a lot about one another’; then I moved on to †˜thanks for all you’ve done for me’, and †˜thank you for accepting me, a messy brawler’; then the conversation flowed naturally towards †˜I think you’re wonderful’ †˜I’ve always thought you were very handsome’ and †˜to me, you’re a great catch’; I hesitated when he seemed a bit confused but I went for broke right there.
“What would you say if I told you I could easily have fallen in love with you, Forrest ?”

He froze and I froze as well.
My hand instinctively moved towards his face as I snapped my fingers and noticed I was trembling. He recovered after only a couple of snaps.
He looked… disturbed, to say the least. Sadly for me, he didn’t look happy at all.
“Y-you’re being hypothetical, right?”
I stared back at him.
“Nik… I don’t think… I would date a minor”
“I’ll be 18 in 4 months” I snapped back at him
He paused and looked down at the ground
“We, the faculty are not allowed to date students and you should know that very well, since you broke that teacher’s forearm, the one who was suspected of harassing his students”
“This is different and besides we had enough proof”, I countered.
He made a long pause and his brows furrowed. Then he sighed
“I will not let you love me. I will not accept your love”
“Why?”, I asked hotly.
“Because I am not in love with you” he said with a monotone voice. “I feel terrible in case I may have misled you lately, in case you thought I had any romantic interests but this is it. I do not love you. Please give up on me”
After those words, he simply stood up and walked away from me. I tried to recover from the immediate shock and I ran after him but lost him. I tried looking for him at school but I was told he had asked for his overdue vacations; apparently, he hadn’t taken a single day off for the last 8 years and simply put the request for them to start right away and fled.

The following 7 months were a gray blur. I was told I walked, talked back, breathed, ate, drank, even got into the usual fight here and there and even that I looked incredibly focused. I don’t know exactly how that happened.

He came back and suddenly Doctor Forrest Winter and Nikki Fielder were strangers who never talked to one another when I needed some pain killers or some alcohol or some band aids.

I could have remained a zombie and saved myself some pain if only Linda hadn’t slapped some sense back into me.
It was hideous, she was crying and telling me I had let myself die inside and was in the worst case of denial ever. She reminded me of every single cute and fun thing I had told her about my feelings towards Doctor Forrest and this triggered a sad burst of weeping, the likes of which embarrasses me. It lasted a good 4 hours and I even fell sick with a fever from which it took a long while to recover.

I tried to go on living but after recovering my human, beating heart, it hurt a lot to think about going to School and meeting him. Every morning I would tell myself †˜it’s over, It’s over, it’s over, it’s over’, and I’d try to get on with things. During that period, tears just kept flowing, regardless of what I was doing or thinking (though often at the worst times). MJ told me I looked pathetic. I beat him up then.

So I came back to a normal school life and even went back to visiting Forrest, although not often, and since most juvenile delinquents had already given up on fighting Marion and me because nothing seemed to work, we had a chance to actually do some studying in order to graduate properly.

I snort. Apparently, I was a cute girl when I wasn’t a brawling monster.

Guys asked me to the prom but I went alone and stood next to Marion, who had also gone alone, arguing he expected trouble to come up either from the drunken seniors or some invading gangs who had already made clear they had a bone to pick with us.
We weren’t disappointed.
Bryan “Blood” Jenkins had gathered a huge gang to give Marion and myself a beating and if possible something along the lines of gang rape, mutilation, gang rape, murder, and necrophilia gang rape.
We disappointed him by beating 7 types crap out of his goons and himself.
Normally, I had to stop Marion from going all overkill on our opponents but I let him enjoy himself for once. Then, a first time for me, I called the cops on them.

City’s finest were impressed and let us know they looked forward to having us on their side, which sounded nice for both Marion and I, who were used to never expecting backup.

After we got our hardly deserved diplomas, I went to the infirmary to say good bye.

The doc was at his desk as usual, filling some forms and when he saw me, I was sure I had seen him put on his poker face (it was a damn good poker face, he didn’t move a muscle)
“I came to say good bye, Forrest”
He nodded at me and appeared to be uninterested and bored at my farewell.
Some little angry fire lit up inside me.
“I expect you’ll be very lonely without me pestering you after school”
“I don’t expect so”, he said, returning to his paperwork.
The little angry fire became a little angry blaze. I took some slow paces towards him
“Ah yes, of course, how silly of me to forget Miss Mabel”
He looked at me pointedly and then resumed working.
I continued “who knows, maybe in time she’ll end up seducing you and then dumping you, which is only natural, since I’ve heard she’s just some man eater…” I said as I was nearing his desk
He interrupted me “Even if there were such a case, I hardly think it appropriate for you to address her in such disrespectful manner, Ni- Fielder”, he corrected himself at the end. “My sentimental life does not concern you” he said, frowning and showing how mad he could get.
I stood next to him. “it does. It concerns me. You’re the man I fell in love with and from whom I haven’t gotten over…”
I noticed him losing a bit of his composure. “Stop it, NI-Fielder” he corrected himself again.
I was slightly angry at him. I loved him. And he didn’t give me a real reason to stop. He insisted in treating me like any other girl even though I had been the closest person in his heart. He had began calling me Nikki or Nik over two years ago and now he stumbled when calling me †˜Fielder’. He had tried as hard as his soft, crystalline soul had allowed him to make me hate him or at least forget. I gave up on him with an exhalation.
“You’re right, Doc, you’re right as always. I’ll give up on you”
He slowly turned his face towards me, skeptical.
When I looked into his eyes, I felt an angry kind of sadness. He wanted me to leave him because he insisted he didn’t love me, not knowing that I would have had enough with him letting me cling to his arm.
“You know, Doc? I learned something Marion”
Still wary, he asked “what is that?”
Completely taking him off guard (and realizing how his reflexes were truly pathetically slow) I grabbed him by his white coat’s lapels and pulled him with enough force to take him out of the chair and throw him to the floor where I pinned him.
Of course, he froze.
Sitting squat on his abs, I snapped my fingers at him. It took a while for him to react again.
“W-w-what are you…”
I cut him off. “This will be the last time I see you so I will get a memory out of it, Forrest Winter”
The kiss I stole from him will very likely remain in my memory even when I’m old and hunched, just like that old lady from Titanic.

I touch my lips. The feeling of his cold lips feeling as if melting with my body temperature and the sensation of our breathing flowing…

I broke the kiss. He didn’t look frozen but absolutely shocked as if not believing what just had happened. Then I undid his top button and loosened his necktie. By the time he reacted and tried to stop my hands I was already kissing his neck. Again, the feeling of his cold skin becoming warm invades my memory and makes me shiver. I remember him smelling soo good.
It was a good thing his reaction time was so slow, because by the time he was able to push my face away from his neck, I had already made a big red mark on him.
Then reality came back. I looked at him feeling sad but consoling myself for having been bold enough to steal this moment. Then I slapped him hard.
“Good luck being charmed and stolen by Miss Mabel, Forrest…”, I said as my sadness of leaving him for good caught up with me and made me fight against the tears.

I rub my hand, his cheek had felt warm.

As if the weather was just waiting for me to finish reminiscing, the Rain pours down as if a huge faucet had been opened. I curse Marion for taking the last good part of an hour just to have cold coffee.

A police officer hat rolls towards me through the wet pavement. I walk towards and look into the alley it rolled from. There’s a bystander far away and I can’t make out what it is but I ignore it and walk further.

“Tired of runnin’ yet, lil’ Mary?” I hear the voice that sounds horribly familiar.
“You were always an idiot, Jenkins”, I hear Marion’s voice say. “It’s called strategy. You have more people and they’re carrying blunt and sharp weapons? I take them to where I can take them out one by one”
I realize there’s a small crowd inside the deceivingly deep and twisty alley. I try to call for backup but they can’t hear me due to the rain so I send a text using my mobile which I then return to its regular pocket.

I can hear the grunts and roars of the crowd of attackers. Marion was smart, he can fight one on one and take out anyone in this kind of layout. It’s lucky he wasn’t issued a firearm for patrolling, otherwise they’d have wrested it out of him and he’d be in trouble. I pull out my 9mm issue and get closer.
“Freeze!” I yell at the crowd. “Give up. Back up is here already so lay face down and do not resist”, I bluff.
A mask of insanity turns its face at me and roars.
“FIELDERRRR!!!!!” cries Brian Jenkins, the psycho known as “Blood” and who I personally beat countless times, as he dashes at me.
I fire a round at his leg and one at his mid-section but I only graze the leg and somehow he is able to dodge my second shot. He’s stretching his hand towards my wrist holding the trigger. I notice his other hand trying to get a hold of the barrel. I fire again but he’s already made my wrist turn. The shot goes through his hand but he’s not flinching. He’s already lost all sense in his lust for revenge towards Marion and me. Stupid. He thinks I won’t be able to beat him up without a pistol. His shot hand grips the barrel and points it up and away from him. I kick his shin as hard as possible and even hear a crack but impossibly, he still stands and pulls my wrists to his mouth. The freak bites as if his life depended on it. I grunt as I fight to not scream in pain and kick the same shin again.
I break his leg and he falls but not without letting my wrists go, pulling me to the ground. Both Jenkins and I feel I lose my grip on the piece and starts trying to beat me with the hand he was using to hold my wrists, since now they’re secured in his jaws. I desperately shoot all the bullets out and let go of the pistol and stand up to kick him in the face.
He collapses. And I see Marion is already kicking the rest of the goons in the ground.

“Hey, stop that, Jackson” I say, rubbing my wrists, which have ugly bleeding wounds. The cold rain water hurts.
MJ looks at me and suddenly I hear a loud bang and see him fly backwards, then another bang and my leg has two bullet holes: one at the back from when the shot came in and another one from when the bullet left my body.
The pain is unbearable and I try to crawl away but a hand has grabbed my shoulder and turned me around.
His Sadistic smile can be seen even through the heavy downpour.
“you’re … through… Jenkins… I can already hear the backup coming in… at the alley entrance… you won’t get away”, I bluff.
“Nice try, Fielder” he yells “ but I’m not going to turn around and let you have one over me. See I don’t even care if I’m caught anymore. I have what I wanted”. Then he laughs maniacally. Now he aims at my chest. “Bye-bye, Fielder, see you in hell”
I don’t know how he put more bullets on it but he just fired 4 more rounds at my heart and the pain makes me lose all my strength.

The last thing I can remember before completely blacking out is Jenkins’ roar of madness and the sudden, inexplicable recall of Doctor Forrest’s soft cologne.

The feeling of my own stirring in a cold world without light.

Then the sensation that my corpse is moving through water.

At some point, a sensation of warmth which leaves just as quickly.

Pain. Regret. I wish Marion hadn’t died. I’m dead now. Right?

I think I dream that those beautiful eyes and smile are looking at me in this strange sensation of soft bed all around me. It’s as if the only thing my body feels.

These perceptions fade in and out.

Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup is a kind of litany I believe I hear. But whose is the warm hand on my face?
There’s a gasp.
Then something is crushing my skull.
“Hey bro, if you don’t want her to die, you’d better let her breath” says a voice I can’t quite place.
I’m positive I’m dead. I see the face of Forrest Winter, smiling and yet with tears in his eyes. And it’s heaven.
He puts his lips on my forehead and the sensation of cold lips quickly changes to warmth.
“d-doc?”

I am being reassured that I’m not dead; apparently, my mobile, the one I put on my shirt’s left pocket after texting for backup, turned out to be bullet proof after all.

“But I felt the pain! I couldn’t breath!”
“The impacts did the opposite to CPR and you lost your breath and fainted”
“But how did I make it to the hospital?”
“My little brother carried you †˜cause the roads were blocked due to rain”
“He carried me? Isn’t the hospital about 8 miles from the site?”
“Yup”
“But… but I had a leg wound… I should have bled to death”
“Stupid girl, he bandaged you quickly enough and ran all the way there”
“wait … wait… he RAN? I thought his body couldn’t handle running…”
Summer shrugged.
“How did he find me?”
“I figure he was looking for you from some time before”
“This is unreal…” I noticed his other hand was on a cast “what happened to his hand?”
“I broke it along with Brian Jenkins’ skull”
I am perplexed.
“You? Fight?”
“I yelled him to step away and he fired at me. Apparently he had planned to find you, beat you, steal your weapon and use it against you and had even found out the caliber on the gun so he had spare ammo. I dodged the bullets and crushed his head. He never stood a chance”, Forrest replied as he tenderly patted my hair
My eyes were like plates.
“Dodge bullets? You?!”

Summer, who had been reading the paper until then, looked at us both, got up and walked to a bed tray which had apples and a fruit knife. Without warning, he threw both the knife and one apple at the same time at Forrest.
There was a blur where his left arm was, and next thing, I had a peeled apple in front of me…
“What can I say? Love has a solved all my problems. Or should I say my heart has overruled my brain?”
He took a deep breath. And then he kissed me.

“Three years ago, you were my beloved young and pretty friend, and then you confessed to me. I rejected you because I truly wasn’t in love with you. I fled because I had never felt closer to anyone and yet I was sure this wasn’t love and couldn’t cope with it. I was too afraid of not being fair to you, of you loving me and me not loving you back. But I could feel my discontent when we became strangers after that. And then you kissed me after you had graduated and the world… changed… everything that reminded me of you shone and was warm and the memory of you made me cry and laugh and wallow in despair for having let you go… and it took me two long years to finally realize I had so completely been permeated by you that I could no longer deny my need of your warmth… I told Summer and he helped me search for you… I went to look for you, with a bunch of flowers…”
“It was scary how he started to talk really fast, y’kno?” Summer managed to interject.
“and I was overwhelmed… your… presence… no… my love towards you filled me up with such energy that everything seemed as if in slow motion”
I wasn’t listening… He had kissed me… and it was like dipping in a warm bath of bliss.


THE END

This story is hard to read for several reasons.

The first is the most obvious one: Your decision to divide it into over 30 single posts. Which makes it a bit annoying to read in regards of digital formatting.

Second thing is the time jumps. You are kind of inconsistent about whether you should use present or past tense for things in the present and so on. Since the main character IS remembering stuff, it makes it harder to tell, if you are describing that is happening 2 years ago or now.

The introduction is too short for my taste and it doesn't make me connect well to the character, therefore everything becomes kind of shallow.

Actually I am glad, that you decided to post only the short version of the story, because I think that even the short version is too long. For me it was enough to read the first 3-5 posts to get a solid clue of what is going to happen and that clue was confirmed later on.

Basically, reading the first and last 3-5 posts is enough to know what this story is about, without making me read more.

Maybe, if you would change the order of events, by jumping straight to the bullet and then working from there into extremely cut down flashbacks, maybe then it would be more enjoyable to read.

That's my opinion.

Greetings,
littleRED

- I use different posts to sepparate action/plot to somewhat dam impact
- I use present tense for present. past tense for past. no tense for lack of protagonist perception
- I acknowledge and appreciate the tip on the introduction length

Thank you immensely for your feedback, Little Red

How about using lines for the same purpose, if you really think you can't do without said separators?