The way I used to when I was little and didn’t understand why or how my brain could be so cruel.
I focus on the feeling of the ice beneath my skates. Bohdan pulling me along, and I’m so sure he won’t let me fall that I keep my eyes closed and I breathe in and out.
He doesn’t say anything, but his thumb draws small circles across the back of my hand.
I open my eyes after I think we’ve done one lap of the rink.
And I must be back in time—or maybe I’m being slowly torn in two by the way Bohdan looks at me—just like he used to, before he became someone who could hurt me.
“Why’d you try today?”
He shrugs again, indifferent. “You’ve already seen me at my worst. I did the worst thing to you that you can do to a person. Why would you care if I couldn’t?”
“I’d care.” I say it so, so quietly, I don’t even know if he heard me, or if I even wanted him to—but his eyes shutter, and his grip tightens on me before he swallows, blinking them back open.
Bohdan glances over his shoulder when we round the corner, blades of his skates slicing the surface in movements that still look practiced. “You’re finally moving home.”
“Yes.”
He looks back at me, a faint smile, and my heart stutters when the left side kicks up just a bit more. “What are you teaching? Researching?”
“Teaching. A course on the intersection of archaeology and medicine.” It all sort of tumbles out before my brain even has the chance to tell me that it’s not the type of thing regular people care about. It would be right—maybe most people wouldn’t care. But I know Bohdan will, and he’s not regular. “There’s so much we don’t know about how medical practices were developed, how they were used ... how they were influenced by the power structures of past societies. You know, recently, we’ve found medical instruments that were used by Roman surgeons. There are some really cool field study opportunities, and who’s to say there isn’t evidence for old psychiatric practices just waiting to be dug up?”
His fingers flinch, like he might want to let go. He doesn’t—he sort of rolls his right shoulder back, angling his head, and I wonder if he wants to touch the scar. If that’s become the type ofhabit for him counting is for me—one you do when you’re in so much pain, you’ll do anything to try and make it stop.
But he smiles, sad and resigned. “You never did get to go on one of your digs.”
“No,” I say quietly.
I don’t want to wake my brain up. I don’t want the past and the rules and the way he broke my heart to hear. I don’t want them to stomp all over the highlight reel—the reasons I never did.
I could have gone for a semester, in the summer, anytime really. But I wanted to be with Bohdan more.
I didn’t want to miss a single game with Tia. I didn’t want to miss the nights in their house afterwards, crushed red cups and sticky floors, laughter—so much laughter that even though it was so, so loud and Tia had to get me earplugs, everything was quiet.
I didn’t want a whole semester even further away from Seattle.
I didn’t want to miss a single whisper, a single smile, a single laugh—I didn’t want to miss any of it with him.
And it never occurred to me until much, much later that I was giving something up for something else—something I wouldn’t get to keep.
“I’m happy for you, Sloan,” Bohdan says, voice rough. “I’m sorry that you followed me and that ... that it didn’t work out.”
He stumbles a bit over the last few words, and I do, too, but his grip doesn’t.
I pull my head back, blinking. I’ve tried to reorganize and remap the whole thing in my brain—that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all. But those words tip the bookcase over, the one where I keep all those memories of him and me, shiny, sparkling trophies of this world-ending, heart-stopping love I was so lucky to have, and all of the new directions on my map twist and turn, and they lead me back to the place I try to avoid—the one that tells me it all must be true, that it was never enough.
That I made it all up.
That he doesn’t think it was worth it and it never was, and maybe he never loved me anyway, because how could he love someone like me? Someone bad and awful and horrible and entirely lacking.
“You think it didn’t work out?” I whisper the words, stumbling over them and blinking too much because I can feel my heart rate pickup.
Bohdan just shakes his head, and I think there’s a point, but I must be missing it. I can’t really see anything, the edges of my vision go fuzzy, and he asks, “When was the last time you said I love you?”
I don’t want to think about that. I squeeze my eyes shut again, whispering, “Before something very, very bad happened.”
“Something very, very bad did happen. You’re right. But it wasn’t—” He’s saying it in this maddeningly patient way, how he used to, when he was trying to help me. But he can’t possibly be trying to help me. I’m not worth loving, and I’m certainly not worth helping.
