Page 36 of One Vow

She swallowed hard. “Then it would kill me to let you go again.”

A tear slipped over her nose and landed on my arm where she’d laid her head. “I don’t know if I can make it through a second time, Finn.”

If I would’ve known last night that this would be how we started today, I wouldn’t have gone to sleep. I would’ve stayed awake, watched her sleep, refreshed my mind with all the little details about her, held her tighter, kissed her longer.

I nodded. “Okay.”

There was nothing I could deny her. Nothing I would ever even consider denying her. Her happiness was all I cared about, and if this was what she wanted, then…okay. But first, she needed to know…how I felt. I tightened my arms around her. “Lis, before I go…I never got over you. And everything I’ve done since I left was to prove that leaving was the right thing for both of us, so I could come back one day, and you’d be proud of who I am.”

“Even marrying Beth?”

I smiled. Leave it to Felicity to catch that. “No. That’s about something else. I mean with the rest of my life. I worked hard in med school. I made sure I was at the top of my class. I kept my head down. Did the work so if I ever ran into you, I could introduce myself as Dr. Makenzie and you’d be impressed.”

She nodded. “I am impressed, Dr. Makenzie.”

But it wasn’t enough. I had to leave her again. And I didn’t want to now any more than I did back then. “Do you know my favorite night when we were married before?”

What was I doing? This trip down memory lane was going to kill me.

“Naked Tuesday? Wet and wild Wednesday?” She chuckled like we weren’t breaking up. Again.

I swallowed a couple times to get rid of the lump in my throat so I could speak. “The night we put all the blankets and pillows on the floor in front of the TV and laughed, told jokes, made out.”

She twisted her lips. “We didn’t even have sex that night.”

“It wasn’t always about sex for me.” True, no matter what she thought or how my previous behavior made it look. “That night, I was really happy. I thought if we could just have that every once in a while, it would be enough to get us through anything. It felt normal and I didn’t get a lot of that before. So, it was… one of the top eleven best nights of my life.”

“Finn.” She whispered my name or maybe I imagined her saying it, but I savored the sound. “We didn’t have sex that night because Ryder just beat your ass. We were married for 11 days. You got kicked out of school that day for good and I didn’t…”

She turned away. “I didn’t know if I could be with someone who was kicked out of school.”

The air whooshed out of me like she’d hit me. She didn’t hold me and laugh with me because she loved me. She was holding back because she didn’t love me enough. Nothing I thought about us back then was right. Not from her side anyway. And the second great heartbreak of my life was directly connected to the first.

One Decade Ago

In two minutes, I was officially going to be late. And of all the things I couldn’t afford to be, late for this meeting with the board of chancellors wasn’t it. I was going to save my own ass, to rat out my best friend and put an end to the first fraternity established at Glouster. I was going to take a deal that would keep me in school or at least let me get into another school.

Lis made the deal. She went to her dad and pleaded, begged, and cried. Now I had exactly one chance to tell all.

I should’ve taken the car, but I wanted to walk so I could clear my head, organize my thoughts, figure out what to say to do the best I could to save myself.

I passed teachers, students, people who had no idea what I was about to do, although unless they’d slept through the entirety of the last two weeks, there was no way anyone I passed didn’t know what I’d done.

The voice. The “Hey, buddy, where you headed,” made my guts ache.

I didn’t have to guess what Ryder was doing on campus right now, he’d been kicked out two weeks ago without being allowed an explanation. I also didn’t need to wonder if catching me at this exact moment was a coincidence. Ryder didn’t do coincidence.

“I have a meeting.” But he knew that.

“Don’t do this, man.”

That he could ask after what he did, that he used all of us to make money, that he humiliated not only us but all those women, was a sign Ryder wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to learn.

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what to say. How could he ask me not to save myself and the others?

“Finn…” He stopped walking, I turned, and he punched. I didn’t see it coming. I wouldn’t have expected it. I wouldn’t have expected that he would have jumped on top of me and pounded his fist into my face over and over again. Or that he would’ve stood over me, spat, and bent down to haul me up by my shirt. “We were friends, and I would never sell you out.”

The fact that he actually had ‘sold me out’ when he sold those videos of me seemed to have escaped him.