She’s sitting so close, but her words hit me like they’re coming from a distance. Across miles. Across continents. Across the impossible divide that I’ve never found a way to bridge between us.
“They’re all of you. Around every bad day, every frayed edge, every sickening word, every painful, gut wrenching emotion, you were there. You and me, we reflected each other. You knew yourself better than I did. You believed in you. You never allowed yourself to get lost. I used to look at you and feel nothing but warmth and safety and trust. You were my shelter.My safe place. I still think of you that way. It’s not fair to you. It’s never been fair.” She speaks to the black night, her words ripping through me. “I have enough memories of you to fill half a lifetime,”
“We can just let it go. Breathe out. Let it pass.” Or… I could say the words. It’s the wrong time. Always the wrong. Fucking. Time. But they’re there. I open my mouth to tell her. To tell her all the things that scare me. All the things I want. Everything I feel. And… something else comes out instead, as it always does. More than I ever wanted Esme to be mine, I didn’t want toloseher. I still don’t. “I’ll always hold those memories as precious. Nothing will change my mind.”
She lapses into silence. So does the sky. I guess that was it. Somehow, I missed the whole show, or Hart’s dialed way back. I watched Esme instead.
She turns and our eyes meet between a blanket of black velvet alive with a golden glow. It’s like the clubhouse is surrounded by thousands of fireflies. My breath catches. Hers does too.
I want you. I’ve always wanted you. It’s been you since the day we met. There’s been no one else. There probably never will be. We’re made from the same atoms, tangled up together. You have all of me. You own me. I wish I could say it.
But, just like all the other nights where I might have found the words, they escape me. I fall silent, fold into myself, and breathe out in slow, measured breaths until the moment passes.
Chapter 8
Esme
The entire time we’ve been up here, I’ve stolen glances at Wizard. Part of my brain still can’t comprehend that we’re here at all. We used to spend so much time together, but it’s been years, and this is different. This doesn’t feel like it ever did. We’re not really friends anymore. I mean, we are, but not like we were. We can never go back to that. Everything is different. I am and he is, and even Hart and the rest of the world is all rearranged and changed. But it’s… more.
I don’t know what it is. I’m too tangled up inside to sort myself out, even after a long sleep, a hot shower, and a sandwich. I keep feeling like someone’s come up behind me and pushed me off the top of a hill and I landed at the bottom, safe but winded, dizzy, and somehow not right. Missingsomething.
“We loved the stars.” I say it because it’s safe.
I lean back on the blanket and tilt my face up to the sky. The streaks of smoke are long gone, dissipated like the spectacular sparks and lights. I could almost smell the smoke and sulfur on the breeze earlier, but now it’s just Wizard and his complex manly scents that make my insides feel squirmy.
Wizard leans back too. He rests on his elbows, his screens on a dimmer mode beside him. He can’t fully unplug, but he does tip his head back. I try to be subtle about watching the way his unzipped leather jacket parts over his massive chest, about how his t-shirt hugs his body like a second skin. My eyes keepgliding down to his worn jeans and the way his thick leg muscles flex beneath. I jerk my gaze back to his face. My eyes land straight on his neck, on all the tendons and his bronzed skin, the thrum of his pulse, the way his swallow catches in his throat.
“After grade nine science class, we got so into astronomy,” he says gruffly.
My swallow sticks too. “I liked the myths and legends more than I liked the science of it.”
“But it’s all part of the science. Myth and wonder never used to be separate. To call that proper science is judging people from another era with present wisdom, and that’s wrong.” He says that the way our science teacher did, which back then, blew me away because the guy was a total freaking square. He was passionate about the stars though, which changed my mind about him. It was a small school, and we had him for the next three years of science. I learned to appreciate the passion underneath his dorky exterior, even back then. As an adult, I can really respect that the guy became a teacher. Not all of them were great, but he was.
“I wish…” I start, but cut myself off.
Wizard’s eyes slide over me like the caress of a flame running along my body, hot enough to make me want to jolt backwards, but not hot enough to burn me.
“What do you wish?”
Nothing that’s going tohelp. “The same thing everyone wishes. That they could go back. Change. I wish I could apply a whole lot of present perspective to my younger self.”
“I think that mostly you’d just love her.”
His soft reply makes my stomach clench so hard that I can’t breathe past it.
“You’d tell her that things would get rough, but that she’d be fine. That she’d turn out spectacular, and she’d find her way in the end.”
I slap my hand over my mouth to hold in a sob.Fuck.The stars glisten through a blur of wet. I can’t blink it away. The tears slip down out of the corners of my eyes and dribble into my hair.
I tilt my face so,soslowly. I expect Wizard’s calm certainty. His steadfast strength. His beauty and his ceaseless goodness. I don’t expect to see him scrub a hand over his face, starting at his forehead and continuing down. When he catches me watching, his eyes quickly skitter away. He twists to the side, but not before I catch his face crumple. He looks…wrecked.
“Hey.” I scramble up before I can think. I’m across the blanket, moving his tablet and phones, shifting close until our shoulders brush and the length of my leg presses against his. “I’ve been so focused on me. I’ve been selfish and a total asshole, not able to see more than a foot in front of my own face. I never stopped to ask if you’re okay. You went through this too. You’re still going through it. James is your brother. The club. The guys. It’s all a lot.”
He shakes his head and rifles a hand through his curls. “It’s not that. A little, but it’s not…”
There was something James used to say to me back in high school. When he graduated and moved to Seattle and was probably sleeping with half the college while he told me he was waiting for me to get there too. I thought it was just him being his asshole self. He always poked knives into my friendship with Wizard. About how close I was to his brother, and how, if Iliked him so much, I should make his whole world and marry him instead. James was someone who liked to find the weakest point of a person and pick it apart. He was so fucking good at it. He used to sarcastically throw it at me that Wizard loved me. I just ignored James. He was jealous of our friendship. He didn’t understand what it meant to love someone fully, or that there were different kinds of love. He didn’t know shit about anything, and I knew that. I always. Knew. That. James just wanted to ruin the good things in my life, but I never let him come between me and Wizard.
What if James wasn’t wrong?
