These Lips Will Never Tell

“You have beautiful hair, Cece.”

For once, the words felt like prisoners desperate to come out of my mouth. I can feel my lips moving slightly as I tried to repeat and repeat and repeat everything there is to say in my mind.

“Cece, why are you so tardy?”

Perhaps, that isn’t a nice thing to say but she needs to know somehow, doesn’t she? Somebody needs to tell her one more late time and she’s out, don’t they?

“Cece, you’re tardy and I hate tardy people but damn, you are one piece of special gem.”

Awkward but necessary. I can feel the need to say it. And those are the best words I could think of.

“Cece, why do you always like to drink your coffee cold?”

I have always wondered why, as I look at her from across the office during morning. Perhaps, because there’s no struggle in drinking it? Perhaps, it tastes better? But what tastes better than hot coffee? Does Cece always have bad taste in food?

She likes Macaroni matched with peanut butter. She likes pancake with no syrup. Sometimes, I catch her eating a whipped cream raw.

“Cece, why are you so gross?”

Again, not a nice thing to say but what else is there to say to Cece? She does things way out of the normal radius and guess what? She gets away with it! People don’t give her shit for it. Perhaps, that’s because she’s looking quite intimidating to actually call out? Maybe because she’s okay with what she’s doing that people don’t feel the need to say anything to her?

Oh, but that always has been Cece, hasn’t it? So confident, so sure of herself . . .

But not arrogant. Never arrogant. She knows a lot of things—she’s smart—but there’s no hint of superiority in her. Everytime you talk to her, there’s this subtle gentleness with the way she speaks, like she wants you to really understand what she’s saying. Like she’s speaking to a baby, only she’s well-aware that that baby is capable of understanding complex things.

“Cece, your eyes are so blue I feel like drowning sometimes.”

It’s true. They’re ocean blue, maybe a shade lighter, but it feels the same as the sea. You know that feeling when you’re standing on a yacht and stare at the vast nothingness of the blue water beneath you? There’s this serenity. This purity and this calm that you just couldn’t . . . you couldn’t . . . you couldn’t feel it anywhere else. Nor could you feel it with anybody else. Except, maybe, with Cece.

Cece is beautiful. Her blue eyes, her dirty blonde hair, those small hips, and those bust—oh, damn, those bust . . .

“Cece, you make me feel weird sometimes.”

Like her weirdness is that contagious, I can feel it with me on a random day, too. Whenever she walks past me by the office or she talks to me about office stuff, there’s always this stubborn blush creeping up on my cheeks. I don’t always blush whenever I talk to people. Who the heck blushes whenever they talk to people?

But Cece was different. There’s this tingling feeling that I get everytime I can sense her walking towards me or even when I catch a smell of her cologne somewhere. A feeling inside my chest. Wild. And racing.

“Cece, Brandon’s cheating on you. And you know it.”

We both know it. And as far as I could tell, it was only the both of us who knows it. The only difference is, I am perfectly fine with acknowledging the thing while Cece’s settling with denial.

I saw him. At a pub one night, making out with some girl looking way less beautiful than her. It struck me then, how easily people could take things for granted. How dumb the general population is for not realizing how lucky they are for what they have.

“Just give her to me,” I wanted to say to Brandon the minute I saw him by the pub. “Just give her to me and I’ll treat her like how she deserves to be treated.”

But of course, my mouth was shut. The words kept banging against the tip of my mouth, seething through my teeth like floss, but no. They won’t come out. There was no noise, there was no sound . . . there was just desperation. And desperation, sometimes, isn’t enough.

“Cece, I know your lipstick is cherry flavoured and sometimes, at lunch, when I look at you, I want to put them in my mouth and taste it.”

Again, weird stuff. Embarrassing as it is, it’s true. Sometimes, I just feel this need to grab Cece’s face and put my lips onto her lips. Just to see how it feels to actually kiss someone. Just to see how it feels to actually kiss Cece, the most beautiful girl I have ever met in my life.

“Cece, I know I am wrong.”

I know I am, and I have known it ever since. I have been acknowledging it too ever since it occurred, but perhaps, I failed in actually acknowledging it, for here I am . . .

“I am hopelessly in love with you.”

So, so deep in love, I could not find a way out. You could blame me all you want, you can tell me I inflicted this to myself, you can tell me this is all my fault, and I’d still say you’re right.

Maybe, I did this to myself. Maybe there is nobody else to blame here but me.

“Cece, I am a sinner. I am a sinner for you.”

And I know for a fact that all of us here are probably sinners. None of us our saints, though some like to think so highly of themselves and think they are. I will never pretend to be a saint, for I am aware of what I have done, and the special place I bore in hell for having committing a wrongdoing.

At some point, I’ve always thought the main reason Cece wouldn’t love me back is because we’re so different from each other. She’s outgoing when I’m quiet. She’ confident when I’m shy. She’s pretty when I’m not.

We have the same size of the chest. We have the same dirty blonde hair, we even have the same bust, for Pete’s sake! We both wear heels at work and a pencil skirt to match our outfit.

But I . . . I could never look as pretty as Cece.

Cece was divine. Cece was an angel.

“And I love you, like how you’re not supposed to love somebody exactly just like you.”

I couldn’t help it. There is no helping it. I am in too deep before I even realized it, and just when I was about to find some way to escape, she’s there trapping me forever.

Always in my heart. Always in my mind.

“I love you,” is what I have always wanted to say to Cece everytime I see her at work, at the street, at the coffee shop where she usually buys her cold coffee and her syrup-less pancake . . .

But the words felt so heavy in my tongue. The words felt hard in my throat and they felt meaningless inside my head.

They always have been, and they always will be for eternity.

I squeezed my mouth shut and walked away from Cece’s casket.