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Blake—our connection—was something I had to deal with sooner or later, and from his admissions over the last few days, it seemed that he had made the decision for me.
Legs as heavy as lead, I walked to the door and reached for the handle. It swung open, and Blake stood there looking at me with such reverence in his eyes I almost crumpled. Maybe I did crumple because, before my head had time to process what was happening, I was in Blake’s arms, and he was holding on to me like I was air, and he was desperate to breathe.
“I’ve missed you” His voice cracked. “I’ve missed you so fucking much. I’ve tried to stay away, to give you space, but I can’t. I can’t spend another day feeling like you might slip through my fingers again.”
One of his hands buried itself in my hair as he cradled me against his chest. My face pressed up against the collar of his hoodie, and I breathed him in.
Blake smelled familiar, like damp grass and fresh air, of a time when things were less complicated, and my heart ached for us.
At that moment, we weren’t two strangers reunited by chance; we were sixteen-year-old Blake and Penny.
And we needed each other to survive.
CHAPTERTEN
Penny
I wastwelve when I watched my parents die in the collision that should have killed me as well.
With no family to take me in, the state had no choice but to put me in foster care. At the time, I was too numb to care. My world had been ripped apart, and if that wasn’t enough, it chewed me up and spat me out.
I wanted to die. Wished over and over that the accident had taken me as well. But instead, I ended up on the front porch of a run-down house in Lancaster, Ohio.
‘The Freemans are good people,’ my social worker had said to me on the car ride over. I didn’t care if they were the fairy godmother and Santa Claus—no one would ever replace my parents.
Being all alone in the world is a scary place when you’re a child. But I wasn’t alone for long. Blake was the only other kid in the group home who tried to get to know me. The others were okay, except for a mean girl named Amy, but they didn’t want to be friends.
Blake was different.
He stuck up for me. He made me laugh and enjoyed my company. He became my best friend during a time in my life when I thought I’d never feel whole again, and in the end, Blake had done the impossible.
He had started to piece together some of the brokenness in me.
Although he could never replace my parents, he made living each day a little bit less painful.
And then, one day, he was gone—taking with him a part of me that had never healed.
The day I aged out of the Freeman group home, the social worker had asked me what the first thing I was going to do now that I was an adult. I looked at her, choking down the tears building behind my eyes, and said, ‘never look back.’
And that was what I did.
I didn’t dwell on what had happened to me at the hands of Derek and Marie. I didn’t allow myself to cry any more sleepless nights over Blake. I lived each day as it came and learned how to navigate the world on my own.
I became a survivor.
Even if I wasn’t really living and only merely existing.
I didn’t let myself get close to anyone or put my trust in others. I barricaded my heart behind a wall so high that it was virtually impossible to get over it, and when I did finally let someone in, my anxieties prevented me from taking the next step.
Or, at least, that was what I had thought until I saw Blake again.
But now, as I sat across the room from him, I couldn’t help but wonder if my past relationships had all failed because he was the benchmark.
Because the sixteen-year-old guy I had fallen so irrevocably in love with, who understood me like no other, still owned a piece of my heart.
“What are you thinking?” He broke the heavy silence between us.
After I let him into the cabin, I’d returned to the bed, and he had taken the rickety chair in the corner of the room. We had been sitting like that for the last twenty minutes. Staring at each other, the silence saying far more than any words could.
