TWENTY
Luca
The sun filteredin around the edges of the blinds, kissing the freckled skin of McKenzie’s shoulder. Her back was facing me, the faint rasp of her breath and birds singing outside the window the only sounds in the room.
Her hair shimmered, the light casting a golden halo over her head.
I traced slow circles over her back, allowing my fingers to move gingerly over her skin.
She sighed and let out a low moan.
“Hi,” I whispered, squeezing her hip.
“Good morning.” Her voice was still thick with sleep and couldn’t have sounded sexier if she tried. “You know, if you keep doing that, I may never leave this bed.”
“In that case…” I slid closer to her and brushed my hand through her hair, placing a kiss in the crook of her neck.
I allowed my lips to trail up toward her ear, stopping when I spotted a tiny tattoo tucked behind her earlobe. Though I hadn’t noticed it before, I instantly recognized the symbol because I’d seen it before on Lacey’s wrist at our first appointment. I recalled what she’d said when I’d noticed it.The semicolon represents a sentence not yet finished. It means there’s more left to say.
“You have a tattoo,” I said.
“What? Really?” she asked with an exaggerated gasp. “How’d that get there?”
I laughed as she rolled over to look at me.
“Smart-ass,” I said, my thumb grazing her cheek. “How long have you had it?”
Her face softened. “About fourteen years.”
I nodded, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “What does it mean to you?”
She sighed and rolled her lips inward. “It’s kind of a heavy story. You sure you’re up for that this early in the morning?”
I gave her a faint smile. “I’m up for anything that has to do with learning about you.”
She glanced down a moment before bringing her eyes up to mine. “I got it just before the one year anniversary of Brennan’s death.”
“Did you get it for him?”
She shook her head. “I got it for me.” Her gaze dropped, and she chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. “After Brennan died…I lost myself. He was my best friend. Without him…life changed. It was like all the color drained from the earth, leaving me in this endless gray. It became…too much.”
I touched her chin, tilting her head back to me as I waited for her to continue.
“I was just going through the motions of life rather than living,” she explained. “On the outside, I was functioning—for a while, anyway. I went to school and did just enough to make people think I was fine. But on the inside, every breath was like a knife twisting in my back. Everything reminded me of Brennan. He was gone…yet he waseverywhere.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured as her eyes turned glossy.
She cleared her throat. “It got to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. The mask I’d tried so hard to keep up started to slip. I could hardly get out of bed in the mornings until eventually, I stopped. I just…I didn’t want to do it anymore, you know? I didn’t want to…”
I brushed a tear off her cheek and nodded.
“Live,” I finished for her. I understood that feeling all too well.
“At first, it was just this feeling of not wanting to shoulder this loss anymore, but it became something more. Something deeper. It went from being a distant thought to me thinking of how I’d do it. My own mind became a terrifying place to be.”
I swallowed hard, forcing down the lump in my throat. “McKenzie.”
“So, I told my mom. I confessed everything I was feeling, and she did everything she could to bring me back,” she said. “She got me into therapy. She took time off work to be with me. We went on little weekend trips so we could spend time together. She did what she could to make life worth living again, even though she was dying inside. She was so afraid of losing me too.”
