Page 22 of Conflict Conclusion

Thankfully, Leon was a pro at handling this look. He stared blankly at her until she sighed dramatically. Or at least, it was supposed to be dramatic, but her breaths were coming in soft pants. To be fair, so were Leon’s from careening through the woods, but that did nothing to lessen his worry.

Slowly, Hailey sat up straight and pulled her legs into a criss-cross position. Leon’s hand, which was hovering uselessly in the air, began to tremble as some of the adrenaline left his system. He dropped it into the water and pressed his palms into the pebbles on the bottom of the creek bed.

“My legs are working, my butt will recover, and I’m sure my clothes will dry if I stand in the sun long enough,” she said, her usual petulance surprisingly missing from her voice. “I promise, I’m fine. Thank you for rushing to help, though.”

Leon sat back on his heels, effectively soaking the rest of his pants. “Okay,” he said, clutching at one of the larger rocks beneath his hands. “Yeah, alright. Okay. Yeah.”

Hailey pursed her lips in a way that looked far too adult on her as she did her own scan of Leon. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, his voice clipped.

They stared at each other, the soft gurgling of the stream somehow sounding very disbelieving.

“I’m sorry if I…I don’t know, I want to say ‘scared you,’ but I feel like you don’t really get scared, right?” she said, reaching up a wet hand to push her hair off her forehead. Some of it had fallen loose from her ponytail, either from their run or her fall.

“I’m fine,” he said again, even as the edge of the rock he was holding bit into his hand.

Hailey crossed her arms over her chest, and Leon couldn’t believe this was happening to him twice in two days.

“I’m…going to be fine,” Leon said, releasing his grip on the rock. “It scared me, just for a second, to hear you fall and not be able to see what happened, but you’re right. I think you’re okay, which means I should be okay.”

Even if he hadn’t been okay in months.

As if he had spoken the words aloud, Hailey tightened her arms around herself. “Is this because of my accident? Did it…make you scared? This whole time?”

A hundred words, most of them excuses, flooded his mind, but as if weighed down by them all, he found himself giving a single, tight nod.

“Fuck,” Hailey breathed.

A warm, summer breeze blew across the creek, and Leon decided he should be the actual goddamn adult in this situation and get Hailey out of the water. He went to stand up, but Hailey’s hand snapped out and grabbed his wrist.

“I thought something was up, for a while now, but I figured it was something with work or James or…” She shook her head, and more blonde hair fell around her face. “I didn’t know it was my fault.”

Leon turned his wrist around in Hailey’s grip and grasped her hand, standing the rest of the way up and pulling her with him. There was a patch of sunlight only a few feet away, so he guided her to it, continuing to hold her hand as he sank to the ground.

Hopefully she didn’t notice how badly his legs were shaking.

He was probably just out of shape. Clearly his six days a week in the gym weren’t working, either to scare off the nightmares or to prepare him for sprinting through the woods. James wasn’t going to like it, but maybe he should up it to seven days a week.

“It’s not your fault. It was an accident,” he said, pulling his hand back so he could shove them both under his thighs. His jeans were waterlogged and a little slimy, so he tried to focus on that, and not the stabbing pain in his chest.

“Okay, so it was my accident’s fault?” Hailey asked.

Leon stared at a tree across the creek from them, with a long gash running down the middle. It almost looked like it had been cleaved in half, and yet, each side had kept growing in their own directions.

“There’s no fault or blame. No one did anything wrong, it just…”

How could he possibly explain what the past six months had been like? She didn’t deserve to carry that on her shoulders. On top of that, they were at her going away party, for fuck’s sake. This wasn’t what they should be talking about right now.

And yet…

“It just what?” Hailey pressed, bumping her shoulder against his in a very mensch-like way.

“It just…hit me…that nothing lasts forever.”

There. That was very zen-like, and something you could say to a graduating teen, right?

Hailey shifted next to him, but he kept staring at the base of the tree, where the two parts were still joined together.