From up here, Dolores’ house looks smaller. Just an ugly box among other ugly boxes, stripped of its size. That house used to feel endless. From up here, it now looks beatable.
I sit beside Skylar, watching the last of the light fall across her face, and everything in me goes completely still.
I have seen her furious, broken, soft, smiling against my mouth, and crying without wanting me to notice. I have also seen her at seventeen, with her whole life still undecided, and at twenty-six, with something magnificent built from the wreckage of it. Every version of her has found a way under my skin and stayed there without asking permission.
But this… Her face in the sunset on this damaged roof. This is where I first lost the fight.
I fell in love with her because she sat beside me in a place that should have been ugly and made it feel as if surviving the night were not only possible but worth doing. That has always been the whole of it.
She turns her head. “What?”
I swallow. “I fell in love with you here.”
Her lips part. “Here?”
“Yeah.” I glance out at the town because looking at her right now makes this considerably harder and I need to get through it. “I didn’t know what to call it then. I was eighteen, angry, horny, and stupid enough to think every feeling could be sorted into two categories. Things I wanted to hit and things I wanted to fuck.”
Her mouth quirks. “I remember.”
“But you sat right there.” I point to the tin beside us. “The sunset hit your face and you stopped talking for once.”
“That doesn’t sound believable.”
“It was rare, I know.”
Her smile softens.
“I looked at you,” I say, my voice roughening at the edges in a way I can’t control, “and the whole town became quiet. Dolores’ house. The foster system. Every dirty room I had ever slept in. Every person who told me I was nothing and every person who proved it by leaving.”
I pause. “It all went quiet because you were there and for one second I thought maybe the world had made one good thing by accident.”
Her eyes shine. “Zane.”
“I loved you then,” I continue. “I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to hold it without breaking it. And I sure as fuck didn’t know how not to fuck it up.”
I gaze at her. “But I loved you.”
The wind moves her hair across her cheek. She doesn’t attempt to brush it away.
So I do. My fingers touch her face and she closes her eyes for half a second. I experience it the way I always feel everything with her, too much and not enough at the same time.
I need to tell her now before the softness makes a coward out of me and I convince myself to keep the ugly parts away from her. Which is what I promised I would stop doing and what I will spend the rest of my life fighting the instinct to do.
“My past came back,” I say. “That is why I went quiet on you and why I couldn’t pick up the phone.”
Her eyes open.
There it is. The flinch I earned.
“What do you mean?”
“Griff has been hanging around the workshop.”
She shifts. Just slightly. But I see it. That small, involuntary movement of someone who knows exactly which world that name belongs to and what it means when it shows up.
“Griff said I owed Ricky money,” I say. “Ricky came to collect it.”
She looks at me and I hold her gaze, swallowing the shame. She deserves the truth. All of it. Even if the truth is what makes her walk away.
