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A chilled burst of wind blows through my hair, and I shiver. Bennett unloops his scarf and wraps it carefully around me so I can burrow into the warmth of him. The smell of him.
“Was it . . .” he starts, before looking down at his shoes, away from me. “I know you said it wasn’t me, but I just—I have to ask. Did I do something? To push you away that night?”
New Year’s Eve, three years ago. That Night—the one I’ve blocked out with every power inside my mind, until it’s a distant foggy memory I refuse to revisit.
Still, I find my voice, though it sticks in my throat for a long time. “No, you didn’t.”
He nods, contemplation and relief swirling across his face.
“I think I just got it in my head for a while, that maybe it was me.” He clears his throat, working through a knot there. “That I was too much or I couldn’t read you the way you needed and that . . . that you wanted someone more normal.”
My eyes close as I take his soft, vulnerable words like knives to my heart. And I deserve every single one.
A flash of a midnight-blue bedroom. A dog whining. A soft, half-broken confession—Someone like you could never love someone like me, right?—and a door slamming in the absence of denial.
Stomach churning, I let the cold wind settle me again.
“It had nothing to do with you,” I breathe. “You were perfect, Bennett.”
A breath before, “Then why did you leave me?”
Because you were never going to understand what was wrong with me. Because I was eighteen and terrified enough of losing you to sabotage everything. Because I needed to hurt myself before you hurt me.
And then I kept doing it. Hurting myself over and over and over. Like it would erase what I’d done.
Am I still the monster I was trying so hard not to become?
“I never wanted to,” I try to say, squeezing my arms around my middle. “I just—I was so broken and scared, Bennett. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I did to you. For how I hurt you over and over—for Rhys—”
“Don’t.” He stops me, hands in the air and eyes closed tightly, in pain. “I can’t . . . not yet.”
Everything I’ve considered with Bennett was a path forward. But I’ve forgotten that there’s a chance that won’t be on the other side of this pain. That I’ve caused too much wreckage and it’ll be impossible to clear it all, to fix it enough to pass through to the other side.
Speyside has always been a dream. Maybe it will continue to be.
“Sometimes I worry that leaving you was the smartest thing I could’ve done,” I confess into the quiet. “But it was me not really letting you go that made things worse. Maybe if I had, you could have moved on. Been happier.”
And then he’s there, kneeling on the stone patio, backlit by the fire like a deity with a great halo of flames. His hands hold my face, tender and careful—constant and unmovable.
The steady shore standing unshakable and firm against the ebb and flow of my sea, like he always has.
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he confesses, his voice just as whisper-quiet as mine. “I was never going to be willing to let you go. You’re all I’ve thought about since that day in the locker room. I breathe and you’re in my lungs.” His breath huffs out, almost agitated as he looks back up at me with watery blue eyes. “Why can’t you understand that?”
We stay there, frozen in some distorted beach vignette of pain and longing, desperation and yearning.
I want to show him the darker parts of myself, to display the scarred pieces of me, the smaller, little version of me that lurks in my brain—that has found everything in this world to be painful and terrifying. Except for him.
But I just . . . I can’t.
The words are sewn into the sides of my throat, the threat and the promise of relief in equal measure. So I let him hold me closer, press kisses into my hair.
I watch the flames of the bonfire and wonder if there will be a day when I can show him everything. Or if we are, like so many beautiful poets and the subjects of their affection, doomed to burn out into ash and never get the things we want.
Chapter 51
THEN: Freshman Year, New Year’s Eve, 3:45 p.m.
Bennett
