Free Breathe by Kristen Ashley

at night, in my kickass but lonesome apartment, her beautiful voice filled with longing, singing words I’d never really listened to, hit me like a bullet tearing clean through my flesh leaving a raw ache in its wake.
    I didn’t even try to control the tears that filled my eyes. I didn’t feel the sting of them in my nose. I just let them fall as the ceiling above me went watery and the longing in Ella Mae’s voice, the beautiful yearning of the words ripped me to shreds.
    I’d seen Chace Keaton at sixteen years old, incidentally, Ella Mae’s age when she recorded that song, and I convinced myself I found my hero and he was always there, just out of reach.
    But he wasn’t just out of reach and if I kept hoping, kept reaching, eventually his fingers would close warm, strong and firm around mine.
    He was just plain out of reach.
    He lived in the same town but he was miles and miles and miles away.
    When Ella Mae was done, I played her again.
    And again.
    Then again.
    Then, tears in my eyes, I got up, blew out the candle and walked to the distressed, whimsical set of hooks Dad had mounted by my door. I grabbed my long, pastel green scarf and wrapped it around and around my neck, this pressing the chords of the earphones to the skin under it.
    I replayed it as I grabbed my pine green wool pea coat, tugged it on, maneuvered the iPod around while I buttoned it up, nabbed my mittens that matched the scarf and pulled them on. Then I grabbed my keys.
    I listened to it playing as I pulled open the door and walked out, locked the door, shoved the keys into my pocket and took off down the stairs that led to the back alley and my Cherokee.
    I replayed it as I rounded the side alley and walked swiftly, shoulders scrunched, arms held up in front of me, hands clasped, through the fierce, arid cold that dried the tears on my face.
    I replayed it when I turned off Main Street and walked through the quiet, dark streets to the elementary school. I listened to the words yet again as I slipped through the opening in the chain link fence and headed to the playground.
    I was listening to it when I stopped at the swing set, lifted my mittened hand and rested it on one of the high swing set poles and dropped my head, pressing my forehead against my mitten. Listening and aching and knowing that there was nothing worse in the whole, wide world than the death of hope.
    And I was listening to it when a hand wrapped firm and strong around my bicep but I also heard my low, surprised cry ringing in my head if not in my ears when I felt the touch and that hand didn’t hesitate to whip me around.
    Then I stared up at Chace Keaton’s angry face.
    What the frak?
    I blinked up at him and I did this twice before I realized his mouth was moving.
    He was talking to me.
    “What?” I asked, automatically talking very loudly over music he couldn’t hear.
    His head jerked, his eyes narrowed even as they moved all around the vicinity of my head. I felt his hand leave my arm then suddenly Ella Mae was gone because he’d lifted both his hands and pulled out my ear buds.
    Then I heard him growl, “Jesus, it’s worse.”
    I wasn’t following. I hadn’t gone from denying my lonesomeness to understanding it to the core of my being, letting go a dream, feeling that ache throb through me, beating at me in a way I knew I’d feel it forever to standing in the cold in the elementary school playground staring at an angry Chace Keaton.
    “What’s worse?” I whispered.
    “You, takin’ a walk alone in the dark of night in a town full of bikers who like to get drunk, rowdy and laid and doin’ it with your ear phones in and music so loud you couldn’t hear someone approach even if he was wearin’ a fuckin’ cowbell.”
    He was right, of course. I could actually hear Ella Mae now and the ear buds weren’t even in my ears.
    Quickly, with my thumb, I paused my iPod but I replied to Chace, “Bikers are friendly.”
    “No, Faye, they’re not.”
    “But, I’ve