This story is by Jaysharie T Mckenzie and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
The first time I saw Jaydon, the automatic doors of the shop opened and he stepped through it like a dare. Hair wet. Hoodie darker where the water got it. He shook off his hands, laughing at the ceiling like it had told a joke.
I was holding a basket with milk, migraine tablets, and a lime I didn’t need. He glanced at my basket the way you glance at a stranger’s book on the bus, curious, private. His look landed and stayed. Not a stare. A recognition.
“You look like you’re about to negotiate with God,” he said, nodding at the tablets.
“I already did,” I said. “He countered with toast and water.”
He smiled, a little crooked. “Tell Him Jaydon says try sugar and salt.”
“Tell Him Nia says you can’t fix a head with snacks.”
“We can fix everything with snacks,” he said, holding up two packets of crisps like a peace offering.
We left with the same door whooshing us into the same wet night. He walked beside me without asking, shoulder to shoulder-the kind of instinct people write about as fate and therapists call attachment.
“I’m in twelve,” he said under the chipped arch of our building. “If you need emergency sugar or emergency company.”
“I’m ten,” I said. “If you need someone to tell you sugar fixes nothing.”
“Great,” he said. “We cancel each other out.”
That was how it started. A joke, a hallway, a fuse.
We were a fast burn disguised as a slow one. I learned the shape of his laugh before I learned his last name. He learned the rhythm of my insomnia before he knew my job. We found excuses to be in the corridor at the same time, like we were studying collisions in real time.
When we kissed for the first time, it wasn’t careful. It felt like both of us had leaned our weight against opposite sides of a locked door, and it finally gave. He kissed like someone who had practiced restraint so long that letting go hurt. I kissed him like someone who had taught herself to be small and was suddenly allowed to breathe.
He didn’t drive. He said it like a joke, “I’m a bus wanker” but when a car alarm went off on our street, his body flinched like it wasn’t his. When we crossed at lights and a taxi took the corner too greedily, his hand tightened around mine, not possessive. Protective. Apologetic.
I filed it under trauma he didn’t name. I had my own.
My sister’s name was Mara. After she died, the world stayed bright but lost its edges. People said grief came in waves. I didn’t find waves. I found an undertow. I found silence. I found myself learning how to sleep beside absence.
Jaydon didn’t ask for details. He didn’t offer solutions. Once he said, “I hate how the air changes after a siren,” and I understood he understood something.
We fed each other tenderness like it was contraband. Bagels on Tuesdays. The market three buses away where the citrus smelled like sunlight. My hair tie on his wrist when mine snapped. His key in my bowl like proof of something unnamed.
He made tea like medicine. He left the lamp on if I fell asleep on the sofa. He touched me like I was real and here and allowed.
On a Saturday in March, rain came down so hard the windows shook. We were meant to go buy oranges and pretend the weather wasn’t winning. He texted:
Running late. Door’s open. Make yourself at home.
His apartment smelled like detergent and heat. The radio murmured. A hoodie hung over a chair so recently that the shoulders still remembered him.
I put water on and wondered not to snoop, just to be near the things that held him when I wasn’t there.
His table, usually chaos,was a grid. Papers lined up, neat stacks. Trying-to-be-good stacks.
On top of one: a small black USB. A white label in heavy, deliberate letters:
NORTH BRIDGE
My stomach went cold.
North Bridge is where teenagers shouted secrets into the river.
Where people sat in parked cars to talk about the things they didn’t say anywhere else.
Where Mara and I used to race storms.
Where she died. Where the night bent and never unbent. I told myself it was nothing. Work. Maps. Files. Something not mine. But some doors need to be opened just to stop pretending they’re locked.
I plugged it into his laptop. A folder.
Three files:
dashcam_11-03.mp4
appeal.pdf
therapy.pdf
There’s a sound your heart makes when it drops inside your chest. Not loud. Just absent.
I clicked the video.
Rain. Headlights. The wipers were frantic, desperate. The dashboard glowed blue. A camera mounted somewhere steady. A sleeve. A hand on a steering wheel. Ten and two. Tendons drawn tight.
A glimpse of Jaydon’s jaw reflected faintly in the glass. Not proof. Recognition.
The light turned green.
The road rose.
The bridge.
A figure stepped off the kurb.
Not reckless. Not running. Just someone crossing a street they’d crossed a hundred times.
The brakes cried out. The shape turned. The sound of impact was not cinematic. It was soft, meeting something that refused to move.
Jaydon’s breath broke on the recording:
“Oh God.”
The hazard lights clicked, steady, indifferent.
He reversed. Just an inch. A grotesque mercy. Then he rolled forward. Not fleeing.
Just continuing. Like the world hadn’t split open.
I paused the video. Hard.
Everything in the room went wrong. My tea was cold without my permission. Outside, a car hissed past, like a warning.
The lock turned.
“I know I said five minutes,” Jaydon called, warm, teasing, rain in his hair, “but it’s biblical out-”
He saw the screen.
Then me.
A person can lose their face and put it back on in under a second.
“Nia,” he said. Not a question.
We didn’t move.
“I didn’t see her,” he said, voice flat from being wrung out too many times. “I didn’t see her until—”
He gestured at the still frame. The smear of headlights. The shape of rain.
“Until I did.”
“You left,” I said.
“I left.” He didn’t soften it. His throat worked. “I stopped up the road. I called from another street. I came back. The ambulance was there already. I-”
“And the video?”
“I kept it,” he said. Not defensive. Tired. “So I couldn’t lie to myself about what I did.”
“My sister,” I said, though the reveal had already happened in both of us.
He made a sound so quiet it was almost nothing. He sat down as if standing cost too much.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “Not until now. If I had-”
But there was no version where knowing changed the past.
The magnets were gone.
Just metal.
I called the police because there are moments you choose the person you have to live with.
I gave my name.
The date.
The bridge.
I said I had new information.
When I hung up, I said, “I love you.”
Because the truth needed air before it drowned.
He went still. Not grateful. Not surprised. Just broken open.
“I love you,” he said, like a confession.
“I want to hate you,” I said, voice raw.
“I know,” he whispered. He didn’t ask for forgiveness. He didn’t deserve to.
The knock on the door was soft, almost polite.
He didn’t look back as they led him out. Not because he didn’t want to.
Because he knew I wouldn’t survive the look.
It rained the day of his hearing. Of course it did. I stood across the street from the courthouse.
Hood up. Hands in pockets. The label from the USB folded tight in my fist.
They brought him out. Smaller now. Volume turned down on the body I used to know. He didn’t see me. That was mercy.
The city went on. A bus sighed. Someone laughed. A siren moaned somewhere distant. Someone asked me the time and i gave it to them, this reminded me that i was still here, this was all real
I let the rain hit my face and didn’t move. Love is not absolution. Grief is not punishment. Truth is not a rescue.
They are all weights. You carry what you can.
We met long before we met. I just didn’t know I’d have to watch him from a pavement I couldn’t cross.
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