What We Didn't Do

A/N: Only one review - but im not getting down-hearted, oh no....I'm posting the next chapter!

And this is a plea to everyone - this chapter is important to me and I really really really need you guys to review in any way possible, even it's to tell me it's shit! So PLEASE REVIEW - not in order to inflate my ego but just because I desperately want to know if it works.

Thank you

JAD xx

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I know you will think that I shouldn’t have been so emotional about the news. I know you might be confused given her lack of warmth for the man why Jeannie sat beside me on the floor and cried. I also know you’re wondering how he died. So I guess now I should talk about Corey.

We met in college, two years after Pip had died. It amazes me how almost everything in my life is based on how many years from my twin’s death it is.

Anyway, he was taking psychology and we bumped into each other in the hallway between classes. I got shit from his friends for being the “stupid fuck that got in his way”. Well, he helped me to my feet and didn’t stop apologising. From what he told me he sought me out for a couple of days to try and talk to me again. He knew about me – all about me, but then again, pretty much everyone did. When he found me sat under a tree out in one of the grassy areas he sat beside me and asked me what pills I was taking, before launching off into a full and vivid description of the sex he’d had that gave him HIV. I stared at him for an eternity. After my brother and Rick, this was the only other guy I’d met that was sick.

We struck a friendship, had an unspoken bond I guess and for the last of my college years we were inseparable. He was the one that showed me the club I went to when I met Alex. I was stunned as I walked through the door, people with AIDS just dancing together.

I guess he gave me a place in the world when I thought I’d been abandoned. He gave me a home and a spot to fit into. I made friends with him around, I actually got laid thanks to him – something I thought I would never get a chance to taste. And yes, I fell in love with him. For a few years, Corey was my entire life. And I was his.

So why did it all change? Honestly I don’t know. There was a moment in time when he lost himself in the sensations of the world and I found him with four naked guys and an empty bag of cocaine between his fingers. He’d kept his habits from me, telling me he was ashamed and didn’t want to bring me down. He told me he’d get help, that it wasn’t important to him, that he’d be ok. He made love to me and whispered that I meant more to him than anything.

Long story short, it didn’t last. Well, the drugs stopped, that much I was certain of, but his addictions shifted and I was no longer enough satisfaction for him. He wanted more, more of everything and I – in my fucked up head, with my dreams of happiness and settling down – I just didn’t have what it took to keep up.

I won’t lie, I was angry and I still am. To know that through it all you were never enough to bring him to the heights he wanted to go sent me into a depression I never thought I’d pull out from. That was when Jeannie decided she would be there for me. She walked in on me, a thin cord wrapped around my throat as music blared out of my stereo. Jeannie was never going to leave my side – but Corey Adams had to.

For all her anger, and for all of mine, Jeannie still had a heart for him. She saw the self-destruction in his eyes and though she spat words in venom she knew there was a darkness in him that wasn’t his fault. Sympathy. She held un-adulterated sympathy for him. So as she cried in my arms I knew that as she spoke those words she spoke the truth. He was dead.

I stayed with her and Andy that night. My brother wasn’t entirely happy about the situation, but he agreed anyway.

It turns out, that without my monitoring, without my…love, Corey was lost in his mind once again. How did he die? An accidental overdose of Cocaine. He was found alone, curled up, face down in his own vomit, half naked. No one had been with him.

He made mistakes. And I know that he would have been the first one to admit that. There are things in his life that I didn’t know about, that I didn’t understand. His past had things in it that he never spoke about and I never asked. Was he so in the wrong to go off the rails? Or was it my fault for never being the support that he needed to pull through. You don’t just become a cocaine addict, you don’t just wake up one day and think – hey, I’m gunna do coke today.

An accidental overdose? Maybe I should have been happy it hadn’t happened sooner.

Well, they say it was accidental. To this day I don’t know if that was true.

Why didn’t I call Alex? We never exchanged numbers. Stupid, I know, but we’d never had cause to call each other. He wouldn’t know about Corey till he flew back from Florida. But that’s jumping the story.

The funeral.

I went. Of course I did. Jeannie came too, bless her. I also got to have a practice at speech making, my mouth forming words in remembrance for the first love of mine. Then the coffin was carried to a separate room allowing those that hadn’t made their peace with him at the beginning of the day could do so before he was lowered into the ground.

I dared to stand before him as he was laid out on white silk.

He looked beautiful, just as he’d always wanted to look – stately. Those rich blue eyes were closed tight and his face had been prepared with a soft, dead glow. Blonde hair was brushed back from his face. I stared at him.

I was alone in the room and I took a moment to speak.

“You stupid son of a bitch,” I whispered, placing my hands on the wooden edge. “Why? Why? You had everything you could have wanted. You were past this, you – ”

I bit the inside of my lip. It had been a long time since I had said my peace before an open casket. The body had looked a whole lot different then, with its soft brown hair and bright complexion. He’d looked beautiful too. Like angels the two men had spread themselves before me to pour my heart out into the pine box that held them tightly.

“Is that what this is? Is this your final call for me? Well I’m sorry, baby, but I didn’t hear it. I’ve missed your message. If you’d just…If you’d just said something! If you’d been yourself and found that heart I know…I knew was in there then I…you fucked it up, Corey! You fucked it up! You could have had me! If you’d just told me I would have listened. I would have gone to the gates of hell for…Why do you people have to do this to me? Why make me love you, then make me hate you then die on me! Why do the people that mean most just leave me? Why do you do this?”

A hot tear fell down my cheek, “Why do you corpses affect me so much? Why can’t you just be dead and leave me?”

My eyes were stinging as I stood there, two coffins, two faces, two times and feelings filling my heart. I should have been there for them…for both of them. Told my brother that having HIV wasn’t that bad, that you could pull through – told him that for all the dark times you still had your life and giving up should be the last thing on your mind. Told Corey that I loved him, that I could pull him through, that my heart was his, that I would never give up on him, that I would always be there and that no matter what the night held, I’d be right beside him telling him how fucking perfect, how fucking beautiful, how fucking amazing he was and how I fucking wished he didn’t have to go…

“Why did you have to go? Why did you leave me?”

They were questions that could never be answered. I was on my own with nothing but drying tears and a fallen angel before me.

And as soon as the gates opened…

Jeannie touched my shoulder and I turned, allowing her sweet arms to hold me. I cried. I cried so hard my eyes hurt, my face hurt, my gut hurt. I cried until the woman that held me could hold me no more.

This was grief.

This was mourning.

This was what a lifetime of hate ended in.

Tears and grief.

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